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creative.gf.cx is where the craft notebooks live: how scripts get written, how a director draws the film before he shoots it, and where London stood in for somewhere else on screen. The working notes behind the work.

A typed page from The Shining screenplay with 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy' handwritten in green ink
The Shining screenplay, Stanley Kubrick exhibit, LACMA · photo William Beutler, CC BY 2.0
writing · method
Scripts start before the script.

A working notebook of script-writing methods: Lynch’s 70 cards, Parker & Stone’s but / therefore, Mamet’s want-plan-failure loop, beats before dialogue.

Open /writing/scripts →
Ridley Scott in half-light, mid-sentence, one hand raised
Ridley Scott
storyboards · owner-only
Ridley Scott draws the film first.

26 Ridleygrams across 8 films, from Alien to Napoleon: the ink-and-stipple storyboards Scott draws himself, each credited to its source. Plus the New Yorker profile, links and books.

Open /ridley →
The Farmiloe Building on St John Street, Clerkenwell: a tall Italianate warehouse front with arched windows
The Farmiloe Building, St John Street · photo Matt from London, CC BY 2.0
clippings · london
London keeps standing in for somewhere else.

A reference feed of Secret London clippings on the city as a film set, starting with the Farmiloe Building in Clerkenwell: Gotham’s police station, Yusuf’s pharmacy, a Sherlock Holmes buzz saw. Each entry quoted verbatim and credited to its publisher.

Open /secretlondon →

What + How + Why

What

creative.gf.cx holds craft notebooks: working notes on how things get made. Three so far: a script-writing method notebook, Ridleygrams, a gallery of the storyboards Ridley Scott draws himself, and Secret London clippings, a feed of the places where London stood in for somewhere else on screen.

How

  • Static pages on Cloudflare Pages; a push to main in xlab-nyc/creative-gf-cx deploys.
  • This page borrows sandbox.gf.cx’s feature-row layout, with photographs in place of drawn art.
  • The Ridley gallery is generated from a manifest (tools/ridley_render.py). Every board is credited and links to its source, and /ridley/ sits behind its own Cloudflare Access app (owner-only), so the boards never appear on a public page.
  • The Secret London feed is generated the same way (tools/secretlondon_render.py from a JSON list). Every clipping is the publisher’s text verbatim, set as a quotation and credited with a link; the page is noindex.
  • Photo credits: The Shining screenplay page, photographed by William Beutler at LACMA’s Stanley Kubrick exhibit (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0). Ridley Scott portrait: press still, credit pending. The Farmiloe Building, photographed by Matt from London (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0).

Why

The notebooks compound: method written down once is method reused. Pictures, because both notebooks are about seeing before writing. Lynch’s cards and Scott’s boards are the film worked out on paper before a word of dialogue or a frame of footage.

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