Story structure, screenplays, series bibles, characters, dialogue, narrative evaluation
- articleWhat counts as cheating the audience with an unreliable narrator or voice-over, and what do the open sources say about how those failures arise?
The best-documented screen case is the lying flashback in Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950): the Living Handbook says the director considered the fabricated flashback a failure, while a Senses of Cinema essay argues the sequence is a "mixed memory" with true incidents intermixed and no voice-over, so the term "lying flashback" misleads. The sources do not give an audience measurement; they show that an image-level lie with no frame is the flagged risk, and that the fairness dispute turns on whether the story marks the account as someone's version. The sources found cover no study of unearned twists specific to narration; B097-S22 covers twist and set-up research.
- articleWhat do open or readable reader studies show about how and when audiences notice, trust or distrust unreliable narrators?
Only two reader experiments were found and both are narrow. A 2025 open-access questionnaire study (148 students, one Japanese short story in six orderings) found that readers revise trust when they notice inconsistencies, lean heavily on social roles and genre labels, that story order shaped whom they distrusted but not whom they trusted most, and that reading expertise did not predict trust. A 2022 experiment found that a narrator framed as credible led readers to reproduce and endorse more false facts than a narrator framed as unreliable. Neither measures when in the text readers first notice a problem.
- articleWhat is an unreliable narrator in narratology, and which distinctions (axis, cause, effect, scope) should I make before I write or judge one?
Two Living Handbook of Narratology entries give a usable vocabulary. Unreliability belongs to the narrator's discourse and comes in a "mis-" form (wrong) and an "under-" form (insufficient) for reporting, interpreting and evaluating. It needs a personalised narrator who is presented as a reporter, and it can differ by cause (circumstance vs disposition), by effect (estranging vs bonding) and from one stretch of the narration to another. Four labels per claim (axis, cause, effect, narrator type) are what a draft needs before fairness can be judged.
- articleWhat are J-cuts, L-cuts and split edits, which direction is which, and what must be in place to make one in an editor?
A split edit makes the sound and picture cut at different times. A J-cut lets the next scene's sound start before its picture; an L-cut lets the previous scene's sound continue over the next picture. Apple's Final Cut Pro guide (page Last-Modified 2026-09-29) and Adobe's Premiere help (page text last updated 2025-08-22, read via an Internet Archive snapshot) agree on the definition and both give the same prerequisite idea: unlink or expand audio from video and move one edge. An open Ohio State textbook (Copyright 2024) gives the same definitions with film examples.
- articleCan a model recognise visual motifs in images, and what does the published work actually show?
Phillips et al. (UPF, arXiv v1, 21 Oct 2024) train a shallow classifier on CLIP features to tag images with 20 expert-chosen motifs (e.g. Mirror, Stairs, Woman in the Window) and report F1 0.9138 on their own test set, with 88% of test images predicted exactly. The dataset (10,760 images) was not public at v1 and the paper does not test whether a motif carries a theme in a work. It is a paper result on image-level composition recognition, not a released tool.
- articleWhat concrete things can I vary so that each character in my dialogue sounds like a different person?
Across a 1912 playwriting manual, a 1919 technique textbook and three open-access computational studies, the voice features that make characters separable are: class and role vocabulary (servants say 'sir', 'yes', 'please'), dialect or accent spellings, sentence length and fragmentation, connective and pronoun habits (a character who joins clauses with 'and', or says 'let's/us'), question-asking, and the speech habits of the character's social class. The sources disagree on how far to push surface markers: dialect spelling is the easiest and most measurable device but is period-bound and can hurt clarity, and Archer advises keeping to the language of the character's class.
- articleWhat does each named pattern cost in writing volume and state, what failure modes are attributed to it, and how could an agent recognise the pattern from a story graph?
Ashwell's post gives qualitative cost and failure statements only: a whole-body scan found no cost, hours or word-count terms and one digit string ('80 Days'). So 'writing volume' is stated only in relative terms (gauntlet easiest, sorting hat may mean several games, floating modules need a large amount of content). Graph recognition is not in the source; this candidate offers a labelled-synthesis rule table mapping each pattern's description to measurable graph and state properties, checked against one real graph (Cave of Time: near-tree, 0 cycles).
- articleHow do pansori jangdan (rhythmic cycles) and jo (modes) correspond to mood and scene function, how reliable is that mapping, and what pacing technique can an audio or screen storyteller take from it without pretending to have a pansori drummer?
Sources describe a toolkit of rhythmic cycles from very slow (jinyang, 24 beats) to urgent and agitated (jajinmori) and cheerful (jungjungmori), chosen to follow mood and context, plus modes (ujo, pyeongjo, gyemyeonjo) defined by sentiment and ornament rather than by pitch set alone. The translated music-theory article shows the mapping from cycle to mode is conventional but contested: the same scene has been labelled ujo or pyeongjo depending on the theorist, and slow and medium cycles mix ujo and pyeongjo features. A screen or audio storyteller can borrow the idea of a deliberate tempo-and-mood plan per scene while treating the specific mappings as one tradition's conventions.
- articleHow does a franchise keeper run a continuity database (the Star Wars Holocron): what does it contain, who owns it, how is new material checked, and how are contradictions handled?
In a 2009 Game Informer Q&A, Leland Chee (Continuity Database Administrator, Lucas Licensing) describes the Holocron: an electronic encyclopedia of what has been developed and what is in development, created in 2000 to replace printed bibles, checked against by one licensing-side keeper, with producers given direct access. New material is entered as early as possible so creators can 'stake their claim'. Contradictions are handled by finding a plausible in-world explanation. Films and new TV series were not subject to prior approval by his group.
- articleDo readers like stories with happy endings better than unhappy or open ones, and what do open-access experiments actually measure about it?
The clearest open evidence is Klauk, Köppe and Weskott (Diegesis 2016, read from an Internet Archive snapshot): 24 literary-studies students rated 24 three-sentence texts with positive, negative, delayed or open last sentences. Readers liked the positive ending more than the negative one (4.69 vs 3.55 on 1-7), but did not like the whole text more (4.10 vs 3.94), and rated the positive and negative texts equally complete (5.76 vs 5.79); the open ending was rated much less complete, expected, sound and coherent. A 308-reader dissertation found more identification after a happy ending, and a 2025 film study found no main effect of a tragic death at the end rather than the start on reflection. Short constructed texts and student samples limit all of this, and no open study found measured enjoyment against appreciation across ending types.
- articleIf a short story's payoff is a twist ending, do open-access experiments show that telling the reader the twist in advance (a spoiler) ruins the story?
In one preregistered-target experiment (326 psychology students, six published twist-ending short stories) neither a full spoiler nor a thematic spoiler reliably changed self-rated enjoyment, suspense, fun, lasting impression, being moved or transportation, and a 2-minute delay did not either. The authors read the wider literature as mixed and call the strongest pro-spoiler result an outlier. A 2026 film-clip study with 76 viewers also found no drop in self-reported immersion from spoilers, but used a mid-film clip, not an ending. Together these show that secrecy alone is not shown to carry a twist's value for these readers, stories and measures; they do not show whether a twist is well built.
- articleWhat changes about a fictional world when it is a playable game or simulation (two-level action, point of action, subjunctive mode, chronicle vs story), and what consistency checks follow for game worlds?
Neitzel's LHN entry 'Narrativity of Computer Games' treats games as working in a subjunctive mode, like possible worlds: they pre-form possibilities that can happen in a digital environment. Player actions have a fictional level and a physical level at once, giving a point of action as well as a point of view, metalepsis as the normal case, and simultaneous narration. Simulation or world-building games are said to have the structure of a chronicle rather than a story in the strict sense, unless Ryan's broad definition is used. The entry stresses there is no consensus. For consistency, the sources support separating what the rules allow (possibility space) from what a given play-through realised (record).
- articleWhat is a storyworld (fictional world), and which layers do narratology sources separate: setting, story space, story world and narrative universe?
The Living Handbook of Narratology (archive-host copies) has no stand-alone 'Storyworld' entry in the 2019 contents mirror, but the word is used as a working term across entries. Ryan's 'Space' entry gives the most explicit layering: spatial frames, setting, story space, narrative (story) world and narrative universe. Herman's 'Cognitive Narratology' treats storyworlds as what interpreters build from the text's cues, and Jannidis's 'Character' entry says the ontological status of the storyworld is still unsettled. A newcomer can use the five layers to describe a world without conflating setting with world.
- articleWhat do open sources say about habituation and the "cheap scare" failure mode: why do repeated or predictable scares lose force, and what can be checked in a script or cut?
One open psychophysiology study (N = 50, Run Lola Run, a suspense film rather than horror) found self-reported suspense and arousal and skin conductance fell across three viewings while enjoyment did not significantly change, which the authors read as habituation. Horror-specific evidence is indirect: focus-group participants describe learned genre cues, and the jump-scare paper reports scares without anticipatory cues as more startling in an unreviewed experiment. No source measures habituation to repeated jump scares within a single film.
- articleWhat do open sources say about sound in horror (silence before a stinger, loud sudden sound) and how strong is that evidence?
The open evidence is thin and mostly qualitative: a 2022 Edinburgh PhD thesis (self-watching plus three focus groups, 22 participants) reports that a loud sound after silence can trigger a brief fear reaction, and participants say they feared sudden silence because genre experience taught them a shock follows. A 2026 opinion article stresses that lab startle research uses probe tones, so it says little about film stingers. A 2023 BU student thesis reports music as a large tension contributor, but only its abstract was read.
- articleIs the Zeigarnik "unfinished task" claim behind cliffhanger advice supported by recent meta-analysis, and what does it imply for episode endings?
Wirz et al. (2022) state cliffhanger effects have been explained by the Zeigarnik effect. A 2025 open-access meta-analysis (Ghibellini & Meier, 59 publications) found no memory advantage for interrupted tasks (weighted recall ratio 0.99), but a general tendency to resume them (about 67%). The studies it covers use task interruptions, not narratives; applying the result to cliffhangers is an inference.
- articleWhen do public-domain craft manuals say a character should change, and when should it stay constant or be only revealed?
Archer (1912, Ch. XXII) argues that critics who complain of 'no development' usually mean no unveiling of latent qualities, not no change: within one play-length crisis a real change of habits would have to be catastrophic and hard to believe, so the stage character should be put to a new test that discloses more of him. In the novel, gradual alteration has time. Archer's Ch. XIX adds a rule for conversions: a change of resolve needs a new fact or motive, never just the clock. Hamilton (1908) defines static versus dynamic characters by change over the story and calls developing a character one of fiction's greatest possibilities; his 1910 theatre book uses 'dynamic' for will-driven characters, a different meaning.
- articleWhat did Brunetiere's 'law of the drama' actually claim, which public-domain English translation can an agent read, and how does it sort plays by obstacle?
Brunetiere's essay (dated 1 April 1894; English by Philip M. Hayden, 1914, with Jones's introduction and Matthews's notes) says the common feature of all drama is a will conscious of itself striving toward a goal, and that the dramatic species (tragedy, drama, comedy, farce) differ by the kind of obstacle the will meets. His test against the novel is whether the central figure sets a goal and tries to dominate circumstances (Figaro) or merely receives what fortune brings (Gil Blas). The best-known long wording ('struggle against fatality, social law, a fellow mortal, himself') is Archer's translation, quoted by Jones and by Archer; Hayden's own rendering of the essay is a different text, so an agent should not mix the two.
- articleWhat do open-access independent critiques and tests of the benign-violation theory establish about its scope, and is there open independent evidence outside moral vignettes?
The open independent material reachable here narrows rather than confirms the theory. A Cape Town student project re-analysing McGraw & Warren's moral scenarios (N = 204) reports large effects after changing the scoring (partial eta-squared .37-.52) but also reports that an unpublished Indian-sample replication could not support the theory; a 2023 Trento study (N = 60, CC BY) finds amusement only for the more benign violations and no effect of psychological distance; a 2019 Frontiers paper argues the theory ignores social distance, power and culture. All empirical items are still moral-violation vignettes: no open independent non-moral replication was found, and the two likeliest candidates (Earleywine & Mankoff; Knegtmans et al. 2018) were not readable.
- articleHow do Archer, Jones and a photoplay manual disagree about conflict, and what concrete test and obstacle-strengthening steps can an agent apply to a scene?
Archer rejects will-against-will as a universal differentia (his counter-cases: Othello, As You Like It, Ghosts, the Screen Scene) but keeps a weaker practical rule, 'No obstacle, no drama', and shows plays weakened by an inadequate obstacle. Jones, defending Brunetiere, widens the law to 'up against' any antagonistic person, circumstance or fortune, and reports 'strengthening the obstacle' as his own working method. A 1913-1919 photoplay manual treats the obstacle as the hero's problem in the 'complication'. The three sources agree on the obstacle-strengthening step and disagree on whether conflict is essential.
- articleExactly how does Left 4 Dead's adaptive pacing work (intensity estimate, build-up/peak/relax states, timings, exemptions), and what did a second shipped game keep or change?
Valve's designer documents a small, reproducible controller: estimate each player's 'emotional intensity' from damage and nearby deaths, take the team maximum, and cycle four states (Build Up with full threats until intensity passes a peak threshold, Sustain Peak for 3-5 s, Peak Fade with minimal threats until a natural lull, Relax for 30-45 s or until the team has travelled far enough). Wanderers, mobs and special infected are throttled; bosses are exempt. Warframe's lead AI programmer independently reports a similar damage/kill-based intensity score and a peak-then-hold-off rule at intensity 100. Valve's slides call the estimator crude and give no decay constants or thresholds, and no ablation, so the pattern is documented but its tuning is not.
- articleWhat do open sources actually say about ochi (sage) types, and how reliable is the commonly repeated list of twelve?
Open primary-leaning sources define the ochi (sage) as the closing pun, wordplay or witty line and the paper calls it the most important part of the comedy, but none of the open sources read gives a classification of ochi types. The only list readable is the English Wikipedia page, which says twelve kinds are 'codified', cites a 1996 newspaper piece, and itself lists only ten (niwaka/jiguchi pun, hyoshi repeat, sakasa reversal, kangae pondering, mawari return-to-start, mitate, manuke silly, totan signature phrase, buttsuke misunderstanding, shigusa gesture). Treat the list as a vocabulary lead, not a verified typology.
- articleHow do the open sources say player agency trades off against authored structure, and what concrete design diagnostics do they give?
Mateas (2000) argues story and agency are not intrinsically opposed: agency arises when material affordances (actions available) are balanced with formal affordances (what the plot makes worth doing); imbalance reduces agency, illustrated with puzzle adventures (too many material options), Quake (balanced) and a hypothetical plot-heavy shooter (plot without new actions). Roberts and Isbell state autonomy and authorial control are in tension; Riedl and Stern describe a coherence-versus-agency trade-off and a story director that adapts the plot; Facade's authors say they traded global for local agency under fixed authoring effort.
- articleWhich data structures do Facade's beat sequencer, the Automated Story Director's narrative-mediation tree and Versu's social practices use to hold story state and authorial control, and what did each paper evaluate?
Three primary papers give three reusable structures. Facade (Mateas and Stern 2005) annotates each beat with preconditions, weights, priorities and tension effects, and picks the unused eligible beat closest to an authored tension arc. The Automated Story Director (Riedl and Stern 2006) holds the story as a partially ordered plan with causal links, precomputes a tree of contingency plans for every player action that threatens a link, and reported a prototype whose tree had over 1000 paths. Versu (Evans and Short 2014) gives characters strong autonomy, uses social practices as suggestion-only joint plans, and makes each episode's story manager a reactive practice. None reports a controlled comparison against alternatives.
- articleWhat techniques and failure modes for thematic association (leitmotif) follow from Wagner's writings and Wolzogen's thematic guide, does the 'one motif per character' rule hold, and how might it be used for film, games or series?
Wagner's texts do not state 'one motif per character'. He describes themes tied to dominant moods and to the 'weightiest motives' of the drama, kept few and recurring: a fresh motive for each recurrence of the same mood would be the opera-composer's habit he rejects; motives are re-modelled to fit the passing situation (Lohengrin versus the more literal reminiscences of the Flying Dutchman); a motive's first presentation must be justified by the scene; harsh combinations should be softened by tempo and dynamic. Wolzogen's guide names motives after objects, relations and states (Ring, Compact, Renunciation, Walhalla, Captivating Love, Wondrous Power of the golden apples) as well as persons, and notes Alberich acquires his motive only later. A 1920 photoplay manual (Lang & West) shows the same technique in film: a main love theme reused in minor mode, quickened, fragmented, agitated.
- articleWhat did Brewer and Lichtenstein's experiments measure, what did they find, and how can I reuse their segment-by-segment rating design to test an outline or draft?
The 1980 report (TR 197) measured suspense and surprise ratings after each of four segments for six discourse versions of three event sequences, then liking and 'is it a story' judgments. Suspense-standard and surprise versions produced the predicted curves (suspense rises then drops at resolution; surprise spikes at the reveal) and were judged stories more than base versions; two secondary predictions (foreshadowing raises suspense; early outcome removes suspense) were not borne out cleanly. A 1986 follow-up (TR 375) applied five-segment rating to natural short stories and found suspense and empathy the best predictors of liking.
- articleWhat does PBS require of the story, characters and production team in children's content, and how does it differ from the BBC/Ofcom approach?
PBS's Editorial Standards (adopted 10 June 2025) regulate children's content by its goals rather than its schedule. Every children's programme needs explicit, developmentally appropriate educational goals built into format, characters, settings and stories, and production teams must include early-childhood education advisers. Demeaning stereotypes and slurs are not allowed, and behaviours a child might copy should be avoided.
- articleWhat do the BBC Editorial Guidelines require when children or young people take part in content (consent, welfare, identification, impact over time)?
The BBC puts a child contributor's welfare above any editorial need. Working with under-18s requires a contributor due-care risk assessment, consent the child can understand, and parental consent for under-16s (except non-sensitive questions). Producers must avoid 'jigsaw identification', where several details combine to identify a child, and consider the impact after publication.
- articleIf I write a story for a children's audience in the UK, what do the BBC Editorial Guidelines and Ofcom Code say I must avoid or justify (violence, imitable acts, language, drugs, scheduling)?
UK children's-content rules run in parallel at the BBC and Ofcom. Pre-9pm output must suit a general audience, content made primarily for children is held to a stricter line, and violence, imitable dangerous acts and drugs or alcohol need strong editorial justification. Ofcom bars offensive language in programmes for younger children except in the most exceptional circumstances. Definitions differ: Ofcom's 'children' are under 15, while the BBC's contributor rules use under-18.
- articleWhich screenplay/film-dialogue corpora (Cornell Movie-Dialogs, ScriptBase, TRIPOD, MovieNet scripts) exist, what terms are stated for code, annotations and script text, and what scene or structure measurements are published from them?
None of the common screenplay corpora states reuse rights for the script texts. The Cornell Movie-Dialogs page (220,579 exchanges from 617 films) has no licence text; ConvoKit's MIT licence covers its software, not the corpus. ScriptBase (1,276 scripts crawled from sites like IMSDb) and TRIPOD have no licence file (GitHub's licence API returns 'not found') and no licence statement in their READMEs. MovieNet distributes through an OpenDataLab user agreement and withholds films for copyright reasons. All rest on scripts crawled from public websites.
- articleWhat does the WGA Television Credits Manual say about source material and source-material credits, and does it address AI-produced material?
The WGA Television Credits Manual (effective since 18 June 2010) defines source material and credit wordings but says nothing about AI. The AI rule is in the 2023 MBA MOA Article 72.C.3: GAI-produced material is not source material for writing credit. The 2026 MOA changes only Article 72.G, adding meetings and notice of GAI training licences, not 72.C.
- articleWhen source material exists, how do 'Screen Story by', 'Screenplay by', 'Adaptation by' and 'Based on' credits work in the WGA manual?
In the WGA manual, 'Screen Story by' goes, only through arbitration, to a writer who takes just a springboard, character or incident from story-type source material and builds a substantially new story; the source author then gets a form-of-acquisition credit. 'Screenplay by' fits when story-type source material exists. 'Adaptation by' is generally opposed and only awarded by arbitration in unusual cases. 'Based on Characters Created by' goes to writers holding separated rights on sequels.
- articleWhat counts as 'source material' under the WGA Screen Credits Manual and what credit wording can it get?
Under the WGA Screen Credits Manual (notices after 31 December 2021), source material is assigned material that was previously published or exploited, or written outside the Guild's jurisdiction, that the story or screenplay is based on. Its author gets a credit naming the form acquired ('From a Novel by', 'Based upon a Story by', ...). Earlier participating writers' material and research are not source material.
- articleDo inkle's free GDC slides by Jon Ingold state patterns for reconverging branches and keeping logic defensive?
inkle's free GDC 2015 slides 'Adventures in Text' (OCR of 45 pages) never use the words reconvergence or defensive logic, but the 'Avoiding Explosions' slide lists ways to keep branching manageable: different routes to the same result, shifting focus, coercing the player, hiding the forcing in nested options, using another character and blatant clues, while noting that gamers like explosions. Other slides stress ink's low-cost logic for tracking history and close with 'Branching: do it, and prove it' and 'Game below, story above'.
- articleWhich JSON fields does the articy:draft Unreal importer read for flow pins and connections, and what does it read from the Settings and Project sections?
The importer reads pins' Text, Owner and Connections; outgoing connections' Target and TargetPin and incoming connections' Source and SourcePin as hex-id strings; Settings' localisation, text formatter, script support, export version and two content hashes; and Project's Name, DetailName, Guid and TechnicalName, via JSON_TRY_* macros that leave defaults when a key is absent. As the producer noted, UArticyIncomingConnection::GetSourcePin has an inverted null test: with a database it always returns null, and without one it dereferences a null pointer.
- articleIn articy:draft, how are global variables organised and addressed, and how do they show up in an engine importer?
articy:draft global variables live in variable sets (namespace-like), each variable typed Boolean, Integer or String with a default, named without spaces or special characters, and addressed as Set.Variable; renaming without update can break scripts. The Unreal importer reads them as namespaces and supports independent variable sets per flow player via Override GV.
- articleWhat are the top-level sections and the global-variable and flow-connection fields of an articy:draft JSON export, as an official importer reads them?
No public articy page documents the JSON schema; the official MIT Unreal importer shows what it consumes: top-level Settings, Project, Packages, Hierarchy and ScriptMethods (always), plus GlobalVariables and ObjectDefinitions; global-variable namespaces carry Variables with name, description, type (Boolean/Integer/String) and value; flow pins carry Text, Owner and Connections.
- articleI am preparing a feature screenplay for Nicholl and for guild resources: what do the Academy, Writers Guild Foundation and WGA texts I can read actually require, and is there an official WGA margin spec?
For the Nicholl route via the Writers Guild Foundation, the FAQ asks for an original English-language feature screenplay in standard industry format, as a PDF of 80-125 pages, on US Letter or A4, with a title-only title page and no identifying information (an LoC or WGA registration number is optional). The WGA FAQ page has no margin, font or Courier specification, a bounded negative for one page.
- articleWhat numeric margins, font and page-number position does the Academy's own Nicholl format guide state, and what does the 2026 Nicholl FAQ state instead?
The Academy's old Nicholl format sample (file dated 1998, 2008 capture) gives left 1.5 in, right 1.0 in, top 1.0 in to the body (0.5 in to the page number), bottom 0.5-1.5 in depending on the page break, and Courier 12 pt 10 pitch, while saying there is no absolute standard format. The current Writers Guild Foundation partner FAQ gives no margin figures; it warns that smaller margins or sub-12-point fonts used to get under 125 pages may count against a script.
- articleWhat do the SAG-AFTRA 2023 and 2026 MOA texts each say about Employment-Based Digital Replica definition and Synthetic use, and where do the two wordings visibly differ?
Comparing the 2023 MOA with 2026 Attachment D: the 2026 text keeps the Employment-Based Digital Replica criteria. A footnote treats an asset made without the performer's physical participation as such a replica for Section 64.A.(2)(b) purposes, with no creation payment. The Synthetic provision gains a stated principle strongly favouring human performance and a notice, meeting (10 business days) and failure-to-agree (15/20 business days) sequence, which sunsets on 2030-06-30 back to the 2023 wording. New text covers footage used to train GAI systems for Synthetics. Because the 2026 PDF is marked up, some final wording is inferred.
- articleWhere can an agent read the SAG-AFTRA digital-replica Section 64/64.1 text publicly, and is any of it a clean consolidated version?
Publicly, the SAG-AFTRA AI terms are readable only as MOAs on the AMPTP contracts index: the 2023 MOA adds them as a bracketed Section [XX], and the 2026 MOA (fully executed 2026-05-27) restates Sections 64 and 64.1 in Attachment D as a marked-up text where struck and inserted words run together when extracted. No consolidated 2023 or 2026 agreement is listed, although the 2026 MOA refers to a 2026 Codified Basic Agreement.
- articleHow do the BFI Diversity Standards (as adapted by Screen Scotland) treat casting disabled actors and access consultation, and what do non-profit advocacy sources add or leave unavailable?
In Screen Scotland's April 2023 adaptation of the BFI Diversity Standards, the casting criterion can be met by casting a disabled actor in a role not written as disabled, and also by casting a disabled actor in a disabled role because non-disabled casting in such roles is common.
- articleWhat does a broadcaster's published disability portrayal code require on characters, casting and consultation?
Channel 4's 2022 Disability Code of Portrayal sets programme-level commitments (disabled people's own voice, rounded characters, social-model thinking, removing the 'able gaze', casting people with similar conditions in disabled roles) and portfolio-level ones (senior editorial disabled input in core disability stories); its 2022 Commissioning Diversity Guidelines say disabled performers will be sought for every disabled role and every series will have at least one disabled actor or character, with a caveat for editorial limits on single commissions. These are one commissioner's commitments.
- articleWhen Beat 2.1.18 exports a script with scene numbers to PDF or FDX, which number string does each path emit?
In Beat at 3e2b67f, the FDX exporter writes each heading's Number from the parser's sceneNumber, where a trailing '>' (forced-number reset marker) has been removed; the print/PDF path re-reads the raw #...# range into sceneNumber on cloned lines (the curator traced that the assignment runs in the loop over clones), so a heading written with '#5>#' would likely print '5>' while FDX gets '5'. PDF numbers appear only when printSceneNumbers is on. Inference from code; not executed.
- articleWhat do the BFI's own Diversity Standards pages say a film project must address, and which criteria are mandatory at which project stage?
The BFI Diversity Standards (five standards A-E) are a contractual requirement for BFI film funding and are required for BAFTA/BIFA British categories and for several other named funders (BBC Film, Film4, Doc Society, Future Takes, NETWORK). Development-stage features meet Standard A (A6 casting plus two others; A2 percentage targets are alternatives) and summarise the rest; from pre-production, features meet C, E and one other. Mandatory criteria: A6, B1, B2, C1, D1 and E1 (a 500-word accessibility statement); small teams may get B concessions; Screen Scotland applicants use their own standards.
- articleHow does a working Nigerian screenwriter describe story development, writers' rooms and the writing-to-shoot sequence in Nollywood?
A working Nollywood screenwriter (2024 Q&A) describes series writers rooms (storylines assigned, notes, head writer assigns scripts; staff/invited writers, story editors, head writer), mostly solo writing for films, writing that starts only after schedule, budget and fees are settled (money is the main hold-up), commission drafts in one week to a month, and a page-per-minute rule with no standard length (70-140 pages).
- articleWhat does a Korean-language press account report about a director who draws the full storyboard (conti) before shooting, and what does it say that practice buys on set?
A 2019 Korean press report says the director draws his own storyboards (since his first feature) with camera angle, movement lines, background and even handheld feel, says he will not go to set without one, and relays the DP's credit of a nearly 1,000-cut storyboard for finishing Parasite in 77 shooting sessions; the article links the planning to fewer on-set trials and to keeping the standard labour contract. Causation is the journalist's and DP's attribution, not measured.
- articleAfter a Yarn Spinner for Unity project has translated CSVs, what happens to the translations when I edit, add, delete or reorder lines in the .yarn file?
YarnSpinner-Unity keys translated lines by line tag and stores a Lock (first 8 characters of the SHA-256 of the base text); when the inspector update runs, changed base lines get '(NEEDS UPDATE)' prefixed to the translation, new lines arrive empty and removed lines are dropped. Editing base text without the update leaves stale translations unflagged.
- articleWhat does open-access scholarship say about griot-informed oral storytelling in West African screen narratives, and what limits does it state?
A 2022 University of Cape Town PhD thesis reviews scholarship that likens West African filmmakers to griots and proposes a model of how filmmakers mediate oral tradition, analysed through three films chosen because they adapt literature drawn from oral tradition (Xala, Karmen Gei, Invasion 1897). The griot comparison is a cited scholarly interpretation, and the selected sample cannot stand for West African cinema generally; no production workflow is documented.
- articleWhat do two BAFTA screenwriters say about adaptation decisions: fidelity, structure and when the source form must be reinvented?
Two screenwriters' BAFTA lectures describe adaptation as service to the new film rather than transcription. One warns against being slavish to the source, describes drafts that dropped the novel's voice-over and later drifted back towards the book's own section structure, and a 'flash-sideways' device for scenes shown from two perspectives. The other says her first draft adapting her own play failed because tone and language did not translate, so she restarted from scratch, and advises adapting only material one relates to. These are the speakers' own accounts of their process.