By Geoffrey Botkin
Since the founding of the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival and the Christian Filmmakers Academy, the importance of writing has been stressed by our faculty as foundational to the craft of filmmaking. All film production begins with the script, and the script must communicate more than the wisdom, theology, and insight of the writer. The script format communicates instructions to all senior personnel on a film production.
We are pleased to announce that the motion picture industry’s leading script-authoring software company has joined the Academy in a sponsorship arrangement to assist students in the craft of writing and reading the complex screenplay format. This is a skill every filmmaker must master, no matter what his specialty or gift. The hundreds of professionals who must come together to make a film all work from the same script. All rely on the wealth of information contained in strict formatting rules. Every professional script must have this formatting.
In 1991, Final Draft, Inc. developed a software program that allows the writer to concentrate on the creative process and not on the industry’s stringent and highly complex formatting rules. Today it is used by the more productive writers, producers, and directors.
Promising writers and producers will have an opportunity to win a personal license for Final Draft software as the SAICFF launches The Treatment Contest. This year’s attendees will hear about the scope of the contest and the benefits for entrants. Treatments do not require the complex guidelines of full-length screenplays, but winning treatments will be most easily converted into winning scripts with the kind of software help Final Draft can provide.
“Final Draft is an amazing piece of software,” says producer Mace Neufeld (Gods and Generals, The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger), “and the only program around that allows me to instantly get rewrites of a script no matter where I am shooting, from the most remote film location in the Moroccan desert, to the frozen landscape of Montreal’ who doesn’t use Final Draft — it’s essential.”