Celtx

Celtx is a software designed to help screenwriters, filmmakers, and storyboard artists create their media easily and conveniently. The article I found, on thestorydepartment.com, was written by the CEO of Celtx, Mark Kennedy. He describes the technology as a “flexible” software that people can use however they need to for their art. He explained that one of the main goals they had while making this software was a “convergence” of different types of media, so that writers can be as innovative and original as possible while creating their stories.

This article is written very much in a Cultural Determinist perspective — Kennedy describes how before Celtx, there were few technologies for screenwriters that actually allowed them to use their imagination. Instead they were forced to stick to whatever one format the technology offered them, and there was never very much room for creativity. According to Kennedy, there was a need for a “universally accepted tool”, a system that allowed writers to focus on what they were writing without being frustrated with limiting technology. Before Celtx, there was also a problem with writers and storyboard artists having to use different software and not being able to effectively share their ideas with each other — as a program that featured more than one type of media, Celtx served as a solution to this problem, and increased the artists’ ability to communicate.

In my opinion, this approach mostly makes sense. To my knowledge, Celtx is not a very well-known technology, and the only reason I ever learned about it was because my screenwriting teacher a few years ago made our class download it. This isn’t really a form of writing technology that shaped culture in a general sense. For the majority of the population, Celtx would be a culturally shaped writing technology. But if we narrow down our focus just to the screenwriting and film-making community, Celtx may actually have helped shape their culture — with a software that lets people format things creatively, and collaborate with other artists, the artistic possibilities expanded enormously. So there was really a combination of cultural and technological shaping going on.