Index Cards & Celtx Screenplay Editor

Video Transcript

DREW NOAH: So one final thing I want to show you in the Screenplay Editor is the Index Cards tab. So it's down here at the bottom with your other options. And what this is, if you're familiar with screenwriting, one thing they kind of recommend you doing is writing out your scenes on index cards. In that way, if you can rearrange your scenes. If maybe one scene needs to be before another, you can easily kind of arrange them with index cards and get like a visual of how that works. So they have added this computerized version, which is just pretty cool, and you can see on our example script from the Wizard of Oz, they've got all our Scene Headings. We're going to put them in index cards and I can add a description. Of course, you want to be more detailed than that. So you remember, we also in our Production Library have scene descriptions, and this is that first scene. So I'll go ahead and just copy that and add it to my index cards. So that's pretty cool. One other option, you have the option to give things different plot lines and you can name these plot lines and even color code. So if this was a different plot line, of course, I probably want to name what it actually was and not leave it on Plot Line C. Plot Line C is all blue cards. So that's another cool thing you can do with these index cards. You could also even add scenes straight from the Index Card section by just clicking Add Card. It goes right there. And if you remember when I was saying that screenwriters would use this to kind of rearrange their scenes in the best way possible; well, Celtx makes that possible by just clicking and dragging. All right, I didn't quite get it. Yeah, there you go. You see that little blue line popped up to let you know it's gonna--well, it's supposed to work. There we go. I had to work with it for a second, but you can see it does work. And you can just click and drag this around, just like that. So you can kind of rearrange them. And you can also put some zoom settings if you like. This shows script, actually puts some script into the what you see right after your Scene Heading and this--the first thing after a Scene Heading is technically an Action in formatting but you're basically setting up the scene, what you're going to see in the beginning of the shot. So it's a nice thing to see on these index cards. So it's important to note that when you go around changing the order of your index cards, you're actually changing the order in your script. So keep that mind. You're not just playing around in your index cards. They actually see in your little scene, Order Box, if they're changing order. And then if you go back to your script, you can see now that the first scene is no longer what it was, it's what we changed it to. And down here is what used to be our first scene but since we've moved it around, it has actually changed in our script. So if you write your script and then you want to play with the order in the Index Cards section, it might be a good idea to go over and duplicate it, just in case. And you can always undo, but if you get really far, you want to make sure that you have that old version. And then if you move everything around and you like it, and of course, you can keep it the way it is. But just so you know, when you're messing with your index cards, you're actually changing the order of your script. So that's how you use the Index Cards feature in the Screenplay Editor of Celtx.

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