Review: Final Draft 8

• Article 76 of 89
• MacFormat, October 2009

There are many software packages on the market for writing screenplays, but the undisputed industry leader is Final Draft. Far more than just a simple word processor, Final Draft includes formatting, versioning, structuring and even copyright-registering tools to enable scriptwriters to develop their scripts at all stages of production and pre-production.

The idea is simple: you break your script down into scenes using one of the built-in templates, formatted in the standard script style, complete with ‘mores’ and ‘continueds’ at breaks, scene headers (for example, “EXT. THE PLAYING FIELD – NIGHT”) and title pages. Final Draft will let you keep track, reorganise, tag and colour code scenes, using the metaphor of index cards. If you decide you need additional scenes at particular places, you just add them, detailing what needs to happen in them but leaving them blank until you get round to writing them.

The program also has numerous minor little screenwriting assists, such as character name autocompletes, and a names database. A godsend is the reports function, which tells you which characters and locations get focused on the most.

Since writing doesn’t stop with the screenplay but continues on-set, there are also some useful versioning and formatting tools so that you can omit scenes, lock scenes and colour-code scenes according to revision number. A standalone application, Final Draft Tagger, lets production staff tag items in scripts, such as costumes or events, then export them to scheduling applications.

Commanding a princely £170 and used by more or less everyone in the business, however, it’s rested on its laurels somewhat over the years, particularly the Mac version.

So version eight is something of an eye-opener, even if does look like it’s been cribbing a few features from Scrivener. The developers, as well as adding some very useful new features, have stepped away from their previous approach of “looks the same on Mac and Windows so everyone feels at home” in favour of a far more ‘Mac-ier’ interface, with brushed metal windows and OS X-standard customisable toolbar. However, don’t be fooled into thinking the changes are anything more than cosmetic, since use of deeper Mac technologies, such as iLife, Address Book or iCal integration, Spotlight or QuickView, is strictly off limits.

There are also two new palettes for managing structure and metadata: a Scene Properties Inspector (SPI) and a Scene Navigator. The former lets you add information to scenes, such as titles and descriptions of what happens, while the Scene Navigator provides an easy way to view and sort the information and then jump to the appropriate pages. The index cards have now become “double sided” so that you can view the additional information and then organise scenes by drag and drop – you can do a similar thing with the new Scene View, which gives you a list of all the scenes that can display whatever information you’ve added to them. Final Draft also lets you split the current window into panels, so you can have your script on one side of the window and your index cards on the other.

While this is a definite improvement over previous versions, it still means that you have the SPI floating palette covering up screen real estate and you only have the choice of splitting the window into two. This means navigation and access to scene information still isn’t as easy as it could be.

Also new in version eight are improved templates, and a much better spellchecker and a thesaurus. A new workspace preference lets you have Final Draft open all the files you had open, in the order you were working on them. Printing and PDFing have also been improved.

While in many ways the writing tools and interface of Final Draft are inferior to those of cheaper rivals Scrivener, Storymill, Contour and Montage, this is definitely a tool with pros in mind and it’s in the area of production that it excels. Newcomers probably needn’t splash out for Final Draft just yet, particularly since rival programs can export to Final Draft format as well. But to old hands, the new tools are a definite must-have.