Write and market Hollywood-perfect movie scripts the free way!
If you just write scripts, you won't need the features in this article. However, Indie (independent) producers, folks actually making movies, putting together audio visual shows, or creating documentaries will find these tools of immense value and here we look at visualizing all this good stuff (pun, as ever, intended).
Celtx's Sketch Tool allows us to easily visualize ideas and shot setups by adding our drawings of them to projects. Sketches can be separate items in the Project Library (or in folders within the library) or added to a project's Storyboard (more on that in the next section of this article).
The Sketch Tool comes with pre-loaded icons for people, cameras, and lights, which we can drag and drop into our sketches, making them look more polished. The icons are SVG images (Scalable Vector Graphics), which allow us to make them as large as we like without losing any quality in the image. The http://celtx.com site makes additional icons available (Art Packs) at low costs (example: $2.99 for 23 icons).
Also provided in the Sketch tool are tools for drawing lines, arrows, shapes, and for adding text labels. Just to avoid confusion, let me tell you that there is nothing like pens or erasers or other free drawing features. We'll use various drag-and-drop icons and any of us, artistic talent or not, can turn out very professional-looking storyboards in no time at all.
Celtx Projects are containers which hold items such as scripts, index cards, reports, schedules, storyboards, prop lists, and more including sketches.
We have two ways of creating a new Sketch, which are as follows:
The new Sketch is added to the Project Library window. If one was already there (likely since it is by default), you now have two with the same name. No problem; simply right-click on one of them, choose Rename, and change its name. We can also delete or duplicate a Sketch this way.
To open the main Sketch Tool window from anywhere in a Celtx project, double-click on the name of the Sketch in the Project Library.
In the case of a new Sketch created through the Add Item dialog box, as shown in the preceding section, it will already be open and ready for use. That is, the main window covering most of the center of the Celtx screen is where we sketch. Double-clicking on Screenplay or any other item in the Project Library window navigates us to that item and away from our Sketch. It is saved automatically.
The following screenshot shows how the Sketch Tool looks when opened:
Along the top of the middle window (the Sketch Tool window), we have a toolbar. In the preceding screenshot, most of these tools are grayed out. They become fully visible when conditions are met for their use.
Let's take a tour. The following screenshot shows the sketch toolbar in its entirety:
Now, let's explore these tools individually and see what they do. In addition to the tool bar (shown in the preceding screenshot), I'll include an image of each individual tool as well:
And the circle tool is shown in the following screenshot:
Draw a box and click on the A. The mouse cursor is now an "I-beam". Click in the box. A mini-dialog box appears, as shown in the following screenshot:
This Edit Text box allows the selection of the font, size, bold, italic, and provides a place to type in the label, such as the stirring This is a box. Click on OK and the label is in the box, as shown in the following screenshot:
If we need to edit an existing label, click on the select tool, double-click on the text, the Edit Text mini-dialog box comes up, and you can edit the text.
Keeping the labeled box as an example, we're ready to visit the next two tools, namely, the empty circle and his brother the solid circle, both of which are grayed out at the moment. Let's wake them up.
The empty circle controls the color of the stroke (that's the outline of the item, such as our box) and the solid circle, the fill (the inside color of the item). Note that there is a small arrow on the right side of each circle. Click on the one next to the solid (fill) circle. A color selection box drops down; choose a color by clicking on it. The box now has that color inside it as a fill, as shown in the following screenshot:
If you want to change the stroke and/or fill colors, just click on the stroke or fill tool to drop-down the selection box again.
Moving on, add another box (or circle, whatever) and move it. Use the select tool, hold down the Shift key, click on the new box, and move it over the original box.
These are, in the order, lower to bottom, lower, raise, and raise to top. In other words, the selected box would be lowered to the bottom-most layer, lowered one layer, raised one layer, or jumped all the way to the top-most layer.
Clicking on it groups or bonds the selected items together. This, of course, lights up the next icon on the toolbar, the (wait for it) ungroup tool, which restores independence to grouped items.
Cutting removes an item but retains it on the clipboard, copying leaves the item and also puts a copy of it on the clipboard, while paste puts the item from the clipboard back into the sketch.
Now, we come to the fun part, icons! As in "yes, icon do a professional-looking sketch." (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Celtx provides icons, giving our sketches a polished professional look (neat, artistic, follows industry entertainment conventions) while requiring little or no artistic ability. The Palettes windows, found on the right side of the main Sketch Tool window, list available icons.
The default installation of Celtx includes a very limited number of icons, one camera, two kinds of lights, and a top-down view of a man and a woman. Celtx, of course, is open source software and thus free (a price I can afford). However, one of the ways in which its sponsoring developer, a Canadian company, Greyfirst Corp. in St. John's, Newfoundland, makes money is by selling add-ons to the program, one type being additional icons in the form of Art Packs. In the following screenshot, if we click on the + Get Art Packs link, a webpage opens where one can order Art Packs and other add-ons at quite reasonable prices:
Now, to use an icon in a sketch, let's start with the camera. Open a new sketch by doubleclicking on Sketch in the Project Library window or Add Item from the main File menu. In the Palettes window, move the mouse cursor over Camera and hold down the left mouse button while dragging the camera icon into the main Sketch Tool window. It looks like the following screenshot:
Manipulating icons: When any icon is dragged into the main window of the Sketch Tool (and anytime that icon is selected by clicking on it with the select tool cursor described earlier) it has a dotted circle around it (as shown in the preceding screenshot) and two small solid circles (violet on top, olive below). Clicking on the violet circle and holding down the left mouse button while dragging allows rotation of the icon. Releasing the button stops rotation and leaves the icon in that orientation.
Clicking on the olive circle (the lower one) and holding down the left mouse button and dragging allow resizing the icon, either larger or smaller. As these icons, like the lines, arrows, boxes, and circles we discussed earlier in this article are also SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), we can have them as large as desired with no pixilation or other distortion.
Using the Sketch Tool toolbar and the supplied icons, we can rapidly and easily draw professional looking diagrams like the scene shown in the following screenshot, which shows two lights, the camera, the talent, arrows showing their movement in the scene, and the props:
Again, additional icons may be purchased from the http://celtx.com website. For example, the following screenshot shows the twenty-three icons available in Art Pack 1:
Now is a good time for us to take a moment and discuss the limitations of the Sketch Tool. This feature provides a fast way of whipping up a scene diagram from inside a Celtx project. It does not replace an outside drawing program nor give us the functionality of something like Adobe Illustrator, but it is quite powerful and very handy. By the way, we can use external media files in Celtx and we'll do just that in both of the remaining sections of this article.
Another limitation concerns saving sketches. There's no way of exporting the sketch as an external image such as .jpg or .bmp. In fact, even saving within the Celtx project is automated. Do the following to see what I mean:
We can even use Add Item from the File menu (a shortcut is the little plus symbol beneath the Project Library title) and add another Sketch (same name) to the Project Library and even draw a new sketch in it. Of course, having different drawings with the same name is hardly utilitarian, so here's how we really save a sketch.