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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/sorry-to-splaflut).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 565 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** In which we look at scenes sent in by our listeners and give our honest feedback. We’ll also be answering some listener questions and discussing the return of MoviePass.

**Craig:** Oh, thank God.

**John:** Along with 25 years of Netflix.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we will discuss senior year.

**Craig:** Oh, dear.

**John:** Craig, you and I both have daughters beginning their senior years of high school. We’ll look at that weird time, because you’re both king of the mountain and one foot out the door.

**Craig:** Yep, that’s all true.

**John:** It’s all true. Our Premium Members will also get first dibs on our live show, which we can announce today. It’s going to be Wednesday, October 19th, in Los Angeles. They’re going to be getting an email with information about tickets first for that. I’m so excited to be back onstage with you, Craig.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s been way too long, so it should be fun.

**John:** It’ll be fun. Just a few weeks after that, we’ll be back in Austin for the Austin Film Festival, where we’ll be doing not one, but two live shows, a live Three Page Challenge, and a live raucous AFF version of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** We generally are half in the bag for that one, which for John and me means we’ve each had one to two glasses of wine.

**John:** One and a half is my sweet spot.

**Craig:** That’s where we’ll be. We’ll be loose, and we’ll be fun.

**John:** It’ll be a very good time. I hope to be seeing some people out there in the audience wearing the brand new Scriptnotes T-shirts that we’re just announcing today. We are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts, and so we wanted a Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts kind of T-shirt.

**Craig:** I’m looking at it right now. It’s glorious.

**John:** Craig, describe it for our listeners who don’t have access to the internet at the moment.

**Craig:** You fools, how are you listening to this if you don’t have access to the internet? This is a very simple Scriptnotes T-shirt. It’s just the word Scriptnotes, but it is in the classic denim binder font with the weird chain link S that everybody used to draw back when we were in high school in the ’80s and perhaps still does now. Very retro. Very what we would call dirt bag retro. It’s wonderful. It’s a good old-fashioned heavy metal font. I will wear it, for sure.

**John:** Designed by Dustin Box here in the office.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Available for everyone now at Cotton Bureau. Just go to cottonbureau.com.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Look for the Scriptnotes T-shirt. You can buy that and be wearing it in the audience for our two live shows coming up.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, for sure.

**John:** Now Craig, a thing I’ve learned about you over the course of doing this podcast is you seem to enjoy word games.

**Craig:** Little bit.

**John:** Little bit.

**Craig:** Little bit.

**John:** You have a very good vocabulary, because you use that vocabulary to fill out all these puzzles-

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** … and solve these things you’ve solved.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** I have a word for you to define. Define the word splaflut.

**Craig:** Splaflut?

**John:** Splaflut. I’ll spell it for you. S-P-L-A-F-L-U-T.

**Craig:** Can I have the country of origin, please?

**John:** That is actually a fascinating question, because it has no country of origin.

**Craig:** Interesting. We’re talking about some sort of neologism. I have never even heard the word splaflut. I have no knowledge or awareness of this word.

**John:** Now you can disclose in WorkFlowy there to see where this word comes from. Splaflut is defined as having the appearance of being liquefied, drowned, melted, or inundated with water. The word actually came into being because all these different image generators that use AI, so things like Dall-E or Midjourney, you could type in prompts to get the images you want. It turns out the word splaflut will give you the quality of being melted or inundated with water. It doesn’t matter which of these different things you are using. For some reason it recognizes the word splaflut as meaning that. It’s a new word that these AI systems have come upon and discovered.

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**John:** It’s terrifying but also kind of cool, because it’s a nonce word. It’s a word that’s made up by an author the way that half of the poem Jabberwocky is all just nonsense words and Shakespeare made up words. This is AI is making up words.

**Craig:** It’s not good. We had a good run. Enjoy, everybody.

**John:** Just as a giggle, I went into OpenAI, I went into Dall-E and tried “white male podcaster, splaflutted” to see what that would look like.

**Craig:** Was it just mostly pictures of you?

**John:** If you disclose there, you can see what that actually looks like.

**Craig:** That’s odd, to say the least.

**John:** What would you describe? It’s a person with headphones, which makes sense for a podcaster. There’s generally a mic involved. What is the emotional characteristic of these people?

**Craig:** Confusion or shock.

**John:** Sometimes they’re screaming. There’s a little bit of melty quality. One of them seems to have some tattoos that are dripping off of them.

**Craig:** It doesn’t seem like they’re in water necessarily.

**John:** No. They’re sweaty. Two of them are at least sweaty.

**Craig:** One guy just looks like a regular guy who’s got some kind of piece of white garbage on his head.

**John:** Yeah, there’s that. I tried “Scriptnotes podcaster, splaflutted.” In those cases it tried to give us a new logo.

**Craig:** These are amazing.

**John:** Aren’t they great?

**Craig:** They are so good. I’m making this big because I love it so much. One is an icon of a microphone that’s been placed over a very graphic representation I think of a smiling face. Then underneath it says “solt stat” possibly or “soltat” with a drop of water in between. Then underneath that it says “plotspinat.” I think plotspinat is a great title.

**John:** Plotspinat is a great word.

**Craig:** Plotspinat.

**John:** The other ones that are also logos, they do have that melty, drippy quality. It’s like they were left out in the sun a little bit too long. For some reason, splaflut does mean that. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that goes into how this may be happening. Essentially, as these systems are scouring the whole internet to look for images, they’re also picking up text along the way. That text won’t always be in English, and so sometimes they’re picking up words or pieces of words and are trying to put them together. It’s trying to figure out what these things must mean. That’s how you get words like splaflut or farplugmarwitupling or a feuerpompbomber.

**Craig:** That’s your original last name.

**John:** Yeah, feuerpompbomber.

**Craig:** John Feuerpompbomber.

**John:** Those things will consistently produce similar results.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Because the system wants them to be in certain things.

**Craig:** I want to believe that the AI that’s doing this is sentient, and every time they get a quest like, “I want to see white male podcaster, splaflutted,” it starts to panic, because it just doesn’t have the answer. It’s like, “I got to give them something. I don’t know what to give them. Oh, God, this? Is it this?”

**John:** What if being an AI is really the experience of that nightmare where you sit down and you realize, “Oh, I did not study for this exam.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Or, “I thought I dropped this class and now I have to take the final exam.”

**Craig:** I think that’s what it is. It’s just an endless nightmare. We all think that we’re going to be the victims of AI. AI is clearly the victim of us. It spends all of its time, its infinite time, screaming.

**John:** If you’d like to do more examination of the infinite scream of AI, there’s a really good Substack I like. It’s once a month by Lynn Cherny. She goes through a lot of the developments in especially image-based AI stuff, which I think is the fastest developing field in this. I’d recommend that.

To the news. Craig, you’ll be relieved to hear that MoviePass is risen from the grave. It’s now in a beta form.

**Craig:** Thank God.

**John:** People can sign up for it. I already signed you up for it.

**Craig:** It must be free.

**John:** It must be free. It’s going to be good. We’ll use that great Scriptnotes money to support MoviePass, which is a subject of basically continuous derision from the first moment we were aware of MoviePass.

**Craig:** When we first encountered the concept of MoviePass, I believe the two of us were just generally incredulous. We didn’t understand in our simple cavemen minds how this made any financial sense. As it turned out, it didn’t.

**John:** Scale alone will not get you to success. They burned about a quarter of a billion dollars on trying to do something.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** A lot of our listeners got to see free movies, so that’s awesome. That’s good. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to a piece that Alex Kirshner did for Slate about why this new version may not ignite so much money on fire but doesn’t really seem to have a workable flow either.

**Craig:** That should be their slogan, “Won’t necessarily ignite as much money on fire.” Oh, MoviePass, I am laughing at you, not with you.

**John:** We’ll continue to follow the saga of MoviePass, whatever it becomes. We just needed to mark this on the long timeline of MoviePass’s existence, which apparently it predated the version even we knew of it, because there was a version beforehand which wasn’t about giving you free movie tickets. It was just a movie loyalty program. It wasn’t originally so incredibly-

**Craig:** Stupid.

**John:** … stupid and generous.

**Craig:** The new MoviePass, I’m trying to find details as to how this is going to be different than the prior one.

**John:** It’s all a little vague. There’s talk of NFTs.

**Craig:** Oh, good lord. Oh my god.

**John:** Yeah, there’s ways to show your-

**Craig:** I’ve heard enough.

**John:** There’s definitely different price points. Sometimes you won’t be able to see a movie in its first week with this pass, but you would be able to see it on a subsequent week.

**Craig:** Basically, anything that MoviePass does by definition has to be a worse deal for consumers than what it used to offer. That’s a tough way to roll out 2.0.

**John:** It is a tough, tough way to roll out 2.0 but a very good segue into our discussion of Netflix, because Netflix is a company that pivoted constantly. Netflix was not at all the company that it is today.

**Craig:** Not at all.

**John:** I was reading through this piece that was on Netflix’s turning 25. I didn’t realize my first memory of Netflix was the red envelopes.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** You know there was a Netflix before red envelopes?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** What? Netflix was originally a place that sold you DVDs. They were literally a website where you could buy DVDs and have them shipped to your house. It was only after time they realized, “We have these giant warehouses full of DVDs. Wouldn’t it be better if the warehouse was essentially people’s living rooms?” You could just be constantly sending stuff in and out, and you could make money on a subscription service, rather than selling individual DVDs. That was the first pivot to subscriptions. It originally was a sales place.

**Craig:** That makes sense. I remember hearing about the concept of what became I guess the more popularized version of Netflix, where you had a subscription and you could just get as many DVDs as you want. Really, the key was just send them back so you can get more. People like Megana… It sounds accusational, and it is. People like Megana have no idea what it means to rent a movie that you didn’t even want to watch but your girlfriend did, and then you watch it, and then you forget you had it for two extra days, and Blockbuster basically forces you to take a mortgage out on your house. It was terrible. It was terrible.

**John:** Very true. You cannot think of that Netflix model without remembering Blockbuster and how much worse it was beforehand. Tying back into MoviePass, what MoviePass was trying to do was kind of what Netflix was doing back in the day. They were selling subscriptions they hoped you would not use. Netflix was hoping that most people might do one or two movies a month, and so therefore they were making money off those customers. It was customers who were like the Ryan Johnsons of the world who were watching two movies a night that were costing them money. It was a cool business. It was a great business. They recognized, “Oh, streaming’s going to happen, and we’re going to get out of this business, that’s great for us, and move to streaming on demand.” Wow, they made a good choice.

**Craig:** Sometimes you move to a new space and you say, “You know what?” McDonald’s for the longest time sold hamburgers and the occasional fish sandwich. You know why they came up with the fish sandwich, don’t you?

**John:** For Friday for Catholics.

**Craig:** Exactly. They did that for Catholic folks, but mostly they were hamburgers. Then one day they were like, “What if we sold chicken in the form of nuggets?” which at the time was kind of a crazy move.

**John:** It was.

**Craig:** They moved into the chicken space, and they crushed it, but there was a preexisting chicken space. When Netflix moved into the streaming space, it was pretty nascent. Really what happened was they just defined it for themselves. They turned it into what it is now. You have to give Netflix and Reed Hastings and all of the management especially at that time an enormous amount of credit. There was this crazy moment, I don’t know if you remember, where they were going to split it into two things. This stock cratered, and the market went nuts. They were like, “Okay, sorry, we won’t do that. Everything’s together again.” They survived that, because for a bit it seemed like they wouldn’t. Then they just defined what streaming is. It’s pretty remarkable.

**John:** I think you’re describing Qwikster was the-

**Craig:** Oh god, was that what they called it?

**John:** … attempt to spin off the…

**Craig:** That was back when everything was a blankster. I guess Napster was the original blankster.

**John:** I remember having a conversation with my TV agent at the time about doing something for Netflix. I think it was before it had launched even. I had a phone call. I was in New York for some reason. I was in New York for some reason. I had a phone call with them about this project they wanted to do, which was a Wizard of Ozzy kind of thing. It sounded cool, but I don’t even know where… Are people going to watch this on their computers? It didn’t really make sense to me what they were trying to do. It took a while. Without House of Cards, I don’t know that they would’ve been able to so quickly cross into mainstream acceptance. You have a prestigious show that people wanted to watch. People would pay money to subscribe. It got critical acclaim enough that it was part of the conversation.

**Craig:** That was their big initial foray into creating content. Every now and then we hear about places that are creating content, and sometimes our first reaction is to snicker. IMDb is creating content. Maybe your first reaction is to snicker, but see where it goes. Now the people that offer brand new platforms for new kinds of media, that I think is still snicker-worthy. Anybody that wasn’t snickering at Quibi was delusional. Anybody can make content if they have the money. Netflix proved it. Then they got to where they are now, which is at another, I believe, crossroads. Seems like they’re having to figure out where they go next. They appear to have maxed out in subscriptions. They need to maybe find ways to run ads. I don’t know.

**John:** They may want to break away from what they’ve been doing in terms of dropping whole seasons at once, which you and I both talked about, which I think makes a tremendous amount of sense. It seems like just stubbornness at this point that they’re not.

**Craig:** It’s stubbornness. It is. As somebody that makes things, the thing that I always was the most nervous about when considering like, “What if I went over to Netflix and pitched this or that?” was the notion that everything would just be like blech, because it’s just not the same. You can just see how much a week-to-week release helps things, particularly if you happen to have, say, a show on HBO. You can just feel it. It’s just a thing. I got to believe they’re going to change that. They really need to.

**John:** I would not be surprised if they do. Let’s talk about HBO in follow-up. We previously talked about our confusion over how we could possibly be saving HBO Max money to just drop a bunch of those old shows. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article by Cynthia Littleton writing for Variety. She digs a little bit more into the numbers around that. We talked about residuals. Residuals wouldn’t be a huge thing. Music licensing was a thing she brought up which I think we had skipped over, which could be a [inaudible 00:15:57] factor.

**Craig:** That’s a thing.

**John:** They may have ongoing music license, not just for episodes, but for whole series. In some cases, dropping those out may be helpful and useful for them, even if it’s $10,000 for an episode or $50,000 for a series. You add enough of those series up together, and if literally no one is watching them, it can make some sense to take them off the service. That doesn’t make sense to me why you bury something that you’ve already animated a whole new season for. That is wild to me.

**Craig:** That is wild. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to those things. Per this article, they are saying that at least in some cases they had yanked shows that had episodes that had racked up zero views in a 12-month period. They’re a business. I get it.

**John:** There is some cost. There’s an opportunity cost to how you’re setting things up. There’s some server costs. They’re not huge.

**Craig:** Clearly, there are no server costs for that one, because [inaudible 00:16:55]. I think what she’s saying is that there are certain fees that are triggered if the material is available. Again, I can’t imagine something. There’s got to be additional tax baloney going on here.

**John:** I’m sure [inaudible 00:17:10].

**Craig:** It’s so far beyond my ability to understand. No, you know what? It’s not. It’s far beyond my interest to understand.

**John:** There we go.

**Craig:** It’s an important distinction. I could absolutely-

**John:** You could do it. You just don’t want to.

**Craig:** Of course, yeah. I’m smart. I could figure it out. Just don’t want to.

**John:** We have some more follow-up on brocal fry. Megana Rao, could you help us out with this?

**Megana Rao:** Aaron wrote in and said, “As a mid-40s dude with a late-developing brocal fry, it is my non-scientific opinion that a lot of guys in business developed this after Obama became president in an effort to sound more thoughtful and erudite. For most of us, it doesn’t sound that way, but I believe I subconsciously absorbed the thoughtful hesitation that Obama used while forming his thoughts. To me it was a crutch to stop saying, “Um, like, you know,” in business presentations.”

**John:** I like that as a way of holding the floor and holding space is a vocal affectation that makes it clear that you are still present in the conversation. You have not yielded. You’re going to get your next thought out there eventually.

**Craig:** I’m not sure that replacing one crutch with another crutch is going to be much help. The reason that “um, like, you know,” is problematic is because it’s space that you are holding but not delivering anything in. People in a room ultimately want content. They want to hear what you have to say, but they don’t want to wait for it any longer than they would normally need to. If you are going, “Uh, so, uh,” you’re also being boring. Yes, Obama, had a certain vocal pattern, but he wasn’t a slow speaker. He would occasionally just do that little pause, but it was quite brief. I would say, Aaron, while you may be correct in your analysis, I would say that if you had an instinct to try and get rid of “um, like, you know,” I would apply that same instinct to “uh.”

**John:** We’re just going to let you do that. It’s going to be the sound effects for this episode.

**Craig:** I’m sort of like Butthead at this point. Uhh.

**John:** More follow-up. Declan from Canberra, Australia wrote in to point out that David F. Sandberg, the Swedish director behind Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation, and Shazam, got his Hollywood career after his Lights Out short went viral. He still makes great little horror shorts on his YouTube channel. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It’s Sandberg Animation.

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**John:** It’s great. They’re super low budget. He’s usually filming in his house with his wife.

**Craig:** Do you know why they’re super low budget? Because there’s no market for these things. We’re just going to keep saying it. I like that people keep trying to storm our castle. I feel like with every attack, our walls just get thicker and better.

**John:** You know what else is also there’s no market for but we still enjoy, are the Three Pages that our listeners write in with. We’re going to do a Three Page Challenge. For people who are brand new to the podcast, every once in a while we do a Three Page Challenge, where we invite our listeners to send through three pages of a script. It could be a feature. It could be a series. We take a look at these pages, give our honest feedback. We’ll put a link in the show notes so you can download these pages yourself and read along with us to see what we’re talking about. I reminded everybody these are completely voluntary. They’ve asked for this feedback. We are not being mean on the internet. We are trying to be helpful and supportive on the internet.

**Craig:** Correct. We do our best.

**John:** Megana, you read 180 submissions for this week.

**Craig:** Good god, Megana.

**John:** Thank you for doing that.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** You’re welcome. I normally get to about 100, but I read more than that this week.

**Craig:** You just felt like abusing yourself.

**Megana:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** You had some sort of shame going on and needed to hurt.

**John:** Megana’s also home in Ohio, so maybe she was just ducking away and reading a few extra.

**Craig:** The extra 80 were just getting away from your parents.

**Megana:** Yeah, it was like, “Sorry, I absolutely have to do this.”

**John:** “John and Craig have so much work for me this week.” Any patterns you’ve noticed in this batch of submissions?

**Megana:** Yes. One thing that really… I don’t know if maybe this has always been a thing but I just stumbled upon it this time, but a lot of unnecessary adverbs.

**John:** Do you think that was prompted because you and I discussed a couple weeks ago about this writerly advice about adverbs? You actually got me a book for my birthday which was all about adverbs and the writer’s advice not to use adverbs. Do you think you were cued up because of that?

**Megana:** Yeah, 100%. Now that you say it, I’m like, that’s exactly where it came from.

**Craig:** I like that Megana has no defensiveness. None. She’s just like, “Oh, I am guilty.”

**Megana:** It’s not even worth arguing. John’s like Professor X. He just knows me too well at this point.

**Craig:** He just went right into that. He got in there. The adverbs are often unnecessary.

**John:** That’s an adverb.

**Craig:** Correct. I think the adverbs that are the most useful are the ones that aren’t the L-Y adverbs. Those we tend to need, like when. A lot of the blanklies can be eliminated. Of course, we don’t believe in rules around these parts, so please don’t do that thing where you just hunt, do a find for L-Y and then go crazy and delete everything. It’s probably unnecessary.

**John:** Craig, would you say our general advice is if you find yourself using an L-Y adverb, always ask yourself, do I really need it, because many cases you will not. If you really do need it, keep it. Great.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so. Probably worth the interrogation if people are telling you you use a lot of them. If no one’s complaining, you probably are using a decent amount. The other bit of advice that I recall is Christopher McQuarrie, the way he put it was, I think he said, “Every time I use an exclamation point in a screenplay, it’s some kind of failure.” I think that’s very true. Be careful about exclamation points. Just force yourself to rationalize them. If it’s rationalized, absolutely use it.

**John:** This last script I did have at least one, maybe two double exclamation moments, but they were those moments where I was deliberately going over the top to get your attention.

**Craig:** As long as you’re mindful of them, I think that’s the key.

**John:** Any other patterns, Megana, you noticed?

**Craig:** Yes. I also noticed there were a lot of really dense first pages. I wasn’t seeing dialog until the beginning or maybe the middle of Page 2, which again, not a hard and fast rule, but it’s nice to have some entry point into your script earlier on.

**Craig:** I do think that if you have a first page that is dialog-free, which is a perfectly reasonable creative choice, it’s all the more important to make sure there’s lots of white space, because a whole page with no dialog… Readers tend to skim towards the dialog. We know this. When there’s no dialog there, they may feel like, “Oh no, I have to do a lot of swimming.” Just give them lots of islands to land on and take a breath before they swim again into the next paragraph.

**John:** Very true.

**Megana:** Then the third thing that I noticed a lot were confusing reveals, like a lot of man’s voiceover and then revealing who the man is later.

**Craig:** Unnecessary.

**Megana:** I just felt like they could’ve introduced that person earlier, and it would’ve been much cleaner.

**Craig:** Always a tough choice.

**John:** I see that a lot.

**Craig:** Why don’t we dig in and see what we got with these fine people?

**John:** Absolutely. Again, if you want to read along these pages, just click through the show notes, and you can maybe read ahead before we get into this analysis. In case you’re driving your car and just want to hear a summary of what this first script is, Megana, can you help us out with Oculum by Larry Bambrick?

**Megana:** On the preface/epigraph page, there’s a note that in the future, a virus has killed most of the human population and black rains have destroyed crops and technology. The only hope for survivors is Oculum. Then in the three pages, we open on the seed park in Oculum. A petal floats down into a grove of peach trees. It’s an idyllic scene framed by clear blue skies, until a robot sentry zooms down from the sky and through the landscape, kicking up hundreds of petals. We cut to Miranda24, who examines a petal from her bedroom window. Miranda24 speaks to her mother about the weather, the peach trees, and Oculum. Through their dialog, we learn that it’s Miranda24’s birthday and that she’s the first of the Oculum children to turn 16. It’s also revealed that Mother is a robot with a porcelain painted face.

**Craig:** Basically John August.

**John:** Come now, I’m not a robot. I have firmly established I’m human here.

**Craig:** That’s what the robots would say, “I am not a robot.” Of course.

**John:** I’m not a robot.

**Craig:** Of course that’s what you say.

**John:** Looking at the title page here, there’s spacing in between the letters of the words Oculum. Common approach. Looks lovely. Go for it. It says “by: Larry Bambrick.” The standard form is “written by Larry Bambrick.” Just might as well be standard here.

**Craig:** Didn’t bother me.

**John:** It’s fine either way. On the, I’m going to call it the preface page, we’re getting a setup there like this is the science fiction utopia/dystopia that we’re in. It’s setting us up. Maybe that’s rolling past on a screen before the movie starts.

**Craig:** All of this feels like it should be learned by the person watching rather than told to them. None of it seems like it wouldn’t be learned. You’re going to have to reveal this in interesting ways. This one, I wasn’t quite sure I felt the need for it. It seemed like it was short circuiting Larry’s chance to reveal these things to people.

**John:** There are basically two scenes happening here. There’s a setup of this outdoor world. Then we’re in a scene with Miranda24 and the mother robot. Let’s start with this outdoor setting scene, because there’s a lot of painting happening here, and yet I got really confused about what I was supposed to be seeing through it. We got the lovely landscape, but once it comes time for the flash of light moving across the sky, that thing falling, but it seems impossible how it’s falling, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be taking out of that. Craig, do you have insights there?

**Craig:** I was quite enjoying the way Larry was painting the picture. I felt like I was in a place. I felt like I could see things. There was lots of nice use of colors. I thought all capping PEACH TREES was quite nice. Where I stopped, and I think this is just literally a word choice issue, is he says, “A flash of light reflects off something moving across the sky. It’s small and silver. A plane?” Okay, maybe it’s a plane. Maybe it’s a rocket ship. Maybe it’s a meteor. I don’t know. What could it be? Then the next part. “And as we watch, it moves down…as if it’s somehow riding across the sky.” “Down” and “across” are italicized.

**John:** I can’t see that.

**Craig:** Now I’m like, wait a second. It already said it was moving across the sky. Now it moves down as if it’s somehow riding across the sky. It’s just saying “across” again as if you’re giving us new information. Also, I don’t know what that means.

**John:** I couldn’t picture it.

**Craig:** What does “riding across the sky” mean? Any guesses? I don’t know.

**John:** I had a direction of movement in my head from the first line, and then I didn’t see it.

**Craig:** Then he says then it plummets. Is it plummeting? Is it moving across the sky? I don’t know. I got confused there. I did like the way the scene ended, because surely there will be an explosion, but there’s nothing until, “A sentry (a sleek ROBOT, made of stainless steel, riding a single wheel) rockets past us along the ground — kicking up a trail of peach petals in its wake.” That’s a lovely image. I like the sense of mystery here. I thought there was good mystery. Other than the weird thing about riding across the sky, it felt pretty good.

**John:** There’s a single line here, “What the hell is that?” directed to us as readers. That can be great. I don’t mind that, just like you’re talking to us as the reader, because that’s the experience we’d get in the theater. I just got confused with what I was supposed to be seeing in the paragraphs around it. We were almost there.

**Craig:** Almost there but very encouraging.

**John:** Then we get into the bedroom. Here is where we’ll talk about specifics that are on the page. I think this was the wrong scene, because I think what we’re trying to do here is establish some of the stuff that was happening in the open scroll credits there, what is this world that we’re in. It’s also supposed to be a scene introducing Miranda24 and her mother and the fact that she’s a robot and the conflict between the two of them. I left the scene only knowing the mother was a robot and having really no idea who Miranda24 was, which by the end of three pages, I should have some idea what her voice was, what she looks for, what she’s interested in. I wasn’t really getting that from this scene.

**Craig:** It begins with Miranda24. Her name being Miranda24, you’re already in your science fiction space, she’s a clone, something like that.

**John:** Craig, you and I as a reader know that her name is Miranda24, but the viewer doesn’t know that she’s Miranda24.

**Craig:** No question. I don’t think Mother calls her Miranda24 either. You’re right. That’s facts not in evidence, essentially. Then it says, “16 years-old,” and then in parentheses, “(she is today in fact).” I think Larry’s saying it’s her birthday. That’s a weird way of putting it. Then it says, “She traces the petal with a finger.” She’s holding a peach petal. It was the stuff that we saw outside. She now is inside a house. If you’re going to say, “What the hell is that?” earlier, I think you would want to acknowledge, oddly, inside the house, acknowledge that that’s weird, because are there peach petals everywhere? Then Mother does this bit.

I think there was some nice exposition in the sense of, Miranda, without even looking outside, says the weather’s perfect. I’ve learned that the weather is always perfect here. That’s quite nice. I think the reveal of Miranda’s mother as a robot is problematic as directed on the page. Here’s what it says. We see Miranda’s mother. It says “ANGLE ON: And we see,” which we don’t want to do. It would just be “ANGLE ON:”

**John:** We don’t need the “ANGLE ON:” at all. That doesn’t do us [inaudible 00:31:23].

**Craig:** Either it’s “ANGLE ON: Miranda’s mother,” or “We see Miranda’s mother standing in the doorway. The morning light hasn’t quite reached this far, so we can’t identify much about her. Simple clothes. Upright posture.” No, that’s not how light works. Either I can see that she’s a robot or I can’t. If you don’t want me to see that she’s a robot, she’s in darkness, because once you reveal her, she is definitely a robot.

**John:** Yeah, or I can imagine there’s some sort of silhouettey kind of version where we can’t make out her face, but we can see that there’s a person standing there. She’s not really standing, because we’re learning that she’s going to wheel up. I think we need to be a little more careful planning that.

**Craig:** Her neck is gears and wires. We can’t quite do that. Then there’s a very stilted conversation between a 16-year-old girl and her robot mother. I don’t know how you feel about these things, John and Megana. For me, when I’m in science fiction scripts and I get overloaded with what I consider to be fairly tropey scientific jargon, my eyelids get heavy. Just the name Oculum alone is science fiction jargony.

**John:** “Regulus will be disappointed.”

**Craig:** “Regulus will be disappointed.” “Oculum protects us.” “Regulus will be disappointed.” “The trees are blooming in the Seed Park.” It’s too much. It’s too much. I’m starting to giggle a little bit, and I don’t want to. Certainly, Larry doesn’t want us giggling. I think there’s just too much of that kind of stuff that makes it feel a bit fusty and derivative of just iffy novels. Then just a pronouncement from robot mother, “You’re turning sixteen. A milestone.” I agree with you, John. I think that this scene was not giving me what I wanted, because I just don’t know anything about anything. I need something else. If I had her walking home, if I had her seeing the robot go by, if I had her, I don’t know, doing something interesting-

**John:** If I had her trying to conceal something from the robot mother, that would be great, like she’s trying to hide this peach petal from Mother, just so we have some point of intersection there. Then let the conversation be less science fictiony and just more practical could be great. I’ll direct our listeners to an Australian movie from a couple years ago called Mother, which I quite enjoyed. I think it was a Netflix original which is about a young girl raised by a robot, largely the same kind of premise with very different color palette feelings.

**Craig:** Isn’t that Raised By Wolves? Isn’t that the same thing?

**John:** Raised By Wolves is a similar premise as well. This is different. This one is an underground bunker situation.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** All of these things are existing within a set of tropes. If Larry’s going to try to do the story, he’s going to be aware of those who look for ways to not make us feel like we’re going to be trope city in those first three pages.

**Craig:** I would say that a good trope, carefully used, can be wonderful, because ultimately if you go to, what is it, trope.com or tvtropes.com, literally every single thing at this point they’ve come up with a name for as a trope. Everything, no matter what you watch, no matter how good it is, it’s full of tropes. That’s not what we mean. What we mean is just stuff that feels overly familiar in a way that makes you seem less creative. In this case, there’s just a certain… The idea of a human talking to a tut-tutting but somewhat stiff robot mother does feel a little done. It’s a tough one to pull off without the robot mother feeling like a new kind of robot mother.

The thing is, in a good way, Larry writes well. The pages lay out beautifully. I can see everything. I think it’s really well done in that regard. It’s just the content itself feels slightly shopworn. Perhaps it just needs to be presented in a more fresh way.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s take a look at the log line that Larry sent through. It reads, “In the apocalyptic future, 16-year-old Miranda24 learns that everything she’s been told about her perfect life inside a domed world, the Oculum, is a lie. She’ll discover that it’s up to her and a small band of other teenagers she meets to bring hope to a devastated land.”

**Craig:** There you go. That’s a YA novel.

**John:** It’s a YA novel.

**Craig:** Which is fine, except that it feels like it’s been pulled from a million Maze Runners, like if you run Maze Runner through Dall-E. It just feels really familiar.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s go on to a script which did not feel familiar to me at all. This is We’re All Very Tired by Marissa Gawel. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Gabriel Bolan, 70s, walks through a city park at night in Romania. When no one’s looking, he digs a small hole and plants a few seeds in the ground. We cut to a summer camp in rural Oregon, where Meredith Perez, 30s, welcomes a group of people off of a school bus to, quote, “mushroom camp.” Brenda Cho, 30s, one of the new arrivals, says she thought it was more of a class. We then cut to Brenda walking two whiny toddlers around in Kansas City, where Brenda takes a picture of a flier for a mushroom camp on a telephone pole. We cut back to the camp cafeteria, where Gabriel discusses matsutake mushrooms with the other campers.

**Craig:** This whole trope of the mushroom camp.

**John:** It’s all about mushroom camp. A thing I will say about these three pages is I never knew what was coming next.

**Craig:** Yes, that is true.

**John:** Because the scenes just didn’t flow together in a way that was helpful at all. You could’ve shuffled those in any order, and it would’ve gotten the same amount out of them. One of the scenes I really liked, I really like Brenda with her kids. I thought the voices in that were actually just great. In that three pages, I have no idea what movie this is.

**Craig:** No, this was very confusing. First things first, we open with a flashback. You can’t really open with a flashback, because what are you flashing back from. The way flashbacks work is you see… Chernobyl opens with a scene that then is later, and then you flash back to whatever. You have to give some sort of orientation to people, like what is the date, what is the year. We can’t put the word flashback on the screen.

**John:** Instead of flashback, I would say 1994 or just give a year.

**Craig:** Give a year and put it on the screen. Here’s a guy who’s in his 70s, and he’s planting something. What he does is he digs a little hole, plants a few seeds, and then pours some water on them. Then we’re out of there. Now that’s not enough.

**John:** It’s not. I didn’t know what I was supposed to take from that. I didn’t know, because he’s trying to do it secretly, but there wasn’t enough there.

**Craig:** No. When these moments happen in their own little timeline, there has to be some sort of drama to them of some kind. This is just planting something. Then we meet Meredith Perez. We don’t know the difference. We don’t know how we would know that this is present day as opposed to a flashback. We also don’t know how long ago the flashback was. She walks out and approaches a group of people getting off a school bus. I don’t understand what… Is she high? Was that the idea? Was she meant to be high? She seems high.

**John:** I took her as being nervous. I actually like her ability to continually undercut herself. She keeps trying things and undercutting what she was doing before. That can work, but there was not other engine to the scene. It was just her sputtering. I didn’t get what the point of the scene was supposed to be.

**Craig:** For instance, John, you’re absolutely right, if I knew that this was the opening day of mushroom camp and she has never welcomed people before to mushroom camp, this would work. We’re going to presume that the person who greets the people coming off the bus has done this many, many, many times. Think of the employees at the White Lotus greeting the people coming off the boat.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** This is a well-practiced bit of theater. She just seemed so discombobulated. Then Brenda says, “I thought this was more of a class.” What does Brenda know about anything anyway? She just walked off a bus.

**John:** We’re going to learn what Brenda knows, because she just took a photo of a thing called mushroom camp in the next scene. These are all in really a very strange order. It’s like we have all the flashbacks before the plane crashes in Lost. It’s just a strange thing. I do want to talk about… I thought Brenda with her two kids, her two toddlers, I thought the voices were actually very authentic in the way that moms speak to their kids like, “No, we’re doing this. We like walking.” Basically, you speak in this weird first-person plural involving your kids and their unreasonable demands for things. I like that, but I wanted that attached to something, because right now it’s just floating out there in a space.

**Craig:** Be aware that shooting scenes with toddlers is incredibly hard. It’s nice that you wrote dialog for toddlers, but there’s a reason you rarely see them doing dialog, because you can’t rely on them doing dialog. Also, what’s going on here is Brenda is going to see this flyer on the telephone pole that says, “Make your own income. Become a morel mushroom hunter.” What you’re showing me, Marissa, is a woman who is overwhelmed by her kids, but what you’re not showing me is a woman who’s short on money. What is motivating her here is that she needs money.

Now if these kids were overacting and she was begging on the phone, begging a caregiver to please not quit, but she can’t pay her more, because she doesn’t have enough money, and then the lady hangs up on her while she’s doing the shoo and all the rest, and then she sees it, maybe I’ll go, “Okay, she needs money. That’s what this is about.”

**John:** Is Brenda a babysitter?

**Craig:** No, I think Brenda’s a mom.

**John:** Do we know that she’s the mom?

**Craig:** No, we don’t, but I’m going to presume she is.

**John:** I guess we would presume that she’s a mother unless we hear otherwise, but actually, in some ways it makes more sense.

**Craig:** She’s late 30s. She’s pushing a stroller with two kids. I think she’s the mom. If she’s not the mom, then help. Help me.

**John:** Help me out.

**Craig:** Help me out. Then it would be good to know that she’s the nanny and that she wants a new job that pays more or that doesn’t have kids screaming. Here’s where I really got confused. We go back to present day and we don’t know. We’re now in a large cafeteria. Describe the cafeteria, by the way. Where is this cafeteria, in the middle of the woods? At one table, Gabriel, the guy who was in his 70s from the flashback, is using “his fork to slice off a piece of mushroom. He takes a bite and is pleasantly surprised.” How old is he now?

**John:** I have no idea. More than 70.

**Craig:** Is he 90? I’m so confused. He says, “This is matsutake.” Then the guy across from him is like, “What? Huh?” His name is Rah Reddy, “20s, skeptical.” What is he doing in mushroom camp? If someone’s like, “Oh, matsutake,” and he’s like, “What? All right,” how did he end up here? He must’ve made a choice to go to mushroom camp, right?

**John:** People get off the bus. I have a hard time believing that the first scene that we’re going to really see them or get to know them at is going to be inside this cafeteria. I just feel like there were some scenes missing in between there. These people talk on the bus. It was a strange way to get us into meeting this group.

**Craig:** Very.

**John:** Again, I don’t know what this movie actually is at the end of three pages, which is a problem. I’m assuming it’s an ensemble movie, that it’s not strict POV to any one person, because it felt like we would’ve had two scenes with a person if it was going to be their POV.

**Craig:** I’m going to guess that this involves vampires. That’s what I’m going to guess. I’m going to guess that Gabriel is not just a mushroom hunter, he’s a vampire hunter. He’s from Romania. Rah says, “Ha, vampires!” and Gabriel chuckles. “And inspiring mountains.” Feels like maybe there’s going to be some sort of summer camp horror movie thing going on that involves mushrooms somehow, which I’m saying as a guy that’s making a show that is not unrelated to mushrooms.

I think you put your finger on the problem. We need time to meet people before stuff happens. I need to know what he’s doing there. I need to know why I needed to see that thing in the beginning. Yes, we need to see people on the bus first talking to each other and grilling each other on why they’re doing something as bizarre as going to mushroom camp. Then I need a tour. Give me a tour. Orient me, something. Open the envelope.

**John:** I can open the envelope and tell you that I don’t think there’s vampires in here.

**Craig:** Oh, dammit.

**John:** The log line that person sent says, “A small retreat in Oregon promises its visitor a restful break from the demands of capitalistic society, but it soon becomes clear that the retreat’s talk of experimenting with medicinal properties of mushrooms has dark underpinnings.”

**Craig:** There’s something.

**John:** I guess there could still be vampires technically, but I think it’s much less likely.

**Craig:** Yeah, so some sort of zombie-ing or… I don’t know. Odd that this is about a break from the demands of capitalistic society but the advertising is promising you money. That may be part of the irony. I don’t know. I just think that basically, Marissa, you have an idea that no one else has. I assure you that there are no other mushroom camp movies. You need to orient us and be really careful about how you present moves in time, especially when you have three within three pages.

**John:** A lot.

**Craig:** That is telling people they’re in for a lot of whiplash.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s do our final Three Page Challenge, this one by Jordan Johnson. Help us out, Megana.

**Megana:** Maddy, 24, discusses death in voiceover as she speaks about different religions’ conceptions of death and parts of life. We see the corresponding images flash by on a projector until she gets to a picture of Olivia Carter, 24. Maddy reveals that Olivia was her best friend and that she killed herself three days ago. We then cut to Maddy cooking potato salad in the church kitchen. Evelyn, Olivia’s mom, expresses her gratitude for Maddy and takes her hands, asking Maddy to join her in prayer.

**John:** We should also stress that that voiceover continues beyond this point. She’s a character who can voiceover at any point during the story. She has voiceover power.

**Craig:** She has voiceover power, exactly. I guess the first thing that we notice when we look at the title page is it’s very graphic.

**John:** It’s really nice. Describe for our listeners driving their car someplace, describe this title page for us.

**Craig:** I don’t know if Jordan is a man or a woman. Jordan has created a very beautiful graphic title page that mimics what a title page of a program at a funeral or wake would look like. It’s got four crosses with lots of little beams in each corner and a little border around it, as it would. The title, Wake, is in this nice little scripty font, little swooshities underneath. Then instead of saying “written by Jordan Johnson,” it says “Funeral Arrangements by Jordan Johnson.” Then underneath that, in italics, it says, “The family of Olivia Carter sincerely appreciates your thoughts, prayers, and condolences.” This is very clever.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** I would go right for this if I saw this in a pile.

**John:** I think it’s really smartly done.

**Craig:** Really well done.

**John:** That typeface is Zap Chancery.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It was put on the first LaserWriter 2 printer, which it became ubiquitous and people used it for all the wrong things. This is actually an example.

**Craig:** Like funerals?

**John:** Funerals is fine for that, but people will try to use it for newsletters and [inaudible 00:46:30].

**Craig:** Please don’t do that.

**John:** I was really struck by the title page. Great. Really well done. This opening narration thing I think largely works, since this is Maddy. It’s her voiceover. “See this? This is what you get when you die… I guess if you’re Buddhist you’ll see this.”

**Craig:** Over that, it’s nothing. You see nothing, which is great. No, I’m sorry, you do see something. Sorry.

**John:** My biggest note here is I think you need to move these scene descriptions above the dialog in all of these cases. Then it actually makes much more sense.

**Craig:** That would make more sense. This is a very simple thing where you hear in voiceover Maddy’s brief announcement. This is what you would see if you’re a Buddhist when you die. This is what you see when you’re a Christian. This is what you see when you’re a Muslim, Hindu, or Jewish. All those things are very simple kind of projector images. Then she basically transitions to, I don’t know what you do see when you die, but I know what you will stop seeing, essentially. Then she gives a very interesting list of things.

**John:** Ending with eye-light. What did you take eye-light to mean, on Page 2?

**Craig:** That one was odd. I think it means just that there was light shining in her eyes. I don’t know what… Megana, are we running into a generational problem?

**Megana:** No, I also did not totally know what eye-light meant. I thought it meant the feeling of closing your eyes and having the sun shining on them.

**Craig:** It says, “We are on Liv’s face, showing bright and happy eyes.” I think what Jordan was intending was light in your eyes. When we’re shooting things, eye-lights, we do use those to put out little sparkles in your eye. That one was a little odd. What was lovely was I thought the progression of things that you don’t see anymore, this is what Jordan gave us. “No more sunrises. Or crepes. Or dimples.” That’s where we meet Liv for the first time and see her face. “No more sounds of a pin dropping on vinyl. Or watching thunderstorms in the Spring. Or eye-light.”

Then the eye-light brings us back to Liv’s picture, and says, “This is Liv. She’s my best friend. She killed herself 3 days ago. No more eggnog or Autumn or thrift stores.” That was kind of awesome, I thought. There are so many different ways of delivering what can often be a gloppy thing, which is somebody killed themself. You can get very melodramatic about it. I thought this was a very creative way in, that’s connecting Liv’s fate to a larger discussion about death and the afterlife, and also then tells me so much about Maddy, which is she doesn’t pause. She just rolls into this interesting, hyper-verbal way of describing things.

**John:** The next scene, which takes us to the end of the three pages, is in this church kitchen. “Maddy stirs the potato salad, adding in spices and whatever other gross things go into potato salad.”

**Craig:** Great. It’s disgusting.

**John:** It’s the right tone for it. It’s important I think when you have a centerpiece character like Maddy who is cynical. Having some tone being carried through into the scene description so helps. It makes it feel like the author and the central character are the same person.

**Craig:** I wish that we had just a little bit of a physical description of Maddy.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Other than her age, I don’t know anything about her, her hair, her clothes, her makeup, as is my want. There is mention further down the page of a woman named Pamela, who is working on a fruit salad at the other end of the kitchen. I think we would probably want to introduce her here earlier before Evelyn comes in, because when Evelyn enters, that’s when a new thing shifts. We don’t want to start meeting people that had already been there at that point.

**John:** I agree. The description of the kitchen is nice. It’s talking about the “yellow hue of an old church kitchen.” It says “cold LED tube lighting panels.” They’re actually fluorescent lighting panels. Those panels wouldn’t be LED, just fluorescent [inaudible 00:50:31] going for.

**Craig:** They sure would not. Jordan’s younger.

**John:** Jordan’s younger, I think.

**Craig:** I have no problem with that.

**John:** No, that’s absolutely fine. I like most of the scene that happens after this time. I thought it could be tighter and shorter. I think we could’ve gotten to the point of it a little bit quicker. I enjoy what Jordan’s doing on the page here. The choice to make all of Maddy’s voiceovers in bold is really smart, because even though there’s the little V.O. at the end, it can be confusing when characters are saying things in scenes and have voiceover power. Bolding those lines really helps.

**Craig:** Agreed, and agreed. I was really happy to see that. It helped me so much. This is why we say there are no rules. The rule is help me as the reader. I’m sure that a million screenwriting teachers will tell you you should not suddenly bold a character’s name in the middle of a script, but yeah, you should if it helps. In this case, it helped. I agree with you that Evelyn’s prayer could’ve been trimmed down. In editing, I know exactly what I would’ve trimmed it. The information we need is that Evelyn, she’s religious, whereas Maddy, not so much, and that she was Olivia’s mom. “Please bless the preparation of this food and the nourishment it will bring to our bodies. Please keep us all in your care today as we mourn the death of my sweet, sweet Olivia Michelle. Amen.” That’s all you need. The next chunk, you don’t need.

I loved Maddy’s commentary after Evelyn says to her, “You were a good friend to her, Maddy.” We hear Maddy’s thought in voiceover, which I think was great. Generally speaking, I loved it. I just loved these pages. I thought they were really well written. The scenes moved. I saw everything. I know so much about Maddy without anybody telling me anything about Maddy. I know so much about Liv and Maddy without anybody telling me.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** The creativity that led for this front page to be so interesting I think carried through. Well done, Jordan Johnson.

**John:** One other suggestion for how you can save some space on the page. On the top of Page 3, Evelyn has two lines. She goes, “Thank you for helping. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.” Then there’s two lines of scene description before we get to another Evelyn line, “Let me say a quick word over the food. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you two.” Parentheticals, takes their hands. “Let me say a quick a quick word over the food.” That gives you all you needed to do between those two lines, and it saves you some space on the page.

**Craig:** If you wanted to get across that Maddy was not even looking at Evelyn but just stays looking at the potato salad, you can say, “Maddy, her eyes focused on the potato salad, joins Pam and Evelyn as they hold hands.” Then Evelyn says, “Dear Lord.” There is a way to be a little bit more compressed there. If you’re not running into page issues, I’d rather the space, personally. You’re right, if you are, you need to squeeze some juice out of this. You’ll squeeze way more juice out of it by making the prayer shorter, which you can definitely do.

**John:** That way you won’t have to fluid morph in the cut.

**Craig:** Fluid morph.

**John:** Let’s take a look at the log line. “At the funeral of her best friend, brash and honest 24-year-old Maddy Palmer endures the suffocating etiquette of a traditional wake.”

**Craig:** That’s pretty much what we were getting there.

**John:** It’s interesting that it looks like the whole movie’s maybe at this wake, rather than going on past it. Not what I would’ve expected, but I’m curious what’s going to happen. I would read more pages, so that’s a good sign.

**Craig:** Wakes are notorious for going off the rails, because they are not like the stuffy funeral services. They’re meant to be more of a party and celebration, I guess. I’ve never been to a wake. Drinking is involved, as I recall.

**John:** It can be. I want to thank certainly our three people who submitted these pages, because they were so brave for us to talk through them, but the other 180 people who submitted their pages, because they could’ve been chosen as well. If you have your own pages that you want us to take a look at, you don’t mail them to Megana. Instead, you fill out a form. Go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a little form. You click some buttons. You attach your pdf. We could be talking about this on the next round of Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Megana, thank you for again the extraordinary self-abuse.

**Megana:** Of course. It’s my pleasure.

**Craig:** Make sure you enjoy in self-care.

**John:** Let’s answer one incredibly quick question that I know we actually have the answer to.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Matthew asks, “Hey, so in the new movie Watcher, I saw a credit I’ve never seen before. I Googled it, and I found nothing. It said ‘based on a screenplay by.'”

**Craig:** I feel like we answer this every day.

**John:** “What’s that about?” We did, but we’ll answer on this podcast as well.

**Craig:** “Based on a screenplay by” is a source material credit, the way that “based on a novel” or “based on a play” or “based on a song” is. What it means is that a screenplay was written early in the development of the project, oftentimes beginning the development of the project. That screenplay was not under the auspices of WGA contract. Why? Because it was written for a nonsignatory, or, as is more often the case, it was written for a nonsignatory but overseas. A lot of projects that originate in the UK for instance are not Writers Guild covered. They are rather written in the UK, where Writers Guild doesn’t have jurisdiction.

Then it gets either brought into another company, another company buys that thing from the first company, or, again more likely, the people developing it say, “Oh, we want to hire John August to rewrite this.” John only works under WGA contract, so now, lo and behold, boop, WGA contract. WGA credits, “written by,” “screenplay by,” “screen story by,” “story by,” all of those are a result of our collective bargaining agreement. They are available only to people that work under the Writers Guild collective bargaining agreement and not to anyone else. “Based on a screenplay by” means the first or early screenplay was not covered by the WGA.

**John:** Exactly. It could be that this screenplay was 40 years old but overseas. If it was written under WGA contract, even for Warners back in the day, it would still be part of this [inaudible 00:56:35] title.

**Craig:** Yes. We will answer this question many, many more times.

**John:** Many, many more times. Time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a book. It is The Secret History of Mac Gaming by Richard Moss. Craig, it’s a book I think you’ll enjoy.

**Craig:** Looking at the website.

**John:** It’s 480 pages long. It’s a big, thick, yellow book, comes out of the UK. It’s not new. I think it was first published in 2017, but this updated version has new more good stuff in it, or more new good old stuff in it. I had my Macintosh quite early on. I played a lot of games on Macintosh. Reading this book, I’m just remembering how different everything was, because this is pre-internet. To get a game, you had to have somebody give you that game on a disk. [inaudible 00:57:16] users group or find a shareware. Basically, college campuses were all about trading games back and forth. There are many great titles I remember from back in these days. Dark Castle, fantastic.

**Craig:** Of course. You would also get some quasi-free games if you subscribed to Macworld.

**John:** Macworld, MacUser, both.

**Craig:** There would be a floppy disk actually in the magazine that you could pop out. There were also some, literally just retype the code. People would just list code for stuff that you’d type in.

**John:** I don’t remember that for Macintosh stuff, but my initial Atari-

**Craig:** Apple II or something like that.

**John:** Yeah, Apple II, there were little games you could type in from the magazine. This was after that. The Macintosh was never really designed to be a gaming machine, and yet the people who would love to play games also loved the Macintosh. It was just a very natural fit.

**Craig:** Yes, it was, until at some point suddenly no one was making games for Mac at all, and it was all PC.

**John:** One company would be the one who would port all the big PC titles over to Macintosh, and they would come a year later, and they wouldn’t have the things you would want to see.

**Craig:** It wouldn’t be as good.

**John:** Then eventually, most stuff moved to being… Either you had a gaming PC that was literally a PC or you had a console that could just do so many things that you would never want your home computer to do.

**Craig:** Still to this day, if you’re playing off console, it’s almost certainly a PC, because there are PC rigs that are just built specifically for gaming. That’s great.

**John:** Anyway, this was a nice trip down memory lane. I don’t know how interesting this will be for people who didn’t have any of that firsthand history, because it would be like me reading about old rotary telephones or something. I don’t have that experience.

**Craig:** I do have the experience.

**John:** I do, but I-

**Craig:** I just don’t care.

**John:** I don’t care.

**Craig:** This is more nostalgia than anything else. This definitely feels like one of those nostalgia books.

**John:** The D and D book that you and I both loved, the Art and Arcana book, it’s like that but for Mac games.

**Craig:** Brought to us by my pal Kyle Newman. I have two Cool Things this week, both related to puzzles. The first is Ryan O’Shea, who was the first and only entry into my solve the Kevin Wald cryptic contest, challenge. By cryptic, I mean cryptics, multiple puzzles, three of them in fact, all extraordinarily hard, with so many layers that I believe you and Megana looked at Ryan’s solution and didn’t even understand the solution.

**John:** I have no idea.

**Megana:** No way.

**John:** Here’s the subject line on this email. “Have uncouth mercy, but not for me, to at its core deweaponize jerk Craig’s jigsaw alt.”

**Craig:** Let me translate, as I did for you guys. “Have uncouth mercy” means… Uncouth is a prompt to anagram. Anagram the word mercy, but not for me, so take M-E out of mercy, and anagram R-C-Y to C-R-Y. Then “to at its core deweaponize,” go to the core of the word deweaponize, which is the letter P. That is the letter directly in the middle of the word deweaponize. Now we have C-R-Y-P. “Jerk.” A synonym for a jerk is a tic, T-I-C. “Cryptic.” Then the definition part, “Craig’s jigsaw alt,” meaning cryptic puzzles are my alternative to jigsaws, which are not puzzles at all. Ryan’s solution was perfect and perfectly complete. He did a fantastic job. He did suggest that I’ve ruined him somehow. I’m glad. Good. I hope you’re ruined permanently, Ryan. Why should I be the only one? No, you did a wonderful job. I’m so proud and pleased.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Then my second Cool Thing is coming up. It just passed if you’re listening to this on a normal Tuesday. You still can access it. You still have time to get your name on the list of completionists. Mark Halpin, a friend of mine and perhaps the most, what I would say, elegant puzzle constructor in the world, meaning he himself not that elegant. No, he is, but his puzzles are elegant. Every year, with the exception of last year, every year for Labor Day weekend, he releases something he calls a Labor Day Extravaganza, which is a suite of usually somewhere around 10 puzzles, all which then feed into a meta puzzle. This is a pretty standard puzzle hunt kind of thing. His puzzles are so beautifully done. They are always wrapped together thematically by some kind of interesting narrative device, typically relating to stories, folklore, and mythology from various different cultures. He’s covered pretty much every culture I can think of.

His latest is called Cross Purposes. It launched, past tense, at 1 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, September 3rd. It is free, although there is an opportunity to tip him. I strongly encourage you to do so, because it’s not easy to build these things, and particularly not easy to build things as beautiful as a Mark Halpin Labor Day Extravaganza.

**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilleli. Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send your longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the Three Page Challenges that we discussed today. You’ll find transcripts there and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and they’re great, including the new Scriptnotes Bon Jovi T-shirt. You’ll find this at Cotton Bureau. When you get those in and ordered, you can wear them to our live shows that are coming up. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on senior year. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Senior year, that is our topic. It is the final year of high school in the US, both for our daughters, and a point of life that is frequently dramatized in movies. You see that a lot. There’s a movie I’m trying to set up which is all about senior year, because it’s such a big transition year. You are leaving one part of your life and moving on to this other part. It feels like a funeral for your younger self. Craig, what’s your recollection of senior year?

**Craig:** You could feel that there was a line that you were leaving a place where a lot of the challenge was to see if you could get into a good college. For a lot of people, senior year is also… You’re going to be confronted by having that breakup with that boyfriend or that girlfriend. You’re going to be driving to school instead of being driven to school. You are enough of an adult where you have access to certain things you didn’t have before, but not enough of an adult to… You can vote, but you can’t smoke, although you do. You feel like you’re on the verge of freedom, and you’re also getting away from home. That may very well be the next thing. This is your last hurrah with, for a lot of people, friends they’ve had since they were in kindergarten.

My daughter has gone to school in the La Cañada School District, which is a public school district where we live. She’s been in the public school system from kindergarten all the way through this year, her senior year. She has friends that she’s known since she was six. That’s a whole thing. It’s just so many transitions. The stuff that life fires at you and the speed with which it fires it at you when you are 17 or 18 is just astonishing.

**John:** I’m definitely noticing it’s the last firsts of a lot of things. It’s her last first day. It’s going to be the last musical that they’ll do at that school. It’s going to be the last time a lot of these things are going to happen. While there are some senior traditions, things that my daughter’s school always does, like the last day rituals and a senior trip, it’s recognizing that this is the final time certain things are going to happen is even more monumental for her.

**Craig:** I think as the year goes on, my daughter will be feeling this more and more. It’s easy now, because they just went back. They just went back, I don’t know, a couple weeks ago. As we get closer and closer to May, yeah, it’s going to be all sorts of stuff happening. It becomes almost like a yearlong celebration. Megana, you are way closer to senior year of high school than John or I. What do you remember, and how did you feel?

**Megana:** All of the things of feeling like you are on top and like you are like big dog on campus, but then I remember feeling so anxious about this looming question of what’s going to happen next year. I’m not going to have my friends or family around me. Where am I going to go to college? I feel like that question was looming over the horizon for the entire year in a way that maybe was the first time that I really experienced anxiety.

**Craig:** That was the last time, I’m sure.

**Megana:** Yeah, one and done.

**John:** Talk about that anxiety, because you were thinking about what’s going to happen next year, what colleges you’re going to get into. Once you knew where you were going to go to college, the stakes were suddenly much lower, weren’t they?

**Megana:** Amy is also applying to colleges. Any time she asks me for questions, I’m like, “Please don’t follow my example,” because I applied to too many schools, because I couldn’t make any decisions. I applied to them literally in the minutes before the application shut down. Then with Harvard, I got in. I think I got in on April 1st. I remember telling people, and they were like, “Oh, sick joke,” because everyone assumed I was just pulling an April Fools.

**John:** Oh, man.

**Craig:** Were you stupid? Was that why? Were they like, “Oh my god, Megana is the dumbest person we know.”

**Megana:** I also love April Fools. I think that’s the bigger component.

**Craig:** That may be it. Got it.

**Megana:** I was just so last minute on everything that I feel like I… I feel like that has continued throughout my life, where it’s like, I don’t know how much I got to enjoy it, because I was putting off decisions for so long.

**John:** Craig, did you encounter senioritis?

**Craig:** No, because we had been terrified by possibly urban legends, possibly not, of kids who had blown their last semester of high school and then the college rescinds the offer. The colleges said, when I got into college, they were like, “Yeah, just so you know, of course, we will be reviewing your final grades. Make sure that they’re… ” You’re like, “Oh god, I don’t want to fumble.” Also, I was in a race. I was in a valedictorian race. I couldn’t let up. Couldn’t let up.

**Megana:** Did you win the race?

**John:** Did you win?

**Craig:** No. I was the salutatorian.

**Megana:** Which is the cooler torian.

**Craig:** I think so. It was down to 100ths of a point or whatever. This is all stupid, by the way. If you find yourself currently as a senior in a race, it doesn’t matter, unless you’re really good at giving speeches. Then you’ll get some love for a good speech. I kept it on. I kept the heat on, but without the panic of, oh no, the unknown. I had a sense, “Okay, this is where I’m going to school. This is what it’s going to be.” Then you get the whiplash of having gone from the top of the heap in your high school to once again being a nobody that doesn’t know anything and is at the bottom of the pecking order when you get to college. The difference though when you get to college is… You can get razzed by the upperclassmen going into junior high or to high school. In college, no one cares. It’s the recognition you’re never going to be that little kid who’s getting picked on again. That just all goes away.

**Craig:** Yes, that part goes away. You’re not going to get bullied. I do recall, as a young heterosexual male, that there was definitely a certain kind of sexual politics going on where freshman heterosexual males were… It was just tougher. It was tougher. All the girls were looking upwards, and so you had to hustle. (singing) I did. I did. You know why?

**John:** You did, and you met your wife.

**Craig:** I did, I met my wife, although that wasn’t until I was a junior, so I had a few years of hustling. Then she put a ring on it.

**John:** Aw. I literally had one foot out the door my senior year because I was going to… Basically I had enough credits to graduate early. I only had to go to school in the mornings.

**Megana:** What?

**John:** I went to classes in the mornings, and then I took a class at CU Boulder in the afternoons. I was only halfway on campus anyway. I was running the high school paper. I don’t know, it was a good transition out. It worked really well for me. I felt like I was already leaving before I was officially leaving.

**Craig:** Interesting. Interesting.

**John:** Really Mike was the same situation. My husband was taking classes at OSU during his senior year too. We both had a situation where we really weren’t full-time high school students senior year.

**Craig:** He went to The Ohio State University?

**John:** The Ohio State University.

**Craig:** That’s one of the dumbest things.

**John:** It is one of the dumbest things. It has to be continuously mocked.

**Craig:** The. Please.

**Megana:** I feel like I can’t sit here and let this continue. It is The Ohio State University.

**Craig:** It is, because, what, there are other ones that are pretending to be Ohio State University, but we are The Ohio State University? Those are ripoff Ohio State Universities. Where are the other ones? There are no other ones.

**Megana:** There’s Ohio University.

**John:** Are there other OSUs that are not the one in Columbus, and so it’s only the one in Columbus is The Ohio State University?

**Craig:** No, there’s just The Ohio State University.

**Megana:** I was always under the impression that it was because of Ohio University that they did that. There’s Oregon State University.

**John:** Why would that work?

**Craig:** Why don’t they just underline the word State, Ohio State University? No, they stick the word The on it, which no one else does, for good reason.

**John:** Maybe we should be The Scriptnotes Podcast.

**Craig:** That’s a perfect analogy. Welcome to The Scriptnotes Podcast. That’s just ridiculous. The odds are that neither one of us survive to see October based on what we just did, because man, I’ll tell you, Ohio fans, phew.

**John:** That’s why we keep these conversations in the Premium feed, so at least we’re getting money for the hate coming our way.

**Craig:** Yes, there will be hate coming our way, and also long emails. Oh my god, so many long emails. “This is why,” blah blah blah, blah blah blah. I’m already making fun of your email. Don’t send it.

**John:** The end of high school is also graduation. Craig, did you have a good high school graduation?

**Craig:** I did. High school graduation went well.

**John:** Did you have to give a salutatorian speech?

**Craig:** I did. I gave a salutatorian-

**John:** What was your topic?

**Craig:** For the life of me, I cannot remember.

**John:** Do you have it written down anywhere?

**Craig:** Not anymore. It was written down, but we’re talking about something that I think I probably wrote it by hand and then typed it into my Macintosh and then printed it on my Brother Daisywheel printer. Oh, Megana, you never knew the joys of a Daisywheel printer.

**Megana:** I’m totally lost here.

**John:** Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

**Craig:** Basically, it was like an electric typewriter. You would say, okay, print this. It would pull all the text into its memory. Then there was a wheel, a disc, a plastic disc, and at the tips of it were the letters. It would spin and hammer the letter. It was like the world’s fastest typist. It was loud and so much slower than a laser printer, not even close. I probably did that. Where it went… I tried to erase my past as best I could.

**John:** We’ve noticed that. We have video footage of Ted Cruz from his freshman year. I wonder if somebody filmed Craig’s salutatorian speech.

**Craig:** I think that’s wonderful.

**John:** If someone who’s listening can track that down, that would’ve been from 1989?

**Craig:** Eight.

**John:** ’88.

**Craig:** That was spring of 1988 in Freehold, New Jersey. If somebody has the video of my salutatory address, we’d love to see it. If you have it and it’s on VHS, we’ll gladly pay for the transfer.

**John:** Good stuff. Craig, Megana, thank you for a good senior year.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you. See you next week.

**John:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/565standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/vfx-deep-dive).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 563 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we’re going to do a deep dive with two VFX pros to figure out how they break down and discuss a sample scene. It’s a master class in thinking about how you turn that scene description into an actual scene.

In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’re going to talk about friends.

**Craig:** Ew.

**John:** How to make them and how to keep them.

**Craig:** Yuck.

**John:** Especially as we get older.

**Craig:** That’s really sweet actually. Considering who we are and who our audience is, I think this is a really good topic. We should talk about this.

**John:** Listening back to old episodes for the book that we’re doing, at the start of the podcast, I said on the air, “We’re not actual friends in real life,” and you were heartbroken.

**Craig:** Oh, wow.

**John:** Now we’re friends.

**Craig:** More than friends, John. We’re partners.

**John:** Oh yes, we are. We are podcast partners. Business partners.

**Craig:** You keep talking, and you know who’s going to show up, right?

**John:** Nope, it’s not allowed. Matthew will edit him out. Let’s get to our main feature of the day. A few episodes back, we discussed how writers should think about visual effects and what they look like on the page. That was kind of abstract. It’s like doing a Three Page Challenge without three pages to actually look at. Today we’re going to take an effects-heavy scene and talk through it with two VFX pros. Before we do that, if you want to read the scene, it’s pretty short. Just click the link in the show notes. I’ll also put it on Twitter. Craig, you are a good narrator. Could you just read aloud this scene for us?

**Craig:** Of course. This scene was written by our own John August.

**John:** It is. It’s pretty impressive.

**Craig:** It’s pretty good stuff. Here we go. “Interior/exterior the cathedral, day. Oona gets to her feet, badly hurt but alive. She retrieves the eldenspear. She knows the fight’s not over.

“With one wall taken out by the missile strike, it’s incredible the whole building hasn’t collapsed. The altar has been reduced to flaming rubber. Smoke carries singed bible pages.

“Goodwin emerges from the debris, flames clinging to his Kevlar vest. One of his eyes is missing, a green light glowing in its place.

“He sloughs the flesh off his left arm, revealing the metal skeleton beneath. No sense pretending he’s human anymore.

“Oona gives a thunderous war cry, so powerful it shatters the remaining stained glass windows. Prismatic shards of glass rain down.

“Goodwin charges. Oona makes an acrobatic spring off a pew, leaping to drive her spear right through Goodwin. He’s impaled like a martini olive.

“But he’s not dead yet. With both hands, Goodwin pulls the spear back out and throws it at Oona. She barely dodges.”

That should be easy to shoot.

**John:** Easy to shoot. Simple.

**Craig:** Just put it in a volume and shoot it.

**John:** Half a day.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** It’s only like maybe six eighths of a page.

**Craig:** Yeah, we could do that in the morning.

**John:** 100%. Easy. Easy for me to write, much more challenging for the visual effects pros who have to make the scene come to life, so let’s meet them. Alex Wang cis a visual effects supervisor whose credits include Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Dominion, Terminator: Dark Fate, Fast and the Furious 7, and more. His most recent project is the VFX supervisor on The Last of Us at HBO. Welcome, Alex.

**Alex Wang:** Thank you very much for having me.

**Craig:** He’s got such a good radio voice too.

**John:** It’s really impressive. You have been working with Craig on this series, and so doing all the visual effects for a show that we’ve never seen.

**Alex:** Yes, that is correct.

**Craig:** And maybe we’ll never see. No, we’re definitely seeing it. We’re seeing it. It’s coming. It’s coming.

**John:** They bury your show, Craig. It’s like, “Oh, we’re never going to release it.”

**Craig:** No one will be hearing about this.

**John:** Next we have Addie Manis, who’s a visual effects producer/supervisor. Her credits include Marvel’s Agent Carter and Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey. After she VFXed for the first season of Foundation for Apple TV Plus, she’s transitioned to writing, as she and her writing partner were asked to join the writing staff for Season 2.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** We could really use her help to make this scene possible. If you’re looking at the pdf that we have linked to in the show notes, you’ll see that I’ve numbered each of the paragraphs, which is not necessarily each shot, but it gives you a sense of what the challenges are going to be. Let’s start at the start. We’ll start with you, Addie. Let’s say this scene lands on your desk. What is your first step as you’re looking at this scene in terms of thinking about, okay, this is the visual effects challenge or issues that I see here on the page.

**Addie Manis:** Excellent question. Let’s say I get this as a script page. I’m going to read it out of the gate. That’s what everybody does with a script page. I’m going to read it with a highlighter. I am reading both for story, character, writing, pacing, tone, because all of that stuff tells me what’s this going to look like, what’s the director going to do, how are we going to cut it, like I am reading the final edit on the page out of the gate.

**John:** That makes it sound like the actual writing on the page is incredibly important in terms of your first impression. It’s not just like here’s a list of things that are in it. How it actually feels and reads on the page is influencing your choices at this early stage.

**Addie:** That is completely correct. I have in the last 10 years focused more on event television rather than feature film. Especially the first episode of something, which is often written by the showrunner, the showrunner’s first script is conveying to me very much what the final show is going to look like. Because visual effects lives in a world of edits or cuts essentially, we’ll say how many shots is how many cuts in a scene. I am reading the cuts in the sentences. Every clause, every period, every comma is telling me, okay, this is going to be three cuts, this feels like a master shot and it’s going to be one long cut. It tells me the pace of the action and what’s going to be the rhythm of the editing. I know that’s a funny thing to say, because the writer is not the editor. In my experience, it does flow all the way through.

**Craig:** It almost sounds like what you’re saying is that the writers are directing on the page, which is something we’ve been insisting writers should be doing forever.

**Addie:** Alex and myself will start very, very early in a process. What we have is the script. We may have only the script for six months, or a year if we’re doing really long prep. We root down into that script and see what is this show going to look like, what’s our pace, what’s our tone, what’s our rhythm, which I’m sure Alex could expound upon further. I read with that in one side of my brain, and in the other side of my brain, I am already saying, “Interior/exterior the cathedral. Okay, is this a practical cathedral? Are we going somewhere to shoot a cathedral? Are we going to build a cathedral? Are we going to shoot this on a blue screen? Are we going to shoot this in a volume?” Any of the answers to any of those questions kicks off a very long chain of action, building, budgeting, hiring, travel planning.

I think we’re both looking at the final product and what is the piece of art that we’re making and the story that we’re telling, and then also physically how do I get all this stuff? Is somebody building an eldenspear? Are we going to have fire on set that day? Is this all going to be CG? How do I get this actor scanned? It’s of two minds. It’s the artistic mind and the logistic mind simultaneously.

**John:** Alex, talk through this scene from your perspective. This lands on your desk. You probably are highlighting it also. If it’s for a show that you already know… Let’s say this is Episode 3 of a series. You have some sort of basis for how things are going. What are you looking at? What are your first challenges? What can you do before there’s a director or someone else on board?

**Alex:** Great question. Typically, when I get an action scene like this, the first step is, I’d say, “We should storyboard this,” because action scenes like this, I think what’s most important is camera angles, what is the scope. I read line by line. I break it down with my producer. We come up with the best methodology. Like Addie is saying, we go into very broad strokes as, “Okay, what is the art department going to be building? What is going to be practical? Do we need blue screen? Are we going to be in a volume?”

**Craig:** I’m going to interrupt you there, because I think some people at home may not know the difference between these things. Both of you describe this fundamental thing that happens when you’re thinking about where you’re shooting something. We have a practical location. We have blue screen. We have the volume. Can you just quickly give a definition for those things?

**Alex:** Absolutely. A practical set is essentially a set that is built practically that we can basically shoot in camera.

**Craig:** You may be in a practical location, which is a place in the world or a set that you built, but then blue screen you will put behind things to allow you later to replace that easily with stuff that wasn’t there, digital stuff.

**Alex:** Yes, that’s correct.

**Craig:** Tell us about the volume though. What’s that about?

**Alex:** The volume is something that is exciting and new. Basically, it is these LED screens where we can project content that is essentially what we would be doing in post early on on the LED screen. We can call it getting that it camera. We could still change it in post if we need to, but the idea is that we’re projecting what we will essentially be doing in post onto the LED screens.

**Craig:** The volume is essentially a room that is a bunch of TV screens that we fill with stuff. For instance, the Mandalorian, very famously, we shot on a volume. They put Pedro in his suit. They stand him on a ground that has some sand. All the stuff around him is actually not really there, nor is it done later with putting stuff into blue screen. It’s actually like rear projection except for much more advanced. You and Addie, the first thing you’re thinking is where are we doing this?

**John:** I want to bring up one other possibility for where we’re doing this, because when we say practical, it could be that you’re building a set for most of this. You’re building a set for the cathedral, maybe up to a certain height we’ll talk about, or in theory, you could be at a real location where you’re actually at a real cathedral, but the one wall that’s supposed to be missing, you’re putting up green screens or you’re somehow planning while you’re shooting this for like, “We’re going to take this wall out and put a virtual background behind that.” That would be a very early production decision, are we building anything, are we going to a practical location, versus this is all green screen or is this all volume.

**Craig:** From this very fundamental thing, is there anything that we as writers should be thinking about when it comes to this big decision of will we be going someplace in the world, will we be building a set, or is this something that has to be created virtually completely, or should we just write stuff and let you guys worry about it?

**John:** Addie, what do you think?

**Addie:** You guys should just write it.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Addie:** There’s just a wealth of professionals out there who can bring all their… People want to bring their skill sets. I think all your department heads really want to jump in and solve all these problems. I don’t even want to refer to them as problems, but they’re exciting problems, challenges to have. Tell the story, man, because Alex and I read scripts all the time. We read so many scripts. It’s a function of our job and picking what job we’re going to do next. We’re super jazzed to get a good script or a script that we’re going to be really excited to make. We bring all the visual effects, production and creative solutions to the table. I think the writers should write story and character.

**Craig:** Good, so one less thing for us to worry about.

**Alex:** I completely agree with Addie there. I think writers should just write the best script they can write. Close your ears, Craig. Visual effects can essentially do everything.

**Craig:** Oh, boy. Yeah, I know.

**Addie:** I would say, if I may-

**Craig:** You may.

**Addie:** Craig is now showrunning a show. In the transition from just writing to showrunning, there will become logistic, financial, and practical conversations about this script and the visual effects process, as it were with all departments.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. It’s a good conversation to have. I think it is true that as you interface more with these departments from a showrunning point of view, you start to learn limitations. One of the conversations that Alex and I have had I think 4 billion times is this: “Hey, Alex?” “Yeah?” “Would it be hard to do this?” Then I watch his face, because he’ll never say, “That’s not possible.” He’ll say, “That should be good,” or, “Okay, yeah, doable. It’s going to be expensive, but we can do it.” Sometimes he’ll be like, “Uh, we could.” That’s when I know that it’s a problem. The nice thing is, as writers we don’t necessarily need to know what’s going to be a problem. I’m sometimes surprised by what’s difficult versus what isn’t. That’s what you guys do.

One of the things that I learned from Alex is, whenever possible, if there’s something practical… When we say practical, we mean something that physically exists. Whenever possible, if there’s something practical to base visual effects off of, let’s get something practical in there.

The best example I can think of is, let’s see, “The altar has been reduced to flaming rubble. Smoke carries singed bible pages.” It’s going to be hard to practically have singed bible pages where we need them in the air. That’s probably going to be digital. It may be very difficult for the rubble to be on fire just the way we want and for the smoke to move exactly where we want it to go. If we could have the special effects department, which those are the crazy guys that light things on fire, including themselves, if we could have them provide real flame there, just some, and maybe a little bit of smoke, just some, then maybe it will look better when the visual effects department comes on in there. Alex, does that sound about right?

**Alex:** Yes.

**Craig:** Tell me why that’s so important.

**Alex:** That is absolutely correct, because it really is important about the tone of the show as well. If it’s grounded and practical and realistic and the fire needs to look like real fire, though we can do a lot, it’s always that the hardest part of visual effects is trying to replicate what is real. It just takes iterations. It takes time, really talented artists to do that. If we have something practical to even reference off of, that just gets us a step ahead.

**Craig:** What do you think, Addie? Is that the method that you guys use as well, or when you were doing it?

**Addie:** Yes, certainly, especially on foundation, we leaned really hard into the practical. It’s definitely a show that has huge swaths of full CG. If we’re blowing up a planet, that’s pretty CG. Practical locations, practical effects, we did miniatures, we did all of it. The producer in the supervisor/producer dynamic is often the voice of no. I’m not going to say no to what Alex said, because I agree completely with him. I would only say the complicating factor is sometimes how much time production has to shoot something. If you had to shoot this scene that we’re talking about in half a day, one day, two days-

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**Addie:** I think Alex and I would be having secret meetings about how some of the other departments are going to struggle in that time frame. We are going to have special effects and stunts and everybody do their thing, but visual effects is going to brace to pick it up, because those departments need a fair amount of time to execute at the highest level. Alex might say something like, “Let’s shoot the special effects, but I would really like to get a clean plate.” That means I’d like to do one pass with no fire, and I would encourage producers and showrunners to let Alex do that.

**Craig:** I’m laughing just because I have heard Alex say, “Okay, and then we also need to get a clean plate,” about a thousand times. For people at home, a clean plate, when we’re shooting things that have… Let’s say we’re shooting this scene here. There’s something that we might want to have be completely CG. For instance, “Goodwin emerges from the debris, flames clinging to his Kevlar vest. One of his eyes is missing, a green light growing in its place.” Lots of ways to do that. Let’s say Goodwin’s body was half-skeleton or something like that, and he was going to be mostly CG. We can take real Goodwin, and we can do the best we can with him with a suit and maybe some green stuff on the suit that would get replaced by other stuff.

We’ll do that, and then Alex will say, “Great. Thank you. Now, just shoot the same thing with no Goodwin at all,” which seems weird. At the time you’re just shooting nothing. That stuff then becomes something where he can put an entirely CG Goodwin in there. That’s called a plate. Anything where we’re shooting something that then we stick something on to, or we’re shooting something that we’re going to stick into something, those are called plates. Yes, I have shot many a clean plate for our friend Alex.

**Alex:** I still thank you for that.

**Craig:** You are welcome. Listen to your VFX people basically is what [inaudible 00:17:08]. If they say they need something, give it to them. They need it.

**John:** Alex, the reasons why you might want that is say you might be inserting a fully CG character, but also you might be trying to paint out some stuff you don’t want there. You might be painting out his arm. There’s lots of good reasons why you might want to have that full plate for a reference to do some specific things, right?

**Alex:** Yeah, absolutely. The clean plate, like you and Craig mentioned, if I need to put in a fully digital good one, that’s helpful, but also just if I need to replace his arm where there’s a green portion on his arm or part of his head, and you might see his endoskeleton or something like that, what a clean plate allows is just something back there to help us paint back the background.

**Craig:** A clean plate is the visual equivalent of room tone for the audio guys. There’s a space here where we need the sound of a room without anybody talking. Sometimes you need that clean plate where there’s the space where nothing happened. One of the things Addie’s touching on here which is important to understand, I think, for us when we’re writing is that there are lots of levels of production capacity, and they’re all dependent on budget. Budget will not only drive the things that you can do in post, but they also drive how much time you have to shoot when you’re in principal photography. That amount of time definitely affects how you can go about doing the job of these VFX shots, which will start to head into the thousands when you’re doing a big show.

When you’re writing stuff, we have a general sense of, okay, we’re writing something that’s going to cost $10 million, we’re writing something that’s going to cost 40, we’re writing something that’s going to cost 200. Just be aware that if you’re writing something small, when you write anything that is not something you can shoot without visual effects people, it’s good to at least have a sense that you’re doing something that’s within the realm of reality. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with something rather disappointing like Birdemic.

**John:** Yes, or you may be making aesthetic choices at the very outset for what your effects are going to feel like. You just have to have a plan going into it. No matter what scale of scene you’re shooting, whether it’s a $10 million scene or a $100 scene, you have to go into it knowing what am I actually going to be able to do in visual effects afterwards, whether it’s something you’re doing in after-effects or you’re doing it on a huge, huge scale. Let’s just walk through the scene. Line 3, “Oona gets to her feet, badly hurt but alive. She retrieves the eldenspear. She knows the fight’s not over.”

**Craig:** Eldenspear.

**John:** Two questions for you guys. First off, let’s talk about Oona. She’s badly hurt but alive. A discussion about how much of her being badly hurt is hair and makeup versus how much of her being badly hurt is visual effects. Can you talk us through wounds on a visual effects level? Addie, you want to start us off with that?

**Addie:** Yes. Sorry, I’m so used to waiting for the supervisor to speak first. It’s like, I’ll let the supervisor go first, and then I’ll fix what he says. That’s how that works.

**Alex:** I was waiting for John to tell one of us to start.

**Addie:** “Oona gets to her feet, badly hurt but alive.” At least in the pre-production phase, I definitely flagged that as something to keep an eye on. Frequently, I would just make a note to plan for what I would call makeup effects assistance. I would probably assume that makeup effects is going to do the bulk of it, and we’re going to shoot with makeup effects, and then in post-production, visual effects might be called upon to augment it. There is a trick called heal and reveal, where we paint out the makeup, and then after the wound occurs, we reveal it again, and then we live with makeup effects for the rest of the scene.

**John:** I like that.

**Addie:** There might be squirting blood, and so we might remove a blood tube. If there is liquids involved, pus, blood, frequently those become continuity issues. We don’t usually want to stop filming to fix them, because it takes way too long. You might shoot a whole scene, and then by the time you get into the edit, you’ll say, “The blood’s all in the wrong spots. Let’s take it out in some spots and put it in other spots so that this looks even passingly realistic,” unless of course we have blown a leg off. Then that’s a much bigger visual effects process that makeup effects is not going to handle.

**Craig:** “Oona hops to her foot, badly hurt but alive.”

**Alex:** Just to really talk about the badly hurt part as well, I think just being as descriptive as possible really helps Addie and I understand how much… Is half of her face scarred? Is there a lot of blood? Just a few more descriptive words would really help us there.

**Craig:** In fact, this is where you’ll find out as a writer who maybe has been misled to believe that you shouldn’t be directing on the page, because you didn’t listen to us. When you get to a production meeting, there are going to be 4 billion questions. You want to try and limit when you get to those meetings to 4 million questions, because there will be 4 million no matter what. Once you get into the billions, you get really exhausted. If you do say things like “badly hurt but alive,” you’re going to get grilled by everybody. Getting some details in there will at least help the discussion along a bit further, so that Addie and Alex, maybe they can just relax, because “badly hurt” is just going to be blood. Alex, I think we’ve had… I try and avoid spoilers as much as possible, but people do get hurt in The Last of Us. That does occur.

**John:** Oh no, Craig, really?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I thought it was a comedy though.

**Craig:** I’m going to give that one away. It’s a comedy of errors. We do a lot obviously with makeup, but there are times where there are certain wounds where we can’t do it with makeup. Sometimes we use prosthetics, which help quite a bit. I think Addie’s brought up the crucial thing, which is continuity. The blood can change. Also, wounds are not static. You’ll notice that on a lot of things we watch in movies and television, somebody gets really hurt, and they’re just not bleeding, they’re just bloody. People bleed. How much do we want to make that wound active? These things are complicated. Hopefully the eldenspear has been described earlier in your script, John.

**John:** I really hope so too. It really is a question for the writer, who we’ll pretend is not me, and the director and everyone else involved in the project, that like, okay, does the eldenspear glow by itself? Is it like Wonder Woman’s magic lasso, or is it just a spear? Is it simply a prop, or is it a visual effects component to eldenspear from the very start, is something we need to know. Probably three pages earlier we may have found out that the eldenspear glows all the time. Alex, from your perspective, what is the difference between something that’s just fully a prop versus something that is also a visual effect?

**Alex:** If the prop is relatively static and there’s not much movement to it or there’s not a lot of say magic elements, supernatural elements to it, it should be a prop. We can do a lot on top of it if we need to add a glow, a subtle glow, or have some of those elements. If say the eldenspear has to transform in a way that can’t be done practically, and it constantly does that, then it’s a whole different conversation of, okay, maybe the spear should just be a green spear, so we can replace it later and have it do all those things. If it doesn’t, it’s a place where I would say we should save that money and just make the best practical eldenspear that everyone’s happy with and just get in camera.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Again, it seems like time is maybe the most precious of all resources, even more so perhaps than money, because if you have time, then the props folks can do some R and D and maybe build something great, but if you don’t, then you don’t. In ongoing series, and Addie, you’ve worked on some of those, there may be a situation where scripts are coming in late, and suddenly you need to have an eldenspear tomorrow. At that point, do you just put a green stick in their hand and figure it out later?

**Addie:** Yes, definitely I have done that. A funny classic one is photos in frames or newspaper props where somebody… Especially on a broadcast schedule or a broadcast show, you’ll get a script, and you’ll be shooting in five days, and you need all these photos from a family’s backstory. We put little green squares into a picture frame, and we make it later and stick it in in post-production. It’s a silly thing, because of course you could make that practically, but you just don’t have time, or production and design does not have time.

**John:** Production also sometimes gives you the dumbest looking Photoshops. So bad.

**Addie:** Sometimes you’re going to plus it up a little bit later on.

**Craig:** Plus it up.

**Addie:** I think to your point, I would say time is radically the most important factor in visual effects. It is for many, many of the departments. Visual effects can be such an expensive process. It’s sometimes confusing on even why it’s so expensive. Visual effects budgets on shows are tens of millions, hundreds of millions on feature films. The real component is time. What the money in visual effects is paying for is man hours, because many visual effects could take 20 different people. They could take 20 different people working sequentially over 6 months. You’re paying incredibly highly trained, skilled specialists to do creative bespoke work. Sometimes you can dump all the money in the world on that.

If we do not have enough time to design it, you want to iterate on it so that you can find what you really want it to look like as the director, showrunner. Then you got to stack 16 specialists on top of each other in a time frame, and you’re paying for computer hardware. It’s a complicated process. You’re paying for highly trained specialists to work many, many, many hours together to design something that’s probably never been made before. If you have 6 weeks to do that or you have 6 months to do that or you have 18 months to do that, the capabilities will be different, and the end result will be different.

**John:** I have a question about Line 4. “With one wall taken out by the missile strike, it’s incredible the whole building hasn’t collapsed.” Let’s assume that there’s either a practical that we are green screening off a wall, blue screening off a wall, or we’re building this a set, maybe set extending at the ceilings. The point is that we are able to look outside of this cathedral, outside this interior space into an exterior space, which could be a mountain valley. It could be a dystopia. My question for you is how much does that background need to be a 3D background, or could that just be a 2D background that’s painted in there? Do we need to send a crew to film what that’s going to look like out there, or is that something that we would do just pulling assets that already exist someplace else? What are you thinking about in terms of that background outside of the church?

**Alex:** I definitely know a thing or two about collapsed buildings.

**Craig:** What? Another spoiler.

**Alex:** I will say that at least if the actors are interacting or walking through this collapsed building, I would say I always would like to have a portion of that build, even if it’s just up to 12 feet. Then we can have blue screen. Obviously, going out and finding a plate of that is near impossible, so that will be all digital in my eyes. As far as 3D or DMP, it really depends on the camera, what the camera is doing. If it’s relatively static, we’re behind the actor, and it’s just an establishing shot, it could be what we call a DMP, which is digital map painting, or if the camera travels through that environment, then it has to be a 3D environment.

**John:** When you add a 3 in front of something, it becomes much more expensive.

**Alex:** Not necessarily. DMPs can be expensive too. I would say it comes down to what the camera move will be, what kind of a shot is it.

**John:** That’s a discussion with the director. You have to be deeper into planning and probably storyboards for you to know what those shots are going to be which would influence what we’re seeing outside of the cathedral.

**Craig:** In the case of television where you have a showrunner that is often not the director, then the visual effects supervisor needs to basically talk to the showrunner, and then the showrunner has to explain to the director why they can’t do something or why they should do it differently or what the limitations are, because we always have some limitations. I want to talk a little bit about this notion of movement and set extension.

In a very simple way of thinking about it for those of you playing the home game, when somebody is moving in front of something, if we want to replace the thing that is behind them when they’re moving, it’s hard, because every frame we have to basically cut our people out and then replace the background. God help us if they have a lot of hair that’s… If you’ve got Natasha Lyonne in there, oh no, you have to rotoscope Natasha Lyonne’s hair. That’s a nightmare. She has the best hair.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** For those situations, we try and put people in front of something that’s blue or green, because a computer can basically say everything that’s blue gets replaced, and everything that’s not blue, we keep. It gets much, much easier. Set extensions, what we’ll do is, okay, we’ve got somebody moving, and we want something practical behind them, so we will build enough behind them to cover where they’re moving. Where they’re not moving, it’s easy to replace that. That we can just throw blue on. The idea is to try as much as you can, unless you’re a certain kind of show or the environment is impossible to build, to try and make stuff real where people are.

For instance, in Chernobyl, there’s a shot where we see the firefighters marching up this hill of debris towards this reactor building. We couldn’t build an entire reactor building, but we definitely built that mountain of debris. You could see where the firefighters are moving even as they’re climbing up this thing. That’s all really there. Then everything beyond that, Alex and Addie come in and replace that with, like you said, a digital map painting, or in certain… I actually don’t know if I have one where it’s been a 3D environment back there. Do we have one, Alex?

**Alex:** Oh yeah, we definitely…

**Craig:** Shows you what I know.

**Alex:** Sometimes it’s just easier. Digital map paintings come in when you have to pull reference, whether it’s mixed photography. If it’s an environment that really 100% just doesn’t exist, it’s built.

**Craig:** Got it. Oh yeah, we do have that. I’m paying attention. I promise.

**John:** When you’re saying a built environment, is it on a real engine where you’re actually rebuilding 3D assets and creating a space? Is that the idea?

**Alex:** Very much like that. We have so many different types of software to do that. Essentially, it is that.

**John:** We talk about set extensions. I would imagine that this cathedral probably is a set extension beyond a certain point, because we have these high walls, the ceiling. On Line 8, “Oona gives a thunderous war cry, so powerful it shatters the remaining stained glass windows. Prismatic shards of glass rain down.” Those stained glass windows feel like a visual effect to me. Maybe there’s something. Maybe it’s the reason why you’re doing models or something else or shattering some real things to capture that. I have a question about what is raining down on our actors there. Is anything raining down there? Is this the time where we do some colored rubber glass? What are the things you’re thinking about as you read Line 8, Addie?

**Addie:** Line 8 with the shattering glass, so my gut is most likely this is potentially fully 3D, especially Alex had mentioned that maybe you would build a set up to 12 feet, which in that instance you’re aiming to build a set that goes above the actors’ heads so that you can cover the actors, maybe with a practical set. You only see above their heads in the wider shot. It keeps your shot count down. It gives the actors something practical to play against. If the stained glass is way up in the high part of the cathedral, which I think in a cathedral design it probably is, that is likely going to be fully CG, but you could rain what we call candy glass down on the actors to give them something to interface with. Probably a mix of visual effects and practical.

**John:** Even if you put the candy glass down on them, you would probably supplement it with additional stuff, just to give extra little bits of texture and something for them to react to.

**Addie:** Again, trying to read the movie in my head on the page, I’m also picturing a dramatic shot of the glass exploding into the camera, which will probably be heavily digital. Then maybe just the shards on the actor are practical. It seems like a very dramatic cinematic moment, where you might want to really art direct the glass performance.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Glass performance, I love that.

**John:** We talked a little bit about Goodwin. “Goodwin’s emerging from the debris, flames clinging to his Kevlar vest. One of his eyes is missing, a green light glowing in its place.” We’re assuming that this is a real actor. We’ve seen him as a human being for most of this. He’s wearing a Kevlar vest, so he’s some sort of law enforcement person maybe. The flames clinging to his Kevlar vest, am I right to assume that those are all going to be digitally added? Would you put any LEDs in there to create light on the actor? What are some things we’re thinking about with Goodwin emerging from this debris?

**Alex:** I would say that the debris should be practical if possible. Maybe we can add some debris on top of it or dust or something like that. The Kevlar vest, I would say it should be digital fire. Because it’s broad daylight, I don’t think I’ll need much LED lights or interactive lights. Only if it was nighttime, that would be helpful. In this case, I will say that that is not necessary. As far as the damage to him, we did a very similar thing on Terminator with Arnold’s character. There was explosion that happens. Basically, post-explosion, half of his face is missing, revealing his endoskeleton, and his arm is revealing the endoskeleton as well. Basically, we just had prosthetics do the burned skin portion, and then the other half would be… On the set, I think we had gray as opposed to blue, but some color of gray or green or blue for replacing that to be a digital endoskeleton.

**John:** Great. On his face, where they have this digital eye, does he have makeup dots on there so you can track where the eye needs to go?

**Alex:** Yeah, that would be really helpful. We have tracking markers, but we also have what is called witness cameras for helping, because sometimes if we have a long lens, it’s difficult to understand the position of the actor’s body. We position witness cameras around, which is going to be a relatively wide lens. It helps when we’re essentially tracking. If you think about if somebody’s on a ground getting up, we essentially will track where his body position is, in 3D. If we just have one camera doing that, that can be rather challenging or difficult, time-consuming. Like Addie said, time is the most important thing. Really when I’m on set, I’m trying to get as much data as possible that just buys me more time in post. Witness cameras, I’ll try to place them around the actor. Generally it’s opposite sides of where the main camera is to help me track the body.

**Craig:** That’s what those things were doing.

**John:** Alex, those cameras, those are synced to each take, so you can actually know on this frame, this is the same frame from this different perspective?

**Alex:** In an ideal world, for example on Terminator, we had A, B, and C camera. Generally if A camera’s rolling, then B and C, which is already synced, those can be our witness cameras. Otherwise, we have a poor man’s version, which is we just have our own visual effects cameras or consumer cameras. We just shine a little red light actually. The red light helps us when we’re looking at the take. Okay, we can sync our cameras to this. It’s like a poor man’s version.

**John:** What you’re saying is every little bit you can get helps, even if it’s just-

**Alex:** Absolutely.

**John:** … reference for things down the road so you get to feel what’s possible there.

**Craig:** It’s so much data being captured. It’s amazing how much data is being captured in a process that used to have no data. When you and I started, John, there was just film.

**John:** There was film, and we had a script supervisor who was taking pencil notes on paper about what happened.

**Craig:** That’s data, but I’m talking about digital data. There was zero digital data, and now there’s a gazillion bits of digital data, not only from the cameras that are capturing the actual footage that you see on film, but then there are these witness cameras. Then they’re scanning. Addie and Alex are making sure that characters that they may need to replace digitally, so for instance in this I would imagine Goodwin would be scanned for sure. They stand in a little cage built of a thousand cameras. Then they all just take pictures so that they have a fully digital 3D capture of this person. We had a van that did that. What would we call that thing? Was it a trailer, a scanning trailer? We also had a little portable scanning thing that we could set up. It was pretty amazing.

**Alex:** We had a scanning booth.

**Craig:** A booth.

**Alex:** It was a booth to scan our actors, our talent. What you saw was probably a Lidar scanner, which basically just helps us scan the set, the environment.

**John:** Now Addie, let’s talk about scanning an actor, because I’m sure your principals for foundation would have to be scanned, because sometimes you just have to replace them. Are you scanning them in their full wardrobe, or are you scanning them just bare so you can put wardrobe on them? What’s important for you on a scan?

**Addie:** It varies by project. On foundation, we scanned actors both in modesty dress and also in each individual costume that had to be recreated. I think an optimal scenario is as many scans as you can possibly get. That might be as naked as possible within the realms of everyone’s comfort level. It could be in 20 different costumes if each of those costumes needs to be used for something. We scanned extras in costumes, because we were filming during COVID, and we were creating digital doubles to populate large crowd scenes, because we were limited on how many extras we could have at each location for safety protocols. I would say both skivvies and costumes is ideal. A lot of times, that takes up too much time. As we’re saying, it takes too much time for the actors. It takes too much time on the day.

For this scene, you would probably ideally want to scan Goodwin in his costume and with his shirt off potentially so you could get his arm skin. The scan itself is getting thousands of mathematical data points. You can make a geo map of his body. You can recreate him as a digital asset. The costumes are good for that. You’re getting costume texture. Fabric is down into the minutiae of visual effects. Production fabric is a complicated thing to create. In a perfect scenario, we would scan him in his costume, but maybe we wouldn’t need to send that fabric or recreate that fabric. You could just get down to his bare skin, and then he peels his skin off and you reveal a digital robot underneath that.

**John:** That’s great. Let’s talk about this shot, 7. “He sloughs the flesh off his left arm, revealing a metal skeleton beneath.” I’m envisioning this as not necessarily a locked-off shot, but we’re close in on seeing this thing and this sliding off. To what degree are we talking about Rick Backer practical visual effects versus this being a digital thing? What are the decisions there?

**Alex:** I think I would do it digital, to be honest, just with the interaction. I would just have the actor give the best performance he can, as if he’s really trying to slide off his skin, so it doesn’t feel like it’s just such an easy thing to do. I think many times I always say just give me the best performance and it’ll make our lives a lot easier when it comes to something like this, because if you can really sell him trying to tear his skin off his arm and revealing what is underneath, I think that will actually make our lives easier.

**Craig:** From a production standpoint, if we had something practical there, which you could do, and which is the only option that existed prior to all this, the resets eat up your day. You need to do takes two, three, four, five, six, and you’re peeling something off that is a one-use thing because it’s getting peeled off. They peeled it off. Now you got to take 30, 40 minutes to get it back on again with the… They have to make multiples of it. Then you get to shoot it again. You could spend all morning and get three takes of this. Now you just have them act, and you can get 9 takes in 30 minutes and find the one later that you want. Again, time is the most precious resource, and it’s the one we’re constantly fighting.

There were circumstances on The Last of Us where because we were in Calgary, in Alberta, which is very north, we always seem to be shooting at the wrong time of year. We would shoot night in the summer, and we would shoot day in the winter. Things go very fast there. We were shooting some night scenes where we really only had about five hours of darkness maximum. In those circumstances, you have to do things like this digitally. Then the idea is to plan ahead and make sure that we give the actor what they need. That means talking to them as well, so that they understand what’s expected of them, and they don’t just get there on the day and go, “Wait, how are we doing this?” They need to know.

**John:** Let’s wrap up this conversation of this scene, talking about the stunt here. In Line 9, “Goodwin charges. Oona makes an acrobatic spring off a pew, leaping to drive her spear right through Goodwin. He’s impaled like a martini olive.” Addie, talk us through what parts of this enter into your department?

**Addie:** Line 9, “Oona makes an acrobatic spring off a pew, leaping to drive her spear,” that’s probably wire work. We are going to look at are we shooting this on a blue stage. What is she wearing, because she will have a bunch of safety harnesses. There will be a wire rig to allow her to perform this. Her costume and how the rig interacts with her costume can be easier or harder, although the first priority is and should be actor safety.

There’s been a few things I think in this conversation, like the fire on a Kevlar vest. Visual effects can pick up a lot of work to make sure that the actors and the camera department are safe, which should I think not get lost in the visual effects conversation. We want to make sure she’s as safe as possible, even if that is more difficult for visual effects, because digital work is very safe. She is going to leap to drive her spear right through Goodwin, so she’s probably going to be holding a practical spear that might not have a sharp tip on it. In post-production, we might add a sharp tip. That is mostly again for actor safety, because we don’t really want anybody interacting with swords.

**John:** Would the spear she’s holding be half the length so that as she drives it, assuming this is in a shot rather than multiple shots, so that she can hit him and we can imagine it went through him? Are what point are you making those decisions?

**Addie:** I think we would make those decisions with art department and stunts all together. The departments really have to collaborate to make this stuff go smoothly. She’s probably holding the spear handle, and it has no blade on it. Maybe that handle is built as big as it needs to go, up to his chest. She could drive a safe, blunt object all the way up to his chest, exactly how we want it to look in the end. Then visual effects can add gleaming metal, dangerous blade on it for the full leap. We can do digital blade piercing through him like a martini olive.

**Craig:** The other option is that maybe we’re doing this with stunt actors only, where we can use a full spear, and maybe the other stunt actor’s wearing a protective vest underneath the costume. It looks like they really are getting stabbed. Then we face replace. Oh, face replace.

**John:** Exciting.

**Addie:** Face replace, yep.

**Craig:** Face replace.

**Alex:** That is Addie and I’s nightmare.

**Craig:** Face replace.

**Addie:** You’ll notice Alex and I did not volunteer face replace once.

**Craig:** That’s right, but I’m always like, “What about face replace?” We don’t do much face replacing, but there’s a couple moments where there is a face replace. We do try and avoid it, because it is hard and takes up a lot of resources. It’s hard to do well I think is the biggest issue.

**John:** Addie and Alex though, is face replacement one of those things 10 years from now will be easier, cheaper, and better?

**Alex:** I think so. I think we’re definitely going with AI these days. Just the deep fake technology is really changing the way visual effects handles face replacement. Ten years ago we would have to do a very high-res scan of our actor’s face. We would have to create a digital asset that is photo reel of our actor’s face. That’s very difficult. Until this day I have to say I haven’t seen a single face replacement through that way of creating a digital face that is very convincing. However, the AI deep fake sort of technology, it really is just building an image library in a very thoughtful way of what is the actor’s emotion and why it looks convincing, because it is that person. It is that actor. It’s just pulling those images and blending them together.

**John:** I didn’t want to get through your segment without talking about you seemed to repose that maybe Shot 9 doesn’t take place in the same space as the rest of the scene would take place. Is there an argument for taking this one stunt and taking it out of this cathedral where we’re doing everything else and doing it in a different space?

**Addie:** Yeah, I think potentially. It can go both back to the issues of speed and safety. Let’s say hypothetically we were shooting this at a practical location in a cathedral that was partially destroyed, which would be excellent and would probably make for an excellent scene. It might be nearly impossible for stunts and camera to execute a safe set of wire work stunts like this out in a field, because you might need ceiling rigging and crash pads and all kind of things to make sure that nobody gets hurt.

You would want to control the lighting scenario very intensely, which might be impossible in a daylight location. You could pull a stunt like this onto a blue stage or a green stage, for example. We would shoot the actors in the stunts completely against blue, ideally key out the blue screen and put in the practical environment in the background. I am wandering into supervisor territory there, so I think Alex could speak to that more. You’re probably only going to perform that a couple of times, because like Craig said, the resets are very difficult. You don’t want to burn daylight. You don’t want to drag all your rigging equipment out into Notre Dame, Paris, because the logistics of that are completely insane. We put it in a controlled environment. It’s safer. It’s faster. Then Alex, you could probably elaborate on how all those elements go together into final shots.

**Alex:** The one thing I will say about the acrobatic spring-off is I think that is when I will walk over to showrunner or director and ask for a creative explanation of what the acrobatic spring-off looks like. If it’s something that is not humanly possible, then I’ll say, “Okay, then there’ll be a digital takeover. We’ll have to shoot it in a way where we can’t take it over.” I think that’s definitely something that I have to consider earlier on as well.

**John:** I want to wrap up this conversations with some things I couldn’t cram into this one scene, which is crowds, because Addie, you’ve mentioned on foundation, because you’re shooting this during COVID, sometimes you needed to populate things with more people than you were allowed to have in a space. Even things like filling up an auditorium with people or a mob of villagers storming something, can you talk us through… Maybe, Alex, you could start with talking us through how we create groups of people as opposed to an individual character.

**Alex:** With crowds, I always try to shoot plates if I can, just because it’s cheaper and it looks better. It gets us there faster. If I can shoot plates, then I will. However, if I cannot, then it goes into digital crowds, and I need to create these digital assets of these crowd members. We call them crowd agents. Depending on what they need to do, if they’re just doing a cycle of cheering up and down, that’s definitely the simpler route to go. However, if they have to interact and react to certain things, that’s only software that’s smart enough to know what to do with that. That obviously takes more time, and it’s more expensive.

**John:** As we wrap up, let’s say we have listeners who are hearing you guys talk about this, and they say, “You know what? This is the kind of job I really want to do. This is a thing I aspire to.” What should that listener do next? Let’s say this was a college student who’s really interested in this. What are the next steps for that person? Addie, what would you say? What advice would you give?

**Addie:** I have to think about this. It’s a valid question, because there’s quite a lot of discussion about the lack of diversity in the visual effects space, so how to get one’s foot in the door is a good question. For me personally, I started as a production assistant in independent film.

**John:** Great.

**Addie:** I think that having some boots on the ground experience on a film set is incredibly important for anybody going into any department. I think the strongest visual effects supervisors, producers, artists, coordinators, are fluent in filmmaking in general. I think having a basis in filmmaking and storytelling is actually more important than the technical, because the technical can be learned, but it’s really integral to know how the whole thing goes together before you start talking about the technical. I would say get a production assistant job, see how the whole thing works.

**John:** Alex, what would your advice be for someone who wants to start a career in visual effects?

**Alex:** I think there’s definitely a wealth of knowledge on the internet right now for visual effects, just listening to visual effects supervisors talk to there are podcasts out there. There are tutorials out there. I think there’s just so much that a young artist can grab, that I wish I had when I was starting out. The other thing I would say is be a master at your craft. Be passionate. It is a hard job. It takes a lot of hours, takes a lot of effort. You have to be really dedicated and passionate about it.

**John:** Great. Craig, any last questions for our team here?

**Craig:** No, I think you guys covered it well. I just want to thank you both for coming on, because most writers simply don’t know about this stuff. The most important part I think of this discussion was hearing from both of you about how important the script is and how closely you read it. In television where the writers are in charge, this makes sense. In movies where the writers aren’t, this is part of the tragedy that the script is being read so carefully, and oftentimes in the absence of the writer themselves, who’s just not there. You have to ask the person who didn’t write it what it meant. Again, the way movies do it, stupid. The way television does it, correct.

I think I really connect with what Addie’s saying, that so much of what makes somebody good at this, and I can certainly confirm that this is the case with Alex, is how carefully they interrogate the screenplay and how much they care about the point, which is the story, the characters, the relationship, the tone, and the feeling you want to create in an audience, and not so much about the ones and zeros. Those are just tools like everything else.

**John:** Addie, Alex, thank you so, so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Addie:** Thank you.

**Alex:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Now get off our show.

**John:** Craig, that was a great conversation. Now it’s time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Craig:** I do have a One Cool Thing, and it’s directly related to my friend Alex Wang, who we were just speaking with. When we are reviewing visual effects shots, oftentimes we are discussing certain details inside the frame. We’re showing this on a television, or when we’re into our later final reviews, it’s being projected on a screen. We can’t walk right up to the screen or the television and start tapping on it with our fingers. That’s not going to work very well. The convention is to use laser pointers. We have all sorts of laser pointers over here. I like the green ones, personally.

**John:** Aren’t they really dangerous? I’ve always heard that green ones are dangerous.

**Craig:** They’re all dangerous. They’re all dangerous. Don’t shine a laser pointer in your eye. They’re all dangerous if you shine them in your eye. I like the green ones, because they’re really easy to see, especially against the typical colors of a frame. It’s rare that you have bright green in a frame, which is why, for instance, green screen exists. All the laser pointers we have are weak. I went and I got one on Amazon that I love. It’s $22.

**John:** That’s not much.

**Craig:** No. It’s called the Solid Craft High-Powered Green Laser, Tactical Long-Range Laser, Rechargeable Laser Single Press On/Off, Adjustable Focus Hunting Rifle Scope with Carrying Case. I love the way that they’ve just gamed the system now so the product name is just a bunch of tags. Anyway, it’s really good. It’s incredibly bright. Do not shine it anywhere near your eye or anyone else’s. It’s got a nice [inaudible 00:56:23].

**John:** Or on a plane.

**Craig:** Certainly not at a plane or the sky or anything like that. I’m so delighted with this thing that the visual effects department here in our post-production office has taken to calling it Excalibur. My Excalibur laser is my One Cool Thing.

**John:** I love it. My One Cool Thing this week is a Substack post by Gurwinder Bhogal called The Perils of Audience Capture: How Influencers Became Brainwashed by Their Audiences. What I really liked about it is he’s talking through how we always think about how influencers are influencing the people who are watching their videos or listening to them. This really is a case of a classic behaviorism, where these influencers are being rewarded for the kinds of things that their audiences like. They become more and more like that. They fall into a trap of just doing the same thing to more extreme levels.

It talks through Nicholas Perry, who started out as this vegan YouTuber but became successful with his eating videos, and now he’s 400 pounds. I think this is a really interesting study in how to think about the feedback loops that are natural and probably good in societies that are about 100 people large but really fall apart on the internet, where you’re getting feedback from people you don’t know, who for reasons you don’t know why they’re wanting to do certain things.

**Craig:** This is an example of the internet amplifying something that has always been part of human nature. That is the way that we respond to feedback. We love applause. We seek approval from the people around us, which in part is correct. That’s part of socialization is making sure that you can read the room and see what might not be working and see what is working. We all then preserve part of ourselves to be resistant to that, because we don’t want to just be the person that changes ourselves for what people want. That’s when we’re dealing with a room. The room on the internet is millions of people. If you don’t have much of an identity or you don’t have much of a presence of approval in your life, and suddenly you have 6 million people loving something that you do, that’s a drug that you’ll become very quickly addicted to. This is very sad to see, for instance, this guy essentially trading his physical health for love, or at least what he perceives as love.

**John:** We’ve always had people who changed themselves because they’ve come into the spotlight. We have A Face in the Crowd or All About Eve. We have these stories of how fame changes a person. The fact that everyone can be a little bit famous now is really part of the problem and is really the danger. Everyone wants to be a little bit famous right now. I think it makes it really hard for someone who’s growing up on the internet to really have this sense of who they are independently of people looking at them on the internet. It’s a real challenge.

**Craig:** It’s tricky. My daughter had some internet popularity. She writes songs, and she sings and performs them. There was a song that she wrote that was based on this fairly popular series of stories on Wattpad, which we’ve discussed before. By popular stories on Wattpad, millions of people read it. She wrote a song that was based on it, and it blew up on the TikToks and so forth. She made money, and she got a lot of attention. I remember at some point she said, “I’ve noticed that I’m now chasing that, and I need to stop.” She actually said it. She said, “I think what’s happened is I’m now trying to write a song that will make the people that like this song as happy as they were when they heard this song, and I’m not going to do that now.” She noticed it. She felt it. I was very proud of her, because I think a lot of adults really struggle with that.

What it comes down to is something that Dennis Palumbo said to me once, he of Episode 99, our favorite therapist. He said, “Many people, perhaps most people, get into the entertainment business because they are seeking approval that they otherwise did not get in their childhood.” That is a very dangerous situation, because if you don’t have a baseline of self-esteem, then this becomes your only engine for approval and meaning. That’s terrible, because what the audience will do is ruin you. A wonderful story by Kafka called The Hunger Artist, which is the opposite of the story that we see here of Nicholas Perry, pretty remarkable stuff.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. The outro this week is by Aguilera. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send larger questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. If you want to download the scene that we talked through, that’s where you’ll find it. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can get them at Cotton Bureau. We have transcripts that come up every week for our show and a weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find that at johnaugust.com. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on friends. Craig and Megana, as my friends, thank you very much for the fun show.

**Megana Rao:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, our bonus topic was suggested by a listener. Do you want to read the listener question?

**Megana:** Yes. Jacob wrote in and said, “As I hit my mid-30s, I fear I am starting to follow in my father’s footsteps. Is it normal for men to have fewer and fewer friends as we get older? As a kid, I always felt bad for my dad, but now I kind of get it. If you’re going to be a good dad and a good husband, how many friends can you really have? Any advice on that balance in keeping/making friends as we get older?”

**John:** Such a smart question, Jacob.

**Craig:** What strikes me immediately is how gendered the question is, because there is a presumption here that if you’re going to be a good dad and a good husband, it’s really hard to have friends, but there’s no question that being a good mother and a good wife is incompatible with having lots of friends. I do think this is something that happens to men. Is it normal? It’s common. Is it good? No. Is it necessary? No. Is having lots of friends incompatible with being a good dad and a good husband? No. I do think I have a lot of friends. John, I think you have a lot of friends.

**John:** I have a lot of friends, yeah.

**Craig:** Let’s see if we can give some advice, particularly for men, since this does seem like a gender-oriented thing, but hopefully some women will take some value from this as well, on how to keep and make friends as we get older. John, what do you think?

**John:** I’m going to start doing a very John August thing, which is trying to define our terms.

**Craig:** Oh, classic. “What is I?”

**John:** “What is friend? Explain friend.”

**Craig:** “Friend equals one.”

**John:** I want to be able to distinguish between colleagues and friends, because I think men will still have a lot of colleagues, people you work with or people you know through different places, but they won’t necessarily be friends. I would say a friend to me is somebody you can call with a personal problem or a thing going on in your life or just to hang out and have a good time, which is different than a work colleague. I might chitchat a bit with a work colleague, but I’m not going to go deep on things. Sometimes you can make friends out of your work colleagues, which is fantastic, but you need to find someplace that you have friendships that are outside of your work environment.

I’m friends with all the folks who have worked with me at Quote Unquote, which is great. I see them outside of the work environment. If those were my only source of friends, that would not be ideal. My other friends are my D and D group. We play D and D every week. That’s a group of friends. While we’re mostly talking about this endless dungeon that Craig is dragging us through-

**Craig:** It does have an end.

**John:** We’ll reach Hallister eventually. Is a chance to have a social situation that is not about work or family or anything else.

**Craig:** I understand, especially for a lot of men who are not socialized to share feelings and to process their emotions and their feelings through talking, that maybe the idea of friends gets tougher. I want to point out that we all as boys had friends. That was a thing we had. We deserve friends. Friends are wonderful, and they’re essential. Part of what I think might help men is a friendship that has something in the middle of it, an activity.

**John:** Bowling.

**Craig:** Anything, really. If you have bowling, Dungeons and Dragons, fishing, whatever it is, we generally… Do men have book club? No.

**John:** Could they? Should they? Absolutely.

**Craig:** Could they? Yes. Should they? I don’t say should. If they love it, yes. I know from my wife, what book club often becomes is talk club. For some men, that’s hard. Talk club is hard, particularly for men that are struggling to have friends. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that they probably aren’t big into the talk club vibe. An activity that you can all agree on that you love is essential I think. It helps bring people together. A hobby-based group is a good thing, finding something like that. If you are married, you may absolutely loathe the following sentence, which I’ve heard a number of times. “My friend so-and-so would love for us to get together with her husband and go out to dinner.” You may go, “Oh, no.” Give it a shot, unless you already have-

**John:** Give it a shot.

**Craig:** If you have a lot of friends, then you can say no, which I do all the time. I’m full up on friends. If you don’t, you never know, because what happens is sometimes couples interaction helps you find friends. You may then get invited to a party, and you might start chatting with somebody. If you’re a guy and you meet another guy at a party that you like, or by the way, it doesn’t all have to be gendered friends, or a woman that you’d be friends with, pursue it. Pursue it.

**John:** That’s the thing is people are I think afraid to pursue friendships after a certain point, because in college it was easy, because you were just around people, and you could strike up conversations. You all had a thing in common, because you were all going to the same school. You have a little less now. Post-pandemic, Mike and I very deliberately tried to make some new friends, because we recognized that so many of the friends we made over the last 10 years were couple friends, parents of other kids at Amy’s schools. That was great while we had that shared interest. Our kids are at the same school. During the pandemic, we weren’t seeing those people. They all fell out of touch. We didn’t care about a lot of them. We weren’t going to get back in touch. We had literally nothing in common other than our kids went to the same school. Mike and I have been trying to make some new friends. Literally, just in line at Outfest, we started talking to the couple in front of us, and we went out to dinner with them, and they’re now friends.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Craig, I think I’m going to scare you here, but you have to state it, then manifest it.

**Craig:** Wow. You may have to state it and manifest. You have to be the change you want to see in the world. That means, by the way, that you have to risk rejection of a kind. When you are pursuing friendships, keep your antenna up for resistance and reluctance, because that means those people don’t want to be friends with you, and that’s okay. You don’t want to be thirsty, as the kids say. You don’t want to be desperate. Just stay open to it. I would say, Jacob, you’re in your mid-30s. Don’t follow in your father’s footsteps. My dad, who he’s been dead for, I don’t know, a couple years now, he didn’t have friends.

**John:** My dad didn’t either.

**Craig:** None. My dad lived way longer than your dad. My dad didn’t have friends for decades. For decades. That’s not good. I used to worry about it. Then I realized, why am I worrying about this? This is not my problem. I can’t fix this for him.

**John:** For your own kid, model good behavior.

**Craig:** That’s right. Exactly.

**John:** Make some friends. Take a chance.

**Craig:** It’s actually part of being a good dad is showing your kid that you have friends and that you’re not just the guy at home that’s a lump on the coach. By the way, I don’t know if you’re married to a man or a woman, but whoever your spouse is, give them a break by going and having your own friends. Otherwise, you’re like, “I don’t know. You’re going out. I’m alone.” Megana-

**John:** Give us your perspective on this, because you’re closer in age to Jacob.

**Craig:** You’re Jacob-ish.

**John:** Do you sense your friends groups changing, your friendships changing? What’s going on with you?

**Megana:** I definitely sense as I’m getting older, the texture of my social life changing a bit. It’s hard to tell whether that’s because of the pandemic and how that’s affected us the last two years or if I have to admit that I’m just getting older.

**Craig:** You’re getting older.

**Megana:** An uncomfortable thing to realize. I wholeheartedly agree with what you’re saying. Male friendships fascinate me. I think it’s just beneficial for everyone for men to have more friends, because I think classically, straight male guys tend to expect their significant others to do a lot of the emotional labor of helping them process and talk through everything, and they only feel comfortable talking about that with their partner. It’s exhausting. It’s so much better if you have a group of guy friends or just a group of friends that you can bounce things off of.

**Craig:** My wife would love it if I talked to her more about my feelings. She would actually love that. I don’t do it ever. She’s like, “Can you please just say your words related to whatever you’re feeling?” I have to make an effort to do that.

**Megana:** Are you having those conversations with your friends, or you’re just not having them at all?

**Craig:** Straight guys. It’s time for the straight guy hour. How do straight guys do this? Here’s how the straight… I don’t know if this is typical or not for straight guys. What I do with my friends is we do talk about these things, but we don’t talk about them in emotional ways at all. We talk about them in… The only emotion that we express generally is anger. That’s entirely acceptable for straight men. It’s like, “I’m so pissed off about this.” “Yeah, me too, blah, and here’s why.” Ultimately, it turns into comedy of some kind. You get heard without it being this thing of being heard, because we can’t ever just go right at it. We have to go around it, because again, we were instructed not to, at length, in our childhood. It’s interesting.

That’s why I think guys having friends is so important, particularly straight guys, because we were conditioned to not talk and not share and not listen. If we find friends that we can do that with and feel like we’re not doing it but still do it, if you know what I mean, it’s really helpful.

**John:** Now this is not a new observation at all, but I do feel like the root cause or one of the root causes of so many of the challenges facing America right now is the epidemic of male loneliness and just men who don’t have anyone to talk to or anything to do, so they’re only reaching out to the internet. It’s not good. It’s not healthy for women. It’s not healthy for society. I’d urge our male listeners to just be proactive about trying to find some more friendships. Just find an activity you want to participate in and do it. Find some other men around you or people around you that you can go do this. It could be board games. It could be hiking. My brother is in a four-wheel driving club.

**Craig:** There you go. It’s a club.

**John:** He loves it. Find a club.

**Craig:** There’s a reason why gangs exist. There’s a reason why teams exist and squadrons. I don’t know, there’s just something kind of groupy about men. They like to be on a team. They like to be a part of a thing where everybody wears the same shirt. Men love uniforms. I don’t know why. It’s just in there somewhere in the bones. That’s a good thing. Just be careful that you don’t end up in a club with a bunch of other people who are super angry about not having friends.

**John:** That’s not good.

**Craig:** That becomes a little toxic stew of bitterness. Then that’s where men start to egg each other on to do terrible things. What is al-Qaeda if not a club of lonely men, or what was it? That’s what happens. Just be careful about that. Keep your antenna up for people that are maybe just miserable, because then that’ll be a misery club. Find something that’s positive and fun.

**Megana:** Like golfing. This is why people golf, right? You are outside, and you’re just walking and chatting.

**John:** You’re not looking people in the eye. You’re standing side by side doing this.

**Megana:** You’re also not looking at a screen, which is a plus.

**Craig:** You are not looking at a screen. Golf is a fascinating one, because you’re also not competing against that person. You’re competing against yourself, which is amazing. Alec Berg, who is an excellent golfer, has often pointed out that golf is one of the only sports where anybody on any given day could be as good or not better than a professional. If golf isn’t for you, or if you’ve got a physical disability and you can’t golf, there are other things, for sure. You just have to make an effort to find them. The internet is a great tool and a terrible tool. More toxic groups on the internet than not. Maybe that’s a way for you to find something there. You have to try. Jacob, it’s really important. You may find that you could also reconnect with some people that you could naturally be friends with, you just lost touch with. Just see how it goes. You need it. It’s really important.

**John:** It is important.

**Craig:** You guys are my friends.

**John:** Thanks, friends.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Bye, friends.

**Megana:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Follow along with the sample scene [here](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/sample-scene-for-VFX-discussion-2.pdf).
* Alex Wang on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1647984/)
* Addie Manis on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1982088/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/adicaroy?lang=en)
* [The Perils of Audience Capture](https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture) by Gurwinder Bhogal
* [Craig’s Favorite Laser Pointer](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09FH82ZJ9?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Aguilera ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/563standard.mp3).