Beyond School

Life is physically and mentally too cramped for me to write the posts I’ve been planning about Pink’s Whole New Mind and Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.  I’m tutoring three days a week, finishing up my change of visa status (I never thought I’d need a Green Card, but there it is), and moving into our new apartment on Tuesday - after which I hope to be able to think clearly.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying simply sharing some of the amazing free resources I’m discovering these days. Today’s offering:  Celtx (click screenshot for full view).

From the Celtx site, a partial overview of the scriptwriting, storyboarding, collaborating, production scheduling, and on-and-on-ing it performs:

Celtx is the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production software. It has everything you need to take your story from concept to production. Celtx replaces ‘paper, pen & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.

Multi-Media Friendly: Celtx helps you pre-produce all types of media - film, video, documentary, theater, machinima, comics, advertising, gaming, music video, radio, podcasts, videocasts, and however else you choose to tell your story.

All-In-One: Unlike scriptwriting software, you can use Celtx for the entire pre-production process - write scripts, storyboard scenes and sequences, develop characters, breakdown & tag elements, schedule production, and prepare detailed and informative production reports for cast and crew.

Fully Integrated: Celtx is designed to help your entire production team work together on a single, easy to share project file - eliminating the confusion of multiple project files, and the need for ‘paper and binder’.

There’s more, too: a Project Central community site for global Celtx users, and more beyond that. Check out the site for the goodness - and don’t miss the screencast tutorials to get the full effect.  Just wonderful - hats off to Celtx.

It’s cross-platform, by the way, so goodness for all, PC, Mac, and otherwise. (h/t to Ostatic for the excellent Six Essential Open Source Apps for Mac Videographers post. Go there for five more goodies beside!)

If you like this post, please spread it:

Just spreading the love to my fellow Mac users by sharing Monolingual, a free open source program that saved me 4Gb of hard drive by removing the hundreds of languages localized on all my software, and by stripping the PowerPC files from my Intel MacBook.  (If you have Adobe Creative Suite, you’ll easily save 2 or 3 gigs with a single click. Bloated with languages. Sorry, Cyrillic, you had to go.)

Be sure to run both the “Languages” and the “Architecture” programs.  And buy me a beverage the next time you see me.  Better still, donate a few bucks (or Yuan, or Quid¹ ) to the folks who created this useful tool on the Sourceforge site.

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1. what the hell is a quid? [↩]