Montage (Mac)

The main advantage I see of using Montage over other software packages I've looked at is its simplicity and ease of use, focused on the writer. It opens quickly, has an easy-to-use and easy-to-learn interface, and at the same time has nearly all the features you'd actually need or use from more complicated and expensive programs.

You can set up several different screenwriting templates, depending on what kind of thing you're writing - various BBC genres, the standard American screenplay formats, comic book dialogue, television and musicals. You can have the various elements of the screenplay color coded or not, and can create your own template.

It's easy to shift between various views, such as the overall script view, the title page, or a scene or outline view; and there are templates for fleshing out information on characters and locations, or for various research notes. There is a place to outline tasks, contacts, queries, for writing up a synopsis. These various views are integrated, such that if you change the name of a character on the character view, the name will change throughout the script. These are all searchable via user identifiable key words. You can add annotations or notes to specific bits of the script, which would be very helpful during the revision process.

While the window for Montage is a standard Mac-style window, you can easily enter and exit a full screen view for a focus on your script that completely eliminates the distraction of seeing your other apps. The program as a whole is strictly focused on writers - while you can attach pictures for the characters and locations, there's nothing here that supports storyboarding and the like.

Some features don't work as intuitively as I'd like. For example, in the "Research" view you can add various topics with notes for each, but you can't tab from the name of the topic to get to the notes field - you have to actually mouse click into the notes field to make it active. I understand that a new edition of Montage is forthcoming, so it may be worth waiting. As it is, this is a simple and streamlined, no-frills alternative to some of the overpriced screenwriting programs out there. I like it because it puts the focus on writing - and makes it easy to avoid distraction from the main task of screenwriting which is using your imagination and hard work to create characters and a compelling story.

This software was a real surprise. I had been using Final Draft for quite a few years now, version 6 through 8. I was still quite happy with version 6, then came out version 7 that was extremely buggy and one of the main bugs was never fixed (it could cause formatting errors in your whole screenplay which took ours to fix), which I think is unacceptable for 200$ software. Anyway, version 8 was stable again, but I still thought it was lacking so I looked around and found movie outline, which was around the same price, but much more feature rich. I especially appreciated that it had a great outline feature, which I think is also important for a screenwriting software. Anyway, even though I liked it better, it still was far from perfect. And then I heard about Montage. And I must say, it's not perfect either, but it's getting much closer. It has a great outline feature, the user interface is very intuitive and very efficient (and nice looking), finding your way around your screenplay, changing characters, scene locations, scenes etc. is much easier, adding notes that are not directly in your screenplay, but can easily be accessed when you're looking at your screenplay (one of the many features lacking in Final Draft, which always drove me mad) is also possible. Anyway, you get the idea, extremely feature rich, easy to use, very good interface... and it's only half the price of Final Draft. And it seems version 2 is coming out soon, so I'm quite excited. One thing that's missing in this software is a good coloring system, so I hope version 2 will have that (but the coloring system it has, thought lacking, is better than final drafts, since it has a few more colors. But a good coloring system, in my opinion, should allow you to assign several colors to the same scene, which neither of these softwares permits. I find that a mystery, by the way. It would be so simple to implement and would be something extremely practical (I'm shaking my head as I'm writing this).

I'd like to give this screenplay writing software a perfect 5-Star review, but it has a bug that limits its use once your screenplay is ready to start making "contact" with the film industry. It's supposed to download a list of industry contacts, including email addresses. This feature doesn't work and Mariner is unresponsive in getting it fixed. The screenplay writing features are otherwise pretty cool and function intuitively as advertised. I'd sure like to have that contact list, though.