John August

Archives for 2013

Building shotlists from Fountain screenplays

Fountain

Responding to a lazyweb request, Matthew McCowan built a handy little script/app for building shotlists from screenplays written in Fountain. Stu Maschwitz [explains](http://slugline.co/blog/shotlists):

> Fountain’s Notes [[like this one]] can contain any text you like, including multiple paragraphs. Since Notes don’t print, you can use them to store all kinds of useful information, such as notes on revisions, character bios, or even text that can have special, nerdy powers.

In this case, McCowan’s script is looking for notes that start with SHOT: and gathering them with the scene header to form a tidy shotlist. But you could easily generalize this to gather all notes, or tweak it to look for another criteria such as the name of the person giving the note.

One of the huge advantages of Fountain is its easy extensibility. Any tool that can work on plain text can work with Fountain.

The Origins and Formatting of Modern Screenplays

Video, Words on the page

In [this 15-minute video](http://vimeo.com/67418669), John Hess gives a terrific overview of the history of the screenplay format, and how changes in the film industry changed the way the words are arranged on the page.

I could quibble with a few things.

First, the modern screenplay has an obvious analogue in the stage play, and didn’t develop in a vacuum. Second, Hess gets a little proscriptive at the end of the video, and conflates screenwriting software with the format. (Which is part of why we made [Fountain](http://fountain.io), to untangle the writing from the formatting.)

But his overall point is worth making: the screenplay format *is* what it is, and it’s a fool’s errand to try something wildly different.

Eating dessert first

Writing Process

Joss Whedon on [getting things written](http://www.fastcocreate.com/1683167/how-to-be-prolific-guidelines-for-getting-it-done-from-joss-whedon):

> For me, it boils down to specificity, knowing exactly what I’m trying to accomplish, because if I have three projects, it’s ‘Oh, maybe I’ll work on S.H.I.E.L.D. or maybe I’ll work on this or this.’

> You know, it’s so easy to just get nothing done, but you’ve got to rock a little David Allen out to be able to get things done and break your list down into next actions. And this is true of producing and directing but even of writing.

> It’s like, Okay, today I am going to figure out this action sequence. Today, I am going to watch a shit ton of other action sequences, whatever it is, but that would be the other side of it after the specificity of knowing. Don’t just say, ‘Oh, I need to work on that.’ Say, ‘I need to work on this element of that.’ Absolutely eat dessert first. **The thing that you want to do the most, do that.**”

Scriptnotes 100 tickets now available

News

UPDATE: Sold out. Really quickly. We’ll talk with the Academy folks and see if we can free up more tickets. If so, I’ll try to give fair warning about when they’re available.

It’s not surprising that we have resourceful listeners, and a few of them discovered tickets were actually available on the Academy site starting on Friday. Only a few folks bought them, so I decided not to publicize their availability so that people who were waiting for the promised July 1st date could get tickets.

—

Tickets for the live taping of the Scriptnotes 100th episode, July 25th in Hollywood, are now available [on the Academy site](http://www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2013/07/script-notes.html).

This isn’t WWDC, but the combination of free beer and limited space means we’ll probably sell out pretty quickly, so don’t delay.

Tickets are $5, or $3 if you’re a student or Academy member. And if you’re both, well, aren’t you fancy.

The event is presented by the Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting program, and hosted in this strange and great space called the Academy Lab at 6322 DeLongpre Avenue, just south of Arclight Hollywood. It should be a great night. We’ll be announcing our special guests soon.