"OK, that's pretty nice, but my budget doesn't include hundreds of bucks for storyboarding! How 'bout something for a bit less?"

Some of the nicest applications around started as grassroots efforts and grew into viable solutions designed to help you accomplish a task with as little bloat as possible.

Kinda like a fine wine, Springboard (Six Mile Creek Systems) has evolved into a clean, well-defined solution without all the fluff. You can buy this nifty little application for about $35. It's a perfect solution for organizing your ideas into one place on your PC. It lets you be creative and get organized without getting in your way. You can build a complete storyboard with it, you can attach it to your script and you can animate then render the whole thing. With this software, though you won't have access to a library of 3D objects or complete set building features. You will be able to create frames with your own drawings and enter text notes to each one. You can add frames with a simple keystroke and rearrange them as you go.

Once you start working with Springboard, the beauty of it's simplicity comes to life with it's color coded layering, which allows you to separately add and move objects such as cameras, lights, props and even actors around the frame. After you have a nice frame designed, you can pan around it and even zoom in and out. Once you have everything in place all you need to do is export to a web page or create a movie file and you can share with everyone on your crew. This little gem also can help you organize your script with a hierarchical outline of your story and it provides you with a nice print interface that allows printing the whole enchilada or just a la carte selections so you can review just what you want.

If you don't need renderings and visual aids, but still feel the need to organize or you want to submit some spec work to the film industry, you need a scripting editor. Imagine working in an office that takes in scripts from all over the world. Wouldn't it be a mess if everyone submitted their "treatment" in any format they wanted to? You'd get some on legal, and some on letter size, some on tabloid and just to stand out some would send theirs on canvas... oh... not the garden variety unbleached beige canvas. It would be pink with green lettering! Yep, that's why the Writers Guild of America decided to set some standards. Final Draft 8 has become a standard of the entertainment industry. Final Draft also offers an AV version, which is for the commercial industry.

They may not take your script seriously, but submit in this format and they'll take the formatting seriously! Final Draft has all the necessary tools to keep every line item, cast member and scene in your story organized and searchable right from the comfort of your PC. There's color coordinated fields that help you to quickly identify each segment of the script, and the user interface is designed specifically with the screen writer in mind.

With all these tools at your fingertips, you can approach each project with confidence, and rest assured that no job is too big or unwieldy for you to produce. We've just touched the surface on storyboarding and scriptwriting software out there now. Gone are the hand-drawn stick-people and the painstakingly typewritten (and carbon copied!) scripts. Getting organized with storyboarding or script writing up front can save you big bucks in the end of the production cycle. Do your research, think about your needs and how you would use these powerful solutions available to the video professional to create great videos and scripts. Some of these software companies offer free trial versions, so sample sample sample-it's fun!

Terry O'Rourke specializes in retail advertising photography and videography for clients world wide.

Click here to download a PDF Manufacturer's list of Videomaker's Storyboard Software Buyer's Guide .