Short Film and the SFD

Well, I am still working on my feature length screenplay, but being a novice at this, I thought I'd start with something simpler, a screenplay for a short 10 minute film, featuring inanimate socks and other laundry. Yep, you read that right. My husband wrote a funny little inner monologue from a sock's point of view entitled "The Secret Lives Of Socks" and so I turned it into a screenwriting project for myself.

I recently upgraded Final Draft for my PC, after years of owning it on my ancient Macintosh clone. (I think I had FD ver. 1... or maybe ver. 0, heh) I was thrilled to find out I could just pay the upgrade price and not the full price to get it for my PC. Anyway, it is really cool. I had done a little bit of the script in Word before the software arrived. Then, once I installed FD 7.1, I copied and pasted the word text, and, woosh!! It was all (mostly) in the correct screenplay format, with character names and dialogue indented as needed and so forth. Impressive! The new version also features a voice readback, so you can have your computer read your script to you, and you can choose different voices for each character. I doubt it can put any kind of emotion into the voices, though. LOL. Also, there used to be a support program called "3x5" that helped you to do index cards to organize your scenes - now that's all part of Final Draft. I'm impressed so far, though, some people say that FD 7 has some bugs and they're sticking with 6. I'm hoping that the the 7.1 has worked most of those out.

"In fairness, the developers did release this new version a little earlier than they should have as early, out of the box editions were plagued by some hiccups. However, Final Draft, Inc. quickly solved those problems. They now provide free updates for version 7 that repair any possible bugs to the first editions of the new Final Draft."

Well, I am proud to say that in a day and a half, I have completed my SFD (Shitty First Draft) of "The Secret Lives Of Socks" and will spend some time to check format and so forth. This is great practice to do before diving into a 100 page project. It is a cute little story that we could film ourselves with our digital video recorder if we wanted to - no fancy props or locations and no special effects - just a lot of humor, well, I hope. LOL. Who knows, maybe next year, we could take part in the Tribeca Amazon Short Film Competition.