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Slugline. Simple, elegant screenwriting.
Noir. Cinematic black-and-white and lighting control for your iPhone and iPad.
Plastic Bullet. An infinite variety of vintage camera looks. Now available for Mac.
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 2:34PM Wow, today is a big day! A new Super 35mm camera has been announced.
Stu
I love the low frame rate on the product tour video.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 5:16PM 
Many people predicted that there would be a major upset in the publishing world when the Kindle dropped below $99. They were wrong—it happened well before that.
Independent authors have been able to self-publish their work on or through Amazon for quite a while, but in the last year or so there has been an explosion of success stories. Authors like John Locke, Amanda Hocking, Andrew Mayne, and Joe Konrath have appeared on best-seller lists right alongside authors whose names are a part of any trip through an airport concourse.
The reason for this, as I see it, is a collision of several factors:
And of course, price. Many indie novels are as inexpensive as 99¢. As self-published author John Locke said in his book How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!:
…when famous authors are forced to sell their books for $9.95, and I can sell mine for 99 cents, I no longer have to prove my books are as good as theirs. [They] have to prove their books are ten times better than mine!2
The 99¢ price point is particularly interesting, and has, of course, been the subject of much hand-wringing. Amazon has a fixed royalties model for ebooks: For titles priced between $2.99 and $9.99, publishers take home 70%. Any other price nets 35%. For every book an indie author sells at 99¢, they receive 35¢. For a $2.99 book, a self-published author sees a royalty of $2.00. Again, Locke has an emphatic point of view as to why he chooses 99¢:
My decision came down to whether I thought I could sell seven times as many books at 99 cents as I could at $2.99.
By my calculations he only has to sell six times as many books to beat the $2.99 model ($0.35 x 7 = $2.10). There’s much more to Locke’s position on this though, so I recommend you read his book if you’re genuinely interested.
Some decry the buck-a-book pricing as devaluing literature and destroying humanity.3 What it’s meant for me in practice is that I’ve discovered some fun new authors, and that the “gateway drug” principal is real. Cheap books got me reading more, and now I buy regular-priced ebooks more frequently than I’d ever bought dead-tree fiction.
I’m not the only one. Amazon’s Kindle best-sellers page has been a mix of indie offerings and traditional titles for as long as I’ve been aware of it. Books there range from New York Times best-sellers to pulpy self-published impulse buys, at prices ranging from $12.99 to free. Indie publishing has arrived.
I write a lot here about accessibility of storytelling tools. Cameras keep getting better and cheaper. Post tools once reserved for the stratospheric high-end trickle down to our laptops. But there is no more democratized form of expression than the written word. If there’s a story in you, write it down.
That’s been true forever, but now you can take a small additional step and share your story with the world. Maybe you’ll give it away. Maybe you’ll sell a million copies.
I’m writing this now because National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) is about to begin. If you’ve ever had the itch write a book, you can do so virtually surrounded by a supportive internet community of writers who gather once a year to bang out a draft in 30 days. It’s a wonderful way to practice the best writing advice there is: Don’t get it right, get it written.
NaNoWriMo considers a novel to be 50,000 words or more. To get there in 30 days, you’d need to write 1600 words per day—fewer than in this blog post. It’s not easy, but it can be done. More importantly, failing at something like that is a lot better at succeeding at the dumb crap you were planning on doing in November.
This is the bit I’m still working out. So it’s obviously the most interesting part.
As wonderfully detailed on the excellent Scriptnotes podcast by screenwriter and master blogger John August, when you sell a script, you enter into a somewhat fictitious work-for-hire agreement. Your script and its copyright become the property of the purchaser. Even though it was your idea, you agree to pretend that the studio hired you to write it. There are several very good reasons for this structure that John and his co-host Craig Mazin explain perfectly, but one downside is that you maintain no ancillary rights to your work, You can sell a script and never see another dime beyond the sale price.
This is not true of novels. You’ll hear stories about producers developing projects as graphic novels first before pitching them as movies. Part of the reason is so that a studio can see pretty pictures of what their movie might look like, but another big part is that the copyright holder of the comic will maintain the literary rights to the story. This means royalties on any film that gets made based on that work, including any sequels, TV series, or stage production—royalties that would not likely be a part of a spec script deal.
On top of that, Hollywood is currently beyond reluctant to invest in any idea that doesn’t have built-in familiarity with an audience. It’s potentially easier to get Scott Pilgrim vs. the World made than Inception, even though Scott Pilgrim was a niche comic with tiny circulation, and Inception was the pet project of a can’t-lose filmmaker, with a huge star attached.
As a filmmaker, you might have an easier time pitching a movie based on your “breakout hit” (hundreds sold!) or even “cult classic” (dozens sold!) self-published novel than you would with an original spec screenplay. And if your pitch is successful, the “back end,” as Hollywood folks like to say, could look much better for you, depending on the deal you negotiate.
If you decide to accept the NaNoWriMo challenge, I have one and only one recommendation for you: Get Scrivener. Last time I pimped Scrivener to you, it was version 1.0, Mac-only, and had only fledgeling screenwriting features, which comprised my primary interest in it. Scrivener 2.0 offers many improvements to the screenwriting features, but helping you write long-form fiction is what this beast was truly created to do, and at that it excels.
There’s so much to say about Scrivener that it deserves a whole post (maybe more), but my most recent love affair is with its Dropbox syncing feature. To get a taste of it, go here and scroll down to Folder Syncing. Combine this feature with one of the many Dropbox-enabled mobile text editing applications such as Elements or WriteUp and you’ll never be more than a few taps away from tweaking your prose.
Scrivener also offers detailed options for exporting .epub and .mobi files, the book formats for Apple’s iBooks and Amazon Kindle, respectively.
Sure, if you’re a great writer, you don’t need anything special (services such as Smashwords will create an ebook for you from a properly formatted Word file). But if you’re a terrible writer like me, you need all the help you can get. Scrivener is a lifesaver. Check it out for Mac and Windows.
Writers read and readers write. As Merlin Mann wrote recently regarding the lovely new Instapaper 4.0, the mere decision to read more can make your life better. I look at the purchase of a Kindle as an active step into an exciting new world of democratized storytelling that starts with the written word but that ripples out as far as blockbuster movies. Get reading. Maybe even get writing. You’re a part of something important.
I didn’t link to the very cheapest Kindle because I think the user experience of the Kindle touch will be significantly better. ↩
Indie authors get to use exclamation points as often as they like. File that under “pros and cons.” ↩
Citation needed. ↩
Stu
Amazon just announced Kindle Format 8, which offers several fancy new features such as embedded fonts, fixed layouts, high resolution graphics, and “panel views” for graphic novels.
[via Andrew Mayne]
Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 2:03PM I had such a fun time talking with Kanen Flowers and Merlin Mann on Kanen’s Scruffy Thinking podcast. As Kanen puts it:
We discuss living in San Francisco, Star Wars, finding and doing what you love, trusting your grandmother’s advice, being unemployed after having lunch with Stu and a lot more.
Check it out, as well as Kanen’s other podcast, That Post Show. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how to find Merlin Mann’s amazing 5 by 5 show Back to Work.
If there’s anything I’m proud of about this episode, it’s that I may have tricked Merlin into being inspirational.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 3:18PM In 2001 The Orphanage was still a brand-new company, and I was not yet a professional director. The project that changed that was a music video for Cher’s A Song For The Lonely, which Cher had dedicated “to the courageous people of New York especially the fire fighters, the police, Mayor Giuliani, Governor Pataki and my friend Liz.”
A huge architecture buff with fond memories of a recent Manhattan film shoot in my mind, I pitched Warner Records an idea for a Cher-guided tour through New York’s proud history, exemplified by a multiple reverse-timelapses of some of the great buildings of the city rising up before our eyes. Here’s a page from my treatment:
I got word that the job had awarded and that Cher would be calling me on my cell phone. Her enthusiasm for the concept apparently steamrollered any trepidation Warner might have had about assigning this video to a first-time director.
I was terrified of the entire thing, but when Cher called, she immediately disarmed me. “So what are we supposed to be talking about?”
We shot in December, in New York. We got special permission from the Mayor’s office for live audio playback in the streets of Manhattan, a practice that had recently been outlawed. I hadn’t even met her yet and I was already experiencing how much the city of New York loved Cher.
Photo by John Benson
Cinematographer Rolf Kestermann and I decided to shoot on the brand-new-at-the-time Sony F900. This was in part due to the rapid post schedule and large number of visual effects, but it also facilitated a DV Rebel schedule hack that I had devised with my producer Scott Kaplan. We shot on a Thursday and Friday, and our camera kit wasn’t due back at the rental house until Monday morning. On Saturday, he and I took the F900 and a rented convertible around Manhattan and I shot the B-roll that became VFX plates for some of the signature effects, such as the Flatiron and Citicorp building shots.
One of the best pieces of advice I received was to schedule the shoot so that the very first thing up was complete coverage of the song with Cher looking her absolute best. So we scheduled the “black void” shot for early Thursday morning. This, along with the greenscreen stairs, we would shoot in Brooklyn, and then move to Manhattan for the rooftop shoot.
The black void shot was a huge success, but it almost didn’t happen. The sun wasn’t even up yet and we got word that Cher’s makeup artist, the famous and gifted Kevin Aucoin, was nowhere to be found. Of course much later we would sadly learn that this had been due to his struggling with a terminal illness, but at the time all I could think was that my directorial debut was about to be cancelled before it even began.
Then word came back from Cher’s trailer that she was going to proceed with the shoot—and do her own makeup. She was 55 at the time, and she was about to get in front of the cameras without the aid of her star makeup artist. That was when I realized how committed she was to the project. When she was almost done, I was allowed into her trailer to say hello for the first time that day. She was stunningly, unbelievably beautiful.
Between takes of the Technocrane shots of her running up the greenscreen stairs, Cher didn’t return to her trailer or even to her chair. She jogged in place near the stairs to keep her energy level up. As I explained the effects that we’d be adding in post, I stopped myself, realizing that this Academy Award-winning actress and accomplished director needed no coaching from me. “You’ve done this before,” I said. “Yeah, but you haven’t.” Was her reply. She was onto me. She smiled and put her hand on my arm. I’d walked over to comfort my star and she had wound up comforting me.
That was a pattern that would continue. On day two of our shoot, on the cobblestone streets of Manhattan’s Meat Packing district, I offhandedly called out to my first AD that the extras needed to walk faster in the next take (weirdly there’s sort of a rule that director’s shouldn’t talk directly to background talent—something about it meaning that they are no longer background). As we reset back to the end of the block for another Steadicam take, Cher took my arm and said, “Babe, if you call them ‘extras,’ they’ll act like extras. But if you call them ‘actors,’ they’ll give you their best.”
At least, I think that’s more or less what she said. I had a hard time concentrating after Cher called me “babe.” If there’s one human on the planet who owns that word, it’s her.
We were shooting on public streets with a large crew and full street closures, but we had some challenges dressing our little corner of New York to the appropriate periods. To cover that, we smoked up our streets with big, loud smoke machines. The events of 9/11 were still a fresh and painful memory for the city though, and complaints about our smoke started coming in. The police officer manning the intersection gave word that we’d have to shut down our atmospheric effects, but I still had one more shot that I desperately needed.
My AD leapt into action, borrowing “first team” (that’s Cher) and the script supervisor’s camera and walking over to the cop. An autographed polaroid later, we were shooting one last smoked-up street shot. Again, the power of Cher. On her walk back a guy yelled out his third-story window: “Yo, Cher!” In the thickest New York accent I’d ever heard. Without skipping a beat, she yelled back: “Yo!”
All of this, by the way, in the most brutal December cold that I’d ever experienced in New York. Look at the parka I’m wearing in these photos—It’s designed for summiting Everest. Meanwhile, Cher was strutting up and down the street in skinny jeans, heels, and a thin shirt under a light jacket.
Photo by John Benson
Despite the cold, the street shots went incredibly smoothly and I’m still amazed that we got all the coverage that we did in that one short day. But the rooftop shoot the previous day was another matter. It seemed to take forever to move the company from Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan, and when we got up to the roof, the weather turned on us. Our gorgeous view of the Empire State Building was blocked by dense fog that rapidly became a light but persistent rain. Nevertheless, Cher climbed right up onto the roof—part of which was only accessible by a rickety ladder—and sang her heart out. There are shots where she’s standing in heels a foot away from a thirty-story drop, with only me and her bodyguard holding her feet for safety.
Like every first-time director, I planned a 360-degree dolly shot. I’m not sure which is a more popular bad idea for first-timers, this or the powers-of-ten shot. 360-degree dollies are almost never as interesting for the audience as they seem like they will be to a new director, and they are incredibly challenging to pull off. Imagine lighting a movie star on a giant rooftop, trying to hide the lighting gear from a camera that will see everything, and then asking the entire crew to leave so you can shoot. Including Cher’s vanities team. Guess what happened. The shot wasn’t that great, but worse still, without hair and makeup being allowed their “last looks,” our star didn’t look her best, and we wound up leaving most of the shots out. Although I must say that it was fun crouching at Cher’s feet with my clamshell monitor while the Steadicam rocketed around us on that roof.
I’m more proud that I survived the process of making this video than I am of the job I did as a director. It was my first directing job and my last music video—I wound up being a lot better at commercials. But I’ll never forget the experience and the numerous lessons I learned on this project, and I’m honored to have been a part of Cher’s tribute.
Scott Stewart, Jon Rothbart, Me, Scott Kaplan, Cher, John Benson