Inneresting 01
September 19, 2018
What's this, then?
Aline Brosh McKenna makes fun of the way I drop the “t” in the word “interesting.” I grew up in Colorado, where we don’t pronounce unstressed t’s in words like mountain (moun’in) and cotton (caw’in).
Changes like the glottal stop t are actually pretty common. Regardless, here are some things I found inneresting this week.
This video of Paris in the late 1890s is transfixing. Not only are they correcting for film shudder, the foley sounds they’ve added are really convincing. It’s crazy to me that we had motion picture cameras before we had cars. Also, people actually dressed like that!
I used to think English was simple. John McWhorter digs into the habitual past, for which we use forms such as would and used to. Surprisingly, he skips over did. He wrote a whole book on that.
According to this Name Age Predictor, I was most likely born in the 1960s, when in fact it was 1970. Still, it’s a useful tool for checking your characters’ names. For example, Agnes is either a grandmother or a toddler.
We redesigned screenwriting.io this week. That's the site we have for answering incredibly basic questions about screenwriting. Mostly this was a test-run for some changes to my main site later this year.
Something useful I discovered in Final Cut Pro this week: Copy a clip, then Paste Attributes... onto another clip. This is especially helpful when swapping out watermarked stock footage with the real thing. All your filters and speed changes are saved!
I'm close to hitting my goal of reading 20 books this year. Thanks, GoodReads! If you've read Arlo Finch and haven't left a review on GoodReads or Amazon, it definitely helps.
Should I do another episode of Launch? That was the seven episode podcast series I did about the making of Arlo Finch. I’m about to start my European tour, and there’s book two coming out in February, so there's plenty to talk about. My biggest hesitation is that writing, recording and editing the episodes take a massive amount of time, and I need to be working on book three. If you have thoughts, drop me a note to ask@johnaugust.com
You probably need a new shirt.
Lucky for you, we just made one.
The new Scriptnotes shirt is called Colored Revisions. It's designed by Dustin Bocks and is available now on Cotton Bureau.
That's all for this week! See you next email.
UPCOMING EVENTS
at Austin Film Festival
October 26
The Creative Career at 3:15pm
Scriptnotes Live! at 10pm
October 27
Three Page Challenge at 4:30pm
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