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Making Films and Making Websites

 I recently listened to an episode of the Scriptnoes podcast interviewing Christopher Nolan, director of films such as The Dark Knight, Inception, and Oppenheimer.

Generally, it’s fascinating look at the creative process. More specifically, I couldn’t help but see the parallels between making websites and making films.

Coincidentally, I recently read a post from Baldur Bjarnason where he makes this observation:

Software is a creative industry with more in common with media production industries than housebuilding.

As such, a baseline intrinsically-motivated curiosity about the form is one of the most powerful assets you can have when doing your job.

You definitely hear Nolan time and again express his fascination and curiosity with the form of film making.

As someone fascinated with the form of making websites, I wanted to jot down what stuck out to me.

Screenplays Are Tools, Not Films

Here’s Nolan talking about the tension between what a film starts as (a script, i.e. words on paper) and what the film ends up as (a series of images on screen).

Everyone’s struggling against, “Okay, how do I make a film on the page?” I’m fascinated by that...I enjoy the screenplay format very much…but there are these endless conundrums. Do you portray the intentionality of the character? Do you portray a character opens a drawer looking for a corkscrew?

There’s a delicate balance the screenplay form must strike: what needs to be decided upon and communicated up front and what is left up to the interpretation of the people involved in making the film once the process starts?

The problem is you have to show the script to a lot of people who aren’t reading your screenplay as a movie. They’re reading it as a screenplay. They’re reading it for information about what character they’re playing or what costumes are going to be in the film or whatever that is. Over the years, it varied project to project, but you try to find a middle ground where you’re giving people the information they need, but you’re not violating what you consider your basic principles as a writer.

However, as much as you want the screenplay to be great and useful, moviegoers aren’t paying to read your screenplay. They’re paying to watch your film. Nolan notes how he always re-centers himself on this idea, regardless of what is written in the screenplay.

I always try to view the screenplay first and foremost as a movie that I’m watching. I’m seeing it as a series of images. I’m imagining watching it with an audience.

Interestingly, Nolan notes that the screenplay is a medium that inherently wants the editing process to be intertwined in its form. If you don’t leverage that, you’re not taking advantage of the screenplay as a tool.

[movies are] a medium that enjoys this great privilege of Shot A plus Shot B gives you Thought C...that’s what movies do. That’s what’s unique to the medium.

A script is words on paper. A film is an interpretive realization of those words as a series of images.

But it’s even more than that. Just think of what it takes for words on paper to become a film:

  • The interpretation of the meaning of those words by the actors who deliver them (through not only the words themselves, but body language and other non-verbal cues).
  • Sound, which includes music, sound effects, etc.
  • Visuals, which includes special effects, costume designers, makeup folks, etc.
  • Much, much more.

It may seem obvious, but a screenplay is not a film. It’s a tool in service of making a film.

Software Artifacts Are Tools, Not Websites

In other words, what you use to make a website is not the website itself.

The “Source of Truth”

When a movie is released in theaters, it would be silly to think of its screenplay as the “source of truth”. At that point, the finished film is the “source of truth”. Anything left in the screenplay is merely a reflection of previous intention.

So do people take the time to go back and retroactively update the screenplay to accurately reflect a finished film?

No, that would be silly. The finished film is what people pay to see and experience. It is the source of truth.

Similarly, in making websites, the only source of truth is the website people access and use. Everything else — from design system components to Figma mocks to Miro boards to research data et. al. — is merely a tool in service of the final form.

That’s not to say there’s no value in keeping things in sync. Does the on-set improvisation of an actor or director require backporting their improvisations to the screenplay? Does cutting a sequence in the editing process mean going back to the screenplay to make new edits? Only when viewed through the lens of the screenplay as a working tool in service of a group of people making a film.

Figma Mocks

The screenplay is an evolving document. A screenplay is not a film, but a tool that allows disparate groups of talented individuals to get what they need to do their job in service of making a film.

Nolan emphasizes this a few times, noting that the screenplay is not what moviegoers ultimately experience. They come to watch a film, not read a script.

As individual artisans involved in the process of making websites, it’s easy to lose sight of this fact. Often more care is poured into the deliverable of your specialized discipline, with blame for quality in the final product impersonalized — “It’s not my fault, my mocks were pixel perfect!”

Too often websites suffer from the situation where everyone is responsible for their own little part in making the website but nobody’s responsible for the experience of the person who has to use it.

Nolan: writing words on paper (screenplay) in service of making a series of images people experience (a film).

Me: designing visuals in Figma (mocks) in service of making interactive software people experience (a website).

Takeaways

  • There’s an art to the screenplay and its form, but that shouldn’t be lost on why it exists in the first place: to make a film. Same for the disciplines involved in making websites.
  • Too much care and craft can be sunk into the artifacts of our own craft while forgetting the whole they serve.
  • Artifacts made in service of the final form are not to be confused with the final form itself. People come to watch films, not read scripts. People come to use websites, not look at mocks.

Comment? Reply via: Email, Mastodon, or Twitter.


Jim Nielsen's Blog

19 Mar 2024 at 19:00

Scripting News: Monday, March 18, 2024

 

Monday, March 18, 2024

This is amazing. Some of my friends at Automattic quickly put together a toolkit for WordPress that allows it to host my blogroll. There are still some missing pieces and some CSS glitches. But this is exactly where I hoped we would be at this point.#

Read this on Threads. The thing that's great about this moment is that people are just beginning to get the possibility of not being locked into silos. They don't know how to parse my posts and screen shots, because I can do something they never thought they'd be permitted to do. Well we've got some visionary and lovable techies at Masto and Blueski who want you and I to be able to do that. And we've been building on that. And will continue to do so, Murphy-willing. #

Blogroll fix. The blogroll was grabbing the up and down-arrow and Return for keyboard navigation, one of my favorite blogroll features. Put the cursor where you want, and arrow through the list. Press Return to expand, and again to collapse. Then down-arrow and repeat. But sometimes you want to use these keys for other functions. So I changed it so you have to click the blogroll to set the focus. Its border turns blueish, and the keys work as described. Press the Tab key or click outside the blogroll to take the focus off the blogroll.#

I'm working with developers again, thank goodness. I once thought I could make server products or toolkits for people I called "poets" -- motivated writers. I have given up on that, at least for the time-being. I think a properly motivated intelligent writer could get developer-like results, I've seen it happen (Brent Simmons, Dan MacTough). They make really good developers because they understand the user perspective so well, it still lives inside them. The problem seems to be motivation, and a poet knowing that they need to be super-motivated and have the time, to get anything technical to work. If they knew what was required, my 2024 theory goes, and had studied for it, the way they studied for their degree, they could not only be successful, but they could contribute to the developer process. Analogously, we all have to learn a little cooking just to get through life, but only a few people are chefs. Julia Child, a hero of mine, believed she could teach anyone to be a good-enough cook. But I bet she was frustrated by human reality. 😄#

Now that I have ChatGPT around, my Lorem Ipsum text for testing can be slightly more interesting. #

Linkblogs work differently#

  • Linkblogs work differently in blogrolls. When I click a link it takes me to the site the blog linked to, not to the blog.#
  • So.. When you click the link in the screen shot below it takes you to a Metacritic review of the program#
  • Screen shot.#

Scripting News for email

19 Mar 2024 at 04:00

Displaying Webmentions Extension for Datenstrom Yellow

 Screenshot

A screenshot of webmentions being displayed using the webmention extension for Datenstrom Yellow

The other night I was helping my friend Mani setup webmentions on his website since he is building his website and I was hoping to build something while I was helping him. He got me thinking, "I should really do something on your website with webmentions!" I also said to myself, "I will do something about it!" As cheesy as that sounds, it was a good motivational moment to get something done.

I guess that was the night to start back something I had the skeleton started, well at least partially. Sometime last year I started the skeleton.

Well I did it!

I built a extension displaying webmentions on my website. This is something I had started sometime last year and I finally got around to do it again. I actually had a repository for it on Github. Since I didn't touch it for so long, I had also noticed that Robert had make an issue on the repository asking if I had made the webmention extension working. Robert also uses Datenstrom Yellow He wrote this back in January.

I would like the IndieWeb, indieauth, webmentions, micropub, etc. to be more present in the Datenstrom community. I am hopeful that more people down the road will use Datenstrom and me more inclined to create more plugins for it..

The extension is made for the flat-file CMS (content management system) call Datenstrom Yellow or simply Datenstrom. This is the CMS of choise my personal website. For the longest time I had hard-coded (I'm phasing this out) the displaying of webmentions on my website since I wanted to have some implemention of displaying webmentions. Creating this extension may not be a big deal to others but I feel it's a big leap for me as I get more comfortable getting back into modifying the tools I use daily. I would like to help contribute more the the communities I participate in such as the Datenstrom Community. Creating this extension will help me give back and tippy toe back into the developmental world.

With that being said new to building extensions for a CMS. Having lingered this idea for some time, I took a look at the API. As I started to build this extension, Datenstrom provides good documentation overall. There are plenty examples to utiilize the API used to interact with the CMS. You would think that me using this CMS for so long I would be doing more with it? I guess I finally go the itch. I'm still learning the ins and outs of it as I get into the more advanced features.

The main files that make the extension work (GitHub Repo). So here is how it works!

  • extension.ini - tells Datenstrom what to do with the files and adds extension config paramenters to yellow-system.ini (config file for Datenstrom).
  • icon.css - A CSS file for Material Icons from Google Fonts.
  • webmention.css - A CSS file to style the webmention extension.
  • webmention.js- A javascript file to parse webmentions from webmention.io into HTML and it pulls the webmentions for the specific page you are on.
  • webmention.php - This tells Datenstrom how to interact with the API and how to activate the extension.

This extension is still a work in progress. There is so much to do still. Please bear with me as I make the code, especially the javascript, more readable and more optimized. I also know I repeat myself. It at least functions to get started. I'll be updating this code throughout the next few days and as needed down the road.

If you are interested in collaborating, I'd love to connect or simply create a pull request on the Github repository. Do you or someone use Datenstrom as the CMS of choice? I'd love to know!

To learn more about Datenstrom visit their website or the GitHub repository.

Also posted on IndieNews.

Pablo Morales

19 Mar 2024 at 03:11

Harberger Tax

It’s always nice to see trails of thought connect up. An idea I first encountered and really liked in a 2014 Steve Randy Waldman (interfluidity) post has apparently since acquired a name and a more extended provenance. Waldman’s post, Tax price, not value, presents the idea as a LVT/Georgism-flavored solution to NIMBYism enabled by artificially […]
ribbonfarm

19 Mar 2024 at 02:54
#

All peanuts and peanut butter I can recall eating use the term “dry roasted” on the label. I’m assuming that is opposed to “oil roasted.” Has anyone had these and are they so horrible that every bag of peanuts and jar of peanut butter since has to specify that they are not oil roasted?

Chuck Grimmett

19 Mar 2024 at 01:39

Linkblogs work differently

Linkblogs work differently in blogrolls. When I click a link it takes me to the site the blog linked to, not to the blog.

So.. When you click the link in the screen shot below it takes you to a Metacritic review of the program

Screen shot.

Scripting News

19 Mar 2024 at 00:10
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