A good aspect of the advanced six week course at Manhattan Edit Workshop is the practicality: our weekend homework is to come up with a good deal memo for editors. Instead of first looking on the net, I went to the local B&N. I found some interesting clauses from some interesting books. I’ll post my final version very soon.

I also looked at some other books in the film section. One of which caught my eye.

As I can control the rights to Quentin Crisp’s literary works, I was interested in book called How to adapt anything into a screenplay. The book was OK, but didn’t lend itself to helping me with my project, but there were some good outlining tips. Here are some I though were worth taking note of:

A. What single word encapsulates the theme?

B. What is your pitch sentence: “What if… And then…”

C. Answer these seven big questions

1. Who is the main character?
2. What do they think they want? What do they in fact need?
3. Who/what keeps them from getting what they want?
4. How do they succeed in an interesting/unusual/original way?
5. What are you trying to say be ending the story in this way?
6. How will you tell the story (voiceover/flashbacks/unifiying filmic devices: colour, symbols)
7. How do characters change over the course of the story?

If you can’t answer all these questions, please don’t start writing your script!

This morning was about an introduction to post-production workflow. That turned into a debate on how much to charge, how long to estimate a job could take, and the relevance of understanding the technology of post.

For a 90 minute low-budget feature where the editing starts after principal photography, the first two weeks are about getting to a first cut. The rest of the time is a debate with the director about how to make each successive cut better. Shot selection won’t change. Most performance selections will happen in the first couple of versions. The rest of the debate is about story strcuture and reordering scenes and reducing running time.

The last re-write! How many editing courses feature screenwriting structure…?