Follow Up

Final Draft and WGA registration

February 5, 2014 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.

The Scriptnotes Holiday Live Show

November 20, 2013 Follow Up, Los Angeles, WGA

As we discussed on the last podcast, Craig and I are doing a live episode benefiting the Writers Guild Foundation.

Thursday, December 19th
8pm
The Los Angeles Film School (new venue!)
6363 Sunset Blvd
Hollywood, CA 90028

In the spirit of A Christmas Carol, we will be visited by previous Scriptnotes guests, including Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wear Prada), Derek Haas (Chicago Fire, 3:10 to Yuma), Kelly Marcel (Saving Mr. Banks), Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko), Rawson Thurber (We’re the Millers), Blacklist creator Franklin Leonard, and producer Lindsay Doran. Plus we’ll have brand-new guests on hand to discuss features, television, and the business of slinging words.

There will also be surprise give-aways and way too much eggnog. Will Craig play Scrooge to my Cratchit? Join us and find out.

Tickets are normally $25 — but only $10 if you use the special promo code UMBRAGE at checkout.

Note that we’ve moved to a bigger venue. We’re now going to be using the main auditorium of the LA Film School, across from the ArcLight in Hollywood. We’ll likely sell out, and likely quickly, so don’t dally.

Tickets should be available at exactly 10am today (Wednesday) at the [WGF website](https://www.wgfoundation.org/writing-seminars/).

PDF to FDX

November 19, 2013 Follow Up, Screenwriting Software

In an [earlier post](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-to-convert-a-pdf-to-final-draft), I listed three ways to import a PDF into Final Draft:

1. Retype it.
2. Copy and Paste and Reformat every line.
3. Use Highland.

On a Mac, Highland was by far the best choice. It was much faster and much more accurate.

Joel Levin at Final Draft emailed me to recommend an alternate workflow that’s listed on the [Final Draft site](http://kb.finaldraft.com/article.aspx?cid=1001&aid=519):

> If you have a recent version of the Adobe Acrobat Reader you can go to File > Save As > Text and save the document as a text file.

> Import this text file into Final Draft (File > Open) as a script but you may need to do some reformatting.

I just tried it, and will update my earlier post. Here’s a screencast:

The short version is that for the file I tested, this method was better than copy-and-paste — but only slightly. Elements were more likely to be recognized correctly, but line breaks and spacing glitches were daunting. The script also swelled from 114 to 343 pages.

I wondered if it was just something strange about that one file, so I tried the same method on a bunch of the PDFs in the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library). Some of them turned out better than others, but all of them were significantly messed up.

So while it’s generally an improvement over copy-and-paste, you’d still need to spend quite a bit of time getting a useful script out of this workflow.

This actually isn’t Final Draft’s fault — their app is doing a commendable job on the fairly janky text file Adobe Reader is creating.

Nor is it Adobe’s fault — they built a general-purpose PDF app that doesn’t know anything about screenplays. It’s like complaining that a hammer is a terrible screwdriver.

Highland is a specialized tool for doing exactly this kind of conversion, which is why it works so much better. My previous recommendation still stands: if you need to convert a PDF to Final Draft, your best bet is to use [Highland](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/screencast-pdf-fdx) on a Mac.

If you can’t use Highland (e.g. you’re on a PC, and can’t bribe someone with a Mac), this Final Draft workflow is better than copy-and-paste. My thanks to Joel for pointing this out.

Shirts back in the Store

November 7, 2013 Follow Up, Geek Alert, News

Back in June, we sold the first-ever [Scriptnotes t-shirts](http://johnaugust.com/2013/t-shirts-and-transcripts). We took pre-orders, printed them, and sent them out all in a batch.

In that process, we learned a lot about the making and shipping of physical goods — how online shopping carts work, how to calculate sales tax, optimizing postage. We’re geeks. We like that stuff. Plus it’s been fun seeing Scriptnotes t-shirts out in the wild.

So we’re doing it again.

Through Friday, November 15th, we’ll be taking orders for a new batch of shirts. They’ll ship starting December 2nd, in time for the holidays.

Like last time, we’ll only print what people order, so if you want a shirt, you need to [order now](http://store.johnaugust.com).

The first batch of Scriptnotes shirts were available in umbrage orange and rational blue. The new Scriptnotes t-shirt is available in any color you want so long as it’s black. ((I always assumed this Henry Ford quote was apocryphal, but apparently it’s real. The original wording was, “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”)) For this shirt, we offer both unisex and women’s cuts.

I’m really happy with how the logo turned out. It’s faint, and seems to be gently glowing from inside the shirt.

Scriptnotes is not our only labor of love, so we decided to make some more shirts while we were at it.

First up is Fountain. How do you show a revolutionary [plain text screenplay markup syntax](http://fountain.io) on a t-shirt? Ryan Nelson and I went through a bunch of variations with document icons and street maps, but none of them felt right.

Ultimately, it was the color that set the tone. Olive green felt appropriately basic. Paired with white type (Highway Gothic) and a Fountain flag, this shirt feels like what you’d wear at boot camp. We’re recruiting a Fountain army, and this is the uniform.

Courier Prime is a [beautiful font](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/) designed by Alan Dague-Greene. Since it’s a text face, you aren’t supposed to notice the individual glyphs — it’s for reading, not showing off — but I wanted to highlight just how smart the whole character set is. What makes Courier Prime special — apart from its bolder bolds and crisper serifs — are the true italics, modeled after the “informal” script of old typewriters. Here you get to see the full alphabet at once. ((If you’re ever in doubt which Courier you’re seeing, check the lowercase y. In Courier Prime, the tail of the y never flattens out to a line.))

Right after Courier Prime came out, we made a few shirts with a similar design, but printed them on a heather gray. If you’re not familiar t-shirt lingo (I wasn’t), “heather” means that the fabric has a speckled quality, woven of threads in a range of colors to give it depth. For Courier Prime, that made it far too hard to see the details.

This time, we’re printing white on solid midnight navy, so you can see everything.

Our fourth shirt is actually the very first shirt we printed: Classic Karateka.

We made one hundred of these shirts to celebrate the launch of Jordan Mechner’s game on iOS. Only friends and team members got the first batch, but when we put up the few remaining shirts last month, they sold out in minutes. So we’re doing one last run.

Our final shirt isn’t about a product, but rather an idea. Longtime readers and listeners know I’m not just a fan of technology and gadgets, but the underlying science behind them. We live in a culture that has been completely transformed scientific innovation, yet at the same rejects scientific realities.

I vented some of my frustration through the frustrated science teacher (Mr. Rzykruski) in Frankenweenie. For this last shirt, I’m paraphrasing myself and his answer to the question of why no one likes scientists.

The adult shirts are silver (very light gray):

For the kids shirts, we went black:

All the t-shirts were designed in-house by Ryan Nelson, and printed locally in LA.

Once again, we’re only printing what people order, so if you want a shirt, [visit the store](http://store.johnaugust.com) before next Friday.

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