Interview with Celtx Boss part 1: Open Source

As part of our ongoing harassment of the Celtx staff (who are currently weathering a hard core version of our recent snow storm out in Newfoundland) I sent an interview their way, and one of the Celtx founders, Mark Kennedy, super kindly took the time to respond. Here’s part one of two for your bloggy eyes, and watch for the full version of this to appear alongside a mind-bending variety of illustrations and scripts from the Assembly in the project ‘zine.

How did Celtx get started?

The Celtx Project was started in 2001 by Mark Kennedy and Chad House, the co-founders of Greyfirst Corp., a technology company located in Eastern Canada developing semantic web applications.

After studying how films were being made and looking at the kinds of software applications that were being used to make them, Mark and Chad saw an opportunity to introduce a modern, Internet friendly tool to help independent media creators.

Why does Greyfirst care about free software for arts coordination?

As one blogger recently put it, “…film making IS community, and film making IS collaboration.”

Seemed to us that any software application whose aim was to foster the film community, and which had any hope of enabling film makers to collaborate on a project, had to be based on open standards.

We just took it another step and decided to use open source software to build Celtx, specifically, the Firefox web browser.

How many people made Celtx what it is?

There are seven (7) people at our offices in St. John’s, however we would not have gotten to where we have without the invaluable contribution of hundreds of volunteers translating, testing and marketing Celtx for us.

Can Celtx do more then scripts?

Celtx is the first software to provide all of the tools needed during pre-production in one application – from idea generation, to writing a screenplay or stage play, completing a breakdown, making a storyboard, and scheduling the shoot.

And of course, this can all be done collaboratively over the Internet using the Celtx Web Services.

Oh, and you can also use the Celtx Web Services to publish your project to Celtx Project Central ( http://pc.celtx.com/ )

What other open source projects does Celtx draw on?

We use the Mozilla Application Framework extensively, including the Firefox web browser and Sunbird calendar. The Celtx server is an Apache set-up, running all open standards technologies.

What other open source tools would you recommend for artists?

The 3D drawing application, Blender ( http://www.blender.org/), just released a new version of their award winning software. I’d definitely check that one out if people haven’t already. Another good open source tool for recording and editing sound is Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ )