John August

Tools

How we record Scriptnotes

Follow Up, Geek Alert, Tools

scripnotes coverMany listeners have asked how Craig and I record our weekly podcast, so here’s a quick rundown of our standard operating procedure.

When and what

By email, Craig and I figure out when we’re going to record. It’s usually a Thursday or Friday, late in the afternoon. In that email thread, we also decide what topics to cover. If it’s a Three Page Challenge, I’ll ask Stuart to send each of us PDFs of the entries he’s picked.

About 10 minutes before we start recording, I make a sketchy outline in Highland with reminders for myself: the episode number, today’s topics, housekeeping bits, and my One Cool Thing. If there’s anything I need to read aloud — for example, a quote from an article — I usually copy-paste it into this document.

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.

It takes practice to keep up a conversation when you don’t have the normal physical cues. The first few episodes were rough. But I think the podcast is actually much better for 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.

Editing

While Craig and I are talking on Skype, each of us has GarageBand running on our own computers to record only our side of the conversation. When we finish recording, we each copy our GarageBand project into the same shared Dropbox folder. From there, my assistant Stuart yanks out the audio and marries the two tracks in a vintage copy of Soundtrack Pro, which is where he does most of the real editing.

Many podcasts simply record the Skype call, saving the step of marrying the two tracks. But with all the fire trucks and street noise at Craig’s office, it’s very handy to be able to manage the two sides of the conversation separately.

One problem with recording two tracks separately is sync. We begin with a “1…2…3…go” so that we both hit record at the same time. We clap-sync as well. Despite all this, our tracks eventually fall out of sync, so Stuart has to nudge them a bit. I’m hoping Marco Arment will release his fabled track-nudging utility to the world. We’d pay good money for it.

Once Stuart has finished editing a track, he’ll put it back in Dropbox. I’ll listen to it and write up the text for the post, along with links and outro. All that gets added into a new GarageBand project, where Stuart also makes chapter markers. He exports m4a and mp3 formats, then uploads them to Libsyn, which hosts the files.

Every Tuesday morning, Stuart throws the virtual switch to make the episode live.

Nuts and bolts

For hardware, we started with Dan Benjamin’s really useful guide to podcasting gear, but ultimately made different choices.

Craig and I are each using Audio-Technica AT2020 USB microphones mounted on Heil PL-2T booms. (When I’m traveling, I pack the Blue Yeti USB microphone instead. It’s really good, but really heavy.)

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.

For live shows, I record on the Zoom 4N 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.

Podcasting versus blogging

Several longtime readers have pointed out that I used to blog more. Now two or three weeks may pass where I won’t have posted anything but Scriptnotes.

But I really don’t think the podcast has taken my attention away from blogging; life has.

I’ve gotten much, much busier over the last two years, and it’s been hard to stop everything and blog about whatever screenwriting topic arises. The standing commitment of a podcast each week is easier to keep up. It’s like working out with a partner — you show up because of the social obligation.

And as much as I enjoy writing, a blog is essentially a monologue. It’s been rewarding to have a dialogue each week.

Let’s talk about Nikki Finke

Episode - 93

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Directors, Film Industry, Resources, Scriptnotes, Software, Tools, Transcribed, Words on the page

John and Craig discuss the polarizing potentate of Deadline Hollywood Daily, then segue into what a healthy entertainment journalism ecosystem might look like.

From there, it’s a discussion of Amazon Studios’ new storyboarding software, which demos well but isn’t likely to change much. It’s a good jumping-off spot for talking about storyboarding in general.

Also this week: T-shirts! Live dates!

Official Scriptnotes t-shirts are available in Umbrage Orange and Rational Blue — but only until June 21st, so don’t delay. You can find them at store.johnaugust.com (or follow the link below).

Two live shows this summer! June 29th and July 25th, both in Los Angeles. Click the links for details.

LINKS:

You can download the episode here: AAC.

UPDATE 6-14-13: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

Screenplays and the iPad mini

Tools

Several folks on Twitter have asked me whether the iPad mini is good for reading screenplays.

It is. It’s really good.

Everything on the mini screen is slightly smaller than normal — annoyingly so in the case of some UI elements — but because screenplays are set at 12 point, the text is plenty big enough for comfortable reading, even when zoomed out to full-page.

The screen isn’t retina, so text isn’t as sharp as it can be on the newer full-size iPad. But the screen is not bad at all, and you’d only notice the difference if you directly compared the devices.

If you’re considering getting the mini to read screenplays, I’d advise you to take a look at it for yourself next time you’re at the Apple store. Scripts for most of my movies are available in the Library here at johnaugust.com, so pull up one of the PDFs and see how you like it.

Both Safari and iBooks can handle screenplay PDFs, but for anything more complicated than simple reading, I’d suggest you pick a dedicated app. When the iPad first launched, I recommended GoodReader as the best PDF reader. It’s still solid — but it’s complicated, and kind of ugly. There are many PDF readers available for iOS, and they’re all cheap, so it’s worth trying out a few to see which you like the most.

Is the iPad mini better for screenplays than the full-size iPad? Maybe. It’s smaller and lighter, and much more comfortable to hold for long periods of time. If I were buying something primarily as a screenplay reading device, I’d get the mini. But the truth is, I’m not reading ten scripts a week. For me, my full-size iPad is just fine.

For reading books, I still prefer the Kindle Paperwhite. The sidelit screen is nice, but the main advantage is psychological: it’s only good for books, so there’s no temptation to check email or play another game of Ticket to Ride.

Falling in love with plain text

Highland, Screenwriting Software, Tools

Stu Maschwitz explains how blogging led him to get over his need for as-you-type formatting and embrace plain text:

I’d often find myself battling that little WYSIWYG text window. I’d press Return after some quoted text and it would create another quoted paragraph. I’d press the “quote” button to un-quote the current paragraph, and an extra line would be inserted. I’d try to delete it and now there was no separation between the paragraphs. I’d press “Publish” and the extra line would be back.

I’d eventually go into the post HTML and try to remove the offending line break, crossing my fingers that I wasn’t destroying something else in the process. After all this, I’d be afraid to touch the WYSIWYG editor again. A typo or broken link would have to be pretty important for me to risk touching this house of HTML cards I’d created.

For his blog, the solution was Markdown. For screenwriting, the solution ultimately became Fountain, our joint spec for writing screenplays in any old text editor.

Tools like Markdown and Fountain don’t replace dedicated apps, which can do sophisticated things that would otherwise be very difficult. But too often we’re trying to do too much too soon.

If you’re fighting to get Final Draft to recognize a parenthetical, you’re no longer writing. You’re formatting. You’re a poet picking fonts. You’re a novelist worrying about hyphenation.

Plain text keeps you from worrying about the wrong things at the wrong time.