Announcing A New Product from General Cinema Dynamics: Draft

Draft for Screenwriting

We at General Cinema Dynamics Corporation are thrilled to announce our newest product, Draft, a professional online collaborative screenwriting software. This is especially exciting for me as a working screenwriter. Other options out there are either too expensive, too proprietary, and too complicated. So we created Draft. I think you'll love it, as I have. I've been using it as my daily go-to screenwriting software, and I've been using it to write my latest screenplay, Paradise Lost. During that time beta testing it I've found it to be both incredibly convenient and strikingly robust.

I'm jazzed to be able to now make it available to you for FREE, and to writers everywhere, looking to put their dreams onto paper.

Before you try out Draft, let me tell you tell you about some of the features and advantages:

Live Collaboration

I've often longed for a dedicated screenwriting tool that allows me to work with another writer (like Quentin Tarantino, Neil Gaiman, or my daughter Gala) who's at a different location, maybe on another continent, and for us to be able to easily collaborate in real time as if we were all in the same room. Draft does that, and it makes it easy.

Industry Standard

Screenwriting is a creative art, but it is also a technical document — a blueprint for a movie. Draft is designed for working professional writers, but it's easy enough to use that aspiring filmmakers can intuitively write their dream screenplay. All of the page formatting and elements are based on the long history of screenwriting in Hollywood, with familiar elements (like sluglines, action, characters, parentheticals, transitions), scene numbers, mores and continueds, and title page. There's a scene organizer to allow you to easily shape your material. Draft also works the way you want to work, with light mode and dark mode, script notes, keyboard shortcuts, revision mode, find & replace, importing & exporting .pdf, .fdx, Fountain, or JSON formats. Draft supports standard US Letter paper, but also supports the A4 paper favored by our international friends. Draft is for everyone, everywhere.

Online And Offline

We've made Draft as an online web accessible app, so that no matter where you may be you'll be able to access it on your phone or computer. But sometimes, like on a remote location or on an airplane, you may not have internet access. For that reason we've designed Draft to be able to work offline as well. You might not be able to collaborate while offline, but you'll be able to get your ideas onto paper and your collaborator will see it as soon as you come back online.

Autosave And Time Machine

Draft saves your work as you go, and it keeps a record of your changes so that you can look back at the version history of your workflow in a familiar Time Machine fashion. If saving to the Draft cloud makes you nervous, you can save or export versions locally onto your device, in most formats. Being failsafe, stable, and not losing my work is a personal priority of mine. Draft doesn't wait for you to press Command-S, it keeps a record of every keystroke you make, from beginning to end.

Future Proof

We're constantly improving Draft to make it better, and though Draft is designed to write old-fashioned traditional filmmaking screenplays, we're looking to the future of filmmaking, and we have some innovative ideas on how Draft will support AI and Generative Filmmaking in the days and years to come. Draft updates are automatic and invisible to your writing process. It'll just get better and better!

And It's Free!

Did I forget to tell you that we're offering Draft for free? There's no cost to using Draft other than your computer (or phone) and the time you put into your work. You can write 20 screenplays in Draft, and there's no charge. We believe that creativity doesn't have a price, and that screenwriting software should be freely available to everyone on the planet. In the future we will be offering advanced writing assistant tools, and marketplace services, for those who want a premium experience. But the functional features of Draft screenwriting software will be available to all.

Thank you.

The only thing you’ll need to do is to make an account on draft.pulptime.com. Note: If you have already have an account on pulptime.com, you’ll need to create a new account to access the software.

Try Out Draft For Free Today.

We founded General Cinema Dynamics Corporation with the motto of Engineering Entertainment, to bring filmmaking into the future of filmmaking, and we feel Draft is one of the cornerstones of our vision. We hope you enjoy. Happy writing!

@Roger Avary

CEO of General Cinema Dynamics + Pulp Time

The program has been great ... I'm not sure why someone hasn't made a free screenwriting software before?

There have been a few options, but nothing that I was ever happy about working with. I tried CelTX and hated it. KIT Scenarist is a little funky and doesn't have collaboration integration. Highland technically is just a text file, and more of a format than a program. I want something that works the way I work, and so we had to build it ourselves! I hope everyone likes it. If there's a feature anyone wants we can add it, and if there's a buggy bit, we can patch it. Now, Gala, we can actually work on it at the same time, and your cursor can chase mine and make changes as I'm writing, lol!

Can you take a completed story/book you write and drop in each chapter, and will it start to divide it up into scenes for you along with beats? Of course one would have to massage any draft of this after the initial AI has done its' draft. Other programs that claim to do this produce gibberish.

this is so awesome! i've been trying to get off the FD teat for years! love how they treat paying customers like criminals. haha. My friend and I are trying to dive right into the deep end and use Draft to co-write a screenplay. But we have an issue and a couple questions.

1) we can't seem to initiate a collaboration. We both have Draft accounts (free for now) but when I try to share a document, I get an error "Slate could not complete this operation. Your local changes have been kept." (note: changes are being kept so far) I tried logging in and out, but no luck. He also tried creating a doc and adding me but no luck. I'm on a Mac Studio running the latest OS and latest version of Safari. My friend is using Chrome on a MacBook.

2) I also can't seem to get the keyboard shortcut to switch to Scene Heading to work (cmd / cntrl 1). It works fine by selecting with the mouse, but half the time I try the hotkeys listed in the tools dropdown menu I end up opening the tabs menu in Safari (I'm starting to suspect Safari might be the root of my issues). (late discovery - I just found out I can tab to Scene Heading, but it's 8 tab presses)

3) finally, is there a spellcheck? I don't see a tool (which is not a dealbreaker), but it also seems like the MacOS system-wide spellcheck isn't catching misspellings in the document either (the broken red underscore).

Sorry for being such a pill right off the bat! Also, thanks for leaning into tabs! that is the one thing that really kept me in Final Draft! haha.

These are good notes and we're looking into them. Thank you, JR.

Okay, all of those Draft fixes are in place now. Collaboration, in particular, should feel pretty awesome. You can see who’s in the “room” with you and work around each other, but the particular paragraph you’re on will be locked while you’re writing in it.

we successfully crossed streams and joined scripts in collaboration!

however (there's always a "however" isn't there), there is a new workflow stalling issue. Whenever either of us tries to click within the text of the document, the view snaps to the top of page 1. For example, we're currently 3 pages in, if I scroll down to click/insert where I left off, the document snaps up to the top of the document. If I scroll down, the insertion cursor is still active at the bottom of the document and I can start typing. However, as soon as I hit return or tab, it snaps back to the top of the document.

This is happening to both of us on separate machines and across browser types. Also happening in solo/non-collaboration documents. Also also, the auto-saving has more of a "pause" before I can start typing again - used to feel more like saving was happening in the background. I wonder if this is all somehow tied to the paragraph locking?

What browsers are you both using?

this happens in Safari for both desktop and mobile (before and after Apple's latest updates) and definitely on Brave for my desktop.

not sure if you pushed out an update or if my computers just started behaving, but it seems to be working now! thank you and the devs!

Can't wait to dig into this. I've tried absolutely every alternative to FD including the ones you mentioned. Even built my own work arounds for Microsoft Word and Pages, etc. Anything not to be stuck with FD, which just seems to have out and out contempt for its users. Great there's an alternative. Hope it becomes the new industry standard.

Anybody try this to go with writing software & AI ? What will they think of next? A humanizer for AI-copy LOL ... https://trywalterai.com/ai-humanizer/

Thanks for the invite Roger!. I've uploaded a finished script I wrote from 1994 and just re-read it this week with fresh eyes. I probably haven't read it in over 15 years.

I've also uploaded the script to ChatGPT and asked it to help breakdown the script as if I was in the planning stage.

I ran into a problem in the Story - Scenes section. I can see 209 scenes identified, but the window to scroll through each scene (where I'm adding the synopsis of each one) only let's me see the first 4 scenes and I can't scroll through them.

I've tried it on Safari and Brave, same issue.