Adobe Announces Screenwriting Software

Adobe Systems’ recently announced Adobe Story, the newest addition to the popular Creative Suite product line.  Adobe describes Story as “A collaborative scriptwriting tool for film, broadcast, and rich media.  Adobe Story enables the online pre-production workflow for those who want to collaborate and expand their ideas anytime, anywhere, with anyone.”  Adobe Story is an obvious addition to the most robust software suite for designers, developers, filmmakers, and recording artists… what took them so long?

According to Adobe’s documentation there are four different roles that you can assign to someone you wish to share your screenplay with:

Co-authors
Co-authors can add, modify, or delete content from the script.  However, they cannot delete the script itself.  Co-authors can also, like reviewers, comment on the script.

Reviewers
Reviewers can add comments to the script but cannot edit it.

Viewers
Viewers have read-only permissions to the script.  They can read the script but cannot modify content or add comments to it.

Taggers
Taggers can add extra information to the script.  This information could include location details, schedule, instructions, and so on.

StreamingMedia.com was given a preview of Adobe Story and made the following observations about the new screenwriting product.

• Because Adobe stores the metadata for each character and portion of the script, the product has the potential to eliminate one of the bottlenecks of metadata in the production process: the need to rekey information, gathered in pre-production, into the production and post-production workflow.”

• Adobe has made security a clear priority in developing Story. Besides a user name and password required to login and work on the web version of the application, collaborators must also have an invitation from to work together on specific projects.

• One problem we noticed was that anyone that has privileges to a given project can edit another person’s comments without any trace. In the second comment down, Tim added the sentence after the hyphen to my comment, but there’s nothing to indicate that on the screen. We’d like to see additional security that only allows the original commenter to edit his or her comments, or at least some sort of tracking of individual users’ modifications to others’ comments.

• Color-coding is included for each character given a bio. Story only allows for six colors, so for now you’ll have to stick to writing scripts with no more than six main characters in them. Sorry, soap opera or epic screenwriters; you’ll have to wait until Adobe enhances this feature to keep track of your casts of thousands. It would be nice to see the color-coding show up in the script for either the character’s name or name and dialogue.

• The script editing is pretty standard as far as screenwriting software goes, and it can ingest FinalDraft as well as Word documents that have been created in a script format; one nice feature, though, is a handy tool called Smart Type that automatically suggest a variety of commonly used words and descriptions in order to speed up the process of writing your script. I found this very helpful and quickly got used to the “interruptions” that really freed me up to write meaningful dialogue instead of consistent script terms.  Spell check would be a helpful addition to the screenwriting portion.

For screenshots and more, visit StreamingMedia.com’s Story review.