John August

Challenge

Mistakes development executives make

Episode - 46

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Challenge, Film Industry, QandA, Scriptnotes, Transcribed

Craig and John skip Comic-Con so they can discuss annoying and unproductive habits of development executives, along with advice for working with screenwriters.

The back half of the podcast is devoted to the first-ever three page challenge, in which we critique listeners’ samples and offer suggestions. If you have a chance to read the samples before listening to the podcast — they’re in the links below — you’ll get more out of it, but we try to summarize things so that it’s useful even without the text.

Let us know what you thought of this experiment (on Twitter @johnaugust and @clmazin) so we’ll know whether to do a round two. We received more than 200 entries for the challenge — more than enough, so please don’t send any more. If we do another pass, we’ll pull from what we have.

Our thanks to everyone who wrote in, and especially to Ajay, J. Nicholas and Bryan for letting us talk about their stuff online.

Also discussed this week: standing desks, music theory, laptop speakers and inflated podcast numbers.

LINKS:

You can download the episode here: AAC.

UPDATE 7-19-12: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

Setting, perspective and terrible numbers

Challenge, Scriptnotes, Story and Plot, Three Page Challenge, Transcribed, WGA

It’s two parts craft and one part business as Craig and John discuss the alarming earnings report coming out of the WGA, plus a deeper look at setting and POV.

For feature screenwriters, it’s hard to find a silver lining in the WGA’s report on 2011 earnings. Numbers are down significantly, both in total dollars and the number of writers earning anything at all.

2011 earnings chart

Of course, you don’t have to be employed to write a script, so we spend the rest of the show talking about two crucial aspects of screenwriting: choosing effective settings and deciding on POV.

Setting is both a macro and micro decision. Early on, you need to figure out where your movie takes place. Everything about your story will be impacted by the world you choose. Then as you write individual scenes, you look for environments that provide opportunities and challenges for your characters — and for the director. Film is a visual medium, so smart screenwriters consider what settings will suit a big screen.

Perspective, or POV, is about figuring out which characters have storytelling power in your movie. Which characters can anchor a scene without the hero? Which characters can do voiceover? The choices you make greatly effect audience expectation, so it’s worth thinking about at the very start.

Finally, we talk about the Three Page Challenge. On an upcoming podcast, we’ll be critiquing three pages (and only three pages!) from listeners’ scripts. If you want to participate, visit johnaugust.com/threepage for details.

LINKS:

You can download the episode here: AAC.

UPDATE 7-12-12: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

Highland and the Kindle are friends

Apps, Challenge, Geek Alert, Highland

Ben Godar uses Highland to read screenplays on his Kindle by converting PDFs:

Once you drag the PDF into Highland, it will convert it into Fountain – recognizing all the screenplay elements. Export as a Fountain file, then save as plain text. From there, you can get the file onto your Kindle by e-mailing it to your Kindle address, upload using a program like Calibre, etc.

Fountain files are really just text files. You can change the .fountain extension to .txt and Kindle will happily read them.

The file still won’t look exactly like a screenplay on your Kindle. Everything will be left justified. But the line breaks will stay the same, character names will be capitalized… all in all, it will look like a screenplay.

Ben’s solution works, but I’d love to see a little more screenplay formatting. If any clever readers feel like some geekery this holiday weekend, here’s my challenge to you:

Build a converter that takes a Fountain file and formats it nicely for the Kindle.

In addition to text files, Kindle understands RTF and HTML/CSS, so one of those might be a good option.

If you make something interesting, email or tweet me a link. I will be delighted to hype anything cool that comes of it.

Script-a-scene contest

Challenge

Jessica Bendinger (Bring It On, Stick It) is hosting a competition centered around her new novel, inviting readers to adapt a bit from it into a scene.

It’s like one of this site’s scene challenges, but based on an actual real book rather than my random themes of science and/or self-amusement.

You can check out the rules for Jessica’s competition here.