John August

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Cover page artwork

Formatting, QandA

Is artwork that only appears on the title page of a screenplay frowned upon?

— Darryl McD

Yeah, that’s kind of cheesy. If I had to choose between two scripts in front of me, I’d probably pick the one without the artwork.

That said, if you look in the [Downloads](http://johnaugust.com/site/downloads) section, you’ll see that I used a circle around ‘Go’, largely because the word itself is so small. And the cover page for Prince of Persia has the title in the logo font, but since it’s based on a hugely popular videogame, there’s a good reason for it.

For the other 20 or so scripts I’ve worked on, there hasn’t been any artwork on the cover. I’ll occasionally use a font other than 12pt Courier for title itself, but always something simple.

How many lines per page?

Formatting, QandA

Today’s question isn’t really a question at all, but rather an investigation into how many lines of type should fit on a standard screenwriting page. While this may seem frivolous — a little like “How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin” — almost every screenwriter has tweaked and shuffled, nipped and tucked to get a draft a few pages shorter.

Lines-per-page translates into lines-per-script, which is arguably a better metric than page count for how long a script “really” is. So I applaud Jeff trying to figure it out.

questionmarkI have a seemingly simple formatting question that I cannot find the answer to anywhere: How many lines should fit on a page?

I don’t ask for help with out trying to help myself first, but believe me, this one has got me stumped. My research yields vastly different results and even an interesting (disturbing?) modern trend. (I know it’s a long read for an e-mail, but I’ve done the research and I would really like your thoughts.)

I know all about setting margins and screenwriting software, but even following those suggestions, there appears to be a large discrepancy in the actual number of lines per page from script to script. Here’s how I have counted lines per page for purposes of this research:

Open a screenplay up to any page, start at the first line of screenplay on that page (a scene heading, character name, dialogue, action; not white space or a page number) and count that as ONE. Then, count every line after that (including white space) all the way to the last line of screenplay on that page (not including bottom CONTINUEDs if the script has them). The number you end up with is what I call Screenplay Lines per Page.
[Read more…] about How many lines per page?

New CSS template for screenplay formatting

Formatting, Geek Alert

UPDATE (2/26/09): This is an early draft of what would later become [Scrippets](http://scrippets.org). Check out that site for more up-to-date information. And you’ll notice that I ultimately did go back to using paragraph tags, rather than list items.

One frustrating part of discussing scripts on the internet is that the formatting is always wrong. Changing the typeface to monospace (such as Courier or Monaco) helps a little, but the indentations are still wonky.

Beginning with [yesterday’s post](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2004/avoid-cut-tos-in-a-busy-sequence), I’m using a new CSS style template I created to handle screenplay markup on the site. If you know know about CSS, it’s the way modern web pages are built, separating content from formatting. The rest of this post gets kind of technical, so you may want to bail out now.

Okay, geeks who are still with me:

Doing screenplay in CSS seems pretty straightforward. The base class (Screenplay) would handle the width of the virtual page, and make everything 12pt Courier. The individual elements would be .sceneheader, .action, .character, .dialogue, .parenthetical, and .transition.

My first instinct was to handle the elements with paragraph styles, like this:

<p class="sceneheader">INT. BOB'S DINER – NIGHT</p>

Unfortunately, paragraphs carry with them a bunch of problems. First, they’re the bread-and-butter of blogging programs like [WordPress](http://wordpress.org), so odds of choking the interpreter seem pretty high. And in order to use them, I would have to wrap them in <div> tags, which is another potential boondoggle.

So instead, I decided to define a new class of unordered list for the container class, and define each of the elements as list items. One issue that quickly comes up is line spacing. For screenplays, you need one blank line after a line of action or dialogue, but none after a character name.

EXT. FOREST / ELSEWHERE - DAY

Susan is on a cell-phone call. She smiles at Melissa, who walks by with two cups of coffee.

SUSAN (V.O.)

Right now, this is probably our top pilot. But things change.

In markup, this looks like this:

<code>
<ul class="screenbox">
<li class="sceneheader">EXT. FOREST / ELSEWHERE – DAY</li>
<li class="action">Susan is on a cell-phone call. She smiles at Melissa, who walks by with two cups of coffee.</li>
<li class="character">SUSAN (V.O.)</li>
<li class="dialogue">Right now, this is probably our top pilot. But things change.</li>
</ul>
</code>

Here’s the CSS code that does the job:

.screenbox {
	list-style: none;
	width: 420px;
	background: #eee;
	border: 1px solid #333;
	padding: 5px 14px;
	
}

.screenbox li {
	font:  12px/14px Courier, fixed;
}

.sceneheader,
.action,
.character {
	padding-top: 1.5ex;
}

.action {
	padding-right: 5%;
}

.character {
	margin-left: 40%;
}

.dialogue {
	margin-left: 25%;
	padding-right: 25%;
}

.parenthetical {
	margin-left: 32%;
	padding-right: 30%;
}

/* special case: dialogue followed by
a parenthetical; the extra line needs 
to be suppressed */

.dialogue + .parenthetical {
	padding-bottom: 0;
}

.transition {
	padding-top: 3ex;
	margin-left: 65%;
	padding-bottom: 1.5ex;
}

I used a fixed width for the .screenbox (420 px), but the formatting looks okay for anywhere between 300 and 700 pixels. Everything else is handled by percentages for horizontal spacing, and ex heights for vertical spacing.

You’ll notice that .sceneheader is really no different than .action. I defined it so that if at some later date I decided to tweak it (for instance, adding scene numbers), the markup would already be there.

As always, anyone is welcome to use and modify this template as they see fit.

Backing up is hard to do

QandA, So-Called Experts

questionmarkI just had the unfortunate happen: the dog pulled my laptop off the table by tripping across the power cord. Yeah. Anyhow, I lost a bunch of screenwriting materials because the fall damaged my harddrive beyond repair.

I’m learning the VERY hard way that backing up is not just a good “insurance policy” but a MUST. I thought it might be a subject you might shed some light on from your personal experience.

— Eric
Indiana

Like flossing, stretching, and updating your will, backing up your work is one of those unquestioned Good Ideas that’s pretty easy to ignore. It’s the law of delayed consequences: people tend to put off work that doesn’t have immediate gratification.

Honestly, I don’t back up nearly as much as I should. Or, “should.” If you read any computer magazine, they’re constantly harping on you to back up every night to a redundant RAID, then weekly to a tape drive, with off-site storage and whatnot.

Bah. My philosophy can be summarized in six words: What’s the worst that could happen?

It’s a revelation that came to me the last time I switched to a new computer. I dutifully dragged my files onto an external hard drive, ready to migrate them to their new home, when I realized that pretty much everything I needed on the new computer was either…

  • already installed, or
  • would need to be redownloaded for the most recent version.

The only item that needed to make the move was my “Projects” folder, a mere 500 megabytes. So why was I bothering with everything else? It was time to apply my new philosophy.

What’s the worst that could happen if I didn’t back up my applications and system software? Well, it would take a little more time to re-install them. But, I’d be saving a lot of time by not bothering to back them up every day/week/month.

What’s the worst that could happen if I didn’t back up my old projects? Well, I’d hate to lose them; they’re like old friends frozen in 12pt Courier. Beyond the emotional cost, I do occasionally need to refer back to them. So it’s worth the effort to periodically grab the folder off the server and copy it to my local hard drive. Likewise, every few months I burn a copy of the whole thing onto a CD-ROM and mail it to my mother in Colorado, figuring that if an asteroid wipes out California, at least future generations will be able to read what [SCOOBY-DOO](http://imdb.com/title/tt0267913/) was like before they cut it down to a PG rating. (Answer: much funnier.)

What’s the worst that could happen if I lost the current version of the project I’m working on? This is probably the worst-case scenario, because I’m generally on deadline and working for people with very little patience for technical difficulties. If I’m using my Powerbook, I’ll often email the file to myself as a backup, and also save it to my keychain drive. When I’m at home, I’ll often do the email trick, or copy items to my .Mac iDisk.

And then there’s the backups you don’t even plan. In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond makes a convincing argument that the best place for a tribal chief to store his surplus food is in his neighbor’s stomach. The same is true for data. (Go with me here.) Most of the scripts I work on these days travel around as .pdfs. One side benefit of this digitalization is that for any given script, some friend or assistant will invariably have a copy sitting in her mail. I sleep a little more soundly knowing that I could simply ask her to send it back.

In conclusion: Backing up is a waste of time, except for the few items for which it’s crucial. So worry about those, and not the rest.