John August

Tools

The Free Stuff

Apps, Bronson, Highland, Meta, News, Software, Tools, Weekend Read, Writer Emergency Pack

My friend Nima recently pointed out that most of the stuff our company makes is free.

That’s probably not a great business model, but it’s always been our culture. We only charge for those things that have significant ongoing costs — like upkeep and hosting — or a per-unit cost to produce.

If you’re a writer, here are the things we offer at absolutely no cost. As in free.

johnaugust.com

This blog has been running since 2003. Nearly all of its 1,500 posts are screenwriting advice. The Explore tab on the right is a good way to get started looking through the archives. For example, you might start with the 129 articles on formatting.

Scriptnotes

Craig Mazin and I have been recording this weekly screenwriting podcast for over ten years. It’s always been free, with no ads whatsoever. The most recent 20 episodes are available in every podcast player. Back episodes are available to Scriptnotes Premium members, or can be purchased in 50-episode “seasons.”

Inneresting

Chris Csont edits this weekly newsletter, which serves as a good companion to Scriptnotes. Every Friday, it has links to things about writing, centering on a given theme. It’s a Substack, but completely free.

Highland 2

For years, I’ve written all my scripts and novels in this terrific app our company makes. It’s a free download on the Mac App Store. The Standard edition is fully functional, with no time limits. Students can receive the enhanced Pro edition through our student license program.

Courier Prime

English-language screenplays are written in Courier, but not all Couriers are alike. Many are too thin, and the italics are ugly. So we commissioned a new typeface called Courier Prime. It’s Courier, but better. Since it’s free and open licensed, you can use it through Google Fonts and similar services.

Weekend Read

Reading a screenplay on an iPhone is a pain in the ass — unless you use Weekend Read. It melts down screenplay PDFs so they format properly on smaller screens. Weekend Read also has an extensive library of older scripts, including many award nominees. It’s free on the App Store.

The Library

The Library has most of the scripts I’ve written, and hosts a few other writers’ work as well. For several projects, I’ve included treatments, pitches, outlines and additional material.

Screenwriting.io

While johnaugust.com offers detailed articles on various topics, screenwriting.io answers really basic questions about film and TV writing. If you’re Googling, “how many acts does a TV show have?” we want to give you the answer with no cruft or bullshit.

100 Most Frequently Asked Questions about Screenwriting

We gathered the 100 most frequently searched-for entries on screenwriting.io in this handy 85-page PDF.

Launch

I recorded this seven-episode podcast series about the pitch, sale, writing and production of my first Arlo Finch book. If you’ve ever thought about writing a book, you’ll want to check it out. Free wherever you listen to podcasts.

The Paid Stuff

Given all the free stuff we put out, how does our company make money? We sell things.

Highland 2 Pro

Highland 2 Standard Edition is free, but most users choose to upgrade to Pro for its added features: revision mode, priority email support, extra templates, custom themes, and watermark-free PDFs. It’s an in-app purchase, $39 USD.1

Writer Emergency Pack

Writer Emergency Pack began its life as a Kickstarter, and is now one of the most popular gifts for writers of all ages. Available through our store and Amazon.

Bronson Watermarker PDF

Bronson is the app I needed when watermarking scripts for a Broadway reading. Now it’s become the default watermarking app in Hollywood. It’s $20 on the Mac App Store.

T-shirts and hoodies

We used to print and ship our own t-shirts, but we now sell them through Cotton Bureau. We put out a new Scriptnotes shirt every year. It’s definitely not a profit center, but it’s fun seeing merch out in the wild.

Weekend Read Unlocked

Users can unlock their expanded library for $10 USD.

Scriptnotes Premium

The Scriptnotes podcast runs out of a separate LLC from our software business. Premium subscriptions pay for the salaries of our producer, editor and transcriptionist, along with hosting and management fees. Craig and I don’t make a cent off it.

  1. Prices may change. Also note that Apple sets international pricing, so some apps cost a little more or a little less in some countries. ↩

Getting the Razer Tartarus Pro keyboard to work with macOS Catalina and beyond

Geek Alert, How-To, Tools

As I’ve written before, I use this weird keyboard which has helped greatly with my carpal tunnel issues.

While this odd keyboard is great for normal typing, certain key combinations are unwieldy. So for the past decade I’ve used an external gaming keypad to the left of my keyboard with custom macros set up for some common commands:

  • Select All
  • Undo
  • Copy
  • Cut
  • Paste
  • Paste and Match Style
  • Pasteboard History (which is part of Better Touch Tool)

When my beloved Logitech keypad crapped out, I switched to the well-reviewed Razer Tartarus Pro. It’s nicely built! Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer drivers for the current macOS.

After a lot of googling, I’ve cobbled together a solution. So in the interest of sharing what I’ve learned — and remembering how I got this to work in the first place — let me walk through the steps.

Note that this doesn’t do half of what a proper driver could accomplish, particularly for gaming. So please, Razer, make one! But if you want to use a gaming pad like the Tartarus Pro for keyboard shortcuts, this does the trick.

How to make the Tartarus Pro work on macOS Catalina

It’s important to understand that macOS sees the Tartarus Pro as a plain old keyboard. So if you plug it in and hit the 08 key, you’ll see it type a ‘w’.

Luckily, there’s software that can recognize that and do something useful instead.

Better Touch Tool is best known for getting random mice and trackpads to work, but it does a nice job on keyboards as well. (I’m using the 3.5 Alpha version.)

better touch tool setup

Let’s look at the Select All shortcut. You’ll notice the “Assigned Action” is ⌘A. Now direct your attention to the righthand sidebar. That’s where all the real work happens.

1) For the moment, ignore the “Click here to record a shortcut” section. We’ll come back to that.

2) You want the shortcut Enabled, so check the box.

3) You should put a note in this field for clarity.

4) The HUD overlay is surprisingly helpful. It shows what’s happening, like that you just hit “copy.” I find the Title text to be too large, so I use the Subtitle instead.

HUD display shows Copy

5) For Trigger Conditions, you want to choose “Works on keyboards with the same type as used for recording.” Yes, this is a ridiculously long label.

6) You want it to Trigger on Key Down.

7) You don’t want it to repeat.

You’ll do these steps for each key on the gaming keypad you want to remap. Here’s my setup.

keyboard photo

I also set key 20, the spacebar, to Undo.

In theory, you’re done! For a few weeks, this worked great. And then it started having issues. When encountering password fields, my normal keyboard would start triggering keyboard shortcuts. I had to restart Better Touch Tool multiple times per day.

Basically, the app kept getting my normal weird keyboard confused with my special weird gaming keypad. I needed to call in the big guns.

Enter Karabiner

I’d long heard of Karabiner Elements, a public domain app that can remap any key and do really impressive things. But it’s intimidating as hell.

Here’s what I wanted Karabiner to do: remap the keys of the Tartarus Pro to seldom-used keystrokes so I could then set those as triggers for Better Touch Tool.

Looking through their user forums, I couldn’t find any perfect matches for this use case, but luckily @bradcurtis had built a set of custom mappings (a “complex modification” in Karabiner speak) for a similar purpose.

Installing them is odd. Here’s how you do it.

  1. Install Karabiner-Elements. You’ll have to give it a ton of permissions in System Preferences.

  2. In Karabiner-Elements Preferences, choose Complex Modications and then Add Rule.

  3. On the next screen, choose “Import More Rules from the internet.”

  4. Either search for “Tartarus” or follow this link

  5. Choose the Import button. It’ll ask you whether you want to open the link in Karabiner-Elements. You do.

  6. Click the button to “Enable All”

Karabiner setup

If you have the Tartarus v2 like @bradcurtis, you’re done! All of the keys should be mapped to new, less-common keystrokes. But if you have the Tartarus Pro like I do, you need to modify the settings you just imported to change the product ID. This is where it gets frustratingly user-hostile, because it requires you to modify a JSON file in an external editor.

  1. Navigate to ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json — the easiest way to do this is by choosing Go > Go to Folder… in the Finder.

  2. Open this file in a plain text editor (I use TextMate).

  3. Find and replace 555 (the product ID for the v2) with 580 (the product ID for the Pro).1

  4. Save this file and restart Karabiner-Elements.

After doing this, and mapping these new keystrokes to Better Touch Tool, I’m back up to full speed.2

Again, almost no one on Earth will never need or want to do any of this. But if you’re the one person who needs this solution, I hope it helps. Please pay it forward by documenting something you’ve discovered.

  1. If you’re looking for a different product ID, open the Event Viewer in Karabiner-Elements and choose Devices. ↩
  2. I added one additonal modification, converting key 20 (which is coded as “spacebar”) to Left_Shift-Left_Option-s. ↩

A DM’s guide to Roll20

Geek Alert, Software, Tools

Since the start of the pandemic, our regular D&D game — which has always been in person — has shifted to online. We use Zoom to chat, and Roll20 to simulate the tabletop.

I’m comfortable using Roll20 as a player, but when it came time to begin planning my own campaign as a DM, I was stumped. The interface is wildly confusing, and the built-in tutorials aren’t up to the task.

Craig offered to walk me through the process of setting up and running a game. We recorded the whole thing, which is now available as five videos.

If you’re considering DMing a game in Roll20, I strongly suggest you start here. Craig’s a good teacher.

How We Record Scriptnotes, 2020

Geek Alert, Meta, Tools

scripnotes coverMany listeners have asked how Craig and I record our weekly podcast. I wrote about it in 2013, but a few things have changed. So here’s an updated look at our standard operating procedures and gear.

When and what

Scriptnotes producer Megana Rao and Craig’s assistant Bo Shim figure out when we’re going to record. It’s usually a Thursday or Friday, late in the afternoon. Megana and I have usually talked over potential topics, but Craig and I will also text during the week to discuss. If it’s a Three Page Challenge, Megana will send each of us PDFs of the entries she’s picked.

We’re all working off a shared outline in WorkFlowy, which includes the episode number, today’s topics, listener questions, various housekeeping bits, and our One Cool Things. I recently made a template. If there’s anything we need to read aloud — for example, a quote from an article — I usually copy-paste it into this outline.

Since Craig works in Pasadena and I work in Hollywood, it’s not practical for us to be in the room together, so we record the podcast on Skype. This is the part many people can’t fathom — we’re almost never in the same room together. I lived in Paris during 2016 and 2017, yet we kept doing the show pretty much as normal. Whether you’re miles or time zones apart, you can do it.

It takes practice to keep up a conversation when you don’t have the usual physical cues. The first few episodes were rough. But I think the podcast is actually much better with Craig and I being apart; like the audience, we’re only hearing each other’s voice, so everything we’re communicating needs to happen in speech.

I don’t care about hearing myself through the headphones, but if you do, you may want to consider a setup that lets you plug headphones into the mic or mixer. If you let the audio round-trip through the computer, the lag will drive you crazy.

Editing

While Craig and I are talking on Skype, each of us has QuickTime running on our own computers to record only our side of the conversation. (File > New Audio Recording…) When we finish recording, we each save our audio into the same shared Dropbox folder. From there, editor Matthew Chilelli yanks out the audio and marries the two tracks in Logic.

Many podcasts simply record the Skype call, saving the step of marrying the two tracks. But it’s very handy to be able to manage the two sides of the conversation separately. We can edit out background noise and generally keep it much tighter.

As a backup, we have Call Recorder for Skype running. It’s saved our bacon a few times.

Matthew ends up editing two versions of the episode: the normal one and the premium version, which includes an additional segment at the end. When he’s finished — generally Monday at around noon — he’ll put them back in Dropbox. Megana listens to them and writes up the text for the post, along with links and the outro. I sign off, then all that gets added into the files.

Megana then uploads the premium file to our subscription service, where it comes out immediately. She schedules the normal version to come out Tuesday morning.

Nuts and bolts

For hardware, we started with Dan Benjamin’s really useful guide to podcasting gear, but ultimately made different choices over the years. I’ll include Amazon referral links for items available there, but certainly consider local retailers — or items you may already have.

For my mic, I’m using the Shure BETA 87A Supercardioid Condenser Vocal Microphone mounted on a Heil PL-2T boom with some generic pop screen. This mic requires a pre-amp and USB interface, so I’m using the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, which feels like overkill but has been problem-free for many years.

When I’m traveling, I’ve been packing the Samson Q2U Handheld Dynamic USB Microphone instead. It’s really good for the price and simply plugs into USB. When we have remote guests I’ll often drop this mic off at their house if they’re in town, or just Amazon it to them if they’re somewhere else.

For listening, there’s nothing better than the Sony MDR-7506 headphones, which not only sound great but seal well, keeping Craig’s audio from being recorded on my track. I like them so much that I’ll bring them with me on a trip.

Before the pandemic, we were recording more shows in-person at my office using a RØDECaster Pro, which is genuinely terrific. It combines a pre-amp, USB interface and recorder into a single interface. The new Zoom PodTrack P4 looks to meet a similar need and is probably also great. I’ve had a good experience with various Zoom recorders over the years.

For live shows, I’ve generally been recording on the Zoom H6 digital recorder. Even if we’re using audio from a sound board, I’ll still aim the Zoom at the audience to gather crowd noise.