"What is Boolaka.com? An attempt by three entrepreneurs to do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to information - decentralize, democratize, and incentivise creativity, cooperation and inspiration."
Read the full story » (opens in new window)
Visit Boolaka.com » (opens in new window)

Final Draft 8.0 was released today. It is available for $249, or $79.00 for an upgrade from Final Draft 7. A limited demo is available. New features include a Scene Navigator, Page Count Management, Scene Properties Editor, Scene View, Remember Workspace, and my personal favorite, Export to XML. There are additional improvements to existing features, including an improved font. I see no indication whether or not the OS X version is a carbon or cocoa application. Reviews are welcome!

FYI- Celtx is now at version 2.0.1. As noted previously, Celtx is a free screenwriting and pre-production package available for Mac, Linux, and Windows. It is available in the languages of English, Brazilian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (TW & CN), Czech, Danish, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Macedonian, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmal and Nyorsk), Polish, Portugese (PT), Romanian, Russian, Srpski (Bosnian?), Slovenian, Finnish, Swedish, and Turkish.

I have no idea how this happened. It took several years to get to 1.0, but now out of nowhere it seems a version 2.0 of the open-source screenwriting program Celtx has been released. It's only been six months or so since the last version and here we are with 2.0. According to the release notes, this version includes "Celtx Studios", a server-side archiving, collaboration system, which is in free beta but will cost $50/year at some future point. Other features include extensions, a "notifier ribbon", faster underlying rendering and javascript engines, and 38 bug-fixes. Celtx runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows and is available in many languages. Enjoy!

This has been making the rounds... About the life of an assistant in hollywood...

Enjoy...

You made the move out to Los Angeles? Way to go! Me too! Do you have an internship lined up? Oh, that's awesome! You're hoping that will turn into a job? That's adorable, but statistically unlikely!

There is the occasional internship turned assistant job, and for those of you that see that happen, congratulations. That is truly awesome. The rest of us though, are suddenly going to find ourselves without employment. Of course, it's not really that sudden, since most internships don't pay, but that's beside the point. Where do we find work?

1. The Internet

To everyone interested in making movies, the internet and plummeting cost of digital video have opened up a cornucopia of potential audiences. Such innovation doesn't come without risk, however, and you need to remember that quality, not quantity are what will win you loyal viewers. In that spirit, I refer you to the ever-timely ONN:

YouTube Contest Challenges Users To Make A 'Good' Video

Those of you who have been following the RED phenomenon may be interested in this news from engadget about a just-announced new camera system. Looks to be fairly cheap and configurable, just as previous RED One cameras have been. There's a thread on this at Slashdot as well. Update: Oh, and they announced a 3D-camera system too.

2nd update: Interesting critical look at RED here. (warning- a bit technical)