Adobe Story Review - by Lee Bailles
I’ve just been trying out the new offering from Adobe - ‘Story’ - designed to enable Adobe to encroach on the world of writing applications. As an avid cinephile and amateur screenwriter I am always in the market for a new tool that can aid my creative productivity. As an amateur filmmaker, what could be better than a writing app that also interacts with your film editing applications? Enabling you to see the idea through from inception, to the big screen debut and eventual DVD release complete with localised subtitles for overseas territories.
So far it looks like a very primitive version of something like: the free and very competent platform agnostic tool CELTX that offers inexpensive collaboration 'studio' tools; the expensive but market leading Final Draft; and the relatively inexpensive Mac tool Scrivener.
However, it’s real strength may be the ability to work online and offline, work collaboratively and benefit from the tight integration with other future Adobe apps - especially any production / breakdown software they might be planning.
Pros
• Financial - although there is no incentive for home users to dive in, early adopting corporate users will no doubt enjoy the benefit of getting a great deal on the application when it is bundled as part of a suite.
• Cloud collaboration will be useful for non-collocated teams. This is already very popular with those using CELTX.
• The ability to tag your script elements, such as props and wardrobe, are crucial in order to break your script down for production. Story uses heuristic analysis to automatically identify key words in your script and tags them under various categories like Character, costume, food, beverage etc.
• Working within projects - enabling everyone to share and version control their projects will speed up the production process and ensure the team will be working with the latest version of the scripts.
Cons
• The interface is not engaging, dull flat and lifeless and difficult to work with in some lighting conditions. Working on a small netbook is not recommended at present, and on certain displays or builds you will find it launches with parts of the interface obscured by the dock
• Features like Page numbers, 'MORE' appearing on page breaks and a title page being missing are absolute deal breakers for professionals working in the industry. How can you send a script to someone for possible sale or review without such basic information that is already freely available in Word?
• No index card functionality. This is imperative for many writers, being able to visualise your scenes and reorder them on the fly, both virtually and later when printing for inclusion on a cork board
• Currently no planned integration with exporting to other tools such as CELTX.
The conclusion? At present it cannot compete with CELTX and Scrivener. But I would keep an eye on it. Within a year or two it could soon become a non-Hollywood industry screenwriting standard; especially for small and medium enterprises and those in Advertising and e-learning production.
It will be interesting to see how much this early version will eventually retail for. Right now you can obviously try it out for free, just go here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/story/
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Reply #1 on : Wed April 07, 2010, 05:34:55