Content is king. We have heard that one too many times. A script is the spine of any creative output. A script, however, is not just a “creative document,” says Bollywood dialogue and screenplay writer Mayur Puri (Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai, Om Shanti Om, Happy New Year). “It is a blueprint, a document, an instruction manual that tells every filmmaking department what they have to do,” he says, “it tells the actors what and how to speak, it tells the editor where the transitions, dissolves, fade-outs are. So, it needs to be legible, clear and precise.” That’s where a screenwriting app comes in handy.
When the world was busy whipping up Dalgona coffee for the gram during the COVID pandemic lockdown, Bengaluru-based software developer Prashanth Udupa, 44, with more time on his hands now, experimented with screenwriting — just as a hobby, not professionally. “My brother and I were running a small mini theatre in Bengaluru, called Teriflix. We converted our unused property into a 13-seater theatre, where filmmakers hosted their pre-release screenings. There I networked with film producers and discovered what a screenplay is. In 2018, curiosity led me to screenwriting workshops by Kannada directors Rohith Padaki and Adarsh Eshwarappa, and by the end of 2019, I’d written a few small scripts just to enjoy the process,” says Udupa, developer and co-founder of Scrite, a made-in-India screenwriting app featuring English and 11 Indian languages.
The beta version of the app was launched in 2020 and, earlier this year, it went live (with paid subscriptions, between Rs 249 per month to Rs 1,999 per year). Over time, it has amassed over 30,000 registered and 10,000 unregistered users.
Udupa co-founded Scrite with Mumbai-based Punit Thakkar, 34, and Kannada writer-filmmaker Surya Vasishta, 37, both he first met at the now-defunct Teriflix. Thakkar was then working with Bollywood film producer Guneet Monga’s Sikhya Entertainment. Their third partner, Vasishta, who’s also an actor and graphics/visual design artist, did the UI/UX design of the fully bootstrapped app.
Another Indian app Studiovity, founded in 2021, provides screenwriting solutions but “its focus is more on pre-production or production. For us, the focus is the writer and their need,” says Thakkar as Udupa adds, “When we started in 2020, mostly foreign apps were available. It’s lovely to see other Indian alternatives. There’s enough water in the ocean for all of us to carry in our buckets.”
When he started writing a script, Udupa realised his characters would only speak in Kannada — his native tongue. “Translating into English was robbing the essence of what I wanted my characters to speak. I was using a combination of multiple things at the time: (screenwriting apps) Celtx, Final Draft trial, and Microsoft Word. Nothing cut it for me. I can’t write in a linear way, scene after scene, and I felt there should be a software that would allow people like me to write randomly, not in a sequence,” says Udupa who, familiar with open source technology, had a lightbulb moment: “maybe I can write a software for this,” he thought. Udupa has been building apps since 2002, in scientific visualisation, electronic design, automation, for the medical visualisation industry, and for partners who worked with defence. A creative writing app was a first for him. “A lot of the thought processes used in the scientific visualisation space (electronics and circuit design) kind of apply here as well,” he says.
Scrite, an app for Indians-by Indians, was thus born. To the founders’ surprise, their app found a mention in a recent Instagram story by Kannada actor-writer-filmmaker Raj B Shetty (Kantara, Swathi Mutthina Male Haniye). “Another very important inflexion point for us was getting a call from Rakshit Shetty’s Paramvah Studios in 2022, where I gave a demo, and the writers eventually switched over from Celtx to Scrite. Some of their films, including Sakutumba Sametha (2022), were written using Scrite. Screenwriter Hemanth M Rao (Sapta Sagaradaache Ello) uses Scrite, too,” says Udupa as Thakkar adds, “Gujarati filmmaker Krishnadev Yagnik, whose film Vash (2024) was remade into Hindi as Shaitaan (2024), has written Vash 2 on Scrite.”
Kannada filmmaker Abhaya Simha (Gubbachchigalu, Paddayi) has seen Scrite evolve from “a promising idea to a mature, professional-grade screenwriting tool on a par with international softwares.” Having been a Movie Magic and Final Draft user, Simha transitioned to Scrite, since its very first version, for his film and television projects. “One critical limitation the otherwise excellent Movie Magic and Final Draft have is the lack of support for Indian languages. As a writer, I think and express in Kannada,” says Simha, “I want my energy to go into exploring the emotions of a scene and not into translating my thoughts into English or doing extra formatting labour. Additionaly, Scrite enables features like name prediction, reports, and other scripting tools in my language. That’s a game-changer.” Simha is busy writing his next two film scripts on Scrite.
“All screenwriting apps have a storyboarding system but it is disconnected from the actual screenplay text. Ours is the only app where both are connected,” says Udupa, adding that the app “is getting moulded by writers and filmmakers,” through its “active discord community, with people sharing feedback, reporting bugs and issues and asking for features.”
Scrite has a two-column report with video on the left side and audio on the right; its statistics report gives the action-dialogue ratio, indoor-outdoor location split ratio, the film’s overall timeline, splits between Act I, II and III, and ratio of screenplay components like confusion, chaos, monologues. One can directly go to a particular part of the story by clicking on an index card. It has templates to plot one’s story, like the popular ‘Save the Cat’, which gives a readymade story structure with empty boxes to fill in the details. The boxes can be moved around, so one doesn’t need to write in a linear way. In the future, the developers hope to explore shot breakdowns, storyboarding, scheduling, app-based script narration, collaborative editing, a mobile app, and maybe a timer to keep writers motivated enough to complete their scripts.
“The language support is Scrite’s strongest asset,” Simha reiterates, “It makes the entire process feel native and intuitive.” In August last year, Manju Warrier-starrer Malayalam film Footage released. Footage was written entirely on Scrite by first-time director Saiju Sreedharan, known as a film editor (Maheshinte Prathikaaram, Mayaanadhi, Kumbalangi Nights, Virus, Anweshippin Kandethum). “I wanted to write a screenplay for my first movie (as a director), Footage. I tried several softwares, Celtx, Final Draft, Studio Binder and Slugline. None worked for me, because I wanted to write in Malayalam,” says Sreedharan, who stumbled upon a video of the “very user-friendly” app on YouTube. “In Scrite, we can add reference pictures to every scene, which is wonderful and helps to understand the mood and how the scene is going to look like when someone is reading it,” he adds.
Sreedharan recommended the app to Tina Thomas who’s writing the script for his next directorial Munpe, a thriller starring Tovino Thomas. Tina and her husband Pratheek Thomas, both use Scrite for writing screenplays. “We run Studio Kokaachi (kokaachi.com), we make graphic novels and have also done animation for films (Gangster, Lust Stories, Gully Boys, OK Kanmani). Over 10 years, we’ve made animated sequences (title and inside) for 30-35 films,” says Kochi-based Tina, who didn’t use any apps before Scrite. “It’s reasonable. I can’t afford an app like Final Draft,” she says, “Plus, I write in Malayalam. Sometimes, PDFs and Microsoft Word turn some Malayalam alphabets into jalebi-like figures, but when I copied my Malayalam text from Google Translate to Scrite, it didn’t re-format, it gave a faithful representation.”
Even as Scrite has index cards and allows character and scene mapping, Tina is a creature of habit. She does her mapping and how the scene plays out by hand on paper. Then she moves to her workplace blackboard, which allows her to physically move around while thinking and drafting. “I like being analogue,” she quips, “When I have the sense of a screenplay, then I type on Google transcript app and paste it on Scrite.”
On Scrite, Udupa says, “one gets to see a subject from many characters’ points of view, authentically. It’s a much more structured way of writing diaries. The number of pages that the screenplay ends up becoming has a correlation to how much screen time that a film ends up occupying. So, there is this rough math that every page becomes roughly a minute of screen time. So, filmmakers can calculate, how much every minute is going to cost. A budgeting angle also comes in.” And one can “extract all the dialogues of a particular character, if need be.”
“You don’t need to be a talented screenwriter to use the app. I’m a testament to that,” quips Udupa. Of course, if you’re not a writer, neither Scrite nor Artificial Intelligence (AI) can make you one. “AI is a great tool for existing writers. It’s an augmentation of creative work not an alternative tool,” says Puri.
While Udupa says they have ideas on how to leverage AI for Scrite, he asserts, “AI should enable our customer, who’s a writer and director, make their life easier, not by taking away their happiness from the creative pursuit, but by taking away the labour of mundane work that follows.”
Puri has been an avid user of “the intuitive but pricey” Movie Magic Screenwriter (Rs 10,000-12,000 for three installations). He doesn’t enjoy the user interface of Final Draft. Since neither of these apps allow one to use two languages, Puri transitioned to Scrite in 2020-21, and has written the script of his directorial debut on it — LAFIK (Lost and Found in Kumbh), starring Rahul Bhat and Rajshri Deshpande and produced by LA-based Mulberry Films. The film’s teaser was recently launched at the Bharat Pavilion at Cannes Film Festival 2025.
“Most people in Bollywood use Final Draft and that too not the original,” Puri admits, “Even the biggest studios are stingy about buying actual software and the crack of Final Draft is easily available.” Yet, many Hindi-film screenwriters are embracing Scrite, like Puri and Saket Chaudhary (Hindi Medium, Shaadi Ke Side Effects, Pyaar Ke Side Effects), also a core member of the Screenwriters Association (SWA).
Not too long back, Final Draft collaborated with the SWA and “gave a decent discount to the SWA members,” adds Puri, “But, as someone who’s formerly worked at SWA, I was a little unhappy because they should have weighed all market players. If an Indian software is giving you everything that a foreign software does and is better and cheaper, why would you not promote that? Everybody is resistant to change.” Scrite is, perhaps, the only screenwriting app in India that caters to regional-language film markets. SWA hosted a webinar in 2021, where they hosted screenwriting softwares, including Scrite. Thakkar says they are in conversations “to simplify script registration in India, etc. We wanted to make professional screenwriting accessible to as many people in India, to localise it to suit the Indian writers’ needs, although we do have 30 per cent userbase outside of India as well,” he adds.
Puri, who also teaches screenwriting at Whistling Woods and Anupam Kher’s school Actor Prepares, says, “I ask the students to work on the easier and cheaper Scrite. Plus, Scrite faithfully reproduces the script in PDF format (with no formatting changes issues). It is intuitive and understands some 15-odd elements that any screenwriting software must. Another great thing about Scrite that is missing in Screenwriter, Final Draft and Celtx is that it has scene summary synopsis right at the top of the scene, mentioning the number of characters present in that scene. This is a great tool/information for television and OTT writing, it helps in scheduling things much easily instead of having to read the whole scene.”
Puri feels Scrite has so many features that it can get intimidating for new writers, but the basic version helps. He says, “The app is as ambitious as Prashanth is not. I’d suggested him to keep the UI simpler and keep all the extra features as chargeable add-ons for, say, Rs 100 more. Being a little incremental adds value.”
Movie Magic Screenwriter is simpler, says Puri, “it has much better potential in terms of outline view and navigation dock but it has shifted features like character summary to the parallel software Movie Magic Scheduling, a production software which one needs to buy separately and which the writers little require. Scrite’s UI is beautifully designed, is intuitive, and the ease of work is super. It tries to give an overall view, if you want to plot it like the hero’s journey or from an act-based structure, it gives you those options. It’s got a feature called Scriptalay (a library of screenplays and templates for users to download and study). It’s trying to do a lot of things. The app is font and language agnostic. I can toggle between two languages, type in Hindi and describe in English. I can retain the regular formatting of, say, a Hollywood film while I type the dialogue in a different language, using any font on my keyboard. That is fantastic.”
Professors Anindya Sengupta, who teaches film studies at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University and Deepanjjan Roy, who teaches screenwriting at Mumbai’s Whistling Woods International, vouch for Scrite, too.
Sengupta says, “I have bought softwares like Fade In Pro and Story Architect and I like them. Final Draft, though the canonical industry standard, is sluggish in Windows. Until recently, it didn’t support Unicode, which I found quite insensitive in a global situation. Fade In Pro and Story Architect support Unicode, but Scrite is the first software which was designed solely with the goal of writing in Indian vernaculars. Scrite looks different from other screenwriting software because of its scene-centric approach instead of the usual page-centric one. This refreshing novelty has accelerated my personal writing. I prefer to write my dialogues in Bengali and the rest in English. Scrite makes this switch very breezy. The give and take of suggestions and brainstorming possibilities result in the user’s personal attachment with the app and encouraged to think of further possibilities of the app, which I constantly do and suggest whenever anything dawns in my mind.
Roy was informed about the app by his student. “Final Draft and Celtx can be costly or clunky for beginners. Scrite’s great for students who are just getting a feel for formatting without overwhelming them. Scrite made it easier to get students to start writing without struggling with the software. I’ve been introducing screenwriting tools in my classes for the past three years, mainly to help students focus on writing rather than formatting. A free, user-friendly tool like Scrite really helps,” he says.
Sengupta has recently published a sci-fi novel in Bengali, titled 1982, his third publication, that is partially written in the screenplay format. “Prashanth and others might be amused to know that it is entirely written on Scrite. It just needed an export and few tweaks to convert it into a file format suitable for publishing. The experience is so satisfying that I might continue to draft novels on Scrite, for which it is not designed.”
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