John August

Geek Alert

Convert old Final Draft files, in five clever-but-tedious steps

Follow Up, Geek Alert, Screenwriting Software

Last week, I [urged](http://johnaugust.com/2012/pricing-fdx-reader) Final Draft to release a free converter app to let screenwriters move their old-and-busted .fdr files to the newer .fdx format.

A reader wrote in to say that Final Draft already has one. Sort of.

The evaluation version of Final Draft 8 — which supports both .fdr and .fdx — is free on the Final Draft website.

You can open an .fdr file, then save it as .fdx. The problem is, the evaluation version is limited to 15 pages.

[Mac Harwood](http://MacHarwood.blogspot.com/) has a solution:

> 1. Select the menu Format > Elements to bring up the Elements dialog box.
> 2. In the Font tab, select ‘Set Font’ and change the font size to ’1′.
> 3. Then press Apply Font/Size to all elements.
> 4. In the Paragraph tab, set ‘Space before’ to be 0, and then do the same for each element.

> Now the 200 page epic will only be a few pages, which you can save with the evaluation version.

This works, but the resulting file is a mess of tiny letters. His fix:

> Just open up the created .fdx file in your favourite text editor (I use Notepad++) and do a search and replace for all occurrences of “Size=1″ to a blank. Then save.

This workflow could save your life if you were stuck somewhere with an .fdr file and no way to open it, but it’s hardly a practical solution for screenwriters staring at folders full of old files. ((If someone out there finds a way to automate this crazy workflow, let me know.))

Erik Harrison offers a possible explanation for why a Final Draft converter isn’t forthcoming:

> There probably ISN’T a file format [for .fdr]. It’s likely just a binary dump of the state of internal memory at the time of save. Certainly that was true of a lot of word processors I used in the old day, and even still is true for Word in some senses.

If that’s the case, it helps explain why the new iPad app doesn’t support .fdr. In order to support the old format, the app would have to duplicate way too much of the full Final Draft.

Introducing Fountain

Geek Alert, News, Screenwriting Software

I’m happy to introduce a project we’ve been working on for quite a while.

fountain file[Fountain](http://fountain.io) lets you write screenplays in any text editor on any device, from computers to iPads to smartphones. It’s as simple as we could make it, which is what makes it so useful.  

Fountain files are just text. We use a [straightforward syntax](http://fountain.io/syntax) to indicate what’s what — character names are uppercase, transitions end in “TO:”, and so on.

On the page, Fountain *feels like* a screenplay. When you’re ready for formatting, helper apps do the work of adding margins and page breaks.

Screenwriters can use Fountain for writing scripts, but it’s also ideal for archiving.

Because they’re just text, Fountain files are basically future-proof. You’ll be able to open and edit them 100 years from now. You can’t say the same for .fdr, .mmsw or most of the other proprietary formats. And while .pdfs maintain formatting, they’re nearly impossible to edit.

Why Fountain
—-

Fountain gets its name from Fountain Ave., the famous Hollywood shortcut. ((Asked for advice on the best way an aspiring starlet could get into Hollywood, Bette Davis supposedly replied, “Take Fountain.”))

We see Fountain as a path rather than a destination. It’s not an app. It’s not even really a file format. It’s a way of getting from a jumble of words to a screenplay.

If you’re familiar with [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/), this is the screenwriting equivalent. That’s no coincidence; I actually exchanged my first emails with Markdown’s creator, John Gruber, way back in 2004.

I wrote:

> I’d like to have a Markdown-like syntax for formatting text documents into screenplay form. This way, writers who wanted to use their favorite text editor could still generate well-formatted scripts.

Good ideas sometimes sit around for a while.

In 2008, Nima Yousefi and I built a modest implementation called Scrippets, which we released as a plug-in for WordPress and other platforms. Scrippets made it easy to insert small bits of screenplay-like material in blog posts and forums, but it was never intended for full-length screenplays. ((Scrippets is also the secret sauce in FDX Reader, which is what got us thinking about how we’d handle things like page breaks and scene numbers.))

Credit for the full spec goes to [Stu Maschwitz](http://prolost.com), who developed a similar-but-different format called SPMD (Screenplay Markdown). Recognizing that duplicated effort is wasted effort, we’ve spent the past few months merging the standards to what it is today.

Fountain shares a lot of its syntax with Scrippets, ((Indeed, we’ve folded Scrippets into Fountain, and future versions of the plugin will incorporate the revised syntax.)) but we really rethought everything in order to accommodate a range of writing situations and styles. It’s been a process of balancing philosophical consistency (no symbols) with practical concerns (centering titles). Through it all, Stu’s vision and vigilance moved this from being a good idea to an actual thing.

Fountain has benefitted from its many fathers, including me, Stu, Nima, Martin Vilcans, Brett Terpstra, Jonathan Poritsky, Clinton Torres and Ryan Nelson.

Using Fountain
—

You can write Fountain in any text editor on nearly any device, from an iPad to a Commodore-64. If you can get a text file out of it — even an email — you’re Fountain-ready.

In its raw state, Fountain is great for first drafts. It’s terrific for collaborating with a writing partner on Google Docs. It’s also incredibly handy to be able to write scenes anywhere.

Ultimately, screenwriters will use another app to finish formatting their scripts. Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter don’t explicitly support Fountain — yet both import the files remarkably well. (That’s why it’s great being a plain text file.) If you feel like writing in Fountain, you don’t have to wait for new apps…

…but [they’re coming](http://fountain.io/apps). Today, we’re announcing the format spec and an SDK so developers can add Fountain to their applications. The format is free and open-source. We want to see an ecosystem of apps and services that handle Fountain.

The road ahead
—

Back when we announced FDX Reader, I got a lot of emails asking, “When are you going to make a screenwriting app?”

Answer: Today. My hope is that we just made a thousand. Fountain turns every text editor into a screenwriting app.

To me, calls for a “Final Draft killer” are hugely misguided. Professional screenwriters will always need apps that can do the heavy lifting when it comes to production: revisions, locked pages, colored pages, etc. The big apps do this well.

But the tools should match the job. Google Docs is much better at collaboration than a dedicated screenwriting app will ever be. Power users of Vim should be able to write in their custom environment.

Fountain is meant to be *generally useful.* I’m excited to see how it becomes *specifically useful* to screenwriters in the months and years ahead.

For now, I’d invite you to read [Stu Maschwitz’s introduction](http://prolost.com/fountain) and then [check out the Fountain site](http://fountain.io).

How long is Rope?

Geek Alert, Story and Plot

In an [old article](http://www.antonellapavese.com/papers/damasio_remembwhen.pdf) that Scientific American recently reprinted, Antonio Damasio looks at how Hitchcock’s “no cuts” feature Rope squeezes 105 minutes into 80:

> Where do the missing 25 minutes go? Do we experience the film as shorter than 105 minutes? Not really. […]

> First, most of the action takes place in the living room of a penthouse in summer, and the skyline of New York City is visible through a panoramic window. At the beginning of the film, the light suggests late afernoon; by the end night has set in. Our daily experience of fading daylight makes us perceive the real-time action as taking long enough to cover the several hours of the coming night, when in fact, those changes in light are artificially accelerated by Hitchcock.

His analysis of Rope’s timeline is a sidebar to a longer article about how the brain time-stamps information to make the past seem orderly and the present feel “present.”

But in terms of Hitchcock’s film, I think Damasio overstates his case.

All movies exist in unreal time, not because of cuts and gimmickry, but because the experience of watching a movie involves surrendering to that film’s reality. We go into dream mode, especially when watching something on a giant screen in a dark theater.

Psychologists could — and I suspect have — shown test subjects a hour-long continuous shot of humdrum video. When asked to report its duration, guesses would vary considerably.

That’s not cinematic mastery. That’s our brains being only so-so at gauging time, particularly when denied outside clues.

In movies, unless something seems wildly impossible — driving from LA to New York in an hour — audiences are extremely forgiving about time, particularly if overall story logic seems to be consistent. In many of my favorite movies, I couldn’t tell you how many hours or days or months have elapsed in story time.

When movies work, you don’t care.

The rest of Scientific American’s special [A Matter of Time](http://www.scientificamerican.com/special/toc.cfm?issueid=40&sc=singletopic) issue (on newstands) is fascinating, by the way, touching on quantum matters, ancient clocks and other geekery. My very first screenplay was about Boulder’s atomic clock, so I’m a sucker for these things.

Introducing Bronson Watermarker

Geek Alert, News

bronson iconI’m happy to announce our first-ever Mac app: Bronson Watermarker.

You can find it in the [Mac App Store](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bronson-watermarker/id481867513?mt=12) today.

Bronson does exactly one thing: watermark PDFs. There are other apps that let you do that (including Adobe Acrobat), but none of them are particularly good. They make simple jobs complicated, and they cost a lot more.

Bronson Watermarker also has two features that set it apart:

1. Give it a list of names, and Bronson will create individualized PDFs, ready to print or send.
2. Choose “Deep Burn” and Bronson will embed the watermark so thoroughly it’s never going away.

Watermarks are common in Hollywood, where studios and producers want to make sure screenplays don’t get passed along beyond their intended readers. Bronson Watermarker will save assistants a lot of time and hassle.

But Bronson is good for all sorts of uses beyond screenplays, so we’re aiming for a much wider user base — basically, anyone who needs to send out PDFs to people they don’t entirely trust.

Here’s the video we made about it:

You can read more about the uses for Bronson at the [official site](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/bronson).

The backstory
—-

Like [FDX Reader](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/fdxreader) and [Less IMDb](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/less-imdb), Bronson Watermarker exists because I couldn’t believe someone else hadn’t already made it.

This past year, I needed to individually watermark 40 scripts with actors’ names for a reading in New York. No problem, I thought.

Because I’m a nerd, my first instinct was [Automator](http://www.apple.com/macosx/apps/all.html#automator), the Mac’s built-in batch scripting utility. It has a command for “Watermark PDF documents” with a surfeit of options — angle, offset, scale, opacity — but no ability to actually generate the watermark text. Automator wanted an image to stick on the PDF. I only had a list of names. I was out of luck.

If Automator couldn’t do it, surely a third-party utility could.

After a lot of Googling, I found several Mac apps that looked promising, each letting you type the text for the watermark. Unfortunately, none of them could generate more than one PDF at a time.

So, with deadlines looming, here was my workflow: copy the name from a text file, paste the name, export, rename the file. Repeat forty times. It was inefficient and error-prone.

I vowed never again.

I knew exactly what I wanted. I knew how this missing app should work. That evening, I emailed Nima the details, along with sketches for button and field placement. He sent back the rough version of the app two days later.

And now it’s real and [ready to buy](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bronson-watermarker/id481867513?mt=12) in the Mac App Store.

Props to Nima Yousefi for his speedy coding, and Ryan Nelson for the artwork and icon — and all the animation in the promo video.