John August

Follow Up

Which apps are screenwriters using?

Follow Up, Fountain, Geek Alert, Highland, Screenwriting Software

We had [57 entries](http://johnaugust.com/threepagelive) for the Three Page Challenge we’re conducting on May 15th.

I wondered which apps these screenwriters were using, so I checked the metadata for each file. ((Mac Nerds: After a lot of Googling, I couldn’t find a way to display creator information for each file in a folder; I had to do them one-by-one using Finder’s Get Info. If you have a command-line trick for this, I’d love to know it.))

| **App** | **# of Entries** | **% of Total** |
|—————|————–|———–:|
| Final Draft 8 | 18 | 32% |
| (unclear) ((The (unclear) category is for PDFs that don’t have a recognizable creator. For example, some PDFs show up as being from Preview on the Mac, which is primarily a reader but can be used to paste together multiple files.)) | 7 | 12% |
| Fade In | 7 | 12% |
| Final Draft (Windows) | 6 | 11% |
| Slugline | 5 | 9% |
| Final Draft 9 | 4 | 7% |
| Screenwriter | 3 | 5% |
| Celtx | 2 | 4% |
| Final Draft 7 | 2 | 4% |
| Highland | 1 | 2% |
| TextEdit | 1 | 2% |
| Word | 1 | 2% |
| **Total** |**57** | 100% |

Adding up its various incarnations, we find that Final Draft created just over half the entries. That’s about what I would have expected.

But I find it interesting that so many users have stuck with Final Draft 8, rather than version 9. There are still holdouts with version 7 as well.

I was happy to see six dedicated screenwriting apps (Final Draft, Fade In, Slugline, Screenwriter, Celtx and Highland) among the entrants. I didn’t find any Adobe Story or WriterDuet scripts. ((If you submitted a script written in Adobe Story or WriterDuet, let me know and I’ll amend the figures.))

Writers submitting to the Three Page Challenge are, almost by definition, listeners to the Scriptnotes podcast, in which we’ve discussed Final Draft, Fade In, Slugline and Highland among other apps. I wonder to what degree that has influenced their choices.

Three Page Challengers are also generally aspiring screenwriters, rather than working pros. To me, that makes entrants more likely have recently purchased software (or web-based subscription services) than established writers, who tend to stick with what they know.

The online submission for Three Page Challenges worked well enough that we’ll keep using some version of it. In the next incarnation, we’ll ask upon submission which app the writer used.

The ruins of Spectre

Big Fish, Follow Up

Kelly Kazek looks at [what became of Spectre](http://www.al.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2014/04/take_a_video_tour_of_ruins_of.html):

> Spectre was a “town” built as a set for the filming of the movie “Big Fish,” which premiered in December 2003 but had its wide release 10 years ago, in January 2004. With the exception of one scene in Paris, the entire movie was filmed in Alabama, a rarity in a time before the state offered film incentives.

> The road and fake trees leading into the town of Spectre, and the buildings, mostly just facades, were never demolished but were left to the elements.

We shot Big Fish primarily in Wetumpka, Alabama. The town of Spectre was constructed on a privately-owned island.

In the film, you see Spectre in three incarnations:

– The magical little town young Edward encounters at the start of the film.
– The rundown early-80s version after the road is build.
– The fixed-up version after Edward gets everyone to sign on to a trust.

We shot the rundown version last, so that’s what remains on the island: the ruins of the ruins.

Spectre doesn’t exist in the musical version of Big Fish. Instead, Edward’s home town of Ashton plays a much bigger role, ultimately becoming the town he needs to save at the end.

Several years ago, Derek Frey (Tim Burton’s assistant for Big Fish) visited the Spectre sets to see how they were holding up. You can see his photos [on Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/derekfrey/sets/72157604393626472/).

Full Whedoncé

Directors, Film Industry, Follow Up

Back in Scriptnotes [episode 125](http://johnaugust.com/2014/egoless-screenwriting), I wondered if a filmmaker could pull a beyoncé and release a film without any advance notice. I speculated that someone like JJ Abrams or Joss Whedon probably could pull it off.

Then a few weeks ago, Whedon seemed to do just that with [In Your Eyes](http://inyoureyesmovie.com/?utm_source=external_display&utm_medium=vod-google-search-na-na-20140420&utm_campaign=9868&gclid=CNvIqvDelb4CFYxufgod1RgAtg&dclid=CM-0ufDelb4CFQkIhQod9yQAYQ).

But was that really a beyoncé, or just the new version of direct-to-video? Was it more or less of a beyoncé than Much Ado About Nothing, which predated Beyoncé’s beyoncé. (Preyoncé’d?)

Popjustice wants to make sure we don’t forget what it really means to [pull a beyoncé](http://www.popjustice.com/briefing/anatomy-of-a-beyonce-a-proposed-classification-system-for-surprise-album-releases):

> We all think we know what a beyoncé is, but it’s vital that we do not assign beyoncé status to every album release that breaks with established release patterns. If we do misuse the term, we risk devaluing the purity of Beyoncé’s original ‘BEYONCÉ’ beyoncé.

Popjustice is looking at albums, but many of the criteria apply equally well to films:

> A Full Beyoncé must contain ALL these elements.

> This must be a full album, ideally but not necessarily containing a larger than average number of tracks.

In Your Eyes is a feature. That counts.

> The artist must be a global superstar, a multi-platinum act in at least one major territory, or an artist with a huge/deranged online fanbase.

Fanbase, check.

> Trickily, it must be common knowledge that the artist has been working on new material – but the release must still also, somehow, be a surprise.

> There must have been no legitimate leaked information about the nature of the release in advance of the release. A beyoncéd album that has been trailed by an interview regarding its release could potentially be regarded as little more than a conventional album release with a shorter promotional window.

Everyone knows Whedon is doing the Avengers sequel. But this, a script he wrote and produced but didn’t direct, was nowhere on the radar.

> There must be no conventionally promoted single leading into the album’s release.

There wasn’t a trailer. In fact, the online trailer is the first few minutes of the film. ((The trailerless-ness may ultimately work against In Your Eyes. The promo only shows kids; the film is mostly about adults.))

> It must be a standalone album release – it can’t just be an addition to a previous album campaign, a deluxe edition or any sort of repackage.

Check.

> By its nature this album will almost certainly be released digitally first – it’s impossible to send CDs into production then get them to retail without news leaking. (If an album does indeed make it to stores with literally no warning before, say, shops open at 9am, it will be permitted as a full beyoncé.)

In the podcast, I speculated that a filmmaker like James Cameron could conceivably create a release date for a fake film and use that to book theaters. But realistically, digital is how this would work, and that’s what happened with In Your Eyes.

> The nature of the release must be convincingly presented as an artistic statement or creative choice, rather than being a transparent attempt to drum up interest in an album campaign that hasn’t been working out properly.

It’s fair to ask whether the surprise-here’s-a-movie tactic was mostly because it didn’t make financial sense to do a more conventional release. The movie has no marketable stars other than Whedon.

> Total beyoncégeddon must be achieved across all social networks for at least 24 hours.

While I got a lot of tweets about it, I didn’t sense the universe going apeshit over this movie. Part of the problem is that movies require significant time to watch. You can watch a music video in three minutes and tweet while you’re doing it. With a feature, you’re asking people to stop doing everything else for 90 minutes or more.

In the end, I don’t think In Your Eyes pulled a beyoncé. But I think it’s rightly classified as a Whedon anyway. As a release strategy, it fits much more in the tradition of Dr. Horrible and Much Ado. He’s been doing this for years, and doing it well.

But I hold out hope that we will get our surprise film one day. It will have stars you recognize, and production values that leave you wondering how the hell they kept this under wraps.

Try to open this PDF, cont’d

Follow Up, Geek Alert

Yesterday, I [asked](http://johnaugust.com/2014/try-to-open-this-pdf) readers whether PDF encryption was actually effective, and offered up two sample PDFs as a test.

Two readers quickly cracked the easier of the files:

> The first file only took about 30 seconds. Right now the second one is running and it’s hit 5 digits so far running at an average rate of 1,005,000 words/second. I’m on an i7 CPU, similar to what you could buy in a nice Macbook Pro laptop.

The vulnerability is the password. The password for the first PDF was a four-digit number. The password for the second PDF was a random 32-character string, which made brute force much less effective.

> I ran multiple instances of the same app starting at different password lengths (6, 8, 10, 11, 12) so was getting upwards of 5M words/second. I let it run for 12+ hours or so but the possible combinations are staggering.

How staggering? Well, if you use a mix of upper and lower case letters and numbers, you get total of 62 possible characters:

0123456789AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz

Then, depending on your password length, math makes it awesome.

Length Combinations Laptop Dedicated Distributed
2 3,844 Instant Instant Instant
3 238,328 Instant Instant Instant
4 15 Million < 2 Secs Instant Instant
5 916 Million 1½ Mins 9 Secs Instant
6 57 Billion 1½ Hours 9½ Mins 56 Secs
7 3.5 Trillion 4 Days 10 Hours 58 Mins
8 218 Trillion 253 Days 25¼ Days 60½ Hours

I’ve adapted this chart from [these numbers](http://www.lockdown.co.uk/?pg=combi) courtesy Ivan Lucas, which date back to 2009. I’ve arbitrarily labeled the three columns as “laptop,” “dedicated” and “distributed” to illustrate what kind of system might be used in 2014 to achieve these results. The point is that each additional character in the password really does make it much more difficult to solve.

In fact, even at the fastest rate on this chart, solving the 32-character combination on the second PDF would take longer than the age of the universe. ((I’m almost sure I’ve done my math wrong, but I love a provocative statement.))

One of the people who cracked the first PDF actually works in IT security. He warns against getting smug:

> There are far more advance methods that utilize GPU hardware and elegantly-crafted combinations of known hash values, dictionary attacks, and brute force to get results much faster.

> Hackers have refined their tools using a pool of hundreds of millions of real-world passwords stolen from servers. They don’t have to use brute force if they know that 80% of people follow certain patterns.

For PDF encryption, the consensus seems to be that the latest version of Adobe is pretty effective if you’re using the 128 or 256 bit option and have 8+ random characters. Random, as in not a word in a dictionary.

No standalone file is safe from someone with enough time and the right tools. But for something like a screenplay, encryption is quite a bit better than I expected.

Far from being useless, PDF encryption is potentially worth it. I may start using it more often.