Tim Johnson, founder and CEO of ScriptLadder
Tim is a software engineer by training but has also been a creative writer most of his life.
One night, maybe like many of you, he walked out of a really awful movie with his wife and said, “I could write a better movie than that!”
He half-remembered that screenplays had some kind of special formatting rules, something about fonts and indentations.
The next day he went to Portland's fabulous Powell’s Bookstore in search of a slim book explaining the indentation rules so he could write his first screenplay.
He found a shelf of about 50 books about the craft of screenwriting.
Huh. Maybe there was a little more to this whole screenwriting thing?
Five years later Tim had bought almost all those books, taken 4 screenwriting classes, and written 3 screenplays.
His first screenplay was called "Memorial Day", a dark and stormy comedy.
After a class reading of 10 pages the instructor asked, "So...this is a comedy?"
Not a good sign.
Since then he's come to realize that making a film is one of the most collaborative art forms there is,
yet writing the screenplay is often a solitary activity with little feedback along the way.
Tim and his team designed ScriptLadder to give screenwriters that feedback, in the form of visual analytics, online notes, and online table-reads.
The most fun is when he's at a conference and has someone upload a script they slaved over for months.
In about 10 seconds they can see all the amazing infographics about their story from multiple angles.
The typical response is, “Wow, so THAT’S what I’ve been writing all this time!?”
Tim believes ScriptLadder will help you connect with your story, with your colleagues, and ultimately with your audience.
And isn't that why we all want to tell our stories in the first place?