Interview with a Celtx Boss part 2: the Margins take the Mainstream

check out Part 1 of this interview with Mark Kennedy.

What do you think is the most important thing to consider when working collaboratively?
You have to be willing to accept that changes will be made to the project without your consent, sometimes to aspects of the project that you may have laboured over and love.

Collaboration is all about the unexpected synergies and ideas that are generated from working with other people. Best head in to it with an open mind.

How’s the tech/arts scene in St. John’s these days?
Both are doing really well. The arts community is as vibrant as ever, and there seems to be a mini (micro?) tech hub forming.

As they saying goes, “Adversity is the Mother of invention” and one of the side effects of being so isolated and far removed from the mainstream arts and tech communities is that we have to innovate the H-E-two-sticks out of everything in order to stand out.

What is new in the new version?
This release adds storyboarding, scheduling, an international stage play template, a new Web Services panel, private/team web sites on Project Central, support for proxy servers, A4 support and interface updates.

What can you tell us about future plans for the project?
About half the time spent developing Celtx is focused on future releases. That is, for every new feature we add in a new release there’s several more that are roughed in but which are not yet turned on.

We’ll focus some of our development effort in 2007 on improving the web services, like adding versioning and an enhanced collaboration feature. We’re also going to take a look at adding some budgeting features that would be tied to the forms. So, for example, the cost of a prop, along with the estimates for any other breakdown item, could get tracked in a project budget form.

What would you love to see attempted with the project that hasn’t been yet?
It’s been pretty amazing already, with a new user writing their first script using Celtx and having their film chosen for Sundance. Or seeing Celtx being used in Nigeria by independent film makers.

However, we’d love to see an International collaboration. Since Celtx supports multiple languages, it should be prove pretty useful for people from different countries to work together.

Can you name a few of your favorite Celtx projects?
I always enjoy reading through the projects posted by Celtx users in our public showcase area, Project Central. We recently initiated a Project of the Week program which has exposed some great talent from the Celtx Community. Many of these can be found on our blog (http://blog.celtx.com/celtx_blog/ ).

As well, PC is popular with a number of the many universities and film schools using Celtx. One instructor from Australia had his students create re-makes of scenes from the Merchant of Venice. As a fan of Shakespeare it was pretty cool to see how inventive the students were in changing the perspective on things.

Is there a public one you’d recommend people check out and pitch in on?
Well that’s a no brainer!… Indyish’s Assembly Film / Music Relay, of course!

aw.. Anything else you want to talk about?
Just thanks to the Indyish Assembly for the tremendous work they are doing, and the awesome goodwill they are generating for Celtx.

aw c’mon, aw geez ..