714 - Three Page Challenge Live in Austin 2025
Scriptnotes Podcast
John August
4.8 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 2025
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John and Craig gather a congregation of writers in St. David's Episcopal Church for a live round of the Three Page Challenge. They look at three listener-submitted scripts to offer them their honest feedback, face-to-face.
They offer suggestions on world building in the apocalypse, making military characters specific, building mystery and suspense, and crafting con-artist logic.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we answer questions from our audience on how to know if a script looks correct, what we want to see in the first three pages, using actor names in character descriptions, what comedy requires, and how to direct a reader's attention on the page.
Links:
- Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections! ANCIENT GRAINS by Michael Warnecke, HIGH NORTH by Teddy Johnson, TALL POPPIES by Becca Hurd
- Austin Film Festival
- The Scriptnotes Book is here!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Mathew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at [email protected]
You can download the episode here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome. My name is John August. And my name is Craig Mason. And you're listening to |
| 0:04.8 | script notes. It's a podcast about screening and things that are interesting to screenwriters. |
| 0:08.7 | Craig, today's episode is a flashback to when we were at the Austin Film Festival this year in 2025. |
| 0:14.3 | We did another three-page challenge. This was at the church in Austin. And it was a great crowd. |
| 0:20.9 | And we had just a really great time doing it. |
| 0:23.4 | We loved doing a three-page challenge when we can have those participants come up on stage with us and talk through what they were doing. |
| 0:29.0 | Yeah, it was great. |
| 0:29.9 | They did a great job. |
| 0:31.1 | Anybody who agrees to do this is very brave. |
| 0:34.4 | Anybody who agrees to do this live in front of a lot of people under the watchful |
| 0:39.7 | eyes of Jesus is particularly brave. And so I'm like thumbs up to these three. They were very |
| 0:45.6 | courageous and I hope that we help them as we try. So as always, if you want to read along with |
| 0:52.8 | these samples, you can pause this and we'll have links in the show notes to the PDF. |
| 0:57.6 | So you can only read those PDFs before we get into it. |
| 1:00.4 | But before you do that, Craig, today the day that episode drops, the scripted notes book is out in the world, in physical form, in hardcover. |
| 1:08.3 | Oh, my God. This is it. It is. So apparently Australia is not until January 4th, but the rest of the world gets it today. And the audiobook, we had Graham Rowett on recently to talk through an audiobook, please, if you have the book and it comes to you, post on Instagram, post on TikTok, tag script notes podcast, and we will repost you. We will |
| 1:28.3 | hype you up. I will hype you up. If you do so, we can also send you a, the bonus chapter that we sent to all the pre-orders. If you haven't gotten that yet, Drew can send you that to you. Because I'm just so excited that the book is finally out there in the world. Yeah, and I got to say, if you waited, I get it. |
| 1:44.5 | But now you got to actually start thinking about Christmas gifts for your stupid friends. |
| 1:49.3 | And this is a great Christmas gift for your stupid friends, you know? |
| 1:52.4 | 100%. |
| 1:52.9 | You should go to a party and everyone should give each other this big orange book. |
| 1:59.1 | It just smells like Christmas. |
... |
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