Leading image and video manipulation software creator Adobe has made an early version of its new script development software Story available to use for free on its Adobe Labs web site. Adobe plans to include the final version in its Creative Suite Production Premium software package which includes applications for editing and manipulating digital sound, video and still images.
Starting to Use Adobe Story
Story is a cloud-based application that stores its documents on Adobe's web site rather than on your local machine, so you can access your scripts from anywhere but you must have an account in order to view or edit them.
It can be used either through a browser or as a standalone cross-platform AIR application, which looks almost identical to the browser-based version except it adds an offline mode which stores file edits locally until you connect again to the cloud.
Project-Based Script Development
The interface is based around 'projects', which are containers for all of the files associated with a particular scriptwriting project. Each project is based on a template such as 'film' or 'novel' and can contain many scripts, character biogs and web links.
The script editor can begin with a new document or import popular file formats including Final Draft and Microsoft Word and tries to interpret the formatting from the layout of the document. There are tools built in to automatically or manually switch between styles, such as 'action', 'character' and 'dialog' with either the keyboard or the mouse, similar to other screenwriting applications and word processor plug-ins.
Scene List
A list of scenes in the current script is automatically generated on the left side of the screen, and this has some novel and very useful features.
Clicking on a scene heading will reveal the contents of that scene under it, allowing you to look at or even cut and paste from other scenes without losing your place. Double-clicking on a scene heading will jump instantly to that scene.
Next to the scene title are a series of small dots. Story allocates one of these dots and an individual colour to each character that it finds in your script and shows each character's coloured dot against each scene that he or she is in. Hovering over the dot reveals the character's name. This makes it very easy to see which scenes each character is involved in at a glance.
Script Collaboration
One feature that cloud computing makes easier and that Adobe has integrated well into Story is script collaboration.
You can turn on collaboration by entering the e-mail addresses of your collaborators and allocating each a level of authority, from 'co-author' with full editing rights to 'reader' with the ability to read but not change anything in the script.
Problems With Adobe Story
This is an early preview of the software and so it should not be used for anything other than testing, as it is prone to crashes and to losing work without warning.
The editor has omissions such as no page numbers, no title page, speeches that get split or separated from their character names at page breaks and more. The editor seems quite basic in many ways, but there are some quite innovative features and some tell-tale signs of others to come, so it will be worth keeping an eye on how this application develops.
Alternative Applications
This application will eventually be part of a large and expensive suite of software aimed at serious media producers and so perhaps will not be appropriate to the lone scriptwriter struggling to enter the business.
Alternative software packages range from the free Celtx and the BBC's excellent templates for Microsoft Word on its Writersroom web site right up to market leaders Final Draft and Screenwriter, with a few others in between such as Mac-only Montage.
The creators of these alternatives will no doubt be watching the development of Adobe Story very closely to see how its emerging features measure up to their own.
David Chadderton - David is head of education for a theatre arts company in Manchester, England, north west editor and reviewer for British Theatre Guide and ...
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