Final Draft Blog

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Tech Tip: Working Remotely with Final Draft 11

July 1, 2020

While the world adjusts to changes on how we interact with each other, Final Draft is here to help guide you through collaborating with your writing partners in a virtual setting. Whether you’re in a TV writers’ room, or a classroom, Final Draft is h...

Tech Tips: Using Scene View to Organize Your Story Beats

May 22, 2020

A lot of writers use the Beat Board and Story Map to lay out their story in a non-linear way, but if you’re someone who prefers a more linear, A-then-B-then-C approach to structuring a plot, Final Draft 11 has another way that might work for you.

Tech Tips: Alternate Dialogue

August 30, 2019

You’re not sure whether the most hilarious comeback line to use is “So’s your mother!” or “I know you are but what am I?” You think the kid should say “I want my two dollars” but your writing partner believes “You owe me two dollars” is far better. Y...

Tech Tip: ScriptNotes in the Navigator

August 23, 2019

Of all the features in Final Draft 11 designed to help you track, brainstorm, bookmark and edit your story’s ideas, ScriptNotes may be the most obvious; annotating a script is probably as old as the craft itself. New ideas, edits, questions, links to...

Tech Tip: Reformatting

August 16, 2019

Sometimes paragraphs in Final Draft are inadvertently misformatted – Action paragraphs mistakenly render as character names, Scene Headings look like Transitions, lines of dialogue look like Parentheticals.

Tech Tip: Breakdown your Script with the Story Map and Beat Board

August 9, 2019

Please note: this article refers to Final Draft 11. Final Draft 12 has many more advanced story-building tools. Ah, the corkboard. The writer’s roadmap; a finite space for infinite ideas that will eventually become a blueprint for a script. For many ...

Tech Tips: Using Bookmarks

July 26, 2019

Final Draft gives you several ways to move around in your script quickly – the Navigator panels, the Scene View, and the Index Cards.

Tech Tips: Title Page

July 12, 2019

The Title Page is the first thing agents, managers and producers will see before reading your script. Think of your title page as the initial handshake between your script and whomever will be reading the material. The title page won’t make or break ...

Tech Tips: Collaboration

July 3, 2019

For many Elton John fans, it’s a well-known fact that when writing a song, the Rocketman and his writing partner Bernie Taupin would retreat to different locations around the world. Bernie would write the lyrics and Elton the music and then they woul...