Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Software Company Saves a Million Script Pages as the Tablet PC Debuts in Hollywood Contest
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:IT Services
Customer Profile
Software development company Final Draft is based in Calabasas, California. Final Draftmarkets its industry-leading scriptwriting software to a global marketplace. It employs 27 people.
Business Situation
Final Draft’s annual Big Break! scriptwriting competition saw more than 3,000 scripts pass through the hands of employees, readers, and celebrity judges. Final Draftwanted to eliminate these paper-based processes and improve efficiency.
Solution
Final Draftimplemented a Microsoft® solution to completely automate contest management and execution using the Tablet PC and Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003.
Benefits
Eradicated printing—more than half a million pages to zero
First paperless scriptwriting contest
Potentially cost-effective platform for new market opportunities
Saved printing costs of U.S.$120,000
Saved over $25,000 in labor costs / “The Tablet PC and Final Draft make an awesome pair. Quite simply, I think they will revolutionize how scripts are read in Hollywood.”
Marc Madnick, President and Chief Executive Officer, Final Draft
Final Draft, a scriptwriting software company based in Southern California, holds an annual screenwriting competition called Big Break!. Every year, staff, professional script readers, and a panel of celebrity judges evaluate more than 3,000 scripts. Handling that much paper and successfully tracking each script through several rounds of eliminations was a logistical nightmare. Final Draftworked with Microsoft to implement a cost-effective Tablet PC−based solution to automate script management. Readers and judges use an online Web site portal solution and Microsoft® Office Professional Edition 2003 with ink-enabled forms to download, read, and score their scripts on a Tablet PC. Instead of printing more than 500,000 pages of screenplays, evaluation forms, and score sheets, Final Draftprinted none and saved approximately U.S.$120,000 in printing costs.
Situation
Located near Hollywood in Calabasas, California, Final Draft is a pioneer in the scriptwriting software market. Since 1991, the company's products have helped aspiring and published writers to concentrate on the creative process instead of worrying about the daunting formatting issues necessary to produce a viable script. The company has 27 employees, and its products are distributed throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, India, Australia, and South America.
Final Draft’spopular flagship scriptwriting software product is called Final Draft. Television shows such as The Sopranos and The West Wing and feature films including The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter movies are all the results of scripts written with Final Draft.
The Big Break! Contest
For the last six years, Final Drafthas hosted a well-known international scriptwriting contest called Big Break!. Prior to the 2005 contest, Big Break! revolved around a key element of the entertainment industry—the printed script—which set the stage for inefficient, paper-based business processes that nevertheless are the norm in Hollywood.
“Everywhere you look in this industry, there are reams of paper scripts changing hands at all stages of the preproduction and production cycles,” explains Marc Madnick, President and Chief Executive Officer of Final Draft. “Our Big Break! contest was no different.”
Paper-based Inefficiencies
For Final Draftand the Big Break! contest, this translates into old-fashioned, manual paper-pushing on a grand scale. In the last four years, more than 14,000 scripts have passed through the hands of Big Break! Contest Director, Liz Alani. She allocates scripts between 16 professional script readers who act as first-line judges, filling out a one-page evaluation form that recommends whether the entry be shelved or passed along to the next round. As the scripts come in, Alani fills heavy boxes of paper for each reader to take home. Weekly trips to pick up new scripts and drop off old ones (along with the evaluation forms) reduced readers’ productivity.
“In a city like Los Angeles, with mind-boggling gridlock during rush hours, each cross-town trip to retrieve scripts and deliver evaluation forms can eat up hours of my valuable time,” says Elizabeth Stevens, Writer and Screenplay Consultant, and one of the readers for the Big Break! contest.
Recommended scripts go through two or three more readings, this time with readers tabulating scores on official score sheets. “For the Big Break! Contest, I typically receive more than 200 scripts to read,” says Professional Reader, Josh Karp. “However, there were only a limited number of scripts I could carry around. It was most frustrating to not be able to take more work with me if I went to a coffee shop or somewhere else to read the material.”
Gradually the entries are winnowed down to 10 finalists. At this point, Final Draftinvites a panel of celebrity judges to evaluate the top10 scripts. Judges can include studio producers, directors, development executives, notable agents, and actors.
For Alani, tracking thousands of scripts and all the evaluation forms from the first round of judging was a challenging process that only got worse as the scripts made their way through two more rounds of judging. “It was a logistical nightmare to keep track of who was reading the scripts and where each script stood in the judging rounds,” she recalls. “I gave each script a number, and I entered the title, the number, the reader, and the date I allocated it to that reader on both a hard copy document and a separate tracking document. Entrants’ names and contact information were uploaded into a database. It was all pretty cumbersome and low tech.”
The year 2004 was the first year that Final Draftaccepted electronic script submissions. It didn’t’ really help with the workload though: staffers still had to print out the entries to distribute to the readers.
So Alani ended up hiring a full-time person to print and collate the scripts submitted electronically and then to enter script data in the database. “Handling electronic submissions in-house really took away from our core business,” says Madnick. “We needed to find a better way to manage the workload, and I knew it had to with eliminating all that paper.”
In an attempt to modernize the process, in 2005 Final Draftworked with film festival submission software company, Withoutabox, to create an online submission system for the contest.
Solution
It was only following a meeting with the Microsoft® team where Madnick was introduced to the Tablet PC running the Microsoft Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition2005operating system that he began to see a way to break the entertainment industry’s reliance on paper.
The Tablet PC offers all the power of a desktop personal computer but with additional features that make it a perfect tool for a professional reader or anyone who annotates or evaluates a written document. A tablet pen allows readers to scroll up and down pages, write, annotate, and save handwritten notes and documents, or convert them into typed text for use in other applications or workflows. The Tablet PC comes in either a convertible model or a slate model. The convertible model has an attached keyboard and looks like a conventional laptop PC; however, users can rotate the screen 180 degrees and lay it flat over the keyboard for a more comfortable reading and writing experience.
The slate model Tablet PC is designed to be slim and ultralight without the weight and size of a permanent keyboard; however, the slate models chosen for the contest all had a detachable keyboard. Both versions include built-in wireless capabilities and long battery life.
“The Tablet PC allows anywhere, anytime scriptwriting, reading, reviewing, annotating, revising—you name it,” enthuses Madnick. “It’s the only mobile computing platform I’ve seen that fits perfectly into the way the entertainment industry works. Scripts don’t stay in one place; they are read, passed around, and reviewed by many people as they navigate the complex course that leads to production. I saw huge potential for the Tablet PC, not only for the Big Break! contest and Final Draft, but for the whole industry.”
Yan Vinterfeld, Chief Operating Officer at Final Draft,concurs, “Using the Tablet PC as a mobile computing platform to completely digitalize the international Big Break! 2005 contest would give us an opportunity to see this platform in action—kind of like a test run for the industry as a whole.”
Over the next few weeks, the team from Microsoft worked with Vinterfeld to devise a complete solution based on the Tablet PC that would optimize the business processes inherent in the Big Break! contest.
An Integrated Microsoft Solution
For Big Break! 2005, everyone involved in running and judging the contest got a Tablet PC, which formed the key hardware/software platform for end users. However, the whole solution consists of many integrated Microsoft products and runs on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, including Internet Information Services (IIS) version 6.0, a powerful and manageable Web server to provide the Web application infrastructure needed to bring the solution online.
The team also deployed Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 to provide an intelligent portal that connects readers, judges, and Final Draftemployees for the duration of the contest. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 employs Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services technology within Windows Server 2003 to create Web site portal pages dedicated to the different groups and different review stages of the Big Break! 2005 contest.
Finally, Alani worked with the Microsoft team members to create ink-enabled forms in the Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2003 information gathering program to replicate both the initial evaluation forms and the more in-depth scoring sheets, as well as to automatically total the scores.
“I was a little worried about how complicated it might be to automate the Big Break! contest,” comments Vinterfeld. “But the Microsoft team definitely demonstrated that it was not difficult to develop a solution based on the Tablet PC to take advantage of a new opportunity. It was up and running in days.”
Introducing the Tablet PC
For the Big Break! 2005 contest, there were 2,400 electronic submissions and only 800 printed scripts. About 80 percent of the scripts were written in Final Draft. All entries were stored onthe SharePoint Portal Server 2003 portal Web site, where the readers signed on to download assigned entries to their Tablet PCs. Readers could review the scripts in Final Draft format, Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Agilix GoBinder, a digital information management software program that allows you to turn documents into digital paper,which can be highlighted and annotated with the tablet pen. Readers also downloaded and electronically filled out a copy of the evaluation form created in InfoPath 2003.
Recommended scripts and completed evaluation forms were uploaded to a “second read” folder on the portal. Alani reassigned these scripts to different readers who went to work further evaluating the entries and filling out the digital score sheets. Then they simply hit the Send button built into the score sheets to upload the score sheets and scripts that were still in the running. When it came time for the celebrity judges to score the 10 finalists, they all used the tablet pen to annotate the scripts in GoBinder and to fill out and upload their score sheets to Final Draft.
Linda A. Epstein, Tablet PC Consultant and Owner of Tablet PC2.com, introduced the Tablet PC hardware and software applications to the professional readers and celebrity judges. Epstein conducted a series of informal training sessions at Final Draft’s offices to familiarize the readers with the features of the Tablet PC. She trained the celebrity judges at locations of their choosing. “I found some hesitation on the part of the professional readers, many of whom were dedicated Mac users,” she recalls. “Initially, they thought it would take longer to read the scripts, but at the end of the day after using the Tablet PC to read scripts for the contest, they saw the value in using the Tablet PCs rather than paper scripts.”
According to Epstein, the celebrity judges were very open to the Tablet PC. The judges received their Tablet PCs with the top 10 finalists scripts preinstalled. The judges were impressed with the fact that they could use the tablet pen to mark up the scripts. “It’s a testament to the potential of the Tablet PC for this market,” says Epstein.
Benefits
An overwhelmingly positive response to the Tablet PC and the substantial business benefits Final Draftenjoyed through automating the entire Big Break! 2005 contest all point to a big opportunity for Final Draftto lead the way in changing how business is done in the entertainment industry.
A Paperless Hollywood
“Big Break! 2005 showed us the value of the Tablet PC in our industry,” Madnick continues. “Without the Tablet PC, we would have printed out 450,000 pages of scripts, 3,500 coverage sheets, and thousands more score sheets—more than half a million pieces of paper. With the Tablet PC, the number of pages we printed was zero.”
Even before the contest was over, other contests and sponsors called Alani to find out how the Tablet PC solution was working. “We were the first-ever electronic contest,” she says. “It generated a lot of buzz in the industry.”
Madnick continues, “I have a vision of a paperless Hollywood: a paperless distribution of screenplays that eliminates many of the costs and burdens we have today. And it all comes down to the writer, the screenplay, and the Tablet PC. If we can get the writers to change, Hollywood will do as the writer does. It’s always been that way. When we ink-enable Final Draft and get the writers walking into the talent agencies and talking to producers with copies of their screenplays on their Tablet PC, other agencies will start building infrastructures like ours to share and review screenplays and to collaborate on revisions. Now our celebrity judges are in love with the Tablet PC; people like Joel Schumacher, who directed Phone Booth and Batman Forever and who wrote Phantom of the Opera is going to be using it from now on. Michael Zoumas, Senior Vice President of Production and Development for Miramax/Dimension is carrying his around all the time. That speaks volumes.”
Saving Time and Money
This year’s Big Break! contest ran more smoothly and efficiently than any of its predecessors, despite the fact that a whole new computing paradigm was introduced to all the key players. “I can’t begin to add up the hours I saved by tracking and organizing the screenplays electronically,” Alani observes. “I loved having the electronic evaluation forms instead of the readers bringing them back to my office in huge stacks. I saved time by further narrowing the selection process in the second round by designing the InfoPath 2003 form to ask, ‘Would you recommend this script as a finalist?’ This helped us go from 200 scripts to 50 very easily.”
Many of the readers found they were able to read more scripts in less time on the Tablet PC. To a large extent, the added productivity was facilitated by the work-anywhere mobility provided by the Tablet PC. But there were other reasons too.
“Having both the script and the evaluation form on the Tablet PC made it easier to read a script, write its evaluation, and quickly move on to the next script,” points out Stevens. “The Tablet PC can be a great tool for making a script not only portable, but also immediately editable. When collaborating with other writers, toting a script on a Tablet PC makes it easier for writers to view and edit the script during meetings. For industry executives who regularly carry around scripts to read in their downtime, or who take stacks of scripts home to read over the weekend, the Tablet PC can make the workload literally easier to handle.”
Reader Malinda Marcus says the Tablet PC definitely cut down on the time it takes to write an analysis and submit it. “I love that I can write directly onto the screen,” she enthuses. “It’s much easier than using a mouse for a left-hander. I believe the film and television industry will be hard-pressed not to switch over to reading scripts online. And it’s a great way to save a tree!”
Environmental benefits aside, Vinterfeld estimates Final Draftsaved a lot of money on paper. “Based on last year’s in-house paper production, the Tablet PC would have helped us save more than [U.S.]$600,000 in printing costs alone over the life of the contest,” he figures. “Printing cost savings for the 3,500 scripts entered in 2005 reached approximately $120,000. And we saved approximately $25,000 alone in salary costs for the additional person we didn't have to hire to handle the printing and collating.”
For Final Draft, the experience of this year’s Big Break! contest means that a repeat performance starring the Tablet PC has definitely been booked for next year. By that time, Madnick hopes to be well on his way to ink-enabling his company’s flagship product. “The Tablet PC and Final Draft make an awesome pair,” he concludes. “Quite simply, I think they will revolutionize how scripts are read in Hollywood.”