Since I had just scripted a 90-second promotional video for my university department, it was easy to pull up the script in the Celtx Studio I’m currently using this semester, and demonstrate breaking down the script, filling out breakdown sheets, and generating script reports and production reports.

Tomorrow I judge a business video competition being held more than an hour away: while being driven to the host hotel, I’ll be able to revise the promo script using the Celtx Script app. (Always try to be chauffeured places: you’ll be more productive!)

One of the Film 239 students asked: “Why bother using anything but Celtx for script development and script breakdowns?” And if you’re an indy media maker, that’s the right question to ask. Mastering Celtx will detail the answer.

The instructional resources include additional sample scripts to play with, and several model syllabus templates (including additional exercises) for building a scriptwriting class partially or totally around Mastering Celtx. Syllabi are highly adaptable, so you can decide how much to focus on writing, how much to focus on storyboarding, and how much to focus on the entirety of tools available using Celtx. These syllabi are designed to work for high school, college, and adult education students.

(Want to know more about Mastering Celtx? You can check out everything in this blog, of course, and the Australian/New Zealand Cengage site for the book includes the table of contents, features and more.)

You don’t need to be a student in a classroom to use Mastering Celtx — but the book includes step-by-step tutorials, practical exercises, and spotlights on how screenwriting works: if you’re teaching screenwriting, playwriting, or ideation/storyboarding, check out how it might work for your curriculum. (You can request a review copy to consider classroom adoption.)

Film crew trainees are also very interested in how scripts are written (even if they’re not planning to write any themselves), and as one student said to me afterwards, “I didn’t think writing a script could be so easy!”

Thanks to instructor Kelly Bahr for the invitation to show off a few of Celtx’s features and talk about Mastering Celtx to her students!

Celtx Shots fully exploits the iPad form factor, and its combination of features makes for a powerful tool.

Here’s just one sample application:

1. On paper, sketch your key images (stickman-type drawings are just fine!).
2. Directly import the images into a new project file using the iPad camera app.
3. Caption the storyboard images.
4. Play back the images as an animatic using the built-in player.
5. Voila! You’ve got a storyboard you can export and email. You can also sync this with your desktop and laptop systems, or with Celtx Studios.

L.A. based filmmaker Sam Yano has written up an extensive and fascinating blog article describing how Celtx Shots can be integrated into the workflow of a feature film.

For current users of Celtx, the Celtx Shots mobile app will seem very intuitive, and nearly all of its features are available in the desktop version (see chapters 8, 9, 10 and 16 of Mastering Celtx for a full discussion). But Celtx Shots includes 81 built-in clipart images for the Sketch editor, and its ability to import and export projects through iTunes is certainly useful.

Celtx Shots is currently $4.99 in the iTunes app store. Will an Android app be available in the future? I’m guessing yes, eventually. But in the meantime, if you’re using an iPhone and/or iPad and already using Celtx, this is a no-brainer: for less than the price of a latte and biscotti, you’ve got a shiny new tool in your tool belt.

If you’ve never used Celtx before, but love your iPad and are a visual thinker, then this might be a great introduction to Celtx. Used in conjunction with Celtx Script, you’ve got a fully mobile preproduction suite of authoring tools.

Congrats to the Celtx team, and it’ll be exciting to see how Celtx Shots is used in the Celtx user community in the months ahead.

The radio show is called NM Film Works, hosted by Trish Lopez of the New Mexico Film Office. Air times and stations:

• Santa Fe and surroundings: Saturday, September 10 at 11am on 1260-AM
• Albuquerque and surroundings: Sunday, September 11 at 12noon on 1350-AM.

Sadly, there is no live online streaming, but the show will be archived online early next week, and I’ll post the location for online playback then.

Traditionally, students would hand in assignment printouts to you; you’d mark them up; then you’d return them.

Printouts have their uses.  For a huge chunk of the past decade, I was on a roundtrip airflight weekly or bimonthly — and the only way to make that work is to use planes and airports as your mobile office. Reviewing student work had the bonus effect of warding off chatty once-a-year air passengers (seeing a professor mark up work brings back too many bad memories for most people), and of course, you could be working on both ascents and descents.

But printouts have their downsides. Students will tell you they turned in their work, when they haven’t — but how do you prove a negative? Students will tell you they didn’t get homework returned, when they did.  When they do get homework back, they’ll often lose the homework — and all of your painstaking annotations. And of course, you might even leave a sheaf of homework assignments on a plane (or subway car or airport shuttle bus).

Consequently, many instructors have turned to electronic delivery from students, and electronic distribution of reviewed work. But if you’re doing all this via email, the traffic direction alone gets daunting. In addition, students often aren’t terribly diligent at reading email, and the same issues remain: “But I emailed the assignment”, “I didn’t get the homework back”, “My spam filter blocks your emails”, and so on.

Many institutions deploy Blackboard, a content management system, for instructional delivery and distribution. And while this solves some of the traffic direction problems, Blackboard is still pretty clunky when it comes to collaboration and maintenance of version histories. If your institution doesn’t deploy Blackboard, then tough luck.

Enter Celtx Studios, a very low-cost “cloud” platform specifically built to share Celtx content, maintain version histories, and assist in project management.

The platform has been designed for small media production teams to collaborate on projects — but the same platform is highly adaptable to classroom use, and solves a number of the above-mentioned issues in collecting and tracking assignments, annotating assignments and distributing reviewed work.

Here are just some of the advantages:

• Students can save their Celtx projects in one central location, enabling them to continue work on the project at home, on their iPhones or iPads, at other campus computer labs, or any other location with a computer.
• All projects are automatically shared with the studio admin (typically, the instructor), eliminating the added step of “submitting” work.
• Instructors can then use Celtx’s Notes feature to annotate and comment on work. Additionally, instructors can add new project elements (like an “Overall Comments” page) if necessary.
• Instructors can also assign collaborative exercises for students, and have the students share projects with each other in the studio.
• Instructors can track progress through Celtx Studios’ Archives feature, which maintains a version history and allows for side-by-side comparison between drafts.
• Instructor reviews are instantly available for students — eliminating the step of “returning” work.

Celtx Studios isn’t a perfect solution — no real search or sortable data features exist yet, and you’ll need to enforce some consistent project naming conventions in order to quickly find an assignment. But if you’re teaching any kind of writing class (Celtx’s Novel template will handle any kind of prose writing), screenwriting class or storyboarding class, Celtx Studios may be worth checking out.

Chapters 14 and 15 of Mastering Celtx (which you can find on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble) discuss Celtx Studios creation, administration and usage in great detail. The book explores all of Celtx’s features so that you can determine if it’s right for you to use — whether for personal or professional use, or in the classroom with students.

In the works are instructional resources for teachers thinking of using Celtx in the classroom — subscribe to this blog, or follow our Twitter feed, for updates on these resources.