Geek Alert

Scrippets for Blogger

September 16, 2008 Geek Alert, Hive Mind, Scrippets

The [Scrippets](http://scrippets.org) [plug-in for WordPress](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-scrippets/) seems to be working well for self-hosted blogs, but it’s no use to folks who use services like Blogger, Tumblr and the like. For people on these platforms, the cost of simplicity is customization — they’re easy to use and hard to modify.

But in an effort to share the scrippets love, Nima and I have hacked together a solution to let users on these platforms copy-and-paste scrippets. It’s not as elegant as a plug-in, but it works.

It’s a two-part process.

First, you need to install the [scrippets CSS](http://pastie.org/273557). I wrote up instructions on [how to do it for Blogger](http://scrippets.org/blogger), but the same basic theory should hold for any other blogging or forum system that lets you modify the CSS.

Second, write your scrippet. We have a new [Scrippets Maker](http://scrippets.org/maker.html) that will automatically generate the code to copy-and-paste into your post.

So if you’re feeling brave — or if you want to duplicate your entry in the Scene Challenge on your own blog — give it a shot. You can even add Scrippets Maker to your bookmarks bar. Just drag the following up to your bookmarks:

Do you have a better solution?
===

~~Currently, Scrippet Maker is a page, but it would make a lot of sense as a bookmarklet. That’s in the works, but if you want to roll your own, by all means do it.~~

Coders out there might have a slicker overall solution for non-Wordpress users, and I’d love to hear it. Many systems (including Blogger) allow outside JavaScripts, so it may be possible to do text filtering much like the WP plug-in. The core scrippetize function is [already available in JavaScript](http://pastie.org/273604).

Meanwhile, there is the bigger issue of how to handle systems that don’t allow CSS modification at all — and forums that don’t want to deal with it. I’d love to find a way to let users link to a graphic version of a scrippet. (Essentially, click a button and the server converts the div into a jpg or png, and provides a link.)

As always, your brainstorms are welcome. And proof-of-concept links will be most graciously received.

Scrippets, a call to coders

August 22, 2008 Geek Alert, Hive Mind, Scrippets

UPDATED. See below.

For the past four years, I’ve been including little blocks of formatted screenplay examples in my posts, such as…

INT. LIVING ROOM – DAY

As the phone RINGS, Gary dozily reaches one dirty-socked foot off the couch to sit up — and suddenly finds himself falling. He lands hard, dazed. We REVEAL that the couch is propped up by cinder blocks, five feet off the floor.

Gary staggers to his feet, bewildered. Realizing who must be behind the prank…

GARY

Grandma!

I call these little blocks [scrippets](http://scrippets.org), and they’ve proved to be very useful. They’re made with [some custom CSS code](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2004/screenbox) I wrote in 2004, ((If you look at the example in the original post, it comes from the script for The Nines, which I was writing at the time.)) which several other screenwriting bloggers have implemented with their own tweaks and changes.

geek alert If you’re reasonably familiar with HTML and CSS, it’s not hard to do the same: you [paste the CSS](http://pastie.org/257678) into your stylesheet, and mark up your script section with the proper tags. For the example above, the code reads…

<div class="scrippet">
 INT. LIVING ROOM – DAY
 As the phone RINGS, Gary dozily reaches one dirty-socked foot off the couch to sit up — and suddenly finds himself falling. He lands hard, dazed. We REVEAL that the couch is propped up by cinder blocks, five feet off the floor.
 Gary staggers to his feet, bewildered. Realizing who must be behind the prank…
 GARY
 Grandma!
</div>

Each line is wrapped in a class tag identifying its function, and the whole thing is wrapped in a div. ((As originally implemented, I used an unordered list instead of a div, and styled list items for the individual lines. It was trendy, but two issues made me switch. First, blog comments are also list items, so nesting another list inside kept creating issues. Second, feed readers don’t get any CSS styling — they got a bullet list. So, for now, it’s divs and p’s.)) A human can read it, but it’s a pain to write.

Fortunately, I do all my blog writing in [TextMate](http://macromates.com/), so it was relatively trivial to modify its “Wrap Each Selected Line In…” command to speed the process. For a few years, I just saved the scrippet formatting until last, and it was bearable.

Then, during the strike, I had the time and inclination to find a more elegant solution. I wrote a [script in Ruby](http://pastie.org/257717) that would let me write the above example without any spacing, markup or attempt at formatting, and then with one command wrap it in the proper format. It’s made my blog life a lot easier. But it’s no help to other bloggers who want to include scrippets, or readers who want to post a scrippet in the comments section. It’s too home-brewed and specific.

Ultimately, I’d like every blogger to be able to include scrippets, both in posts and comments. (And forums, though that’s its own beast.) But that’s a hell of a lot of work to support multiple systems and scenarios. So let’s start a little smaller.

Geeks wanted
===

I want to create a WordPress plug-in that would let a blogger or commenter write…

<scrippet>  
MARY
Anything you want to tell me?

FRANK  
I swear, honey, I don't know how mayonnaise got in the piano.  
</scrippet>

…and end up with…

MARY

Anything you want to tell me?

FRANK

I swear, honey, I don’t know how mayonnaise got in the piano.

However, that’s simply beyond my coding prowess. WordPress is built around PHP, and while I can understand it well enough to modify a simple template, I fail to grok it the way I do Ruby and Python. But I have a feeling some of my readers could write the PHP equivalent of [my script](http://pastie.org/257717) while half-watching Battlestar Galactica.

If that sounds like you, and you’re up for the challenge, I encourage you to muck around with the code and share your progress. [Wordpress](http://wordpress.org) is trivial to install, with a big developer community. See what you can get working, and include a link to let me and others see your progress.

Here are some caveats, pitfalls and other bits of advice to help you out:

1. Since you’ll be setting hooks to filter the text, you need to play nice with other plugins that do the same, such as [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/). Michel Fortin has a [useful post](http://michelf.com/weblog/2005/wordpress-text-flow-vs-markdown/) about some of the challenges in doing Markdown for WordPress. ((And yes, I asked Michel if he wanted to write a scrippet plug-in, but he declined.))
2. While [my script](http://pastie.org/257717) shows the scope of what I’m looking for, Dwayne Bent has already created a [much more sophisticated version](http://liqd.org/wiki/screenplay/main) for DokuWiki in PHP. He’s busy with school, and unfamiliar with WordPress, but offers up his code under the GPL if it’s helpful.
3. <scrippet> may be a terrible delimiter, prone to wonkiness. So other options are welcome. One I’ve considered is +- and -+, which coveys the idea of creating a box around something.
4. The CSS actually does quite a bit of the work. Let your code identify and label the elements, but leave the formatting to the CSS.
5. The plugin should include the CSS — yet make it easy to modify the CSS to suit an individual blog. Specifically, a blogger will want to be able to control the box width, background color, text color and padding. A straightforward admin screen in WordPress seems doable.

I have no timetables or deadlines for the project, but I will offer up a signed Nines poster to a coder who comes up with a viable and elegant version of the plug-in — and of course, heaps of praise and bragging rights.

And if WordPress isn’t your bag, but you feel the calling to take on a similar version for another platform (Movable Type, bbPress, vBulletin), by all means go for it. If this comment thread gets out of control, I’ll move it to a different forum.

**UPDATE:** Just over 24 hours in, there’s been a lot of progress. Thanks to everyone who’s given a chunk of their weekend to the cause.

By Monday or Tuesday, I’ll be posting a link to a test blog where readers can try out the plug-in for themselves. Before releasing it into the wild, we want to make sure it works with a range of stock themes and feels intuitive to readers leaving comments.

Off-topic tweaks

April 30, 2008 Geek Alert, Meta

I’ve made some tweaks to [Off-Topic](http://johnaugust.tumblr.com), including adding comments. For those who never click over there, Off-Topic is largely a list of things I find amusing and/or interesting, including a lot of videos.

The section is experimental, with the explicit goal of trying new things that are prone to failure. It’s not even hosted on the same server as the rest of the site. It’s a [Tumblr](http://tumblr.com) blog with a lot of CSS hackery to make it resemble the rest of the site, and now a comment system powered by [Disqus](http://disqus.com).

The new comment system is actually a lot slicker than the built-in comments used in the main site. But slick often equates with trouble-prone, so we’ll see if it’s useful and stable.

James Cameron on 3-D

April 11, 2008 Directors, Geek Alert

Variety has a [terrific interview](http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117983864.html?categoryid=2868&cs=1) with James Cameron about current state (and possible futures of) 3-D filmmaking. A couple of things that stood out for me:

> Godard got it exactly backwards. Cinema is not truth 24 times a second, it is lies 24 times a second. Actors are pretending to be people they’re not, in situations and settings which are completely illusory. Day for night, dry for wet, Vancouver for New York, potato shavings for snow. The building is a thin-walled set, the sunlight is a xenon, and the traffic noise is supplied by the sound designers. It’s all illusion, but the prize goes to those who make the fantasy the most real, the most visceral, the most involving. This sensation of truthfulness is vastly enhanced by the stereoscopic illusion…

> When you see a scene in 3-D, that sense of reality is supercharged. The visual cortex is being cued, at a subliminal but pervasive level, that what is being seen is real.

Seeing U2:3D last month, I agree: the best thing about 3-D is not that it makes things look cool. It’s that it makes things look more real. My favorite shots in the movie are when the cameras look out over the crowd, because you really feel each individual person. Not only are you there, you have permission to stare.

> On “Avatar,” I have not consciously composed my shots differently for 3-D. I am just using the same style I always do. In fact, after the first couple of weeks, I stopped looking at the shots in 3-D while I was working, even though the digital cameras allow real-time stereo viewing.

Of course, most directors aren’t James Cameron, who helped invent the technology and can trust his instinct on all of this. But we should trust someone’s instincts, because the result is paralysis. One of pitfalls of adding new technology to film production is that the director moves further and further from the action (and the actors) to a Den of Experts, often in a dark tent, who make decisions around monitors. In most cases, you’re better served by having a d.p. you trust.

> We all see the world in 3-D. The difference between really being witness to an event vs. seeing it as a stereo image is that when you’re really there, your eye can adjust its convergence as it roves over subjects at different distances…In a filmed image, the convergence was baked in at the moment of photography, so you can’t adjust it.

> In order to cut naturally and rapidly from one subject to another, it’s necessary for the filmmaker (actually his/her camera team) to put the convergence at the place in the shot where the audience is most likely to look. This sounds complicated but in fact we do it all the time, in every shot, and have since the beginning of cinema. It’s called focus. We focus where we think people are most likely to look.

Cameron is slaving convergence to focus, even pulling it as necessary throughout a scene. This makes sense, but I’d never heard it explained so clearly.

> The new cameras allow complete control over the stereospace. You should think of interocular like volume. You can turn the 3-D up or down, and do it smoothly on the fly during a shot. So if you know you’re in a scene which will require very fast cuts, you turn the stereo down (reduce the interocular distance) and you can cut fast and smoothly. The point here is that just because you’re making a stereo movie doesn’t mean that stereo is the most important thing in every shot or sequence. If you choose to do rapid cutting, then the motion of the subject from shot to shot to shot is more important than the perception of stereospace at that moment in the film. So sacrifice the stereospace and enjoy the fast cutting.

In front of U2:3D, there was a 3-D trailer for [Journey to the Center of The Earth 3D](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373051/), which I’m sad to say looked like ass. Actually, it kind of looked like nothing, because it was blurry in a way I can’t describe, like my eyes didn’t know how to process it.

I think this is exactly what Cameron is talking about. The 3-D shots in the Journey 3D trailer were probably composed for the movie, where they play much longer. But cut into a conventional trailer, it just didn’t work. ([link ](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5033580116498129767&q=Journey+to+the+Center+of+the+Earth+3D+trailer&total=32&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0))

> You don’t need to be in 3-D at every step of the way. And as long as your work will be viewed in 2-D as well as 3-D, whether in a hybrid theatrical release or later on DVD, it is probably healthy to do a lot of the work in 2-D along the way. I cut on a normal Avid, and only when the scene is fine-cut do we output left and right eye video tracks to the server in the screening room and check the cut for stereo. Nine times out of 10 we don’t change anything for 3-D.

I spoke with a writer-director during the strike who had the opposite experience. To get the cutting to work right in 3-D, he and his editor were constantly checking the “deep version.” And that’s a not newbie predilection — for Zodiac, David Fincher cut in HD with a giant screen.

No matter how advanced the technology gets, while you’re in the editing room, you’re still working with a rough approximation of what the final film will look and sound like. Just as with color timing, music and FX, anticipating the depth effect is something you’ll need to remember and forget while cutting.

> For three-fourths of a century of 2-D cinema, we have grown accustomed to the strobing effect produced by the 24 frame per second display rate. When we see the same thing in 3-D, it stands out more, not because it is intrinsically worse, but because all other things have gotten better. Suddenly the image looks so real it’s like you’re standing there in the room with the characters, but when the camera pans, there is this strange motion artifact. It’s like you never saw it before, when in fact it’s been hiding in plain sight the whole time.

> [P]eople have been asking the wrong question for years. They have been so focused on resolution, and counting pixels and lines, that they have forgotten about frame rate. Perceived resolution = pixels x replacement rate. A 2K image at 48 frames per second looks as sharp as a 4K image at 24 frames per second … with one fundamental difference: the 4K/24 image will judder miserably during a panning shot, and the 2K/48 won’t. Higher pixel counts only preserve motion artifacts like strobing with greater fidelity. They don’t solve them at all.

An example of why James Cameron is the Steve Jobs of filmmakers: he understands that what matters is the user experience, not the hard numbers. He also sees how important it is to control the entire process, from shooting through exhibition. The best camera technology is worthless if you can’t get the results you want in a theater.

The good news is that the next generation of moviegoers seems ready to forget that 24fps is how movies are “supposed to” look. And changes within a digital delivery system should be much less painful than the switchover from our current, analog system.

I know it seems like I’ve quoted a lot here, but the interview is long, and there’s a lot more in it about other aspects of the technology which will be interesting to anyone geeky enough to [click through](http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117983864.html?categoryid=2868&cs=1).

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