John August

Fountain

Why Highland 2 doesn’t automatically add CONT’D

Formatting, Fountain, Highland

In screenplays, when a character continues speaking after a line or two of action, the convention is to write (CONT’D) after their second character cue.

TOM

Sure, these radioactive cockroaches might kill us all...

He gestures to a glowing wall of swarming roaches. Like a thousand tiny pixels, they form surreal moving images.

TOM (CONT’D)

But look how pretty!

Final Draft and many other screenwriting applications will add these (CONT’D)s automatically unless you tell them no. And you should say no.

These kind of (CONT’D)s should never be left to algorithms. I’ve written about this before:1

Consider Sandra Bullock’s character in Gravity. Minutes may elapse between her spoken dialogue, but Final Draft will default to adding the (CONT’D) since no other character has spoken in the interim. You can delete the (CONT’D), but it’s a hassle, and it will come right back if you reformat text around it.

To prevent this kind of Gravity situation, Final Draft could set a threshold where it only adds (CONT’D) if fewer than X lines of scene description interrupt the dialogue. But that wouldn’t catch a more common problem like this:

MARY

Tom, stop staring at them! They’re hypnotizing you!

But it’s too late: Tom is transfixed. He starts walking towards the reactor core, completely in the roaches’ thrall.

Mary grabs him, trying to hold him back. But he’s too strong.

Finally, Mary spots Hector up in the control room. She yells, hoping he can hear her --

MARY

Hector!

Mary’s shout to Hector isn’t a continuation of her previous dialogue. It’s a new thing. Some screenwriters would choose to add the (CONT’D), while others wouldn’t.

The point is, it’s a choice the writer should be making, not the software.

Highland 2 will auto-complete if you start typing the (CONT’D), but it won’t try to put it there by itself. That’s consistent with the general philosophy of Highland and other Fountain-based apps: we will never change your actual text.

Note that these CONT’Ds are a different species than dialogue breaks at the bottom of a page. In these circumstances, there’s no authorial intent. It’s simply the screenwriting software trying to fit an appropriate amount of text on a page, and signaling to the reader that dialogue keeps going.

Highland 2 adds these (MORE)s and (CONT’D)s when you print or preview. They’re not baked-in because page breaks can change as you add or delete text.

  1. I was halfway through writing today’s post when I realized I’d blogged about CONT’D twice before. Apparently, I’ve defaulted to Tom and Mary in my examples since nearly the beginning of the blog. They’ve seen some shit. ↩

Separating scenes in Highland

Apps, Fountain, Highland

Jose, one of our Highland 2 beta testers, wrote in with a feature request:

I’d love the ability to print individual scenes, with page breaks after each scene. It can be useful to physically rearrange scenes once printed.

We could add that as a command, but how often would users really want to do that? Rarely-used features are cruft. They make apps more complicated than they need to be, both for users and developers.

Luckily, it’s remarkably easy to do what Jose wants with any Fountain app, including the original Highland.

Step one: Think what it would look like

In Fountain syntax, a page break is simply three equal signs: ===

Meanwhile, scene headers start with either INT. or EXT.1

So in order to put a page break between each scene, you want to replace every instance of INT. with…

===
INT.

…and then do the same with EXT.

Step two: Make it look like that

Within Highland, you can do it with two passes of Find and Replace, choosing Replace All. It’s helpful to copy-and-paste the second part, since Mac’s default find and replace fields only show you a single line.

find-and-replace

It took less than 20 seconds in all.

If breaking scenes into individual pages is something you do all the time, it’s easily automated. Here’s an AppleScript to do it: Split Fountain Scenes.

As always, it’s a good idea to work on a copy of the file you can toss after printing.

Highland’s plain-text Fountain format makes little hacks like this easy. For example, another beta tester requested a way to print his [[inline notes]], which are removed by default.

There’s no need for him to wait for us to add a feature. We suggested he simply find-and-replace [[ and ]] with ++. He got the inline notes he wanted right away.

How would you do this in Final Draft or Fade In?

With difficulty. I couldn’t find a way to do it without manually inserting page breaks at the end of every scene. If you figure out a way, let me know.

  1. You can also force a scene header by starting with a period: .DEEPER IN THE VOID. You can find these by searching for a return followed by a period. ↩

Weekend Read can read scripts aloud

Apps, Fountain, Weekend Read

Weekend Read, our app for reading screenplays on the iPhone and iPad, can also read them aloud. Here’s how to do it.

Ask Siri to “speak screen.” If you don’t already have Speech turned on, Siri will offer a link to the proper settings page:

siri setting

Tap Open Settings, then switch on Speak Screen.

speech settings

While you’re here, you can also choose a speaking voice in the Voices menu.

Then go back to Weekend Read and open a script.

To have it start reading aloud, swipe down from the top of the screen with two fingers, or just ask Siri to “speak screen.”

A set of controls appears, allowing you jump forward and back paragraphs, and adjust the reading speed.

speech HUD

Once you start it speaking, you can even change apps and it will keep going.

How did we do it? Honestly, we didn’t have to do a lot.

Almost all of this is built-in functionality provided by Apple’s Accessibility features. Behind the scenes, Weekend Read converts everything to Fountain, a plain-text format that feeds right into the system. By keeping it simple (and not cheating with view controllers) it just works.

For an upcoming version of Weekend Read, we’re working on small improvements such as “Mary says” and automatic expansion of abbreviations like “INT” and “V.O.”

You can find Weekend Read in the App Store.

Formatting a montage in Highland using Forced Action

Apps, Formatting, Fountain, Highland, Screenwriting Software

A friend was writing a montage today and couldn’t figure out how to get quite the formatting he wanted in Highland:

If I’m moving quickly in a sequence I’ll frequently write IN THE GARAGE or BACK OUTSIDE or instead of a whole slug line. I want action to go on the next line, with no blank line in between.

The problem is, it’s interpreting this as a character name, and formats it as such, and the action beneath it as dialogue.

He wrote something like this: forced action screenshot In Fountain syntax, that looks like three blocks of dialogue, so Highland was giving him this:

IN THE GARAGE

B.A. works on the van.

OUT BACK

Hannibal and Murdock rig the gatling gun.

IN THE BATHROOM

Face works on his old man makeup.

Fortunately, Fountain has ways to override defaults. In this case, the easiest way to get his desired format would be to force those intermediary sluglines (“IN THE GARAGE,” “OUT BACK,” etc.) to be treated as action.

To do that, start each of them with an exclamation point. forced action screenshot 2 That keeps Highland from interpreting the uppercase lines as character names, leaving the lines neatly stacked up, just like my friend wanted.

In most cases, you’ll never need to do this, because you’ll generally want the blank line after the “IN THE GARAGE” or “OUT BACK.” Leaving a little more white space on the page helps the reader understand that you’re moving between multiple locations.

Here’s an example from Ted Griffin’s Ocean 11 screenplay:

And during the above rant by Benedict, we view...

MIRADOR SUITE

now empty, Livingston’s monitors still displaying the masked men in the vault.

WHITE VAN

navigating the streets of Las Vegas.

FIVE SEDANS

tailing the van, security goons piled into each, and maybe we NOTICE (or maybe not) the Rolls-Royce tailing them.

TESS

pacing in Benedict’s suite, biting her nails, debating whether to blow the whistle on Danny. ON TV: a newscast of the contentious aftermath of the prize fight.

UZI GUARDS,

bound and unarmed, unconscious to the activity within the vault.

RUSTY’S CELL PHONE

opened and unmanned.

BENEDICT

listens -- the line has gone dead. He hangs up.

The forced action trick can be useful in other cases where you want to override default behavior.

Perhaps you have a time bomb, and you’re using ellipses to indicate the countdown. You write:

screenshot

Highland reads that third tick as a forced scene header, because it starts with a single period. But you can force it back to action with an exclamation point:

illustration-

Both Highland and Fountain are sophisticated enough to catch most edge cases, but we’re always finding new situations in which writers are trying to do something that doesn’t quite match expected behavior. And that’s okay! The screenplay format is a set of shared assumptions, not a straightjacket. If you really need to include something unusual, do it.1

You can find all of the possible forced elements in the Syntax section of Fountain.io, most of which are supported by the popular apps. (Forced Action wasn’t part of the original spec, so some early apps haven’t included it yet.)

As always, you can find Highland on the Mac App Store.

  1. Both Fountain and Highland support extended character sets, including emoji. Final Draft doesn’t. ↩