RoughDraft is a freeware Final Draft emulator.

So, recently Joe Dante attended a screening of this for QnA reasons, and one of the things he talked about was the ending.

There is actually an answer to this question, and now we know it:

They had several cuts of the film they had been working on, serving various masters, and when their deadline got moved up they picked — from three unfinished cuts — the one that had the most not-broken in it. This is the one that was pretty solid for about an hour, and really hairy in the back half-hour.

Lightwave has a million buttons, but they're all labeled with what they do. "Box." "Twist." So on.

You can do it!

I'm intrigued by the concept of it, and it gets a lot of lip service around here. Never tried one myself. I think pink fuzzy mustaches are dumb.

Got a few pages of it in a book here, I can scan it in the morning if ya want. Not sure how up to date it is, think the book is from the late nineties.

Hooray! I half-knew a thing kind of!

Pft. And what, I don't look like anyone?

Secret: 90% of the smoothness a professional Steadicam op can get with a full rig, that same op can get with a camera on a weighted stick. Obviously not 100%, but about 90% is right. Artist, tool, etc..

Practice. Like an asshole. For hours in your backyard. Practice your marching-band walk, isolating your hand movement from your body movement, practice pans and tilts while moving. This whole thing is more or less the art of mime, used in a different way.

My inside-scoop knowledge comes, almost entirely, from talking to people that I know who worked on said-thing. I rarely read up on filmmaking procedure, and rarely listen to podcasts. (Almost never to commentaries. lawl.) It's just shit someone said, near me, that I happened to get curious about and follow up on.

Now, that's me. Bear in mind, of the core group of WAYDMers — Teague, Brian, Dorkman, Trey, Eddie — I'm the guy who's the least in the know, generally speaking. I know my shit in my own field, and then the stuff I covered in the first paragraph. My cohorts are the ones with the Larger Industry Knowledge.

When in doubt, add Variety and The Hollywood Reporter to your morning bookmarks. (I check those too, but I've been assuming that's standard.)