Speaker 1: One software to rule them all. One software to write them all. I am Carl T. Rogers, the Storylospher, and I'm a writer and director, teaching you how to leverage visual storytelling for your screenwriting. Now, I've been using Final Draft for years, and I'm going to tell you why you should use Final Draft as well. Is Final Draft the best screenwriting software, like a lot of people claim it is? There's a ton of other options out there, and I've actually gone over that before in this video right here, which you can check out, where I kind of compare the different types of software, and especially how they rank up to free software. But, in my opinion, Final Draft is the best option that's there, and I'm going to tell you why. Okay, and it's probably not for the reason that you think. I am in Final Draft's affiliate program, but I have been recommending Final Draft since before I was ever in the affiliate program, and it is the only screenwriting software that I use now. When I first started out as a screenwriter, I was broke, high school student, and so the first thing I did was get some of the free software. But like I talked about in the video that I mentioned, where I kind of compared the free software to the paid software, there's a lot of other better options out there, and if you're really serious about being a screenwriter, then you need to get some professional, meaning paid, software. But when I first got to film school as an undergrad, I did not get Final Draft to start out with, like a lot of my classmates said. I actually started with Movie Magic. I really liked Movie Magic. Movie Magic was a really good choice for me, you know? It was great for beginners. This was about... goodness, this was about 10 years ago now. It's really weird to think about. And so there were not as many options on the market, and there were not as many... the options that were there were also not as fancy as they are now. It even got to the place where, when I tried to save one of my screenplays, it wouldn't let me save the file, because the version of Movie Magic I had was so old that it was incompatible with my operating system and things like that. The operating system was too new. And so I thought, well, let me just check out Final Draft, since that's what all my friends have. Even through grad school, I was still the one person using Movie Magic when almost everybody else had Final Draft. So let me actually try it out and see what it's like, and if it's even any better than what I was using before. And, surprise surprise, yes it was. Because Movie Magic had basically remained unchanged for years and years, and even the updated version that they had available didn't really look like it was going to be much of a change. Whereas Final Draft had all these new features, and even since I've gotten Final Draft and have been using it for years, they've added even more and more features. Here are the reasons why I really like Final Draft, why I'm glad that I switched to Final Draft, and why I think you should use it too. Final Draft has really intuitive keyboard shortcuts, so that you can write real quickly while still maintaining proper formatting. So for example, whenever you're going to go to a new line, you just hit Tab, and it'll normally take you to the next thing. And whether that's a character name, or dialogue, or action lines, things like that. Now this is common to all the other formatting softwares out there, so that's kind of like the base level, but the way they do it in Final Draft I think works really well. And it was actually almost identical to what I was used to in Movie Magic, so that made it easy for me to transfer. So if you're using something other than Final Draft, this is going to be kind of the same. Final Draft also has Dark Mode, and has got the ability to change the color of text for alterations, so that you can visualize your revision history. It's got this cool feature where you can find and replace something throughout the whole script, so you don't have to go line by line and be like, okay, now that I'm changing Frederick to Bartholomew, now I have to go find every single version of Frederick. No, you just find and replace, just like in a Word document or a Google Docs. Now, is Final Draft perfect? Well, of course not. No software is going to be perfect. I mean, my day job is helping companies fix their software and their user experience, so definitely no software is going to be perfect. But the cons that I find with Final Draft are actually kind of minimal. I would say the spell check that it has is not that great. It'll sometimes find some things, but there's a lot of things with its spell checking ability that I wish was kind of more powerful. When I open Final Draft, if I open it from the dock, like I just click on the Final Draft logo and I open it, it does not automatically open the last screenplay I was working on. It'll just open a new screenplay document, and then I have to close that one, and then open recent projects and then open up that screenplay. So that's a little bit of an annoyance, but there's not really that many things that I don't like about it. The revision marks are also kind of finicky sometimes. And I really like to use revision marks so that I can kind of track what I've changed throughout different drafts and different polishes that I'm doing. So that can be a little finicky, but that's also just me being very pedantic about things. So these are just minor inconveniences that I'm talking about, and you're going to find issues like that no matter what screenwriting software that you're using. Another thing that Final Draft does that's really cool is you can have alternate dialogue. So if you've got a line of dialogue that you want to use, and you're like, hmm, I've got an idea for another line, but I haven't decided yet which one I want to do, you can actually have alternates, and they can be saved in the same place. You can just, with a couple clicks, change it out and see which one you like better. Final Draft also has the Format Assistant, which is really helpful, especially if you do not have a lot of years of experience writing screenplays, and you're not sure if there's some formatting issues. And this will kind of go through your script and find some of the more glaring errors that stand out. It's not going to find the more detailed stuff that I talk about in some of my formatting videos that you can see up here. It won't find all those detailed things, but it'll help you with some of the major parts. One of the newer things that Final Draft has added is the Outline Editor and the Beat Board. It's almost like another program within Final Draft that lets you help with your brainstorming and your outlining and your pre-writing. And it's really similar to a tool that I use for my own brainstorming called Whimsical, but it's just kind of built into Final Draft. It's not like where I'm having to go to a web app in Whimsical and having a separate window in Final Draft and kind of go back and forth. This is just in there as a part of Final Draft, so it's all kind of in one place for you. Another thing that Final Draft has, which I'm so glad they added, is a speech-to-text option so that you can dictate your script. And that'll help you go a lot faster, especially if you're the type of person that can think and speak a lot faster than you can write. Final Draft also has a mobile app that you can use to sync across all your devices, so you can be working on one screenplay in the morning on your laptop, and then when you have to go to work and you're on the bus or the train, you can pull out your phone and keep writing on your app if you need to. Now, the app is a separate purchase, but you just connect it to your account and it syncs across all your different devices that you're writing your script on. You can do the same type of things that most document editing softwares can do, like adding notes and tracking your changes, a lot like Google Docs. And that was another thing that was really hard to do in MovieMagick and is potentially not as robust in other softwares. But I would say one of the most important features that you can do in Final Draft, and Final Draft's not the only one that does this, but having this combined with all the other things that I mentioned makes Final Draft real powerful. And that is the ability to collaborate with other people in real time on the same screenplay. The reason why I say this is such a big deal is not because other softwares won't do this, but because the people that you'll need to collaborate with are also going to be using Final Draft. I'm not talking about just the co-writer that you might be working with. I'm talking about the producer who might have optioned your script and wants to give you notes as they're continuing to shop it out. This might be the story executive that has feedback that you need to incorporate. And so that's kind of the main reason that I think you should go with Final Draft because it is the industry standard. It's used by 95% of writers, those screenwriters out there. And the important part about that is it's not just the writers that are using it. It's also going to be the Hollywood executives, the agents, the managers, the producers, and all of them are using Final Draft to give feedback and also to use the script during pre-production. So while your entry point into a lot of these conversations with people is going to be by submitting to them a PDF of your script, once you're kind of got your foot in the door and you're working on a project with somebody, even if it's not another writer, if they want to work on something that's in flight, they're going to want to use Final Draft. So rather than trying to export it from some other program and bring it into Final Draft, it's better if you could just give them the .fdx file and collaborate with them in real time, you know? And that was one of the main reasons that I wanted to switch to Final Draft is because it's part of this greater ecosystem that everybody is using. And Final Draft made it really easy for me. I could easily take my old screenplays from Movie Magic and import them to Final Draft and it kept most of the formatting in place. I had to go fix a few things, but it just made it real easy to switch over. So if you call yourself a screenwriter and you actually want to become a working screenwriter one day, in addition to being able to tell a story and tell a story visually, which is what I talk about on my channel a lot, you need to be able to collaborate with the other people who are able to make your vision happen in this business. Because it's used by the people in the industry that are also not writers, it's going to be really important for you to be able to dialogue with them within this software. So this writer in one of the Facebook groups that I'm in kind of said it best. He says, No, you don't need Final Draft to write screenplays. But yes, you do need Final Draft if you want to work in the heart of the industry. So if you're ready to get Final Draft, then check out the link I've got down in the description. You will thank me in the future. And if you already have Final Draft, like an older version, you want to upgrade to get those newer features that I talked about, then I've also got a link for you down in the description as well.