who are still selling it, now entitled Movie Magic Screenwriter.
The software had a very dedicated following, and we ultimately sold it to Screenplay Systems, Inc.
The company grew, we transitioned from DOS to Windows, I hired a Mac programmer (who is still with me today!), dedicated tech support and an office/sales manager. So, of course, I did what any sane person with a degree in film production and no real programming training would do I sat down and wrote a word processor from scratch.Īstonishingly, I somehow actually managed it, and ScriptThing™ was born.
When WordPerfect came out with a Windows version, however, it was a bloated thing that did not play well with my complicated macros, leaving me with a simple choice: either program a complete word processor from scratch or actually find a job. When my girlfriend (now my wife) got a post-doc down in San Diego, we left LA and I had grown the software sales to the point where I didn’t need to find other work. By the time it did, I was making a modest income from the software. To avoid having to find non-entertainment related work, and following up on the enthusiasm of the show’s writers, I decided I’d put together a manual, give my macros some more polish, and sell it as a scriptwriting package to tide me over until the strike ended. It was a great improvement in some ways, but was still rather buggy at that point, and had both severe limitations, and what I saw as fundamental design flaws, such as forcing us to break even a sitcom script into several files.Īs my Script Coordinator job tended to have a lot of down-time in the mornings until afternoon run-through, I worked on my own projects in WordPerfect with a bunch of macros I’d put together, and several of the show’s writers asked why they couldn’t use what I was using instead of Movie Master.Īnd then I got my big break… in employment that is, as the 1988 Writer’s strike happened and shut all production down for what turned out to be nearly six months.
The next show I worked on had me use one of the first dedicated software programs created for scriptwriting, Movie Master, which at the time was still in beta test. You have to make decisions about things that you’ll feel you aren’t qualified to decide about. We’ve received television’s highest award, the Emmy, for the program’s “proven track record of saving productions time and money through virtual testing,” two Lumiere statuettes from the Advanced Imaging Society and numerous accolades from our users. Our users include Academy Award-winning director, Mike van Diem, who said that FrameForge always inspires him to find better shots, the former president of the American Society of Cinematographers, Richard Crudo, and Emmy nominated VFX Supervisors, like Mark Kolpack.
The program’s been used on TV shows ranging from Downton Abbey to Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD and both big-budget films like Spiderman: Homecoming and The Hangover Part III and on independent films worldwide. The best, fastest way to understand what it is and how people use it to watch this two-minute video we put together with Emmy and BAFTA-nominated director, David Evans, on how he used it on an episode of Downton Abbey. This allows directors, cinematographers, and visual effect supervisors to basically pre-shoot their film (or TV show, commercial or whatever) in the computer, trouble-shooting difficult shots, discover new and better ways of staging and ultimately producing a true blueprint for the shoot. Or you can get our software and do it yourself.įrameForge is an optically accurate virtual film studio where the in-computer cameras exactly match what the real-world camera will see, down to specific lens choices. Previsualization (or previs for short, still with a Z sound) means a lot of different things to different people, as up until very recently it was exclusively the domain of effects-heavy, big-budget studio films, as commercial previs can run tens of thousands of dollars per minute. Now you probably know what storyboards are, those hand-drawn comic strip type images filmmakers use to prepare their shoots and communicate how they want it to look to the cast and crew. We make the Emmy and Lumiere-Award winning previsualization/storyboard software, FrameForge Studio. I’m Ken Schafer, the president and lead program architect of Innoventive Software, LLC.