John August

General

The forgotten fine print

General

Whitney Pastorek writes in praise of the Credit CARD Act of 2009, which reins in some [egregious business practices](http://90days90reasons.com/46.php):

> The history of the credit card is fascinating, and I didn’t know much about it until I started researching. A few special moments stand out: Like how when the first general purpose credit cards started to appear in the late ‘50s, banks would simply mail them to people. None of this namby-pamby “you’re pre-qualified!” letter nonsense that keeps the U.S. Postal Service in business these days. They would just send the damn thing out, and you could go spend money you didn’t have, right then and there.

Credit cards are a for-profit business, but too often they’ve been used to trap even savvy consumers into never-ending loops of debt.

Living room rules

General

Let me offer a quick clarification on policy and procedure here on the blog.

For most posts, I turn comments on. I enjoy discussion. You’re welcome to express your opinion and disagree. But it’s my house. If you’re being uncivil to me or the other people here, I may warn you, or simply kick you out.

When new users post a comment, the system holds it in moderation until Matt or I have a chance to review it. This helps cut down on spammers and scammers.

There is also an automated spam detection system (Akismet), which will occasionally flag a valid comment as spam — particularly if there are more than two links embedded in it. If your comment hasn’t shown up for 24 hours, send us an email and we’ll check for it.

When necessary, I delete comments. Here’s a guide for making sure your comment doesn’t get deleted:

1. Stay pretty much on topic.
2. Don’t link to your own sites, except in the URL spot.
3. Be polite. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say in my living room.

When a comment violates any of these three points, I’ll happily delete it. It’s one click for me. So keep that in mind before you spend 10 minutes writing something that won’t show up.

These are all fairly standard [Living Room Rules](http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2006/10/living_room_com.html), but some people seem unfamiliar with them, so I thought it would be better to state them explicitly.

New Nines stuff in the Library

General

I’ve added two .pdfs to the [Library](/library). (Which is the rechristened “Downloads” section. Thanks to whichever reader suggested renaming it.)

* The visual FX breakdown for two of the sequences — the end of Part One, and the end of Part Three. Both are spoilers, so skip them if you haven’t seen the movie yet.

* The shooting schedule. This is pretty close to how we ended up doing it.

Shooting schedules are hard to read if you’ve never looked at one, so let me talk you through it.

strip

Starting at the left is the strip number. Because some scenes may have more than one part — for instance, a visual effect in addition the main action — you sometimes (rarely) need to refer to the strip rather than the scene number.

Next is the scene number. For The Nines, we numbered all of the Part One scenes in the 100s, Part Two in the 200s, and Part Three in the 300s. Most movies would just go sequentially from 1. [Read here](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/renumbering) for more info on scene numbers with letters.

The third column is a short description of the scene, along with INT or EXT, DAY or NIGHT. Note that the line producer or AD writes this description, so it’s not always what the writer would pick.

Fourth column is the length of the scene, measured in eighths of page.

The final column shows which characters are in the scene, by number. Generally, your most important characters are given the lowest numbers, with preference for the bigger stars. In the case of The Nines, our numbering system went as follows:

* Gary/Gavin/Gabriel = 1/5/18
* Margaret/Melissa/Mary = 2/7/19
* Sarah/Susan/Sierra = 3/6/20

To see how much work is scheduled on a given day, look down to the divider strips, marked “– END OF DAY…” This tells you how many pages you’re expecting to shoot.

As you’ll see, we shot 4-5 pages a day — fairly ambitious for a feature, though indies tend to shoot more pages per day simply because limited budgets mean short schedules.

You can find both documents [here](/library).

Screenwriting 101

General

Following a reader’s suggestion, I added a 101 section to the sidebar to highlight some of the introductory how-to articles on screenwriting.

This site houses about 950 posts, of which more than 500 are of the non-expiring educational variety. I’d love to find a way to guide new visitors (and aspiring screenwriters) through them without annoying longtime readers. So consider this a call for advice. I’d especially welcome links to sites that do a great job walking readers through a lot of related articles.

Currently, archives are broken down by category, a listing of which can be found at the bottom of each page. It’s not a great way to browse. Adding tags could help (maybe a ‘101’ track, or ‘character’ track), but my hunch is that it’s going to take more human work than semantic upgrading to really be worthwhile.

Don’t be shy with crazy suggestions. Even if it’s 100 hours worth of work, it’s no challenge to bring in a cadre of film students to implement it.