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Top 10 Greatest Screenwriting Quotes
April 4 2010 (2 years ago)
As voted by me, and all of my self. Motivational, inspirational and every other ‘tional’ that matters great quotes help us all be greater (and yes at the back, great is roughly equal to awesome – within a few decimal places).
I love top tens. This one was compiled while I set about unselfishly and unequivocally proving that Google can’t point you in the direction of a Final Draft plug-in that auto-generates scene 17, scanning back through your epic adventure and deriving exactly how the mysterious blonde could save the penguin from the blender.
Anyway, on to the quotes – and yes, before anyone points out that the list contains some people that aren’t actually screenwriters – I know. Glad you’re awake, but they are relevant all the same!
- [ 10 ] Always be yourself…unless you suck - Joss Whedon
- [ 09 ] You can make a movie about anything, as long as it has a hook to hang the advertising on - Roger Corman
- [ 08 ] There are no dull subjects, only dull writers - H. L. Mencken
- [ 07 ] A lot of times you get credit for stuff in your movies you didn’t intend to be there - Spike Lee
- [ 06 ] First get your facts, then distort them at your leisure - Mark Twain
Don’t stop there, click through for the top five!
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comments (2)
permalinkFinal Draft, Grrr!
February 8 2010 (2 years ago)
I love Final Draft, but sometimes I’m tempted to ram its head in the virtual shredder for getting something so simple so very wrong!
I spent quite a lot of time converting some short scripts I’d written using a simple screenplay template into Final Draft 8 over the weekend, and I noticed a few bugs which after the third ten-pager really started to drive me nuts;
- The Format Assistant returns ‘Characters should have dialogue’ if an empty element exists directly after a character name, and the subsequent element is a parenthetical (it works correctly if the following element is dialogue)
- Using the Reformat Tool and re-formatting an element to a parenthetical, parentheses replace the existing element entirely (which deletes content) or if the content is not highlighted they are inserted at the cursor position, which results in things like (gasp()ing)
- Using the Reformat tool, and dealing with spaces after each element, the text does not scroll effectively (when you get to the bottom of a page the next element that needs to be re-formatted isn’t readable as its off screen)
I dread ever having to do this for a feature. After using Final Draft for a number of years I’ve found this kind of issue to be pretty commonplace with features that aren’t used every day, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that there’s just one dev/test working on the product. I’ve sent the comments in via their feedback form, but I won’t hold my breath!