I tweeted a link to this video earlier, but it’s such a great summation of why we filmmakers do what we do that I felt I had to post it up on here.
This captures all of the endlessly changing feelings we all go through as we battle to bring our baby to the screen. Enjoy! And, if you like it, do the guys a favour and vote for them, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNNEwFqQCB8
Well this is just a whole big bunch of brilliant:
Not sure about the 3D, though. The rest of the Marvel universe have managed to be all kinds of awesome without needing a 3rd dimension, so I’m sure Thor can, too.
I’m writing this at an almost respectable 7am, but considering I’ve been awake all night it doesn’t feel like the start of a new day.
Why have I been awake all night, I hear you ask? Or is that the voices in my head? They crept in about two hours ago and are pretty insistent on staying there. But I digress.
I have a weird and wonderful brain that kicks into gear at random moments, which is fantastic for creative and lateral thinking, but not so good when it steps up to overdrive just as I settle down for some well-earned kip.
And so it was last night, when my head hit the pillow mere minutes after hitting on the most amazing concept for a HUGE new project. The real beauty of it, though, is that it’s not a ‘new’ project. Rather, in a flash of awkwardly-timed, knock-out inspiration I found a way of tying together no fewer than FOUR existing projects into one symbiotic whole.
For those of you familiar with transmedia storytelling, hold your groans. I haven’t just wedged a bundle of ideas together into one unconscionably complicated and sprawling hole. I have – you may be surprised to know – actually thought it through.
Some of the ideas were already concrete in my head, other were more shapeless and still others were small moments of “wouldn’t it be great if I could…”. But they all shared a common theme that I just hadn’t identified before, a theme which will – hopefully – over the coming few months, be explored through a wide range of stories and across a variety of different media; not least, I suspect, this blog.
This is going to be a HUGELY ambitious project, but one I passionately believe in. I’m going to need a lot of help and support along the way, but that’s what you, dear reader, are there for. Together we can not just explore, inform and entertain, but hopefully expand and engross as well.
Here’s to 2011 and a new world of excitement. Won’t you come and join me for the ride?
PS – regardless of project-related bloggage, there’s going to be a lot more content on the blog in the weeks and months to come, so stay tuned (or come back more often than you have been…)
Apologies for the delayed return to the return to blogging – I’m not sure why I chose to re-start blogging just before going into production on yet another short film – I should plan these things better.
The film in question, Love Like Hers, went remarkably well despite a hectic schedule and 3 lost hours on the first morning thanks to the good old Yorkshire weather. The writer/director, Danny Lacey, has already detailed the ins and outs of a crazy 3 days on both his blog and his live show, which you can watch back on demand on his LiveStream channel, so I won’t go into it too much. For those of you who want a taste of what we went through, here’s a short behind the scenes vid from Danny’s YouTube Channel:
My role was essentially as an on-set coordinator, since I’d come on board too late to really be able to take a lot of the “real” production stuff from Danny. Although, frankly, I ended up with more than enough on my plate as it was. It definitely would have been an impossible mission had it not been for the extraordinary Bethan Davis, who started as a Production Assistant, but ended up as a Production Co-Ordinator/Production Manager and was outstanding, as was Danny’s girlfriend, Jacqui, who shouldered a huge amount of stress on Danny’s behalf.
If there was one mistake we made it was in not having enough time for me to take financial control of the picture, meaning all spending decisions had to come from Danny himself. That will doubtless be rectified in future projects together.
What I’ve learned over the last few weeks, though, is that I’m actually not only a big fan of, but also well suited to being a producer. I like the coordination, I enjoy the on-set challenges, but most of all I like to be able to help other writer/directors achieve their vision.
This became abundantly clear to me yesterday after spending over 2 hours in a script meeting with a first-time writer/director who’s got a great little story mapped out.
Louisa is unique in many ways, not simply because she has made a powerful and fascinating documentary exploring her physical and emotional recovery from an horrific accident. She also knows exactly where she stands in terms of skills, abilities and desires.
The script she sent to me has, at its heart, a really strong emotional pull and a really quirky, captivating idea behind it, but it it – by her own admission – in very rough form. Yesterday afternoon she stopped in to my place and we talked through the whole thing from start to finish and really started to delve deeply into the characters, where they were coming from and why they made the decisions they did. I’m totally confident that when she sends her second draft over it’ll be a vast improvement.
For those of you who want to know why I find Louisa such an exciting person to want to work with, check out her doc, The Highest Low:
And while I’m here, if there’s anyone out there with a script they want to turn or see turned into a finished product, I’m all for taking a look.
Way, way back in the olden days of May or June a few of my Twitter buddies started twittering about the Red Planet Prize, a free screenwriting competition run by Red Planet Pictures, the production company run by Tony Jordan behind dramas like CRASH, HUSTLE and ECHO BEACH/MOVING WALLPAPER.
The competition required writers to send in the first 10 pages of a 60 page TV show, either a stand-alone hour or part of (or pilot for) a longer series.
I’ve had an idea buzzing about in my head for quite a while for a TV series I want to write, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. My early drafts were shabby to say the least, but as the first-round submission deadline loomed I had ten credible pages that I felt I could send off.
The biggest issue was the recommendations of most professional writers when talking about the prize – make sure you’ve got all 60 pages before you submit, so you can send the script across as soon as you get the call. That is, if you’re successful enough to still be in the running once the 1500 submissions are whittled down to those few whose full script will be read.
I asked a friend and script editor, Lucy Vee, what I should do. Her advice? Go for it anyway; it’s free, what have you got to lose. So I did.
I have to confess at this point, I’ve been going through something of a crisis of confidence in my writing in the last few months. I’ve not written a huge amount and what I have written, when glanced back over with a critical eye, doesn’t seem up to snuff for me.
I’ve been laying low, not hitting my keyboard as much as I should have (as evidenced by the lack of bloggage) and focused instead on filmmaking rather than writing. I’ve been on a great project with Northants County Council, through Catalyst Theatre Arts, making a doc about a sibling support project in the area and I’ve also just come off Assistant Producing/Production Managing a UK Film Council short film, ELLIE.
I wasn’t prepared, then, for the email that landed in my inbox yesterday to say my script, NUMBER 10, has made it through to the next round of the RPP. Seriously.
My first reaction was utter delight – it felt like a real vindication of my work thus far and showed me that despite my crisis of confidence, I do actually have a bit of talent at this writing lark. The second thought was dread. I hadn’t actually looked at the Final Draft file with my submission on it since I sent it in. The email stated quite clearly that the full 60-pager had to be submitted by email by Monday lunchtime, just 6 days away.
I checked the file and did some calculations. I’d managed 21 pages of the script so far, of which I’d submitted the first 10. I now had 6 days to come up with another 40 pages that would match the quality of the submission that appears to have piqued the interest of the judges. And given that this was at 6pm, it really meant 5 days. And since I’m away giving a talking Liverpool on Thursday, that really meant 4 days. That’s an average of 10 pages a day, but I’d still need time to proof-read and edit before submission.
Yes, ladies and gentleman, I am also currently blogging. This is 600 words that could have gone into my script, but instead I’m sat here filling you all in. I hope you’re happy. I am.
Yours sincerely,
Oli Lewingon, King Procrastinator & Red Planeteer.
Thursday 1 April not only saw far too many people sucked in by (and irrationally annoyed by) Philip Bloom‘s masterful April Fool on Canon DSLRs, but also the launch of the month-long Twitter-based #scriptfrenzy.
In essence, the plan for Script Frenzy is to churn out 100 pages of an original screenplay in the 30 days of April. But just how useful is it to hammer out a first draft in a frenzy? I took some time to weigh up my own personal pros and cons:
PROs
We all like a deadline. Actually, most writers hate deadlines, but it can’t be denied that setting one focuses the mind. And by sharing that deadline with all the other “frenziers” out there, not to mention all of your other Twitter followers, you’re binding yourself into a loose contract to say you’ll at least have something on paper at the beginning of May.
Sometimes it’s good just to write. Far too many writers – especially those just starting out who are struggling to find the time for wordsmithing alongside busy and demanding day-jobs – put off starting that new piece because there are “other things” in the way. By forcing yourself to sit down and hammer out an average of just 4 pages a day for a 1st draft, you get those creative juices flowing.
CONs
Thinking time. Former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies talks about the majority of his writing time being time spent in “the Maybe” – that etheral neverland of thoughts, shapes and possibilities where stories solidify and conform in the brain before you actually sit down to hammer out the pages on Final Draft. Similarly, Paul Schrader, writer of modern classics like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, has a Maybe that exists in his meticulous outlining and documenting of the entire story prior to the 1st draft. How do you account for thinking time in a frenzied rush to hammer out your 100 pages? Do you need to have put that all in place before April 1st, or do you build that into your month-of-crazy?
Arbitrary page counts. Yes, a feature film script should come in somewhere around 100 pages, but – more importantly – a script needs to be the right length to tell the story, whether that be 75 pages or, God forbid, 150 pages. 100 is a good guideline, but is it an appropriate target?
Forcing the words out. All screenplays need a little time to digest as you go. Undoubtedly, sometimes you do just need to sit down and hammer your way through a stumbling block, but other times you need to be free to step back and recognise when simply bashing the keys is wasted time until you’ve worked out why the scene isn’t working for you.
I don’t have anything against #scriptfrenzy and certainly not against those taking part. But I know that it’s not the way that I can sit and hammer out a first draft of anything. I need the time to consider it, the time to plan it and then to set myself a deadline that’s reachable at a daily page count that works for me, my working time and my goals for the script.
How about you? Are you a frenzier, a plodder or a somewhere-in-the-middle?
Since the back-end of last year, I’ve been working on a new screenplay for an ultra-low-budget film with just two characters and a powerful, emotional love story.
It’s now at that stage with which many writers will be familiar – the skeleton is there, the bones and muscles, but it still needs that little something to really form it into something special.
What I’m battling with now is the classic filmmaker’s dilemma of just how commercial do you make a script for a micro-budget indie? I know that the market for the film isn’t going to be vast, but I also know that a couple of simple – but major – tweaks could open it out to a wider and more passionate market. If nothing else I’m confident these changes would give it a much better chance on the festival circuit.
The trouble is, I don’t know how big a compromise this is. I’m not as familiar with the environment I’d be re-setting the film in and although I think the story would work just as well, am I betraying both my instincts and my original story in pushing for a bigger audience? Or am I doing the underlying story a disservice in sticking to my guns and potentially reducing the market for the finished film?
As it stands I’m torn between the two, hence this little cry for help. At what point does targeting a market becoming selling out?