Archive

screenwriting

Shorts as pilots for features… or as podcast episodes

5 October, 2008
screenwriting
Leave a comment

In the past few years, it has become popular to design short films as pilots for features. I hear directors tell me that they’re making a series of shorts that can add up to a feature. They make a 15 minute short that introduces a world, a set of characters and an event that puts a protagonist in the path of the plan of an antagonist.

The problem with doing all that is the fact that there isn’t an act two following this putative act one is dissatisfying. Not intriguing. Some people found that M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable was irritating because it only covered the first of the traditional three act hero’s journey.

96 minute movies need eight 12 minute sequences. Act one should be made of two of these sequences. By the end of sequence one, the protagonist should be given the option to enter a new world. The fact that they don’t enter it in the start of sequence two shows that they are stuck in their current life.

Maybe it would be a better idea to make a short out of one or both of two sequences not usually included in the feature script, but sequences that the scriptwriter should be able to outline: the story of the protagonist’s fall from grace (how they got to this state of settling for a life of dissatisfied stasis) and the story of how the antagonist came to be (how they became the person/force that eventually will have to come up with the plan that sets the feature story in motion).

These two extra sequences can help writers turn three act feature scripts into ten part video podcast series…

Non-multiplex pitching

2 October, 2008
london, screenwriting
Leave a comment

This evening I attended a session of Non-Multiplex Cinema‘s ‘Write to Shoot’ course. A ten session course to help writers with a concept, synopsis or initial pages of a script who need the encouragement of a writers group to get that first draft done. As well as a structured course, sessions include scene reviews with writers and actors reading scenes aloud.

Unluckily for me, the usual tutor couldn’t attend this time, so we got a talk about pitching.

1. Sell yourself…
2. then sell the idea

The tutor then said that in the two or three minutes of your pitch, you need to make sure that those you are pitching to know

    Who the characters are (mention two or three, but their names are not important: “Policeman, Student, Shark hunter”).
    Where the story takes place (“In a mining operation on one of the moons of Jupiter”)
    When the events are set (“The week before New Year’s Eve in 1999”)
    What the protagonist wants (“To leave the farm and see the galaxy like his father did”)
    Why the protagonist wants it (“To make up for not helping a boy who grew up to be a disturbed man who commits suicide”)
    How the protagonist plans to get it (“By going on a perilous journey to a far off city to ask a wizard for help”)

You should also establish the stakes (“Winning most important legal case of his life, making sure his son doesn’t move to the other side of the country”).

Going back to item 1 in the list above, “selling yourself”… If you have 5 minutes in all, spend the first 1-2 minutes pitching yourself, who you are. You need to keep it short, clear and therefore memorable.

The tutor in the session asked for use to pitch. None of us volunteered.

He asked us to do a couple of exercises. We were divided into pairs. The first exercise took four minutes. In the first two minutes person A explains who they are to person B. In the second two minutes, person B explains who they are to person A. The tutor then asked each of the ‘person A’s’ to explain who their ‘person B’ was. The second exercise involved each person A telling person B a story. Person B was then asked to recount who their ‘person A’ was and also to re-tell their story.

We all found it easier to tell a larger group of strangers about someone else. It was also easier to be pitching what we remembered of someone else’s tale than our own special projects. It also acted as a reminder: we have to make our pitches clear and simple enough for other people to be able to (and want to) pitch to others further up the chain of command.

After 40 minutes on pitching we spent the rest of the session reading out and commenting on scenes written by attendees. There were four scripts: scenes from a stoner comedy, a political thriller, a horror movie and a sex comedy. All the scenes were a lot better than scene I’ve written in the last year, and it was interesting to hear the other writers, actors and producers give their feedback. I’m sure it was useful for those who submitted their work.

Previously on… ‘Editing organazized’

1 October, 2008
screenwriting
Leave a comment

Pre-titles recaps have been around for years. For serialised drama, they get everyone up to speed. “Previously on Hill Street Blues…” Sometimes the format of the show includes an implied recap: at the start of each episode of ‘L.A. Law’ the characters have an office meeting that gets the office (and the audience) up to date on all the current cases.

With the availability of the internet, TV networks have turned more ongoing stories in their dramas. They know that viewers can use web-based info to get up to speed. As long as they make individual episodes interesting, people will make the investment in finding out more about the show. When big shows come back after extended breaks, whole recap shows are shown before episode one of a new season.

Some shows have dedicated recap editors who familiarise themselves with production workflows and the show by editing the recaps at the start of act one. In the near future, they may have more work to do – unless the process is automated…

As online video becomes more popular, production companies will be able to provide recap options for purchasers. Viewers will be able to assess how they want to invest in a TV show. If they want to watch from this point forward they’ll be able to choose the length of the recap they get with their purchased episodes: ranging from 15 to 90 minutes. If they want to start from the beginning of the season, or an earlier season, they’ll get recaps that prepare them for their ‘first’ episode. Recaps could also provided to bridge skipped seasons: they could be generated based on what episodes are bought.

Now that serialisation is the norm, writers should consider whether their three hour movie script might be better as a 17 hour epic (24 weekly ‘one hour’ episodes). Producers are more likely to say yes if the story will work over a further three seasons.

Producers and screenwriters also have the option to create recaps for episodes that don’t exist…

Why “Show, not tell” works

3 August, 2008
screenwriting
2 Comments

The screenwriting principle of “show, not tell” works because people do not normally criticize their own work.

If you show the actions of a character, the audience will make their own judgements of who that character is and what they want. These judgements of the characters combine in the audience’s minds to build up their own stories about the ingredients of your movie. One of the tricks then is to let the audience sometimes get ahead of the characters and at other times let them fall behind.

People enjoy being correct in the assessments of what will happen. They also like to be surprised, as long as the surprises are consistent with what has gone before. If you are writing clear actions based on specific desires, the audience will enjoy developing their own takes on what is going on; very few people criticize their own ‘writing’ ability when enjoying a well-written film.

Budget

22 February, 2008
film making, screenwriting
Leave a comment

Why do car commercials have bigger budgets than air freshener commercials?

Advertising is supposed to be ‘a good story, well told,’ yet why do some tales cost so much more to tell? It is down to sales people: The ad people who sell the budgets to the corporations. Political power within organisations usually goes to those who control the largest budgets, so the big-budget ideas might not be too much of a hard sell to the insecure middle-manager.

It is probably possible to make a perfectly effective car ad for the same money as one for shoe insoles. You’ve got to be in the business of getting the right message across, instead of making sure you and your friends have more toys to play with and each of you has another item for your showreels.

The lesson for those of us creating action-adventure movies on micro-budgets? Make sure you have a good story, well told – and make sure your set pieces come from the emotions of your characters, not from the one-upmanship of ‘my SFX is better than yours.’

Headlines

13 January, 2008
screenwriting
Leave a comment

Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sex, Lies and Videotape, The Silence of the Lambs, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Blair Witch Project

Every few years there is a film title that is so compelling that sub-editors in newspapers cannot help but use it as the source for pun-based headlines. The movie needs to be infamous. The combination of words needs to be distinctive, or even odd. Once a few writers make such puns, others turn to the same source:

Raiders of the Lost Dollar, Sex, Lies and Negotiation, The Silence of the Unions, Four Debates and a Funeral, The Sarkozy Witch Project

It looks like the next candidate for this treatment is There Will Be Blood. I’ve already seen There Will Be Backstabbing, and it seems there are plenty of opportunities for further headline puns based on that title.

What other film names have headline writers turned to over the years? Maybe your script needs a distinctive title too.

Recycle

14 December, 2007
editing, screenwriting
Leave a comment

According to an article at The Hollywood Reporter, the writer’s strike and imminent negotiations with the directors and actors may give TV networks the chance to break out of the development cycle. Each spring they fund many scripts that are produced as pilots (100+ per network), some of which are turned into pilots (around 25), few of which are turned into series (less than ten), few of which make it past the first twelve episodes (one or two make it). This costs millions of dollars – pilots cost an average of $5 million these days.

The strike and possible future strikes mean that the next cycle of development is threatened. The studios want to take this chance to get off the merry-go-round. They want to do this to save money. Writers and post-production people might find the crap-shoot that is pilot season frustrating, but they’ll miss it if it goes. The studios want to spend less money on producing content that will never get shown to an audience. That means less work for production teams.

This will only change once the networks convince the advertisers to support a new development process – where new shows can start at any time of the year. This is the way it used to work in the primordial days of TV and is the way in other countries. Which system is better for writers and editors?

Stop

14 December, 2007
Links, screenwriting
Leave a comment

In an article at The Hollywood Reporter, five screenwriters talk about the strike, adaptation and tips on how to organise your day:

When I was writing novels, I knew Graham Greene, and he gave me the best piece of advice ever given to any writer. He said, “Always stop when it’s going well.” […] because you know what to return to. So you don’t have those sleepless nights.