Run Like Hell is a hilarious feature film in development, inspired by the cult classic video game. As the director attached to the project, I teamed up with producer Adrian Askarieh and Red Giant Films to create this teaser. Step one was writing the script.

I used Slugline of course, and began by borrowing heavily from the wonderful dialogue in the feature screenplay by Max Adams. I don't know what software Max used to write it, but I was able to copy and paste the text directly from the PDF into Slugine. I then began laying in the strange events that unfold just outside our hero's field of view.

I used Slugline's outline view to keep track of the escalation of events, and producer Aharon Rabinowitz used Slugline to add notes to my drafts, often emailing me the Fountain text directly.

Even on a project this compact, Slugline's flexibility, combined with the openness of the Fountain format, made for an easy collaboration across thousands of miles and multiple time zones.

Wanna check all this out? Download the script for the short as a PDF, or in Fountain.

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Fountain screenplay in Slugline on the left. Outline-only document in Byword on the right. All powered by nothing but text.

Matthew McCowan, creator of the Shotlists from Fountain tool, is at it again. Responding within hours to my request, he whipped up Outline From Fountain, a utility for creating Markdown-formatted outline documents from a Fountain file containing Sections and Synopses.

The Automator app takes a Fountain file and extracts only the Sections and Synopses, reformatting them into a heirarchical bulleted list in Markdown format. You can then use a Markdown app, such as Byword or the awesome new Marked 2, to view and export your outline with any styling you desire.

Once again, Matthew has generously made his work available to the Fountain community:

• Outline from Fountain.app – A standalone Mac application. Drag your Fountain files onto it, and it creates a new TextEdit document with your outline.
• Shotlist from Fountain.workflow – The Automator workflow, in case you want to customize it.
• outline.pl – The original Perl script.
• The Last Birthday Card.fountain – A sample Fountain file with Sections and Synopses, so you can try this out right away.

We're thrilled to see the Fountain ecosystem expanding with simple but powerful tools like this. Follow us on Twitter and let us know what kind of tools you'd like to see for working with Fountain files!