Robbed at the Oscars
It’s Oscar time again, which means that one of my weird pet peeves is back in circulation. It comes in many variations, all centering around the idea that some film or person should win (or should have won) the coveted award.
A film that sh...
SpotCast
Ron Small of Sway Productions invited me onto his new podcast called SpotCast, which focuses on the craft of commercial directing. I’m in wonderfully good company there—he’s also interviewed Jason Wingrove, Adam Lisagor, and Vi...
Highland
John August’s video demo of his new app Highland, for converting screenplays between Fountain, Final Draft, and PDF formats. It even lets you go from PDF to Fountain or FDX. In private beta now, Mac App store soon. Read more at John’s...
What I Do With My iPad Part 3: Read Screenplays
Final Draft Inc. announced yesterday that they’ll be releasing Final Draft Reader for iPad next week. The company had already warned us that they were scaling back their iPad efforts from a full screenplay editing app to just a reader. It will b...
SPMD is now Fountain
Screenplay Markdown has a new home, a new name, and some very cool new friends.
Screenwriting Nerds Unite
As the SPMD spec was making the rounds late last year, I was contacted by John August, a well-known screenwriter and the creator of Scrippets, an...
FCP X Updated, Magic Bullet Looks 50% Off
Final Cut Pro X was essentially version 1.0 of an entirely new app, and it shipped with enough features absent that many questioned the continued use of the “pro” name. Today Apple released a free update to FCP X that restores many of thos...
Canon C300 Available for Order
The Canon EOS C300 is now available for pre-order at B&H, for $15,999—in both its Canon and PL mount variants. Expected to ship around the beginning of next month.
Nikon D4
Looks like Nikon is starting to take video seriously with their new D4 flagship DSLR, announced yesterday.
I watched this very nice sample film by Corey Rich at 1080p and it looks great to my eye—no aliasing, no rolling shutter issues, plenty o...
What I Do With My iPad Part 2: Write With a Keyboard
The iPad is a wonderful focused writing tool. Both Harry McCracken and James Kendrick have perfectly described how its simplicity and one-app-at-a-time model encourage attentive productivity. McCracken writes:
With the iPad… You can devote near...
2011 on Prolost
I began the year by posting The Shot You Can Make and creating free galleries that you can browse from your mobile device to compare how various camera/lens combinations would capture a standard movie scene.
I encouraged you to eschew experts and follo...
Screenplay Markdown Lives!
Thanks to the hard work of Brett Terpstra, creator of the Markdown preview app Marked, along with Martin Vilcans and Jonathan Poritsky, there is now a functional workflow for SPMD.
Screenplay Markdown, or SPMD, began as some musings here and matured into...
Why We Fight
I recently contributed a color correction lesson to the current fxphd term, and I grabbed some footage from Brick & Steel to use as examples. As I was going through these year-old shots, I was struck by what a damn good time we had shooting that l...
