Adobe Story Online Scriptwriting Solution Review
Adobe Story is a simple scriptwriting application with plenty of key features that makes it a great tool for video producers. The current version is in beta, meaning that it's available for free on its Labs website (labs.adobe.com). Adobe intends to fold this application into its Production bundle in the future with some clever integrations. As for now, Adobe Story works both as an online web application and an offline application.
Adobe Story uses the AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) framework, allowing the application to be used with a standard web browser. This means there's no download required, although you do need to have Flash Player version 10. You can point your browser to the web application and start working on your script after creating a free Adobe account. The online nature of Adobe Story means that you can also collaborate with other writers or reviewers of your script. And, if you want to work in the offline environment (let's say you need that quiet getaway to focus on your writing), the web application can be downloaded and installed on your machine. When you return to civilization, your scripts will be synced back online the next time you log into the online application. It's a rather innovative approach to how applications behave that provides much more flexibility in the way you write and review your scripts.
Adobe Story has a classic Adobe look, with dark gray columns and highlights in orange and white. We immediately started organizing our projects into categories in the Project sidebar. One of the nice features of Adobe Story is the way you can use categories to organize your scripts. You can create many categories and name them anything you'd like. We choose to use categories as different script types, so we created Narrative, Commercial, Presentation and Tutorial categories to cover each major type of script. Using these categories, we were able to categorize our projects. And projects are their own deal too.
A project can be named whatever you like and can be given a variety of properties, so that you can specify the type of script you're working on. Once a project is created, you can add multiple scripts to it. In this manner of organizing your scripts, you can keep all the scripts for a project in one container. This helps if you need different versions of the same script. Perhaps you'll have several different endings or different languages - you can make whatever your project requires.
Getting started is quite easy with Adobe Story. You can import from a variety of script file formats, including Microsoft Word and Final Draft. Adobe Story will analyze an imported script in order to properly identify the unique and redundant objects in the script. The goal is to retain much of the standard script format from the original document so that scene headings and character names become trackable elements in Adobe Story.
We first tried importing a very simple narration script with very little formatting, just to see how Adobe Story handles external files. We imported a Microsoft Word document. Adobe Story loaded the editor and fonts and, most importantly, the four-page document. We saw that it formatted the first line as a scene heading. That was not originally formatted that way, but it was understandable that Adobe Story interpreted the opening line as such. It's not a big deal, and we were able to adjust the script to fit this unique format of a talking head script that was an audio overlay to a slideshow presentation.
We were disappointed to see that Adobe Story did not convert the apostrophes correctly. Anywhere in the script with an apostrophe was now replaced with three gibberish characters. This made the script pretty dirty. We tried to use the Find operation in the Edit menu, but it simply prompted us to use our web browser's Find function. We tried that, but the text in the script was unsearchable. We had run into our first problem. We either had to convert the Word document to a friendlier document to import or manually fix every apostrophe. Neither option would save us any time.
