Digital development: Using the smartphone to enhance screenwriting practice

In this chapter we focus on the specific practice of script development, to examine how the screenwriter's methods for creating content could be made different by the smartphone. Tracing the journey of a 'screen idea' (Macdonald, 2013) from concept to screenplay, which can comprise many documents, notes, drafts and personnel that each position the screenplay in various creative, personal and social contexts (see Conor, 2013; Kerrigan and Batty, 2016), script development offers a useful lens through which to examine the screenwriting practitioner's creative process in relation to digital media devices and their potential for change. Specifically, we ask: do smartphones and other portable devices enhance or inhibit practices of script development? Do they do anything beyond offer digital versions of what happens in the analogue world; and if not, what might a digital script development tool look like?