689 - The Old New Video Problem
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Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Yeah, my name is Craig Mays. And you're listening to episode 689 of Script Notes. It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, could new entertainment formats like verticals disrupt existing film and television? And what impact will AI-generated video have on all of it? We'll look back to history for clues about the future. Then we'll answer listener questions on momentum, scene geography, and television settings. And

And in our bonus segment for premium members, what moment in history, Craig, do you wish you could most see in person? Oh, my. Oh, my. So just as a spectator, so you can't change anything. You just have to watch. You're just there. Okay. Yeah. Okay. But first, let's start on some good news. So two weekends ago, Memorial Day weekend, the biggest Memorial Day weekend in history at the box office. Yeah. Like, huge. That's huge.

That's right. Stitch Possible. Lilo and Imp. I don't know. What do we call this? Well, Lilo already was an Imp, so it all fits together nicely. Yeah, just when you think you've figured out how this all works, you need to say, oh, well, Disney's just gone back to the remake, the animated things one too many times, and Snow White kind of had trouble. But did I know that Lilo and Stitch was such a giant title? Evidently, they did. Yep. And kaboom. And so...

I'm sure whatever division hit the brakes on the animation to live action thing, they are now like, no, no, no, start it back up. I mean, Stitch is a perfect character for marketing. Yes. They did a phenomenal job with it. You can throw him in and just have him disrupt and cause mayhem and other things. He could run around the Super Bowl. Delightful. And also, it's a good character to animate. Yeah. Because it's not

real real so you can keep it cute yeah we're gonna talk about Tom and Jerry later on but it reminds me of sort of a classic just like mayhem I love Tom and Jerry loved it so much oh my god it was a little bit racist at times all things from that era were like all of them what thing

From that time, Tom and Jerry would have been the 60s? Yeah, late 50s. Late 50s, 60s. Yeah, let's find out. Created in 1940, so then it sort of... Oh, yeah, so really. I mean, cartoons in particular. Yeah. Good Lord. Good Lord. But not racist. I've not seen this new movie. I assume it's not racist. That would have been a weird move for them to suddenly... Added new racism to the live action version. They're like, Trump's president, let's go. Anyway, let's talk about why it's good that movies are working at the box office. I mean...

This is the thing that we were all worried about, right? Like, and COVID, tip my hat to COVID. In addition to killing millions and millions of people, it also nearly killed the theatrical movie business. But you and I have been doing this for a long time. And people have been talking about that business dying for a long time. And we've always been pretty consistent about like, nope, nothing's going to kill it. And now I'm pretty sure nothing can kill it.

Yeah, we're going to talk about sort of, you know, things that are going to disrupt stuff. But also I feel like the experience of going to a theater and watching something with a bunch of people is compelling. And so I got to see my Mission Impossible. I got to see a really cool submarine sequence that looked great on a big screen, the way it's

meant to be seen. And all that's in Lilo and Stitch. Surprisingly, a big submarine sequence in Lilo and Stitch. Like, I didn't know the nukes were going to be such a factor, but they were there. What I would have predicted, but I'm getting why people are digging. Yeah. I haven't talked to Chris McQuarrie since the movie came out. I don't even know where he is. I think he's in London, I think. I assume so. Some secret location. I wonder what he's doing. He must just be, I hope he's relaxing. I

I think so. The article I read about it said he's working on Top Gun 3, so... And he is not relaxing. He's not relaxing. There's no end. But anyway, up 221% from last Memorial Day, which was a nitty-ear, but up 22% year-to-date so far. So it's just great that we're... It's a big number. It's a big number. And so, like, more money also gets people spending more money. It's the cycle of it all is so important. So Minecraft and Sinners and...

And you get Momentum and then Lilo and Stitch and Mission Impossible. And now you're in a groove. And it's great when you have movies appealing to different audiences opening the same weekend. The overlap between Mission Impossible and Stitch was not great. No, no. It's what you want. Exactly. Yes. The Venn diagram was not huge, which is great. Great. I got to see Sinners this, you know, it's like fourth week. And you know, a lot of people were like, we're going to just watch both of them this weekend. Yeah. And both are kind of family-friendly.

I mean, Mission Impossible doesn't strike me as a not family-friendly movie. I remember, you know, when I was starting in this business, it was always about like these two movies duking it out and see like who would do it over the course of a weekend. And I do feel like a thing that has changed is like you're sort of rooting for all movies. Yeah, no one cares about that anymore. Yeah. No one cares who first is checking. Anybody that survives putting a movie out is like...

We're alive. Absolutely. Yeah, it's like crossing the line in a marathon. Did you beat those guys that you knew were going to win? No. No. But you ran a marathon. Yeah. And yeah, everybody's kind of like, good for you. All the studios are happy that the weekend was so big. Yeah, no, it's great for the business. And I did. I ran into Pam Abdee. Not with my car or anything. No, no, that would be bad, yeah. Pam Abdee is running Warner. She runs Warner Brothers Films with Mike DeLuca.

And I told her, and this is absolutely true, how delighted I was that the business had just like every news story was like, when are Mike and Pam getting fired? And like, they were right on the edge of like, you know, according to the news. And then, oh my God, like they just can't. Yeah. Yeah. And there will be bombs. Things won't work. We left out a big one.

Final Destination. Yeah, absolutely. Incredible. Absolutely. First, a series that has basically been a programmer for a while, just to have such a big title. And had never made that kind of money, by the way. So that's amazing. It kind of reminds me of how they resurrected Fast and Furious. Because it was sort of like, you know, drifting. It was tapering. Even when it started, it wasn't huge. And then suddenly it was like, oh my God, all these people that had

kind of finally watch all those movies and we're super into it boom and final destination apparently so anyway i was just like oh i because i've known you know it's i've known her forever and i root for her you know and it's like it's such a weird thing our business the way it just wants to go after people and just to hate that yeah bit of follow-up on our side so highland pro we released a new version 3.1 is out with overview which you saw which is a bird's eye view of your script

But we were also able to turn on something now, which we couldn't do. Apple wasn't letting us do it, but now we can, which is student licenses. And so people, even from Highland 2, if you had a student license for Highland 2, that same email address should work. So a reminder for student licenses, if you have a .edu address, it is free for a year to use Highland. And so there's a little...

Link to follow. We'll put a link in the show notes too. That's how you get them addicted, John. You give the kids crack and then you know you have them. Really, the goal is to make sure people are never starting on Final Draft because you get that weird muscle memory of Final Draft. Oh, I have to do things this way. I have to learn this esoteric thing. No, you don't. Bless you. I believe you should write the same way you can write an email. You know,

Back in the day when we would go after final draft and we had those guys on. Yeah. It was like you were arguing with, I don't know, like a small mob outfit. Yeah. Now, what's even the point? It's just this faceless corporation. It's been bought and sold three times since then, yeah. Owned by another company, it's owned by a company, and they're mostly like process payroll and also final draft. Yeah. Who do you even yell at? Yeah. No one. I would say that screenwriting software is not that company's

No. No. No. But... Yeah. All right. Let us get to our main topic here. So before we talk about new video stuff, I want to talk about old video stuff because as I was thinking through this, people had brought up...

Tom and Jerry. And so I was looking back at the history of Tom and Jerry. It's a Hanna-Barbera creation from the 1940s. And back then, it cost between $35,000 and $50,000 per seven-minute cartoon, which was a lot. And those are gorgeous-looking cartoons. Yeah, they are. But they wanted to expand and do more things.

Television was looking for animation and you just couldn't spend that much money. Instead, they tried some new techniques and became what we think of as sort of TV animation. So things like using static backgrounds, minimal movement, cycling, like the walk cycles that people always walk the same way. So that's how you get Space Ghost. That's how you get the Flintstones. Scooby-Doo. Scooby-Doo. Classic walk cycler. Absolutely. And so for that $30,000, they can now do a full 30-minute TV show rather than seven minutes. Yeah.

Yeah, and some of them were better than others. Yes. But Tom and Jerry was inspired. Yeah. And also, for those of you who haven't watched Tom and Jerry, the premise couldn't be simpler.

Tom is a cat. Jerry is a mouse. They live in the same house. Tom is always trying to catch Jerry. Yeah. And Jerry's way smarter than Tom. And so if you've ever seen Itchy and Scratchy, that's what it is. They're making fun of or goofing on Tom and Jerry. But if like the joke of Itchy and Scratchy is look at the extreme violence. Tom and Jerry was so violent. Yeah.

Tom died all the time. I mean, he literally died once where his ghost went into heaven. But he was electrocuted. His skin was peeled off. His head was constantly smashed. And crucially, they didn't speak. And so they're silent characters. Yes. Occasionally, there was some speaking. It was very rare. It was always like a weird episode. Yeah. But there was no talking. It was all just classic slapstick and great music. Yeah. Yeah. And so going from that to this...

this new format, which was animating every other frame, static backgrounds, and a much bigger reliance on voice acting and sort of voice and sound to do it. And so that's where you get, you know, Fred Flintstone and they're talking and they're very much like sitcoms, but this way or space adventures, but sort of minimal. You did not watch Scooby-Doo for the mind blowing or the Herculoids. No, absolutely. And yet if we hadn't had that budget pressure, those things wouldn't have existed. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, would I bemoan the loss of the walk cycle? Probably not because it was so stupid. Just... And then there's walking and then one of them's like, hmm. But we would have also not had these big cultural things because...

Scooby-Doo, if it had been, I don't know, one special episode, nobody would have cared. No. But it is so entrenched in our culture. Yeah. So fast forward to the 90s, 2000s, and we get into flash animation and web cartoons. And so we don't remember very many of those at all because things didn't break out as being big hits, but there were ways to do animation on the web that were cheap, really cheap, and just

So people could do things, people who would never do any animation before could do some animated things. There was storytelling, there was joke telling. And we don't have a legacy very much of that stuff except for South Park, which wouldn't exist without Flash animation. If it weren't for the people who were doing that kind of stuff, you would never have the spirit of Christmas, which was the first. But that wasn't even Flash.

I think it might have been if it wasn't, if it was made similar technique. It seemed like it was made with actual paper cutouts. But I feel like without flash animation, the idea of sort of doing that stuff wouldn't have been possible. I mean, flash animation was kind of,

There was probably some good stuff, but Flash itself was a nightmare. It was a nightmare. So for folks who don't know what we're talking about, so Flash was a plugin for your browser that would let you play some animation in it. And as before, we had pre-YouTube, pre-

And so it was a way to generate those kinds of things. I did Flash animation in college as like a summer project. As a project. Yeah. You were constantly getting warnings to turn your Flash off or upgrade your Flash. It was always a problem. Like everyone...

Out there hated Flash and also you sort of had to have it. And then I remember the day it kind of died. I was so happy. Yeah. Yeah. And died in part because Apple just refused to support it. Apple just said we're not doing it. We're not doing it because it's not secure. It's not secure and it's also a giant power hog. Giant power hog. Let's come up with better ways to do this. And as it turns out, we did.

So other budget innovations that I think were important, YouTube videos that were like React videos, Let's Play, ASMR, sort of all the stuff where it's just like it's a person talking to a camera, to a webcam. It doesn't have big production values at all. And yet you're spending hours watching this stuff. Found footage.

You and I were both around for the Blair Witch Project. And like that kicked off a whole like, oh, that's a whole new model of how you make a film for very little where the fact that you're making for so little is actually kind of part of the point. Yeah. And prior to Blair Witch Project, there was...

the Robert Rodriguez who did El Mariachi and that was made for like $8,000. A crazy low thing and he was using innovative techniques to tell a kind of classic story but just with a hyper style that suited. It was that era where the 90s were amazing. They were. They really were amazing. I have to say like I didn't realize it when I was in the middle of it but they were pretty like some amazing stuff happened.

Something I was looking up this last week for our project was

Retro postmodernism, because there was like 90s postmodernism. There's a very distinct aesthetic I remember and a way things looked and a feel to that that I haven't seen captured quite again. I don't see anything... Can you give an example of what you mean by that? So a kind of teapot that you'd buy at Target. A shade of purple that has some brown in it. Some like sort of bright but smoky oranges. There were colors that were like, that are very 90s.

And honestly, like videotape boxes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so there's that kind of thing too. But postmodernism in a sense of just like we're pulling from a bunch of different sources and throwing it together in a weird way. The best postmodern building to point to is, of course, the Disney building with the dwarves. Yes. Which is sort of iconic. And that building, which is the main executive building on the Disney lot-

Is a horrible building. Insane building. Horrible. The least usable building. Horrible. The person who is the head of Walt Disney Pictures Studios is not in a great office. Because I've been in it. It's just, it's not great. Yeah. Because that building doesn't have...

good space inside of it. No, it makes no sense. Enormous wasted space. Yeah. It's impressive to look at from a distance, but it's not good. Yeah. It was a Robert Venturi's idea, I did it? Venturi is who I was thinking of. I think Venturi also did like these teapots and other stuff I'm thinking. Yeah. And Venturi also does

where we would go have our meals at Princeton when I was an undergrad. Yeah. And it was a horrible building. Yeah. Horrible. Yeah. Horrible. Yeah. Crime. Yeah. Italian neorealism. So after World War II, like everything was torn apart. The film studios didn't exist in their classic sense. Italian neorealism was...

that was created out of necessity from what they had around them. And then as we talk about sort of necessity, soap operas. So soap operas as a form existed to fill space and time on first radio and then on television. And they have that specific form

and structure for economic necessity. To create as many gaps for ads with as many cliffhangers as possible. Soap operas are just cliffhanger machines. Every ad break is a cliffhanger. Every single one. Yeah. And they're called soap operas because a lot of the ads were for soap. Yeah. For detergent and so forth. Game shows, same thing. 100%. They were designed to

promote ads. Yeah. And we both remember a time when like, who wants to be a millionaire? We're going to put it on four times a week and it's going to kill the business. And I mean, those are fewer scripted shows we had on the air during that time. Yes. But also I remember how everyone was like, oh my God,

This game show is taking over. I'm like, game shows? There. We just took a break from them for a while. But game shows have been synonymous, as far as I'm concerned, with television since the beginning of television. Yeah, and related reality TV. So we had the real world, and then it spawned a bunch of different forms. And so a significant portion of our broadcast week is reality shows that didn't exist in a previous form. But we don't begrudge them the way we did when they first came on. And I think in part because...

When they first came on, they were eating up some of the limited space on network television. And then 4 billion outlets occurred, and now...

I don't know how many reality shows there are, but they're not taking space away. If you want space, you just make another space. Well, and we also have relative tiers of like, we have the giant premiere shows. And we also have a bunch of HGTV shows that are very formulaic in terms of like Home Improvement or Flip This House kind of shows, which have these hosts and like the same beats are followed all the time. Yes. And they work. Yeah. Yeah.

All of this is preamble to say nothing is new. There's just new stuff that comes along that seems new and shocking for a moment and then it passes, which this last week, the conversation was verticals. So Drew and Sam at lunch were talking, well, people are talking about verticals. I'm like,

I'm not quite sure I know what you mean. So Drew, talk us through what you mean by verticals. So verticals are fully produced narrative videos. They're a vertical video format and they have a very specific style and a specific purpose. They're smutty soap operas and they're usually including like a secret billionaire or they're supernatural elements for some reason, like werewolves. And it's all about the cliffhanger.

that makes you watch the next video. The people who run it have said explicitly, like, we're not interested in character arcs. They're about a minute or two minutes each, but the full story is usually feature length.

But the business model is that the first five to eight videos are free and to get you hooked. And then each video afterwards costs tokens, which you can either pay real money for or sometimes you can watch ads. To watch the next video, it's like 50 cents. It's about 20 to 40 dollars to finish a story. And they are huge. And they're keeping everyone in town employed right now.

Yeah. Wait, everyone? To a person. I mean... That's what all of our friends are doing. A lot of people at a certain level are doing it right now. They're working hard for it. And who makes the verticals? So there's three big companies that do it that will put links in. So Real Short, Drama Box, and Good Shorts. Okay. The second two are largely Asian. Real Short is like mostly US and a lot of them are shot here in Los Angeles. Sam, help us out because you know people who are actually working on these shows. Yeah.

Yeah, I first heard about these about a year, maybe a year and a half ago as a way of people making money during this time when everything's kind of slowing down. The general vibe that I've gotten is that

Not just in terms of the creative, but in terms of their approach to production. It very much is similar to the soap opera model in that they are pumping through an enormous amount of material per day. Like 10 pages is on the light side, according to what I've heard. 19 pages is common as well. I don't think it goes quite as high as what soap operas were doing, but I also think that they're not designing them with the same kind of like established infrastructure maybe of like a repeatable studio environment that they kind of rinse repeat. I think that it's kind of more of a mix of...

of different kinds of locations and things like that. So it's kind of like low budget indie filmmaking, one take moving on, just get it in the can. And the director just needs to kind of keep it moving and stay out of the way.

And Sam, here we should bring up your background. So you've worked as an ADA before. So you know people who are actually doing this kind of work. They're getting paid, which is fantastic. And I guess they're using rental houses in Los Angeles for lights and equipment and stuff like that, which feels good.

So, Craig, if we look at some of these samples, they're actually... The production values look like a CDW show. It's kind of bright, but it's not just web video. Right. You feel like they are doing some work, but it also feels like there's one take and you're moving on really quickly. Sure. So...

There's two shorts we could look at. The first one is Accidental Triplets with the Billionaire. That's not to be confused with the good short equivalent, which is A Mistaken Surrogate for the Ruthless Billionaire. The hell is going on with the billionaire? It's all billionaires. Billionaire werewolves often. Oh, okay. Also, the titles, they algorithmically test so that it's the most obvious title. So like the top titles today were We Are a Secret.

carrying his babies, stealing his heart, or married to my savage alpha. Oh my god. Oh my god. You're not here for an artificial insemination? What? What artificial insemination? I asked for a surrogate to carry my child because I need an heir in order to take over my company. Then you do not deserve to be a father. Oh no, this can't be. What am I gonna do? Ha ha ha ha ha!

I promise no one will ever hurt you again. It must feel so great to find you feel like the swan when you're used to living like the ugly duckling. Phoebe, will you marry me? I wish days like this would last a little bit longer. As long as our baby's alive, it's a threat to us. Watch out. I assume you get to marry Oscar and I don't. You will give up your place as heir for a woman? I will not let you manipulate me.

Okay, so Craig, you've just now watched this. What is your first reaction to it as a viewer and then as a person who makes television shows? Well, I'm curious. Yeah. I'm curious...

as to how people are interacting with this. Because it sort of seems like it's kind of not taking itself very seriously, but it also is sort of taking itself very seriously. It's like in this weird quasi-ironic zone. Yeah, telenovelas often live in this kind of heightened zone as well. So that's sort of one reference. It's also reminding me a bit of there's an old MTV show called Undressed, which was a soap opera kind of like this. And it wasn't as heightened, but it was in a similar kind of space to it.

I find the model really fascinating. It's basically like a free-to-play game. It's like Candy Crush, but with, like, you know, stories. Yeah. And so unlike, you know, my grandmother watching Days of Our Lives, this is the speed at which it moves. I mean, I have a lot of questions. Yeah. Like, why isn't she wearing a bracelet on her hospital? Like, that's what hospitals do? Yeah.

And doctors don't just like roll on in and artificially inseminate people. And also, why is a billionaire just standing there? He's a billionaire. Yeah. Why is he just randomly inseminating someone? Well, if you go out to those... I guess I got that. His grandfather will give him the fortune if he has a child. Yeah, but like here? Randomly? Anyway, I have so many questions. So many questions. I have so many questions. But what I'm thinking is that in a cool way, this is like...

You know, we love a Cool Ranch Dorito. When we play D&D, we love a Cool Ranch Dorito. And the people that came up with that powder are geniuses because it sort of just short-circuits everything. Will you get Dorito powder in a Michelin three-star restaurant? You will not. But Dorito powder is like legit. It's like actually legit and incredible because it has compressed everything down. And this sweet filling is like it's compressed everything down and sort of done away with like...

You know, like, how do we get this exposition out? Just have her think it. Just have her think it and have everybody stop talking and have one of them just start thinking for a bit. And then when she's done thinking, people will start talking again. Yeah. And so again, like...

because of necessity, you're just creating a new convention. Like that's a convention in these shows. Great. Sure. Why is it vertical? I can't tell you. Because of your phone. Because these are meant to be watched on your phone. But you can turn your phone sideways. No one wants to turn their phone sideways. Come on, Craig. That's the first thing I do when a video comes up. Oldest thing you've ever said. Well, yeah. Sure. But you know that Lilo and Stitch is sideways.

Yeah. You know, movies are sideways. Movies are sideways. Maybe that's the problem. I'm just saying. So I react to this as like, okay, this is not for me. I don't like it. I don't enjoy it. But I get that somebody else can enjoy it. And also, I'm not angry at it. And so there's a reaction to like... You can't get... It's adorable, actually. You can't get angry at that. And I'm also not angry at like people, like these actors are getting to work. Yes. Now, let's talk about one thing, though.

No one is getting paid union on this. No one is. So if everyone in town, I'm sure you were being slightly exaggerating there, but if everyone in town is working on verticals, what that means is everyone in town is working non-union jobs. Now, if you're not in the Director's Guild, the Writer's Guild, the Actor's Guild, you're

You could do that. Yeah. But if you are, you're not supposed to. Well, so when he says everyone in town, I think we're really talking about like people who've just graduated from film school. Oh. Yeah. And so this is making me think back to... Oh. I thought you meant like literally everybody. Well, I mean, I think a fair number of people, but that's also the folks who... But the kids. The kids are working on these things. The kids are working on them. All right. So some people are getting their chance to direct these things. So they're not in the unions yet. And so they're not breaking any rules or whatever. And if the

If the companies who are doing this are making a lot of money... I don't think we can assume that they are. So this comes from Asia, which is obviously successful enough that they're trying it here. It's a format in Korea or... And the text version of this has been a big thing in Korea for a long time. I see. Like scrolling web comics that scroll this way. And they make bank there. And these things were actually apparently... Some of the first versions of these were actually trailers for the web novels, the vertical novel kind of things. Okay. Okay.

Well, you guys, you guys tell me because you're plugged in on this. Is this part of the second screen phenomenon where people are doing one thing and then they've just got a screen going in the background, sort of? Or are people like riveting in?

I'm going to say no. I think this is more, I think it's specifically aimed in the U.S. at middle-aged women. I think it's triggering more of like a gambling thing, that kind of Farmville. That's not good at all. I think this is the video version of Harlequin romances, Harlequin novels, and that kind of stuff. But it's making them pay money to turn the page. Yes.

It is. Oh, I don't like that. Yeah. It's also, it's dirtier than Hallmark movies. And so Hallmark movies are- What isn't dirtier than a Hallmark movie? Well, so the fact that there was cursing even in that little clip is- Yeah, he did say the S word. Yeah. Yeah.

That's pretty dirty. That part I don't love. Like, you know, I'm always looking out for our middle-aged women here in America. And, you know, these things, if it gets predatory, I mean, we've talked, have we talked a little bit about how basically online gambling has destroyed our country and our future? So I could go on a whole rant about sports gambling. Yeah, sports gambling is a nightmare right now that we're just sort of not paying attention to. Yeah. But,

I remember I was at one of my college reunions. I think it was like the big one, like the 25th. And there was an old friend of mine and Melissa's who was there and she was with her, I think her husband, and he worked for King, the company that makes Candy Crush. And...

I don't remember the exact number he told me, but he told me how much money, and this was sort of at the height of it, how much money was coming in every day. And it was mind blowing. Yeah. And it is just basically addicts push the button stuff. Yeah.

So, you know, I guess this is the next level of it. Look, we are entertainers. Yeah. If someone loves this and like it makes their day and they're happy. If they feel like they're getting $20 worth of entertainment out of it. God bless them. I can't begrudge them. Nothing wrong with it. Yeah. I may be a little bit more willing to begrudge as I introduce the next little wrinkle here. So, yeah.

And simultaneously with all this happening, last week or the week before, Google introduced the new version of VO, so VO3, which is their video production entity. So let's click some links there. So let's take a look at two examples. I pulled off a blue sky randomly. We've talked about before how

The video generation stuff, like we said, this is the worst it's ever going to be. It's going to just keep getting better and more impressive. You mean in terms of the AI set? Yeah, absolutely. This is the worst it's ever going to look. So the biggest deal with VO3 is it can do video with dialogue at the same time, video and sound at the same time. That syncs up perfectly. And so take a look at these two samples. I'll watch this first one. In shocking news, controversial children's author J.K. Rowling's yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of Turkey.

In shocking news, J.K. Rowling's yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of Turkey. In shocking news, J.K. Rowling's yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of Turkey. Now, click on the second one. Okay. I mean, because I'm not sad enough. Here we go. Please, don't finish writing that prompt. I don't want to be in your AI movie. Please, leave me alone. Please, man. Please! Please!

All right. Okay. So describe what you're saying.

Right. So the videos are impressive. I can tell that they're not real, but I think in part because I already knew. So I had context to notice a few things here or there. But they look great. Yeah. The level of reality is extraordinary. A little issue syncing up dialogue to mouth moves, but they'll get that clearly. And they are doing this thing. Okay. The dream. Everybody that makes movies or television has a dream. And the dream is...

To not have everything be so goddamn hard, right? Yeah. And this is that area where you get to get the best of, like, for instance, in video games, you know, when they're making a video game and they're like, oh, you know what? This should have been at night. Click, click, click, click, night. Right? Now, we're doing that on a TV show. You're up all night and then you're like, oh, this should have been in the day. Well, it's not. It's at night. Also, all the rest of them are at night. So enjoy your sleep during the day.

Well, now you could theoretically do that. So I don't know what will come of this. A huge area to discuss and so many pitfalls. First, let's go back to what we just saw five minutes ago where we were talking about the verticals. All those could be generated by these systems easily. You could make things that looked better than those. I'm not sure why they aren't. Yeah, I'm shocked that they're not. Which makes me think...

So sometimes, just like any ad, you know, you get the best possible version of it. I'm still annoyed that sea monkeys don't have briefcases and children and a pipe. So this could be the finest possibility. Except that what I pulled were not things that were generated by the official people. These are just like folks who had the tool for like two hours. Sounds like somebody had to write all that though. Yeah. Somebody probably did write the things we were seeing, which is great, which is...

Good for us, but not good for like the people getting their first jobs or like, oh, I get to gaff on this thing and learn how that works. It's not great. I don't quite know what to say. Although, yeah, I'm sort of wondering, you know, you know, John, one thing that might save us, and maybe this is why the vertical companies are doing it the way they're doing and not doing that is because...

People don't like it. They like it. They don't like the idea of it. Yeah. They're happier watching something that somebody made. Yeah. Just because. Some awkward acting because... But a human did it. Yeah. There is a natural instinct towards that. I think we'll find out because I think people will experiment with this version, with creating verticals with this stuff and we'll see how people react to it. Yeah. I mean, I think that would probably do a little bit better to be honest with you. There's some weird framing in those verticals. But let's talk about...

our actual industry and the ways that this technology could or should or should not be at all touch our things. So I think about like crowd generation. Crowd generation for film and television is already kind of an AI process. Things like this feel like they could do it better. If it's a visual effects company supervisor doing it, do we have a problem with it? No, because those things are already... Yeah. We do not...

individually draw and animate crowds. Yeah. Weta is particularly good at this job. And of course, you know, we had a few scenes in our show where there's a lot of creatures. Some of them are being animated, but a lot are following their proprietary crowd software. And it is amazing to watch how it develops and how it works and creating collision physics and all the rest of it. But no, I would not have a problem with this filling the crowd. If you look at the

in movies from 10 years ago, you're looking at animation cycles, actually. You're going back to cycling. Yeah. Let's talk about backgrounds. And so we can talk about sort of natural backgrounds or city, urban backgrounds as what we used to use for plates. Using this for that, again, if it's the visual effects company providing it, is it legit? Is it...

Is it valid? So it is legit. We do a lot of digital map paintings or a lot of environment work. So what this will probably do is eliminate the digital map painting and make everything that you need a background for into environmental work because it creates a full 3D environment stretched out as far as you want to go.

So I can see that absolutely becoming a thing. This should be very concerning to the visual effects company. Oh, definitely. Yeah. So let's talk about one of the examples here was of newscasters who made a story about J.K. Rowling's boat.

If I'm seeing that newscaster, to me, that has to be an actor in our show. That has to be an actor who I've cast to do that thing. If there's dialogue that I've written that a person is delivering, that feels like a red line for me. But if something is way in the background, like playing on a screen far back, that's something that could have been like stock footage that I licensed. I'm wrestling with that.

Yeah, the reason to hire a real actor and do it is solely out of allegiance to humanity. Because if you have a small thing, I mean, typically what ends up happening is you build a tiny little mini set somewhere on a stage. You hire usually a real news performer, news actor, news anchor, I should say, to the local person to come on and do it. And they read their lines off of the teleprompter just like they would normally. And you shoot it just like they would normally. And then you have to comp it in.

And yeah, there's no reason why that wouldn't work now as background stuff. Because once you put it on a television screen, you're already like degrading it on the film because you're putting an effect on it, which would probably remove the artifacting and all that. Yeah. So we're sort of starting at the end and moving earlier in time. So that's post-production. Now we're talking production. But now let's talk pre-production and visualization, pre-vis. These things could pre-vis the shit out of stuff. To what degree is that legitimate or not legitimate? Yeah.

who's doing that work. And if a concept artist is using this stuff, is that legitimate? If the person whose job it is to do this stuff is the person coming to you with this, is that okay? I don't like it. Yeah. I don't like it. I don't like it in particular because...

It feels like rather than having somebody prove some stuff off of the script or instructions, they're giving me their version of the TV show. The problem is it's too much. So then now I'm watching somebody else's version of my show. And before I can do my show, which I don't want, it gets in your head. I don't like the fact that it would even be in my mind. Well, let's talk about then...

When you're first having a conversation with a production designer and the production designer is showing you like stills from things or showing you sort of like samples of stuff. If a production designer is showing you stuff that was rendered in one of these systems, is that useful? Is that a bad choice? Like, how do you feel about that? I don't, like I said, I don't love it. I like to preserve some artistic integrity. The script is where it starts, of course, and it would be where it would start for this stuff.

Somebody makes an illustration, that's a single illustration. Yeah. And it is a human being drawing it. And that helps me sort of talk with the production designer. For...

action sequences, I like the previous to look like crap because I don't want lighting. I don't want anything. I just want movement and blocking. Well, it's the difference between a blueprint and like a final rendering. Like the final rendering is like, it's actually not so helpful to you. You sort of want to see all the lines and sort of how it all fits together. Yes. But that's you as the showrunner and director on these things for when it comes to like earlier, even in the process, we've talked about pitch boards and pitch decks as you're going into things. I do wonder if

five years from now, the expectation is going to be that you're going in with pre-rendered, basically rip reels that are generated from what this is supposed to be like. But why do you need anyone to come in to do that? Why can't you just do it yourself all day long? You hire somebody out of college and you say your job is to sit there, just give this thing prompts and have it do rip reels, have it do pitches, have it do scenes, have it do an entire movie. What do you need people to come in for?

I think if we start to overuse these tools, then that's what will happen. Yeah. Now, we will also, I think, find out the limitations of how entertaining it is. Yeah. But it's the difference between the final product, which is still assuming that we're going to go off and shoot for real, versus the rip reel to get you the job at the start. I wonder whether it's going to be harder and harder to pitch a thing without the kind of finished product. What if? Yeah. Yeah.

Instead of coming in with your decks and your rip reels, you handed somebody a screenplay that they could read, which I think would still work. Probably. I think it would work because it's none of that. Because then you're giving people a chance to do the movie in their mind, which is a different kind of engagement. Yeah.

That's the way we do things. I have no problem with that. I do wonder if we're going to be seeing more of the sort of Dogma 95, talking about sort of like video trends that have come and gone. A Dogma 95 manifesto of just like... Bare bones. Bare bones and sort of vouching for like, these are the limitations we're setting upon ourselves in order to tell this story. Yeah. I mean, we have zero visibility. It does seem like...

The human need for authenticity is going to be a part of how this stuff goes. And we may even need to enlist AI to do it for us because it's going to become incredibly hard at some point to go, this was AI or this was real.

Yeah, it's hard to look at something after the fact and know whether it was AI or if it's real. But if you're seeing the actual process of how a thing was made, then you know that it's real. And I think people are going to want to see that. Right, and I think that's where we have to, and maybe it's the companies that make these things, have to figure out how to encode a signature. Because, and this is just human nature, Andy Warhol's print of Marilyn Monroe is really not that different from the 5003 production of it.

The original costs a gazillion dollars and the prints cost 12. Yeah. So there's just something about authenticity. Yeah. What I'm trying to distinguish between is there's authenticity of like, this was the process and there's a stamp on this thing that there's a watermark that shows that it exists. I think there's also an experiential sense of like, I can also see the behind the scenes and how this was all done. And that part of the experience for me is watching behind the scenes. Can't you create that with the AI too?

I mean, if they can do that, right? Like if you can, if essentially you don't need to shoot anything anymore, then the real question becomes, how do you ever prove that you did anything? Yeah. Like how do you, how do you prove to somebody short of them

seeing you with their eyes or feeling you with their hands, how do you prove to them that you ever did anything? Well, by stage productions, which are done right in front of you, that you're seeing it happen. Yeah, exactly. But short of live. Yeah. Right. So like if you wanted, if you had like some friend that you don't deal with much and doesn't know any of your other friends, you could just prompt out a kid, have the kid be in your videos, talk about how great your kid is. That person would think that you had a kid. Yeah.

Maybe that's one of the reasons why I'm liking Mulaney's show so much, which is my one cool thing from last week, is that it is actually live and they take listener calls and you can just tell it's actually happening in this moment, which is fun. Hey, Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live is a thing for a reason. It's not been on TV for 50 years for nothing. It's not just because occasionally it's funny or a lot of times it's funny. I think it's funny a lot. Mad TV was funny a lot. In Living Color was funny a lot. It's the same. Yeah. Just ain't the same. Yeah.

All right, let's answer some of those questions. We'll start from Memento Mori. Ooh, great name. I've never heard anyone talk about what to do if someone in your family or someone you know dies while you're on a shoot. If you're on set in some far-flung location making a movie or series and a family member dies, what do you do? What if leaving the shoot means forfeiting an opportunity that took years to generate? What if you're the director? Is there any kind of protocol for an event like this?

You've actually encountered this. Sure. In season one, one of our director's fathers passed away. Our director had to travel back to the UK and to just sort of pinch hit, fill in, direct. I don't know if there are specific rules per the unions, but any humane production is going to basically give somebody the chance to go handle their personal affairs as quickly and efficiently as they can. No one's going to say, just go and come back when you want.

But will they say, yes, fly, do it, come back. And if you're willing, and if you can't, then you can, you can quit. Right. There's always an option, but I can't imagine any production going. No, you figured out if it's an actor, you figure out something else to shoot with another, with other actors.

I would say if you're the person who's lost somebody, you need to tell them, but you also need to show up with a plan for like, this is how long I need to be gone. This is what I, this is who I, somebody I can bring in to replace me. If you know that situation. If you are prepared. Yeah. Right. But sometimes people just die. There are accidents or just sudden deaths. And we've had, actually, there's been a bunch. There's one of our crew members, unfortunately, her partner just died.

surprisingly died. Yeah. And if you, again, if you are humane and I'd like to think that we are, you basically say to that person, we got you covered. Yeah. Right. Take care of what you need to take care of. We got you covered. Come back when you can. And they're also professional and they understand that they want to work beyond just this job. So it's okay for them to say, I can't come back as it turns out. I just can't, I can't, I'm traumatized. And then that's okay. We'll find somebody to replace you. These things happen.

You just can't string people along because then eventually somebody's going to call me about that person and be like, okay, this tragedy happened, but then they kept saying they would come back, but then they wouldn't come back. So, you know, obviously within reason, but...

Yeah, it happens. Yeah. And I know people who have lost a parent, like showrunners in the middle of production who've lost a parent. And it's like the show had to keep going. And so they basically had to postpone their grief until the show had wrapped. And that's bad. That's a different thing. There's analogous situations to other situations to other athletes and other people who sort of encounter that.

It sucks. And just acknowledge that it's terrible and awful and you have to take care of yourself. Yes. So you'll get the time you need to go through the process. Yeah. Show up, funeral, whatever, come back. But the emotional aspect of it, well, no one really has insight into your mind as to what's going on there. But it is one of the things...

that is still kind of insanely beautiful about our business, our crazy circus business, our carny nonsense.

is that we really do believe the show must go on. It's really a thing. Well, and we've set up our systems so that people are replaceable to a large degree. There are certain people who are harder to replace, actors are harder to replace if they're established on the show. But like, you know, if I were a gaffer on a show and I had an emergency in Los Angeles, I would know six other gaffers who could show up tomorrow. Sure. But we all have the sense, like even from our school days of acting...

that there's something special about this. Nothing can stop you from this. Patton Oswalt has a great bit about stage health and how you can be sick, but when you go on stage, suddenly you're okay. And then when you get back off stage, you're sick again. Although he does tell this amazing story about how, unfortunately, he did not have stage health when he walked out there and it was horrible. But we do this and we do postpone all sorts of things. And in fact, I really struggle with,

when this happened to me three times now after Chernobyl and season one, now season two of The Last of Us, when it all ends and I'm in that space right now, I do feel a kind of collapse because all the...

I don't know. Like adrenaline, but it's not quite adrenaline. It's just like there's a momentum. Yeah. It's like, yes, it's like I was running as fast as I could to get somewhere and you don't realize until you stop that your feet are bloody stumps. And now you've got bloody stumps and now you can't move at all. Yeah. It's not healthy. I'm sure the people that make Google's AI are like, see, just use our thing. Yeah.

But I don't know. It is such a human thing in its bizarre way. A question from Panicked on the Streets of London. I've been working full-time as a screenwriter in film and TV for around seven years. Based in the UK, so most of my work and experience is here, but I have experience working in the US. I've more or less been able to sustain myself on numerous projects in various stages of development, with a few projects coming painfully close to a green light, but to date, nothing's been made.

How do you keep momentum going in an industry that on the development side moves very slowly and the wants and tastes of the commissioners seem to change weekly? It's hard not to get disheartened at this point in my career. And I feel like I have a body of work. I feel like I have the connections and I've had a lot of close calls. It's sometimes when a project falls short of the green light, I feel like I'm back to square one. Any advice on how to keep the momentum going or at least deal with the highs and lows of this industry would be very much appreciated.

Yeah, Craig is nodding. Yeah. And we've gotten versions of this question quite a bit and I felt it and you felt it. So the key there is how do you feel like or it's hard to not feel disheartened or to feel like I'm back to square one. The thing is, we never know what tomorrow is bringing. We really don't. We certainly weren't prepared for somebody to pull the rug out from under us, but we're also not aware that tomorrow someone's going to call and say we're making it.

We don't know. And so the problem that we have to deal with is the fact that there is no momentum. It's not a thing. We want to believe it is, but it's not. So all you can do is push from your end as hard as you can, do the best job you can do, and try and be zen about it because it is moving the way it wants to move.

And it's so hard. You know, you probably remember these moments when you were starting out and you had that scarcity mindset where you're like, I need to get a job. And then you finally get one. And then three days later, 17 more job offers come in of things that are way better. And you're like, where were you last week? But we don't know. Reality doesn't care about what we feel. It just doesn't. So I guess there's some comfort that there may be some greatness around the corner. One of the challenging things about our business is...

We are rewarded for the work we're doing on a daily basis, but also for the outcomes down the road. So basically the movie comes out, we see the thing. Whereas if we were accountants, it's like we were just doing the work and we don't like, oh, I'm going to have this big thing. There are no big moments the way there are with screenwriting. The frustration is you can't look down on the daily work that you're doing

in expectation of this movie that may come down the road. You always have to have the vision of the movie in your head, but if the movie never actually happens, you still have to be happy with the work that you're doing on this right now because that's what's sustaining you. It's paying your bills.

is hopefully feeding some part of your soul. And it's hopefully something that someone else can read and say, oh my God, that thing was really good. We need to hire them to do this project. And they may do that next week. And you may not even know that they have the script. You don't even know that they're reading it. You don't know who somebody handed it to, but you're absolutely right. You need to get into the place where you sort of enjoy it for what it is without the outcome issue. It's really hard.

At some point, it's just math. If you're not making enough money to support yourself or the people that rely on you, and you need to be, and you're out of money, you got to get another job. But get another job then, if it makes you feel better, if it gives you some security. It is incredibly frustrating. And the only way out is to accept that it is so. Yeah.

A question to hear about scene geography. Jeannie writes, in this scene, I've got two female best friends on vacation together and they're in a hotel bathroom. One's wrapped in a towel, putting on her moisturizer, doing her post-shower routine in the mirror. The other is in the shower, talking to her friend from behind the curtain.

They're having a conversation, and I want us to see a close-up of the friend who's in the shower in order to see her facial expressions, because there's a lot going on unspoken between these two in this moment. And the fact that she can hide her face behind the curtain is important.

Would you intercut this just like a phone call? They're in the same physical room, but it's two different spaces, two different shot setups, and they aren't seeing each other's faces. Right now, I just have it formatted like a regular scene with the fact that one is in the shower behind the curtain in the action lines, but I'm unsure if that's enough.

Yeah, this to me is not an intercut. This is actually a really common situation. You're just making it clear to the reader that they're in separate spaces within a smaller space. But no, this is actually very common scene writing. I mean, we generally think about the location as the decider. Yeah. So they're both in interior hotel bathroom night. And as long as you make it clear that one of them is in the shower with the shower curtain closed, so the other one can only see a vague silhouette...

Then you're good. Then at that point, they can just have a conversation. Yeah. And so behind the curtain, either as part of a paragraph with a comma or you really feel like you need it, intermediate slug line, which is behind the curtain to sort of create a separate space in there. You probably don't need to. No, it'll actually be annoying to read. It would be easier to just establish what it is. And then, you know, let's say Vanessa's like, well, but it doesn't matter for you. You're not really his type. And then we go to...

Vanessa, and you can write like behind the curtain, she just scowls and then says, yeah, I guess you're right. That's all fine. But you don't want to intercut that. No, no, it's going to feel too weighty on the page. Yeah. And by intercut, just so people know, we mean like,

interior intercut, Diane in the shower, intercut, Vanessa at the counter, intercut, Diane in the shower. The simpler version of this is where you establish two locations and you just say intercut and then you stop doing the back and forth between the two. But it's even simpler than that. Yeah, this one is just an interior bathroom. Let's do one last question. This is David talking about TV settings. As a writer who's obsessed with the technical side of the industry, it's refreshing to hear you care so deeply about how people experience movies and shows at home.

The question I have is, what should the TV manufacturers do? In an ideal world, every display would ship from the factory calibrated as well as the new iPad Pro. But regular people buy TVs primarily based on two things, price and brightness. You're never going to get Sony to ship TVs in the professional mode because it would look so dim on a showroom floor at Best Buy sitting next to a TCL. And while motion smoothing isn't directly tied to brightness, the default modes that crank up the brightness have it on by default.

How can we get display manufacturers to care more about motion and maybe a bit less about how well their TVs measure on test patterns? Well, we can't. They don't give a shit, clearly. They do not give a shit. More to the point, most people don't give a shit. It is astonishing to me how many people watch stuff with motion smoothing on. And I'm like, what are you doing? What are you doing? So I think what we could ask for, though, is basically in the setup, like basically you first turn on your TV, like...

Let's get you started. Like, what do you mostly watch? If the person chooses sports, great. Turn on the motion smoothing. It's going to look better for the sports. Great. Whatever. Sure. But if it's mostly other things, then you should turn off motion smoothing and honestly turn down the brightness. Like, or basically ask them which of these looks better to you. Well, where we may get to, I would hope,

basically every bit of content would come with a piece of identifier code at the beginning that tells the TV what the optimal settings would be for that. Now you can say to people, hey, in general, would you like to go with the filmmaker's recommendations or would you like to just blast this with motions moving and it's up to you? But I would love to know. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, like based on this motion,

and how much brightness it's capable of and what these people want to do, there's got to be a way to do that. There's got to be a way to do that. Hopefully they're working on it because it's a nightmare. It's a scourge. People smarter than us are doing this. People smarter than us. All right. Before we get to our one cool things, I actually have a request for our listenership. So over the years, Craig, I have found that when I need to hire somebody or bring somebody on for a project, the best people for this are almost always listeners of this very podcast.

Most recently, it was Corey Martin who I collaborated with on the Vertigo game, which turned out great. It's on Steam and you should download and play that. I'm looking for a new collaborator this time. It is for a tabletop role-playing game. Ooh. Something like D&D or Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green. Mm-hmm. I know what the game is about. I think I know what the core mechanics are. I know what license, what...

system will probably license to do it. But I really need a partner who is in this space who actually knows this community. There's writing to be done, but it's also a lot of play testing. And I need people who can just play it a bunch with different people who are not me and not our thing. So there's probably a Discord forum.

And it's just beyond my wheelhouse and availability. So I don't know if this is a commercial game. I don't know if it's something we would even Kickstarter. It might just be something we open source and release out to the world. But it feels fun. And I want somebody who wants to make something that's fun for the world. So just like with Vertigo, in the show notes for this episode, there'll be a link that you can click and it'll sort of write up like what I'm basically looking for and what this person would be like. I will talk to some folks and see if there's a person who feels like the right collaborator on this.

Fantastic. It is time for a one cool thing. Craig, what's your one cool thing this week? I probably did this last time. I'm doing it again. When the show ends, my cool thing is the invisible army of people. And I know people are used to this. They're like, oh, I'm the best crew in the world. And no, not everybody can possibly have the best crew in the world.

But the reason we say that is because we have a life with these people. They become just as important as what the show is in the end. The time you spend with everybody in close quarters, long hours, day after day, relying on them to care as much as you care, means that they become this kind of big, huge family. And there are so many people. If people did watch The Last of Us and enjoyed it,

then I wish I could tell you every single one of those people's names. I know they go by at the end of the episode really, really fast. Sorry about that. And also HBO makes it like tiny. So it's like really bad. But I want people to know we have quite a time. It's incredible. It's been the experience of a lifetime and in no small part because I just go live a life, another separate life with all these people. Yeah. And I'm very thankful to them. They all worked so hard. Yeah, you'll never thank your prompts the way that you're thinking. Yeah.

No. The actual people who do the job. No, weirdly, I won't thank the prompts. No. No. F the prompts. F the prompts. Bionicle thing is sunscreen, but it's actually a specific brand of sunscreen. So traveling in Egypt and sort of in general, I'm pretty good about sunscreen. And the best one that I've liked most recently is called

Play Everyday Lotion SPF 50. It's made by Supergoop. And so Supergoop is a brand. It's not Goop. It's not Goop. It's not the Eucalyptus Paltrow brand. It's just Supergoop. It smells good. It blends in really easily. It comes in like a pump, like a big jug that you can pump. And so you can put it on liberally. It's great. And I have not burned it.

Craig, something you may not be aware of is that your arch nemesis, Senator Ted Cruz, actually has opinions about sunscreen that I agree with, which is it's an attempt to greatly change how we're regulating sunscreens in the United States. Because Europe has much better sunscreens than we do because our FDA is stupid and puts up all these roadblocks in front of things.

And does the European sunscreen, is it just like full of sunscreen-y goodness that we're afraid of? Yeah. So basically they have 34 different active filters that you can use in sunscreens in the EU. Only 16 in the US. They have much newer, better ones that can block UVA and UVB much better. Mm-hmm.

They have to cross a higher bar. I mean, to be fair, it's Europe. They're really white. They're really white. They're really white, so they need it. But it's actually not as white because their sunscreens have less of a white cast. And so one of the problems with our sunscreens, the ones that we are able to use here, is that if you have darker skin tones, they sort of white cast and they look bad.

Yeah. And the European ones blend in better. So last time we were in, when we were in Malta, we bought some of the European sunscreens and like they're genuinely much better. I don't like the idea of agreeing with Ted Cruz and I'm not sure how he landed on this. I think it's some sort of weird deregulation is always good. But in this case, maybe it is, maybe like we're over-regulating them in a stupid way. He might've thought it was lube and he got excited. Yeah, that could have been.

But if you are an American who's looking for American sunscreens, Supergoop's SPF 50 called Play Every Day is the brand. Do you know what it is?

What's this? Stay inside. Stay inside is also a friend. Also a hat is a big thing. A hat, staying inside, go out at night. People ask me like, oh, you know, your face looks young for your age. It's like, because I've worn a hat for the last 30 years. I don't really have like crazy wrinkles, I think, in part because I'm a hermit. Yeah. It's not. Helps. It's an indoor voice. I have this woman named Sue who puts makeup on me when I have to go like do these press events, which is mostly to get the shine off my bald head. But the other day she was like,

your skin's really good. Like, what are you using for moisturizing? And I was like, what? You know, they always ask you that question. Oh, is it to make me feel good? Yeah. Oh, she was lying? She didn't seem like she was lying. No, I think that's a genuine question. Here's how I know she wasn't lying because I was like, I don't use anything and she was upset. Like, what?

I think the implied thing is like, you should. Oh, no, she was sort of saying, I want to know what it is. It's working. Now, it may be that she was just buttering me up. She was literally buttering me up with a goop. Yeah, a voice riser. With a goop. With a goop. With a goop.

That is our show for this week. Script Notes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Schrapsen. You're welcome. It is edited by Matthew Cilelli. Our outro this week is by Steve Petrowski. If you have an outro, be sure to send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You'll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You'll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes.

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