weebelly.com

Picked up Final Draft and now I feel sort of spoiled. The grind of manually managing all the character names, centering, parenthetical aspects, stage directions, continueds, etc, through Word and tabs settings wore me down. And then you get those that want it “Samuel French” with character names centered and those that want it in the “Acting Edition” or published format with the space saving left-aligned character names–and the hassle of formatting and re-formatting your script ad infinitum. So, yeah, Final Draft.

Of course, I knew there would be more features, but I didn’t expect some of them. For instance, you can assign voices to your characters and have the script read to you! Sure, it’s a computerized voice and they all sound pretty much the same, and there’s no intonation, etc.; but it’s still pretty fucking cool. There’s a ton of templates: stage play templates from Dramatists Guild, telescript formats with examples from a slew of television shows, three camera setups, query letter templates, treatment templates, etc. The built in “elements” and formatting tools are nice, a quick key stroke and your text is aligned properly and one key tap of an existing character’s name and… up it pops from the list. You can format your script’s scene headings as index cards, hell you can even type on the index cards directly the scene headings and so outline your screen play. You can somewhat automate treatment creation with the scene view option, as well as outline creation. It handles the always tricky problem of script revision–so you can freeze the script and then any changes to a page that exceed the page length are added to A/B pages, as are changes to scenes or scene arrangement. In the index card view you can grab scenes and slide them around to wherever you want them. You can print your drafts and revisions in different colors. You can register your script directly from the program. It has collaboration tools, a split view, name database, built in reference tools, and tutorials, which I’m working my way through now.

There’s a contest that Final Draft offers. The deadline is June 15, so now I’ve got my deadline. I have three or so screenplay ideas and I just picked out the one that most inspires me and that is most developed. I’ll hit that deadline and be done with my first screenplay. Then, working with Illiterite Theatre we’ll start the television script productions…

Overview

Went over to CPT last night and saw Darwinii: The Comeuppance of Man. Tony Brown, several years back, described it as “mesmerizing” and it was indeed that. It started off a bit slowly and I was thinking, “oh, shit…I’m going to have to watch a guy walk back and forth on a strip of red carpet for an hour-and-a-half;” however, once the ball started rolling…

Darwinii

About the play

The play is an apology, of sorts, by Cristobal (Brett Keyser), a man who claims to be the great, great, great… grandson of Charles Robert Darwin. Using ideas about inheritance and genetics and history and sheer comedy Cristobal makes a splendid case as to why this is the truth. In some ways, the play reminded me of Thom Pain: Based on Nothing by Will Eno, which I saw at Dobama some years back, but Darwinii is far less aggressive and confrontational–and far more funny. Keyser keeps the play chugging a long by using varied techniques that are delightful: he comes out in an orange jump suit with his hands cuffed behind he back (he escapes them), he wears Argentinean clothing under his orange jump suit and wields a few hidden knives to demonstrate his prowess, he has imagined conversations with people, he engages in a battle during the Falklands, he sells tchotchkes related to Darwin, plays a book on tape with a woman whose voice leads him on a quest of love, steals rare books from a host of repositories, etc. The play becomes simply a marvelous tale that is not only well-written and reflexive, but well-told and both amazing and delightful to behold.

The play was commissioned in 2009 by the American Philosophical Society Museum, and worth every penny the put into it.

Later that same evening…

Afterward I went to XYZ to have a beer and read some of my screenplay book where I bumped into Celeste Cosentino, Ian Hinz, and Katie Nabors so I got the chance to introduce myself to the Ensemble Theatre folks, which, coincidentally, I could have done on Saturday, had I simply stuck around long enough. Also saw Stuart Hoffman earlier at Darwinii who is having a reading done at Ensemble on the 28th (Cocopelli: a fairy tale for adults) which I hope very much to see. Also saw Mike Williams, who is wrapping up his MFA soon, he was just leaving Poor Little Lulu, which I hope to see next week. Convergence opens its season this weekend, too.