Category: News

News about the Carnegie Screenwriters and its members.

“Always a Bridesmaid” kicks off the Pittsburgh Independent Film Festival

“Always a Bridesmaid” kicks off the Pittsburgh Independent Film Festival
 
The delightful romantic comedy “Always a Bridesmaid” opens the festival this Friday night. The film was written and produced by CSW’s own Wendy Grube. It’s directed by our Jim Helfrich. Many CSW members and friends worked on this film. It stars Julianne Avolio as Lizzie and features Nicole Beattie, Samantha Westervelt, April May Ohms, Minda Briley, Mike Buzzelli, Kevin Hejna, Andy Coleman, Johnny Sikma, Charlie Mengine and many other talented local actors.   Please come out to support them and local independent film.

Join us at the opening/award ceremony for the Pittsburgh Independent Film Festival, Friday July 15 at 6:30pm.

The evening will begin with the presentation of awards followed by live music and then what you all will be waiting for, the showing of “Always a Bridesmaid.” Afterwards you will be able to meet the filmmakers in attendance.

Tickets for the evening are $10. The event runs all weekend and tickets can be purchased for 1, 2 or all 3 days if you want to support indie film and check out submissions from around the globe.

Please invite friends. We are hoping to pack the house.

Click the link for a complete schedule and to purchase tickets. 

Hope to see you there. It looks to be a great night.

Here is the link for the tickets

http://pghindie.com/Tickets.html

Here is the complete weekend schedule

http://pghindie.com/2016_Schedule.html

Episode 2 of “Fade In” set to air on PCTV-21

Episode 2 of “Fade In” with guest Ken Heusey, writer, filmmaker, artist & photographer will air on

PCTV: Comcast Ch. 21 & Verizon  Ch. 47 on the following dates.

Episodes can be viewed online at www.pctv21.org

Tuesday 3/8/2016, 12:00 PM, Channel PCTV

Thursday 3/10/2016, 7:30 PM, Channel PCTV

Friday 3/11/2016, 7:30 PM, Channel PCTV

Saturday 3/12/2016, 12:00 AM, Channel PCTV

Tuesday 3/15/2016, 12:00 PM, Channel PCTV

Wednesday 3/16/2016, 10:00 AM, Channel PCTV

Thursday 3/17/2016, 9:00 PM, Channel PCTV

Saturday 3/19/2016, 12:00 AM, Channel PCTV

Tuesday 3/22/2016, 2:00 PM, Channel PCTV

Thursday 3/24/2016, 7:30 PM, Channel PCTV

 

 

Do I Need Final Draft?

Do I need to purchase Final Draft? (or Movie Magic Screenwriter)

You do not need Final Draft to write your first screenplay. There’s no reason to spend the money unless and until you have a real need for something like Final Draft. Does it make writing and formatting a screenplay easier? Absolutely. Is it expensive and unnecessary to writing your first script? Also, absolutely.

Writers might try to tell you that you must use screenwriting software. Not exactly. What you must be able to create is a standard format script in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) for uploading to registry databases and sharing with other writers.

The reality is, plenty of great scripts were written on typewriters, and manual typewriters at that! I’ve written most of my scripts on yellow legal pads before typing the drafts into whatever software was at hand. I prefer Literature and Latte’s Scrivener for OS X as my primary planning and drafting tool, but I’ve used text editors and Word when those were my available options.

My choice of writing tools depends on my need to share files with other people. If you have colleagues using Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter (or any other writing application) it is always easier to use the same tool collaborators are using.

If you do sell a script or work on a production, the standards are Final Draft and Screenwriter. There’s simply no way to avoid using one of these tools, or both of them, during a professional screenwriting career. Some smaller production companies now use Celtx, and even fewer use Adobe Story, but if you earn a living writing screenplays you’ll use the two big names in our industry.

I hope that every member of Carnegie Screenwriters, and aspiring screenwriter, ends up needing Final Draft or Screenwriter.

 

New CSW Site

The Carnegie Screenwriters are pleased to reveal our new website. At the moment, the site looks rather sparse, which will change as we add content and images. This new design enables us to support the full range of computing devices, with a clean, responsive layout. Test it on your phone, tablet, and computer.

Some features not yet active include a “slide show” banner at the top of the front page and a nice “featured story” option with images. Before we activate these new features, we’ll need images and content. Banner images need to be large (1400 pixels wide by 500 pixels tall, so we can scale them to all devices). Story and promotional images can be any size. Remember, for any images we need to have the legal rights to include those on our site.

The “Events” feature is new. If you have a CSW-related event, other than our regular meetings, be sure to let us know at the regular meetings.

We intend to integrate this website with Facebook (our most active online presence), Twitter, Google, YouTube, Vimeo, and any other media feeds that might reach our audiences.

In the past, people posted content for a few weeks or months, and then our website and social media posting stopped. For an online media campaign to be successful, we must update this site, the events, and our social media feeds. In coming months, we’ll be electing a Board of Directors and establishing some responsibilities for our online presences.