John August

General

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, 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. (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 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.

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.

Time spent thinking

General

My post on the six-hour scene dovetails nicely with this speech by Clay Shirky, which argues that we’re living in an era that’s wrestling with a cognitive surplus:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

Where this line of reasoning gets fascinating is when you factor in other ways people spend their surplus, such as television:

Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I haven’t read Shirky’s book yet, but the article is worth a look.

(Thanks to John Gruber for the link.)