Over the last 7 days leading up to the London Screenwriters’ Festival at Regents College, I’ll be preparing a special (text-only, sadly) Lowdown looking at how you can get the most from your weekend and the biggest bang for your buck.

You can read earlier tips in the countdown: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3.

Day 4: Take Note(s)

I’m going to make a wild assumption that people going along to the London Screenwriters’ Festival are going to be, well, writers. Which means that we’re all interested in using the written – and then spoken – word to express ourselves.

Note-taking, however, is very, very far away from what we do day-to-day. It’s not about meticulously crafted sentences and structures – it’s about remembering what we feel we most want/need to remember.

The biggest difficulty with note-taking is that it’s very much like revision at school: everyone has their own system that works for them. I can’t, therefore, tell you how to take the best notes for you, but I can tell you what works for me and what other people often find useful with notes.

Here are 6 key points to consider:

1. Don’t attempt to transcribe the session – that way madness lies. Your hand (or your fingers if you’re being posh and taking a laptop in) can’t keep up with the speed at which we all speak. So unless you’re a stenographer or journalist trained in short-hand, you’re not going to be able to write down everything that’s said.
2. Take down the key headings – from the powerpoint, if there is one, or as they emerge from the mouth of the speaker. Most speakers use topic headings on slides or note cards to jog their memory of what they’re trying to cover; the same principal can work for you.
3. Consider your own personal shorthand – my dad used to take notes in meetings using his own form of shorthand that eliminates vowels. That was in the 70’s and is now more commonly known as “text-speak” (or txt-spk, I suppose). The point is, it worked for him, you may find something that works for you.
4. Don’t let your note-taking distract from the business of the session – You don’t want to miss key points because you were furiously scribbling what was said immediately beforehand. Keep your notes as brief as you feel you can make them.
5. Allow time to typing up – brief notes are all well and good, but you’ll need to allow yourself time to write them up at some point. This is how I make my notes, by making brief points on my notepad, then after the session going over them and typing them up. I find it helps me remember things better.
6. Or, you could skip notes altogether in the session – allowing you to focus completely on the speaker(s), then write down the key points you remember immediately afterwards. This doesn’t work for me, because I get distracted by consciously “trying” to remember the key points I don’t want to forget and miss other elements of the presentation, but I know plenty of people for whom it works perfectly.

If this all feels slightly too scholastic for you, by all means avoid taking notes completely. If you think you’ll take away what you need to know without writing it all down then that’s the best way to do it – as I said above notes are entirely personal.

The last things I’ll say on notes, though, is that you should see them as a career investment; you’re paying close to £300 for this weekend’s experiences, so however much of a chore taking and typing up notes may appear, it’s always worth considering what you would pay someone for notes like those with the insights you’re going to get from the weekend.

For me, I’d certainly pay more than £300 for the wealth of knowledge I’m likely to accumulate over the course of the LSWF.

Come back tomorrow, Day 5, with just 3 days to go before the festival starts, when we’ll be looking at Networking – that dreaded “meeting new people” thing.

Over the last 7 days leading up to the London Screenwriters Festival at Regents College, I’ll be preparing a special (text-only, sadly) Lowdown looking at how you can get the most from your weekend and the biggest bang for your buck.

You can read Day 1 here and Day 2 here.

Day 3: Making the Most of Your Schedule

After yesterday’s blog about how to pick apart the schedule and select your sessions (another interesting note on which Monica Solom has blogged once again), it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty of how you make the most of the workshops you’ve chosen.

Here’s a quick, 5-point Lowdown on getting what you need:

1. Pause before the start to work out what 3-5 nuggets of info or tips you’d like to come out with at the end of the session and write them out on a blank page in your note book.
2. Make notes through the talk. If you’re not a great – or natural – note-taker, don’t worry, I’ll have more on making notes in tomorrow’s Lowdown.
3. Listen carefully. You’re looking not only for your 3 key nuggets, but also the extra bits of info that you wouldn’t have thought of or hadn’t realised were important until they came out of the speaker’s mouth. But you’re also listening to make sure that when it comes to Number 4 you’re not going over old material.
4. Ask questions. If you find yourself without key notes written by your important pieces of info you’re after, ask. Don’t EVER be shy to ask a question in a panel or a talk. All of the sessions will have time for a Q&A and, if it helps you achieve your goals for the festival that we talked about yesterday, there’s no such thing as a stupid question. However stupid you may feel asking it, you’ll feel even more stupid if you don’t and you walk away without at least broaching the subject.
5. Talk about it. When you’re filing out, when you’re heading across to the next session, when you’re grabbing a cup of coffee or a bite of lunch; talk about it with anyone and everyone. Nothing seals information in your brain better than forcing your brain to process it so you can sum it up to someone who wasn’t there (maybe you’re “workshop buddy” who’s been taking in a competing session. Equally, discussing it with someone who was also in the session can help you see things from another angle that you may have missed.

There is an untold wealth of information to be discovered, mined and absorbed at the festival. Even once you’ve narrowed your choice of workshops and sessions right down, you still need to be aware of what you want to glean from each individual element on your personal schedule.

With 5 minutes of forethought and an hour of concentration, you will emerge from each and every block a wiser person and, hopefully, a better writer.

Tomorrow on the Countdown Lowdown, we’ll take a brief gander at note-taking: an investment in learning.

Over the last 7 days leading up to the London Screenwriters Festival at Regents College, I’ll be preparing a special (text-only, sadly) LOWDOWN looking at how you can get the most from your weekend and the biggest bang for your buck.

Read Day 1 here.

Day 2 – Get Organised, Part II: Setting Your Schedule

After yesterday’s first post you should now be primed and ready with notebooks, pens and business cards on the way.

Today and tomorrow, making the most of the weekend, it’s time to sit down and really study the timetable for the festival and decide what you want to tackle.

This is only a blog of limited space (I know you don’t want to sit and listen to be drone on), so there’s no way I can systematically go through the whole weekend workshop by workshop, but here’s my top tips for choosing the right sessions for you.

1. Think carefully about your short- and medium-term goals. What you should be aiming for from this year’s inaugural festival is to kick-start your journey to the next step of your career – whether you’re a newbie, an old-hand or somewhere in the middle.
2. Print out the schedule from the LSWF website (which you can find here) and put big black marker lines through the workshops that hold no interest for you at all. That narrows things down a bit (but probably not a lot!).
3. Pick two or three workshops on each day that fit with what you want to achieve/improve RIGHT NOW. Whether it’s getting that first draft down, to selling it, to getting representation or looking into self-producing, select the sessions that will help you get there as soon as the festival finishes.
4. Be REALLY honest with yourself. If you haven’t finished a working, saleable/shootable draft of your screenplay yet, is it really worth that workshop on getting an agent, or would you be better off sitting in on the re-writing workshop instead?
5. Pick at least one networking event each day that you will commit to. Networking is the major bonus of actually being at the event (as opposed to watching the sessions back on the ‘net afterwards), so make the most of it. More on networking later in the build up, but don’t avoid it because you’re nervous!
6. Pick at least one workshop every day that’s not something you’d normally attend. Whether it’s about a topic you don’t normally deal with or about a media you don’t normally write for, go and see something different.
7. Pick one workshop a day that just looks interesting and/or fun – something that you actively really want to see. Maybe it’s Tim Bevan, John August or some of the other big names at the fest whose work you admire, or a session with people you know and follow in the wider world. Make it your treat.
8. Lastly, but not least, pick yourself a schedule that’s going to feel rewarding. You’ve got to find a balance between information and entertainment, between over-loading your brain with info and getting enough useful information to push yourself forward.

All the delegates of at LSWF have to face the fact that you can’t be at all of the events you’ll want to be at, but if you spend enough time studying the schedule you will at least be able to maximise the information you take in that will help you take that leap to the next level.

Another great tip I’ve heard is from an article over on TwelvePoint from Monica Solom (thanks for the tip!). She suggests buddying up with other writers to split workshops between you. Then arranging time to get together and swap notes after the fact, so you gain from more than you were able to see yourself. The LSWF social network for delegates is a really useful place to find a buddy if this idea appeals to you.

Tomorrow, Day 3 of the Countdown Lowdown will look at making the most of your workshops.

Over the next 7 days as things ramp up towards the London Screenwriters Festival at the phenomenal Regents College, I’ll be preparing a special (text-only, sadly) LOWDOWN looking at how you can get the most from your weekend and the biggest bang for your buck.

Day 1 – Get Organised

With 7 days still to go, you’ve still got time to get your business cards designed, printed and sent out to you. Granted, it’ll be speedy-shipping, which will cost you a little more, but you really can’t underestimate how important having good – or any – business cards can be.

There’s loads of great, cheap websites to get your cards produced and you don’t need anything flashy or glossy. Try places like Vistaprint or BestPrinting, both of which allow you to design your own cards online and upload your own image.

A quick tip for card design: leave space on the back side for people to make notes about you and your projects. When you’re meeting the hundreds of other delegates at the festival, you’ll find some of them stick in your mind and others, well, wont. But if you keep track of people and their projects you stand a better chance of enhancing your networking after the fact.

Whether you use a standard template (not the best idea, but better than nothing) or create your own, business cards are essential to your LSWF experience. The last thing you want is to be in a situation where people are asking for your details and you have to scribble them on the back of a fag packet (after emptying out all of your smokes) or a page hastily ripped out of your notepad. Not a great impression.

And talking of notebooks – buy two. Just looking at the lineup, you know that whatever you’re going to be taking in you’ll going to be taking copious notes on everything you see (or at least you should be!).

With you notebook, buy yourself a PACK of pens. You’ll be wanting AT LEAST three, if not more, because you don’t want to be scuppered by empty pens.

That’s today’s mission in preparation for the festival, then: get online and order your business cards if you haven’t already, and pop down to your local stationary store and kit yourself out for copious note-taking. It’s for your own good!

Day 2 tomorrow will look at how to choose your sessions and workshops.

On Monday night a friend of mine put a distress call out over Twitter looking for an editor. Having spent the last couple of years cutting my own projects and knowing her company – markthree media – use the same system as I do, I volunteered to pop in on Tuesday and help out.

It wasn’t a hugely technical job; I was there essentially to tackle a couple of issues that had been spotted ahead of final submission to the client and try to shave a little bit off each of the four vids they were submitting. All of which is par for the course on these kinds of videos, it just so happened that their original editor was unavailable to get it done before the deadline.

It was a really interesting exercise for me as a filmmaker, though.

Firstly, I’ve never cut someone else’s footage before, which means I’ve never really made many creative decisions in editing, as I tend to have my final picture laid out in my head while I’m shooting, which means my editing is usually a case of just stringing it together in a way that makes sense. I’ve never had to spend a lot of time working through all the footage and working out how to fit all the pieces in place in a sensible way.

Cutting someone else’s footage also made me realise how much you need to think about the edit when you’re shooting for another editor. Cutting my own stuff means I know what I’ve shot so I never get too hung up on shots that may not be there, because I never think of them.  As an outside eye on an edit, you find yourself thinking, “What I really need is a quick cutaway of this thing in close up,” or “It would be great to have that bit of action from this angle,” which can make it inordinately frustrating when you find you don’t have that footage available to you. I’ve taken note that if someone else is editing my work, I need to give them as many options, cutaways and inserts as I can.

I’ve also learned the enjoyment of collaborative editing. Being a self-shooting producer/director/editor on almost all of my documentary stuff, I make all the creative decisions. While this nicely feeds my control freakery, it masks just how much enjoyment you can get from sitting in an editing suite with a director or creative producer trying different options out and seeing how they work.

Not only did Tuesday’s looooooong day of cutting (left for Town at 9am, got home at 12.35am) give me great confidence in my own ability as an editor, but also allowed me to learn a number of valuable lessons that will make me a better producer, director and shooter.

Anyone need an editor?

This is the place in a park in the middle of Hungary, about an hour outside of her dad’s home town of Budpest, where K and I got engaged. Amazing isn’t it?

For those who want all the details, here’s the rub:

We were over in Hungary on my first ever visit and K’s first for over 20 years, for the wedding of her cousin, Àgi, to the lovely and wonderful Tibi. In truth, K and Àgi are more like sisters when they’re together, slotting back in wherever they left off and having a ridiculously good time. So it was wonderful to be invited over to share in their big day with them, loving them as much as we do.

Having been with K for over 4 years now, I think it’s fair to say I’d been thinking about proposing for a while now, but wanted it to be right. I’d found a ring I really liked, but the band was in yellow gold, which K doesn’t really care for, with a white gold design on top. Having met her mum’s jewellery-designer cousin a few weeks ago, I realised the perfect thing to do would be to get him to make a white gold version of it with a few tweaks here and there. All of which meant, of course, that I didn’t have a ring for Hungary.

The lack of ring, however, couldn’t take away from the perfection of the timing or the location of the wedding and as soon as we arrived with her parents in Budapest, I realised that I couldn’t pass the opportunity up. Like the old romantic I am, I took K’s dad to one side and asked his permission on Friday night, which he gladly (I think…) gave.

On Saturday we arrived at the stunning location for the wedding, which was in the chapel – the last standing part – of an enormous castle that had been razed to the ground by the Soviets during the revolution. The grounds where the castle stood are now what we in the UK would call a country park and Àgi and Tibi encouraged all of their guests to get out and explore the space, which is what we did.

On a wander around the grounds we found the nice quiet spot you saw above. Like all good romantics, I then stole K’s existing ring from her right hand, got down on one knee and asked her to marry me. And she burst into tears. Luckily, it turns out they were happy tears and, with the refrain of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” being sung by Tibi’s sister in the marquee across the gardens, she said yes! It seemed like one of those elusive perfect moments we all plan for, but that only ever happen with a swirl of serendipity.

And that, as they say, is that. It’s not 100% how I planned it or expected it to be, but I couldn’t have found a better place or time to do it. And just to prove it, here’s K’s hand with her non-engagement ring sitting on her ring finger. It’s official! And we couldn’t be happier.

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.

It’s been almost two months since my last post following the closing of the Production Office’s first season. Since then I’ve been engaged in all manner of projects but not found time to blog.

In truth, it’s largely been down to two things: too much work/too little time and a want for things to write about.

When I rebranded the blog with my own name (after years of blogging over at Smile Through It), I intended it to be my “professional” home – a place where the real me was hidden beneath the façade of my work. Over the last week or so I’ve realised that this is far from the right approach. My life is inextricably linked to my work and my work is fed, nutured and grown from my life.

It’s pointless for me to try and separate who I am from what I do, so from here on out I’m returning this blog to covering all the things you may have read on the old blog, but with the added bonus of the increase in work meaning I’ve got more thoughts to share on what I do as well as who I am and how I feel.

On a shoot I did last week as an Assistant Producer on a UK Film Council/Screen East Digital Short, I met a girl who made me realise just how important it is not to deny yourself or who you are. People gain inspiration from many areas of life and through interaction with many people. One of the things that drove me to continue with Smile Through It when I frequently wanted to give up and shut up was the comments and emails I received from numerous people telling me just how much they valued reading my experiences.

It’s not for me to say whether I’m an inspirational person, but if this blog can be of value to anyone at all – including me, as a place to air my thoughts – then it’s a worthwhile place to have around. If you like reading it, please come back more often (I promise I will, too), and if you don’t then don’t worry about it – it’s just not for you.

Life is about doing what you want, how you want, when you want. I’m fortunate to be doing things I love every single day, driven by the knowledge that someone died to give me this chance. I vow, here and now, to neither waste that chance, nor deny it in the hope of presenting a “different” me.

As a good friend of mine is wont to say, onwards and upwards!

Apologies for my tardiness on getting this up on the blog, but here, as promised AGES ago, is the Lowdown on Search Engine Optimisation.

Here’s the original Lowdown video from The Production Office and below it you’ll find a more detailed look at SEO with links to the resources I used to put this one together.  Any questions, please feel free to dip into the comments section.

Search Engines

We all know about search engines like Google and, well, Google really.  But how do they work?  Very simplistically, Google sends little bots, like computerized robots, out around the whole of the world wide web to see what’s out there.  The information they gather from various parts of all of the world’s websites are then pulled together by Google so that when you type in a search for something like Chris Jones, it can tell you about all the places you can find references to those words on the ‘net.

Search Engine Optimisation

SEO, then, is a way to make sure that those little bots scouting around the internet will pick up on your site.  But more than that, what SEO does if you use it effectively is to make sure that your site and your pages are right at the top of the listings so that when people come looking for you they can find you quickly and easily.

But there’s no point being the top of the listings for a search term that no one is searching for; you’ll get no traffic! So check the Google external tool or Wordtracker to find some words you can be top for, you know, the ones that people are actually searching for.

•               http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal (make sure you select UK if you’re in the UK) also through AdWords

•               http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

The Four Golden Rules

One: Have a keyword strategy.  There’s no point competing for hugely common or popular search terms like “DIY” or “Hollywood”, but you may have more luck driving your site to the top of the list with more appropriate keywords for your audience.  You need to target the right searchers, not just any searchers.

Two: Have a well-structured website.  The structure of your website can play a key role in how easily the bots can pick up on your site and bring the information back to the engine.  But structure also means the “visible” part of your site – after all, an ugly, hard-to-read website makes click-throughs from Google useless if people leave your page straight away.

Make sure your site structure contains categories & page names with keywords in them. That way Google picks up your content and themes it under your keywords, so your content gets found in the search engines.

<a href=”http://www.mysite.com/red-widgets/i-love-red-widgets.html”>www.mysite.com/red-widgets/i-love-red-widgets.html</a>

<a href=”http://www.mysite.com/red-widgets/i-dont-like-blue-widgets.html”>www.mysite.com/red-widgets/i-dont-like-blue-widgets.html</a>

Three: Have good content. It seems like a given, but we’re not just talking about interesting and compelling copy for people to read when they get there.

You need quality content that adds value to the searcher’s experience, not just good content. Google loves that stuff!

At the very least for super basic SEO:

1. Have a descriptive title tag for every page on your site and put your popular keywords in there. This appear at the top of each listing, so make it catchy.

2. Have a meta keywords tag with about 10 keywords separated by a comma that describe your page. Don’t stuff all your keywords in there!

3. Have a meta description tag which briefly summarizes your page. It’s used for the search engine listings, right under the title.

4. Sprinkle a couple of your keywords in the page copy, but don’t over do it.

Four: Promotion. One of the key ways of boosting your ranking is having other pages on the web linking to you. So it’s time to leverage all those social media contacts you’ve made on Twitter and Facebook since these Lowdowns and get people linking to your site from theirs. Here’s a tip for free: it helps if you reciprocate.

Linking is known as “off-page optimization”. Just make sure when people link to you, they put your keywords in the anchor text of the link like this:

<a href=”http://www.applelover.com/types-of-apples.html”>i love granny smith apples</a>

“i love granny smith apples” is your anchor text and gives you a better chance of ranking for ‘i love granny smith apples’.

More Than The Basics

As the video says, this is only the briefest of overviews to the SEo process and its capabilities.  For more information, check out these resources:

• Free book “SEO Fast Start”: http://www.seofaststart.com
• Stompernet 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes Course: http://stomping2.com/7-deadly-seo-mistakes/
• http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/optimize/seo-ebook.htm
• SEOMoz guide http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-1-page