Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Q. My partner Brad and I are a couple of USC film school grads who have created a collaborative screenwriting webapp/site called Plotbot, and we're inviting fellow film fans & screenwriters such as yourself to take a look.

Plotbot is a collaborative screenwriting site where you can write a screenplay with as many or as few people as you like. Plotbot is completely free - we're really interested in seeing if we can get a group of people to collaborate. Our goal is to create a tool that can be used well for writing screenplays in general, and for fostering collaborative screenplays in particular.

To that end, Plotbot's all buzzwordalicious Ajax magic, with Creative Commons built in and fully accessible RTF and XML of anything written in it. We've created a framework for both private projects and public projects, with means of controlling access levels for editing and comments, and everything else. The screenplay tool itself formats elements in the screenplay standard, and allows for full wiki-style reversioning and commenting.

Anyhow, I'm hoping you'll be interested in taking a look yourself. If you find it to your liking, you have the ability to invite others!

Thanks, and feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Signing up is quick and easy! Just use this URL:

http://www.plotbot.com/register
Invite Code: binderclip

This feels to me like a solution in search of a problem. It's exhausting enough working with a writing partner. The last thing I want is to make it easy for other people (director, producer, execs) to fuss with my screenplay. Collaborative screenplays? Sounds like writing by committee.

But your mileage may vary. Anybody want to check this out and report back?

1:20 AM

4 Comments:

I would rather slam my head in a car door than write that way.

By  William, at 8:49 AM  

It smacks of the old, "put a thousand monkeys in the room with a thousand typewriters" adage.

I do enough monkeying around on my own, thanks.

By  Cunningham, at 10:12 AM  

Writing by committee...a room full of writers, working together on a single story/script..yeah, that'd never work.

By  Paul William Tenny, at 9:09 PM  

Well, it can also be a totally private screenplay with no collaborators, or just readers, which is actually amazing for some writers who either have day jobs or are constantly moving around. To be able to be constantly writing a screenplay in the correct format online at all times seems pretty neat to me.

By  Lauren, at 11:43 PM  

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