John August

Fountain

Final Draft and WGA registration

Follow Up, Fountain, Highland, Screenwriting Software

Update: Final Draft has removed the “preferred file format” line from their site.

In prepping for our [Final Draft episode](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-final-draft), I came across [this tidbit](http://store.finaldraft.com/final-draft-9.html) on their site:

> The market leader and the preferred file format of the Writers Guild of America West Online Script Registration.

That surprised me. Here is the actual wording on the [WGAw Registry website](http://www.wgawregistry.org/webrss/regdetails.html):

> Preferred file formats are ASCII, XML, PDF (Adobe Acrobat), Word, Final Draft , and Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000; however, all file formats will be accepted.

> In addition, other screenplay software and standard computer file formats are acceptable.

So according to the WGA Registry itself, Final Draft is **a** preferred file format, not **the** preferred file format. Which doesn’t seem to be a claim worth trumpeting that loudly, considering the other options include “all file formats.”

Final Draft does get a small logo on the WGAw Registry site, though. Final Draft put out a [press release](http://www.deadline.com/2013/11/final-draft-wgaw-final-draft-9-2014/) about that. So Final Draft has some special relationship with the WGA. Perhaps it’s the most preferred of all the preferred formats, which include basically anything capable of rendering text.

And speaking of text, ASCII! Younger readers might not even recognize this term. It’s the plainest of plain text, just 128 characters. Do you have a dot-matrix printer? Feed it some ASCII.

Since you can register basically any type of file, can you register scripts written in Fountain? Yes.

Fountain is just text. So if you’re writing a script in Highland or Slugline or Scrivener or Fade In or the growing number of apps that use Fountain, the WGA Registry is happy to take it. PDFs are also a good choice, because they look like a printed screenplay.

While we’re at it, *should* you register your script with the WGA?

I have no strong opinion. For legal purposes, it can be useful to show you wrote something before a certain date. It’s [no substitute for copyright registration](http://zernerlaw.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/it’s-time-for-the-writer’s-guild-to-shut-down-the-wga-registry/), but then again, in many cases the screenwriter and the studio will be engaging in the mutually-beneficial practice of claiming something was a work-for-hire. So I don’t have an all-purpose answer.

All I know is that if you choose to register your script with the WGA, it doesn’t have to be Final Draft.

Fountain 1.1 — “Use The Force”

Apps, Fountain, Highland, Screenwriting Software

We’re about to put out the first revision to [Fountain](http://fountain.io) since we launched it two years ago, and are calling for comment from users and developers.

When we were developing the plain text screenwriting syntax, we tried to balance normal uses and edge cases. Overall, I think we think we got Fountain mostly right. But Stu Maschwitz and I always expected that we’d evolve the specification as we learned more about how people use it on a daily basis.

The theme of the Fountain 1.1 update is “Use The Force.” It’s all about better control over “forcing” elements.

Most times in Fountain, you don’t need to force anything. It just understands what you want. But when you need to, you can force a Scene Heading with a leading period. You can force a Transition using a leading greater-than symbol.

For Fountain 1.1, we’re discussing adding two new forceable elements, and making a change to how Action is forced.

## LYRICS

Highland has been testing a Lyrics variation on Dialogue for a while now, and it works. We think it’s time to make it official.

You create a Lyric by starting with a tilde ~.

~Willy Wonka! Willy Wonka! The amazing chocolatier!

~Willy Wonka! Willy Wonka! Everybody give a cheer!

The parser will remove the ~ and leave it up to the app to style the Lyric appropriately. For screenplays, lyrics are often handled like a dialogue element, but in italics. ((Courier Prime italics are especially nice for lyrics.)) For stage musicals, it’s often uppercase and placed on the left margin.

Lyrics are always forced. There is no “automatic” way to get them.

## CHARACTER

The ability to force a Character element will be helpful for names that require lower-case letters, and for non-Roman languages, where a character might be named something like 黒澤.

To force a Character element, precede a line with the “at” symbol: @

@McCLANE

Yippie ki-yay! I got my lower-case C back!

The parser will remove the @ and interpret McCLANE as Character, preserving its mixed case.

Speaking of lowercase, one other change is that Character Extensions, the parenthetical notations that are on the same line as a Character element, are no longer required to be uppercase:

HANS (on the radio)
What was it you said?

The parser interprets HANS (on the radio) as a Character element.

## ACTION

Figuring out how to handle forced action required the most discussion.

Fountain interprets an uppercase line followed by a second line as a Character. Most of the time, that’s what you want:

MARY

Hi, Tom.

But sometimes you really want two lines of action, with no blank line between them. You’re going to for a style — but Fountain doesn’t know that. So instead you get:

BOOM

BOOM BOOM. Closer.

In Fountain 1.0, we allowed the user to force Action elements with two trailing spaces.

BOOM{two spaces}

BOOM BOOM. Closer.

This has turned out to be problematic in practice. The spaces are invisible, and can be introduced by accident as you write. Highland and Slugline users got confused. Hell, I got confused, and I co-created the syntax.

MARY{two spaces I didn’t realize were there}

Wait! Why isn’t my character name where it should be? Why isn’t my dialogue being handled like dialogue? Nima!

Furthermore, not all Fountain apps supported the spaces consistently.

In the end, we’d like more transparency and less invisibility. Using spaces to force Action should be deprecated.

In Fountain 1.1, we propose that users force Action by preceding a line with an exclamation point:

!BOOM
BOOM BOOM. Closer.

The parser removes the ! and interprets BOOM as Action.

BOOM  

BOOM BOOM. Closer.

Since forcing action is rare, and the other changes are purely additive (and evident to the naked eye), we don’t anticipate huge issues for most users.

Unless we hear a hue and cry about these changes, we anticipate making them official next week. Apps can start supporting this syntax shortly thereafter.

But we’re not stopping there. Upcoming goals for Fountain include:

1. Better consistency among apps when parsing Fountain. We keep finding edge cases, and want to make sure they are handled the same way regardless of which app you’re using.
2. New syntax for marking changes or highlighting elements in finished documents.
3. Continued development of screenplay-like formats, including three-camera and stageplays.

If you have notes or suggestions, I’d invite you to join the discussion on the [Take Fountain](https://app.glassboard.com/web/app/boards/dff2b3bf-5f61-4ab6-8a64-16c71dd57160) Glassboard. Registration is free and open to everyone.

Writing in Fountain on the iPad, using Editorial

Apps, Fountain, Geek Alert, Highland

[Editorial](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/editorial/id673907758?mt=8) is one of the slickest text editors for the iPad, and thanks to some clever Python scripting, it can now show [previews of Fountain scripts](http://editorial-app.appspot.com/workflow/5215636485570560/diZz8hHAW1c):

fountain preview

The Fountain preview is not perfect. I noticed parentheticals didn’t find the right margins and other bits of minor weirdness. But this workflow demonstrates one of the big advantages of Fountain’s plain-text heritage: you can adapt existing tools to work with it.

Fountain-centric iPad apps are coming, but until then there are no shortage of great text editors for iOS, so it’s worth experimenting. Anything you write in Fountain can easily be transformed into a PDF by apps like [Highland](http://taps.io/JdQA) or [Slugline](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slugline/id553754186?mt=12).

Why I like writing in Fountain

Fountain, Highland, Screenwriting Software

For the past 18 months, I’ve been doing all my new writing in Fountain rather than a heavyweight screenwriting app like Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter.

I love working in Fountain so much that I made a screencast to explain [why it’s better](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lElhyw3WGxo):

For geek types, it’s easy to say that Fountain is [like Markdown for screenplays](http://fountain.io/faq). But that doesn’t explain why it’s better for day-to-day writing, so in this screencast I tried to show why a screenwriter might use a Fountain-based app instead of Final Draft or one of the other apps from the 1990s.

In the video, you’ll see that I’m including several comparatively new applications in this category of old-style apps. They may be recent, but programs like Fade In and Adobe Story work largely same way word processors did back when Will Smith was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. They’re essentially Microsoft Word with custom style sheets. They don’t take advantage of how much faster computers have gotten, or the special things you can do when you’re handling structured text like screenplays.

The old apps were built for printing scripts from stand-alone computers. The new apps are built for the web, for phones and tablets, for everything that’s coming. It’s the flexibility and extensibility of Fountain that helps make new things possible.

As always, you can find out more info about Fountain at [Fountain.io](http://fountain.io.), including full explanation of the syntax and apps that have particularly good support for it.

You can get Highland, the app I used for this demo, from the [Mac App Store](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/fountain-screencast).

Over this Thanksgiving break, why not give Fountain a try?