I have already worked out my outline in Microsoft Word before I even fire up Final Draft. I imagine this could be useful if a writer was writing his entire screenplay in Final Draft, starting from the outline stage and blocking in scenes, working out character arcs, etc. The Character Navigator lists all the speaking characters in a scene and gives you a window in which to write character arc material. NEW: CHARACTER NAVIGATOR - Add a character’s story arc via individual Character Beats in each scene. But if Final Draft had a separate file that could be opened which contained the Navigator text it would be very easy to do a quick search and replace. It’s so time consuming that I just don’t do it. This can be time consuming if you have over a hundred scenes in your script. However, if I have already written the names and locations in the Navigator titles or summaries there is no way for me to update them other than going scene by scene and revising the entire Navigator contents. I quite often, while writing a screenplay, change character names, locations, etc. With respect to search, I do feel they missed one valuable feature that would make the Scene Navigator much more user friendly. If I wanted to find a scene containing a certain word I simply searched the script for that word. I imagine it could be useful, but after writing several scripts with FD9 I never used it. In order to make this feature useful you would have to consistently include names or other search words in the titles and summaries. The new search feature allows you to search the custom titles and summaries you have given to each scene and get a list of those scenes that contain the search word. You can also add whatever text you want in the summary box and color code the scene if you like. If you are familiar with Scene Navigator you know it’s a separate window that shows you the order of scenes, the page number they appear on, the title you give them, the location (based on what you've written in the slug line), the time (DAY, NIGHT) and a few other items of your choosing. IMPROVED: SCENE NAVIGATOR - Filter any information by keyword in all views of the Navigator. I’m going to list the features that Final Draft says are New & Improved and give you my take on them. So this review should be read from that perspective. Mine are pretty simple because I'm a simple guy. So I figured it’s time I gave it a review.Įveryone has different work patterns and therefore different ways they use software. I have now used it for the past 5 months and gotten pretty familiar with some of the new features. But now that Final Draft is the industry standard I write virtually all of my scripts with it.įinal Draft 9 was released earlier this year. (See my earlier post How to Turn Microsoft Word into a Terrific Screenwriting Program to learn how to do this yourself.) After I finished the studio job that required Final Draft I went back to using Word. Previous to that I had written hundreds of TV and film scripts with Microsoft Word which I’d modified via Styles to easily format standard screenplay margins and indents for slugs, description, characters, parentheticals, dialog, and transitions, plus shortcut keys for all of these. I was given my first copy of Final Draft many years ago by a studio that was using it.
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