Montage review

Hollywood. Pinewood. The smell of greasepaint on a freshly plumped casting couch... Aah, the exciting world of film and TV. So alluring and yet, so far, far, far away.

It's no use just having a good idea these days. No hot-shot producer is going to take a second look at your blockbusting sequel, The Day After the Day After Tomorrow, unless it's typed in single-spaced, wide-margined Courier New with characters names centred in ugly full caps. Telly bods are stuck in their ways, you see, and if a script's not been properly laid out, it'll be heading for the slush pile quicker than a Birds of a Feather revival. That's why the whole industry seems to have standardised on Final Draft, which until now has enjoyed the kind of monopoly once boasted by QuarkXPress in the world of DTP.

But what InDesign is to page layout, Montage may well be to scriptwriting. Mariner's alternative is better looking, better organised and (masterstroke) perfectly happy opening up native Final Draft scripts. It has the air of a Mac OS X-native application, unlike Final Draft, and is a far better introduction for the first-timer, as right from the off it wants to know what you're hoping to write. Options range from BBC film, BBC drama and two different kinds of BBC sitcom, to musicals, stage plays and screenplays that conform to Warner Brothers' in-house requirements.

Notable omissions are voice-overs or radio drama layouts, and Final Draft does offer a more comprehensive selection that even runs to novels, but Montage's selection will suit the vast majority of scriptwriters. Even if your chosen format doesn't precisely match your intended studio's requirements, it's unlikely to be far from spot on.

Of course, you can do the same in Word if you have the time and inclination to write a series of cascading styles, but Montage works on a series of key tabs and returns to switch between the 12 key elements of a script (character, action, dialogue, scene and so on) and it's intelligent enough to understand what you're working on at any time. Head up a new scene and it will guide you through describing it as internal or external, outlining the setting and assigning a time of day, all in standard script formats. Locations will automatically be added to a separate scene list, where you can add details of props required, and it will even track which characters appear in which scenes. They will then crop up again next time you start a new scene, so you conform to a single set of descriptions throughout your work.

The upshot is that by the time you reach your conclusion or cruelly timed cliffhanger, you can click through the scene, character and locations dialogues and see at a glance which actors are required for which scenes, the props needed and how many scenes are shot in the same location. This is an entirely passive process, allowing you to focus on being creative, while the software puts your administrative house in order ready for handing off to the production crew.

There's a full-screen, white-on-blue mode for anyone who gets easily distracted, and it spell-checks as you go along. It will write out as RTF, Word or PDF, but not as Final Draft.

Throughout the writing process, there are dedicated tools for organising your research notes and contacts and, once your script is complete, it will help with putting together a query letter, even including a number of examples. Whether or not this enhances your chances may depend largely on how many other Montage users have sent nigh-on identical notes to a single over-worked agent.