Archive for the 'General' Category

• 05.10.08 New Nines stuff in the Library

  I’ve added two .pdfs to the Library. (Which is the rechristened “Downloads” section. Thanks to whichever reader suggested renaming it.)

  The visual FX breakdown for two of the sequences — the end of Part One, and the end of Part Three. Both are spoilers, so skip them if you haven’t seen the movie yet. The shooting schedule. [...]

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• 04.29.08 Screenwriting 101

  Following a reader’s suggestion, I added a 101 section to the sidebar to highlight some of the introductory how-to articles on screenwriting.

  This site houses about 950 posts, of which more than 500 are of the non-expiring educational variety. I’d love to find a way to guide new visitors (and aspiring screenwriters) through them without [...]

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• 04.29.08 Time spent thinking

  My post on the six-hour scene dovetails nicely with this speech by Clay Shirky, which argues that we’re living in an era that’s wrestling with a cognitive surplus:

  So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every [...]

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• 04.12.08 Foot Clutter

  foot clutter: the tendency for people’s feet to get stacked up unnaturally when combining single shots together to form a group shot.

  Example:

  This is from the promo materials in development for the web pilot. Each character needs to be in its own layer, so they can stack up for animated graphics.

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• 04.11.08 Quick! Give me a name

  Here’s a useful bookmark: click it and it will generate a first name and last name from the U.S. Census data. Refresh to try again.

  So far, I’ve ended up with Michael Nickle, Sandra Gray, Jeffrey Silva and Tricia Lenz. Those might not be names for my theoretical deep-sea cowboy, but for That Guy in The [...]

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• 04.02.08 Two-hander

  What the heck is a two-handed comedy? Google turns up lots of two-handed comedies, but no one explains what that means.

  – jb

  I don’t know if Variety invented it, but it shows up in their slanguage dictionary:

  two-hander — a play or movie with two characters; ” ‘Love Letters’ has been one of the most [...]

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• 01.20.08 Tabula Rasa

  Last night I saw Cloverfield at the Chinese. And loved it. Since the first trailer, I’ve been plugging my ears and shouting “la la la la” whenever someone tried to tell me something about the movie, and I’m glad I did. A blank slate is a movie-goer’s best friend.

  I have the opposite situation for two [...]

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• 01.08.08 DVDs, and the paradox of choice

  So it’s not just me. This Fortune blog article attributes this year’s 2% drop in DVD sales to consumer paralysis over which of the new formats to buy:

  Market research showed it wasn’t just NetFlix (NFLX) or Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes hurting traditional DVD sales, either. Consumers who bought HDTVs were so afraid of backing the [...]

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• 10.09.07 The Challenge of Writing in a Digital Age

  Last week, I blogged about my upcoming speech at Drake University (my alma mater), which was entitled “The Challenge of Writing in a Digital Age.” I posted my basic thesis statements, and invited comments. As expected, the hive mind was very helpful in reshaping (and renaming) many of my thoughts, so I’m very grateful to [...]

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• 09.01.07 Open Thread

  I’m off to Venice for Critics’ Week, so Matt is running things in my absence. I’ll leave comments open for this thread, if you have thoughts or questions about The Nines (or other topics of interest). There’s also a proper discussion forum running over at lookforthenines.com.

  Ciao e grazie.

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• 07.17.07 Photos from Malawi

  I have all my photos from my visit to Mulanje, Malawi up on Flickr for the world to see. You can check them out here.

  You may want to use the “View as slideshow” link. If you do, you’ll notice a floating lower-case “i” over the center of the main photo. (You may need to [...]

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• 01.14.07 The Hollywood Standard

  This site caters largely to aspiring screenwriters new to the profession. That’s by design. My initial ambition in writing the IMDb column, and then in creating the site, was to answer a lot of the questions I had when I was first starting out.

  Screenwriting is an odd form: half stageplay and [...]

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• 01.03.07 Josh posted

  Josh Friedman stepped away from his duties at Skynet to shake the dust of his blog.1 Catch him before he goes offline again.Yes, I meant, “shake the dust offhis blog.” But, in its way, his blog has lain fallow long enough that one could argue it’s become dust itself. (Yes, it’s a stretch.) But [...]

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• 05.15.06 How do I break into Hollywood?

  Short answer: You don’t.

  Slightly longer answer: The question is meaningless.

  I recently co-hosted a series of panel discussions for the USC School of Cinema-Television aimed at helping current students and recent graduates think about the first years out in the real world. “How do I break in” was the unspoken question in almost every [...]

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• 09.11.05 Hey, why didn’t my comment get posted?

  As a fairly-frequent commenter on other people’s blogs, I know how frustrating it can be when I’ve spent a few minutes working on the perfect riposte, only to have it disappear somewhere in the void. So I thought I’d explain a little bit about how comments on johnaugust.com work, and why they sometimes don’t [...]

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• 06.16.05 Formatting the one-sided phone conversation

  I’m curious about your format for writing a one-sided phone conversation.

  I’ve seen it done in so many different ways now, that I have no idea if there is a more uniform way of doing it, or a preferred way.

  I’ve seen…

  KEVIN

  (on phone)

  I know it’s your birthday…I can’t make it…Look, that’s not my [...]

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• 06.03.05 They still haven’t found what they’re looking for

  Approximately five percent of visitors to johnaugust.com arrive from Google or one of the other search engines. Thanks to server statistics, I can see exactly what search phrase brought them here.

  Some people were clearly ego-surfing: searching for their names as they might appear in comments sections, for instance. But other people, well, I [...]

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• 04.28.05 Answer: You are an American male in his twenties

  Thanks to the 470 of you who were gracious enough to fill out the not-especially-scientific survey, I can now state with confidence that the typical reader of johnaugust.com is a North American college graduate in his 20’s who has a Y chromosome, but no WGA card.

  Now, before anyone protests, I should point out that not [...]

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• 10.27.04 Page count and tight formatting

  I have a question regarding page count. I have a screenplay that I’ve completed, which is about 135 pages or so. I brought it down from 143, but I keep hearing about this magic number of 120 pages, and how that’s what Hollywood looks for. I know my story is tight; it’s now to a [...]

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