Mark Olson built a…well, let him explain:

Storyboard was born of my insane desire to consume videos without actually having to watch them. Normally that would involve putting the TV on in the background and ignoring the video while listening to the audio, but what about the reverse? All visual without the audio. On my kindle.

Feed Storyboard a subtitled MKV file in the command line and get a PDF transcript back (ePub and Mobi coming soon). Neat trick.

(via Waxy.org.)

Growing up, I had a lot of “Little Golden Books.” By far the one that has stuck with me the most has been The Monster at the End of This Book, in which Sesame Street’s Grover braces himself for the arrival of a monster.

The show’s Twitter feed just warmed my heart a bit by publishing a series of tweets that follow the same arc as the book. While decidedly not as poignant as the original, which I take to be about acceptance of others by way of not judging a book by its cover,¹ it’s a nice little exercise in using Twitter to share a fun experience with followers.

Here’s the whole thing as a Storify stream:

(via @BuzzFeed.)

As I mentioned yesterday, I quite like the new Courier Prime typeface. It’s often difficult to put into words what separates one Courier from another, though that hasn’t stopped me from trying in the past.

This time around I figured I’d make an animated GIF cycling through the top contenders. Here it is:

Check out the full size version here.

Personally I think I’ll be sticking with Pitch for writing on my Mac. That said, if Courier Prime were available a few months back I don’t know that I would have sprung for Pitch, which set me back a not insignificant $75 for a roman and italic pair.

I do think that Courier Prime should become the de facto font for printed screenplays, no matter what you use to write with on screen. Not just because it’s good, but because it makes vanilla Courier look bad next to it.

Really excellent work by Alan Dague-Greene. And a big kudos (and thank you) to John August and the Quote-Unquote Apps team. They’re making screenwriting better for everyone one release at a time.

Methodology

Fonts compared:

• Courier Regular & Oblique
• Courier Screenplay Book & Italic
• Courier Prime Regular & Italic
• Pitch Medium & Medium Italic

Courier Final Draft was left out because a) the last time I did a Courier comparison it didn’t distinguish itself enough to stick around and b) I forgot about it. I didn’t include Courier New because it sucks. The only reason I didn’t compare the bold weights is that I don’t own a copy of Pitch Bold¹ and I wanted to keep things consistent.

Copy comes from Hipster Ipsum. (I know iPhone is mis-capitalized. Blame a hipster.)

Each image is a screenshot from Ulysses laid over one another in Photoshop. Type is set at 16 pt, lines spaced at 1.2 (120% in Ulysses’ parlance). The full size image is cropped at 100%. I tried building the text in Photoshop but the results were never as consistent as in an actual text editor. I had been using Ulysses to flip through typefaces on my own and wanted to recreate that effect.

Here’s a closer look at each frame:

Perhaps you saw that video “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” that was revealed to be a hoax created by students at Montreal’s National Animation and Design Center for class. Nelson Wyatt in the Montreal Gazette:

The viral video of the eagle, which was created by students at Montreal’s Centre NAD, has received international media attention and had more than 41 million views on YouTube since it was posted on Dec. 18.

And the school says it’s also generated a few bucks that will go toward a scholarship for a deserving student at the 3D animation and digital design school.

Are students actually going to college to learn how to make a pittance off AdSense? Great lesson.

(via The Daily Dot.)

Gabe Weatherhead:

If a site consistently links to Kottke or Daring Fireball, then that site’s market share is going to get pretty small. Most people are either already reading Kottke and Gruber or a hundred other sites will link to them anyway. But if I find a site that links to something truly out of the ordinary, I’m going to give them some of my attention. If they say smart things about those links I’ll probably give them a great deal of my attention.

I link therefore I am.

Wait…no. Scratch that. I write link posts because I like to.

When I stop to ponder this site’s place in the grand fabric of the Internet I usually slow down posting (which may give you a little insight as to how I’ve been spending my January).

So instead of wondering why I write link posts I’d rather get back to piecing together the story I want to tell.

Neil Middleton has learned a lot while writing a book:

Everyone benefits from writing, but most of all the author. So do it.

Simple.

Speaking of lessons in monetizing video content, here’s Jason Del Rey at Ad Age:

YouTube has reached out to a small group of channel producers and asked them to submit applications to create channels that users would have to pay to access. As of now it appears that the first paid channels will cost somewhere between $1 and $5 a month, two of these people said. In addition to episodic content, YouTube is also considering charging for content libraries and access to live events, a la pay-per-view, as well as self-help or financial advice shows.

Remember Vimeo’s Tip Jar and forthcoming pay-to-view service? Like I said back in September, 2013 is shaping up to be a big year in this space.

Courier Prime is a new typeface from Alan Dague-Greene created for John August and Quote-Unquote Apps.

Since the beginning, screenplays have been written in Courier. Its uniformity allows filmmakers to make handy comparisons and estimates, such as 1 page = 1 minute of screen time.

But there’s no reason Courier has to look terrible. We set out to make the best damn Courier ever.

It takes only an instant to see that it’s the best damn free Courier around. The italic lowercase “i” and “f” in particular are a beautiful touch none of the alternatives possess.

I’ve been using Kris Sowersby’s Pitch as my monospace of choice these last few months (I’m a sucker for that double-story lowercase “g”) but it’s a pricy typeface. Courier Prime is gorgeous, well thought out, available in all essential weights (Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic) and best of all free. Go get it.

UPDATE: John August’s post introducing Courier Prime is definitely worth a read.

My thanks once again to the New York Film Academy for sponsoring the candler blog this past week.

Has the proliferation of documentaries, reality TV and faux-documentary television programming (e.g., NBC-TV’s The Office) in any way diminished the film-journalism genre?

It doesn’t appear to be the case. If anything, the appetite for non-fictional video narratives is on the increase: No fewer than 20 top-tier cable television channels carry documentaries 24/7 in the U.S., while online cyber-docs and webisodes offer additional and unlimited distribution venues. The spectacular success of documentary filmmakers Marilyn Agrelo, Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock now illustrate that big audiences like and respond to documentaries.

The Documentary School at the New York Film Academy’s 6-week, one-year and Master of Fine Arts programs provide more than a vocational education to its very international student body. Aspiring documentarians are exposed to some of the biggest names in documentaries who visit the program, lecture and provide real-world learning experiences for students. These budding filmmakers hear first-hand about the power that documentaries have on education and social change – launching fulfilling careers, documenting the world as they see it.

Carl Franzen for Talking Points Memo:

“This is just a general practice for both Facebook and Instagram to request photo IDs for verification purposes depending on what type of violation may have occurred,” a spokesperson for Facebook told TPM. “Unfortunately, I can’t share more with you beyond that as we don’t go into details beyond that.”

Facebook declined to state exactly why a number of users would collectively receive notifications to provide government issued IDs this week or what specific violations of terms prompted the notifications.

You gotta be fucking kidding me.

I’ll admit that when I nuked my Instagram account recently I worried that maybe I should loosen my tin-foil hat a bit, but this makes my trepidation that they’d sell my photos seem quaint.

No Web service is worth this kind of intrusion into your private life; no private company should insist on seeing a government issued ID and not be able to tell you why.

(via John Moltz.)