John August

Fountain

Outlining scripts in Fountain

Fountain, Highland

Stu Maschwitz offers an overview of [outlining in Fountain](http://prolost.com/foutline):

> Organization and structure are such an important issues that I made sure Fountain had some provision for supporting them. Fountain’s Sections are invisible, hierarchical markers that you can use to demarcate the structural points of your story—or anything else you like. Synopses allow you to annotate a Section — or a Scene Heading — with non-printing descriptive text.

> You can add Sections and Synopses to your Fountain screenplay as you work, or as a part of rewriting. You can also begin the writing process with them. You can use them to denote scenes, sequences, act breaks, or whatever is helpful to your writing process.

Because they don’t print in the formatted script, [section and synopsis tags](http://fountain.io/syntax#section-sections) can help you structure the document in a way that makes sense for you as you’re writing. Rather than just a scene header like…

EXT. BEACH – DAY

…you can throw a meaningful label on it like…

##Giant crabs attack campers

EXT. BEACH – DAY

When we were drafting up the Fountain spec, I honestly didn’t pay much attention to these tags, because I didn’t think I’d use either much. But in writing my ABC pilot, I found them genuinely useful.

I used the top-level section mark (#) to denote act breaks, and the synopsis tag (=) to quickly jot out what was happening in upcoming scenes. That’s great for the end of the day, when you’re leaving some gas in the tank for tomorrow’s writing.

The = can also serve as a quick-and-dirty to-do list, such as:

INT. BEDROOM – DAY

= shorter. start on Asha

Several of the existing Fountain apps — and many of the upcoming ones — can do magic things with section and synopsis tags, formatting them differently or collecting them for an outline view. Together, they make it easier to jump through your script. Rather than looking for a page number or a location, you can skip right to the section or note you want.

The air duct of backstory

Episode - 67

Go to Archive

Fountain, Scriptnotes, Software, Three Page Challenge, Transcribed

John and Craig talk about perspective — both within a scene and the overall story. It’s not always obvious to the reader which characters are in the driver’s seat, so it falls on the screenwriter to make that clear.

We have four new Three Page Challenges this week, with genres ranging from horror to sex comedy. John begs you to never try to establish a character’s backstory by featuring them on a magazine cover.

All this, plus an update on John’s experience writing his most recent script entirely in Fountain, in episode 67 of Scriptnotes.

LINKS:

* [Hanukkah](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanukkah) on Wikipedia
* [Christmas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas) on Wikipedia
* [Krishna](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krishna) on Wikipedia
* [Fountain](http://fountain.io/) is a plain text markup language for screenwriting
* [Take Fountain](https://app.glassboard.com/web/invitation/code/gsaiw) on Glassboard
* Three pages by [Hunter M. Altman](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/HunterMAltman.pdf)
* Three pages by [Kevin Wolfe & Adam DeKraker](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/KevinWolfeAdamDeKraker.pdf)
* Three pages by [Scott Gorsuch](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/ScottGorsuch.pdf)
* Three pages by [Shawn Morrison](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/ShawnMorrison.pdf)
* [Scanadu](http://www.scanadu.com/)
* [Gizmodo](http://gizmodo.com/5965143/holy-spock-the-star-trek-medical-tricorder-is-real-and-its-only-150) on Scanadu
* [Soulver](http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/) helps you solve on iOS and OSX
* INTRO: [Crystal Light commercial](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWr9rZVvMN0)
* OUTRO: [Three Is a Magic Number](https://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/schoolhouse-rock-vol.-1/id123015257) by Bob Dorough on iTunes

You can download the episode here: [AAC](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_67.m4a).

**UPDATE** 12-14-12: The transcript of this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/scriptnotes-ep-67-the-air-duct-of-backstory-transcript).

Fountain for Sublime Text

Fountain

Jonathan Poritsky has whipped up a [Fountain syntax highlighter](http://www.candlerblog.com/2012/09/10/fountain-for-sublime-text/) for [Sublime Text](http://www.sublimetext.com/), an increasingly popular text editor.

I love to see this kind of itch-scratching. It’s why we made Fountain. We want people to be able use it with whatever tools they prefer, and to whatever extent they find helpful.

Here’s a screenshot:

sublime fountain screenshot

Personally, I don’t find this kind of syntax highlighting all that useful for Fountain.

We designed the markup so elements would be defined by whitespace — both visually and logically. Character names already feel unambiguous to me, so making them a different color doesn’t do much. Putting notes and other meta info in color, on the other hand, seems potentially great. So maybe that will come in a future incarnation.

Regardless, there’s no right or wrong way to use Fountain. I love to see people making it their own.

**UPDATE:** Jonathan has already put out an update that adds in syntax coloring for Notes, Boneyard and other helpful meta-things. Totally worth a look.

Writing screenplays with Scrivener and iA Writer

Apps, First Person, Fountain, Highland, Screenwriting Software

A reader named Gerry wrote in to share his screenwriting workflow, which uses [Fountain](http://fountain.io) as a bridge between Scrivener, iA Writer, Dropbox and Highland.

—

first person[iA Writer](http://www.iawriter.com/) is my favorite application to write in because of its minimalist UI and Focus Mode. I just wish it had features similar to [Scrivener’s](http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php) Binder and Compile. I love the flexibility of having one scene or one sequence per document and organizing them within Scrivener’s Binder — as was [described so well](http://prolost.com/blog/2010/6/17/the-state-of-screenwriting-software.html) by Stu Maschwitz on Prolost.

Fortunately, Fountain lets me leverage both iA Writer and Scrivener.

I write scenes in iA Writer using Fountain syntax, saving them as plain text files in a [Dropbox](http://dropbox.com) folder. I can then work with them using iA Writer on a Mac, iPad, or iPhone, which is handy.

iA Writer is perfect for scenes, while Scrivener is great for the bigger script.

Because Fountain files are plain text, Scrivener is happy to handle them. I use Scrivener’s “Sync > with External Folder…” command to build a binder for the script, which maintains a link to those original files.

scrivener screenshot

(I prefer working with a minimized Scrivener UI. I “borrowed” icons from the Storyist application to customize Scrivener’s Binder.)

Meanwhile, iA Writer still sees the individual files. If I edit them, those changes appear within Scrivener after the next “Sync > with External Folder…”

iawriter screenshot

Using Scrivener’s “Compile…” command, I can then export a group of Scene and Sequence documents as a single plain text Fountain file.

With [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland), I can then convert that Fountain file to PDF or Final Draft.

—

Gerry’s workflow is more complicated than many screenwriters would prefer, but I like that he’s using the tools he wants for each part of the process. Rather than being boxed in by one monolithic app, he’s taking the best of various apps.

With Fountain, we’ve worked hard to keep the format as agnostic as possible. Scrivener and iA Writer didn’t have to add support for Fountain, because they’ve always had it.

Some upcoming apps will do more with the format — using its built-in notes and sectioning, for example — but even the most basic text editors can do 90% of what you’d want.

For now, Highland helps complete the loop by letting you convert to and from Fountain easily. The free public beta is still going, so if you’re curious, by all means [try it out](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland).