Archive for the 'Screenwriting' Category

Screenplay Musings 06/01/2010

Published on January 6, 2010 in Screenwriting and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Well we’re seven days into 2010 already, and despite my deadly cold over the last three or four days I’ve actually made some headway on my screenplay. It’s nearly a month already since I made that post detailing my plans to actually write a plan this time round, and I’ve finally made a decent start on it. I’ve got a few pages of scrap paper with some hashed out major events on them, and some interesting images and bits of dialogue that popped into my head while thinking them though.

Admittedly all I’ve managed to do so far is get the first act down in treatment form, but it’s further than I’ve got in a long time. The story remains essentially unchanged, Glasgow slackers find spaceship and adventure ensues, but I’ve changed a few aspects that ultimately I wasn’t happy with. The treatment itself is looking to be about twelve of fifteen pages long, maybe about five or six thousand words I guess, and there’s currently no dialogue or anything but the briefest of descriptions. So far I’m sticking fairly rigidly to the idea of what a treatment should or shouldn’t be.

I’ve taken the plunge and opted for a short, and hopefully humorous cold opening which will at least partly explain what the spaceship is on Earth. Admittedly this was easier to come up with after I had written a short story about where the spaceship came from in the first place. I’ve also changed, at least slightly, the introduction to the characters. In the original version that I started to write straight into screenplay format it was good, but it was also long winded and eventually ran out of steam. The main characters were too busy interacting when they should have been acting. It’s important to remember that film is a visual medium. Unlike a stage play or a radio drama it’s meant to be watched and not listened to.

Now all I have to do is keep plugging away and finish off the entire treatment.

Zhura.com

Published on January 1, 2010 in Screenwriting. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Up till recently I’ve done a lot of my script writing with Microsoft Word. As word processorrs go MS Word is just about the defacto standard nowadays, but it’s far from perfect for something so specialised as screen writing. I admit that I’m not a superstar Word expert, so it’s a slow and cumbersome process for me to get everything properly formatted. I’ve downloaded and used a few different screen-writing macros and templates that automatically format scene headings, dialogue and character names, but it’s far from ideal. It also has a bad habit of formatting the entire document at one time if you’re not careful with what text you have selected which then requires a lengthy spell of  editing to correct. It’s very easy to get scunnered with the thing and throw drafts out of the window because of the mess they’ve gotten into.

I’ve been looking around for some kind of alternative to Word, at least for the sake of writing scripts. The trouble is that screen-writing is such a specialised kind of writing there aren’t that many pieces of software available to cater to its odd format requirements.

The primary industry standard software is called Final Draft which is currently in its eighth incarnation. I’ve tried out the demo version and it does the job extremely well. It has many useful features to aid in writing from an index card view that allow you to view and rearrange scenes to an automated assistance that fills in scene headings and character names without you having to type them over and over again manually. It also, thankfully, imports and exports from many otehr formats and can intelligently reformat them to meet the screenplay formatting requirements.

There is a problem though, and it’s a problem common to all specialised pieces of software: It costs almost two hundred  quid.  That’s a lot of money for something that is only going to be used in the terminal stages of writing the script, and can’t really be used for anything else. As I don’t currently have two hundred quid to drop on Final Draft I’ve opted to have a test drive of some of the free screen-writing software packages out there.

So far I’m working my way through the Wikipedia list of screen-writing programs in the hope that one of them will be as user friendly as Final Draft, but obviously without the large price tag. I’ve had a play with Zhura.com which offers a decent online editing package as well as an extensive community aspect. You can keep your ideas and scripts private, or choose to share them with the larger community for comment and criticism. Naturally, like all web applications, you run the risk of your stuff disappearing if Zhura should suddenly close its doors one day so a web app system probably isn’t ideal for the paranoid amongst us. Still it does much of what Final Draft does, and some things even better.

I think I’m going to see if I can try Adobe’s Story next to see how that works.

Screenplay Musings 24/12/2009

Published on December 24, 2009 in Screenwriting. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Well it’s Christmas Eve, and I’m reliably informed that it’s currently -6°C outside so I’m locked away from the family working hard on my screenplay. Not that I’m antisocial, but I’d rather avoid the inevitable deluge of Christmas compilation shows that the TV companies plaster our screens with at this time of year. When I was younger a good film, or TV show would stimulate my imagination and get me racing away to write something, but as I’ve grown older I’ve found that crap TV has an equal, but decidedly opposite effect. I guess it’s true what they say, “TV does rot your brain.”

As I said in an earlier post I’m currently working hard to complete a treatment for my idea based around the two twenty something glasgow slackers discovering an abandoned alien spaceship. Well that’s the plan at least. So far I’ve only managed to squeeze three and a bit pages from imagination to typed page. “Grey Kodiak you slacker,” I hear you say, that’s not exactly a good start to your vaunted change in work ethic is it?”

Well no, no it isn’t, but I have a reason for the detour honest. You see I’ve come across a problem in my premise, one that I had tried to address unsuccessfully in several draft attempts, and eventually tried to ignore entirely. That probably wasn’t the smarts way to deal with it either now that I think about it. The problem can be summed up by the gut reaction of one person I told the current log line summary to:

Two Glasgow slackers discover an abandoned alien spacecraft and through it manage to bring meaning and worth to their otherwise dreary lives.

“Sounds cool,” he said, “but how did the spaceship get there in the first place?”

“Damned if I know,” I said.

“Bit shit that,” he said…

After describing the basic idea ofthe story to a few folk I’ve gotten a similar reaction from about half of them. The rest seem to be split into thinking that it doesn’t matter how the ship got there, or that that it’s better if it remains a mystery to add some dramatic tension to the story.

Naturally, to my own annoyance, I’ve found myself sidetracked by the question of how the ship got to where the two main characters discover it. I’ve hummed and hawed about writing a cold open that shows the origins of the ship, but this seems to take crucial initial screen time away from the main characters. It also seems a bit incongruous to go from what would be, by necessity, a CGI laden spaceship section straight to a regular boring old Saturday night in the lives of the characters. To do that, and have it impact properly I would have to substantially rethink their goals, motivations and perhaps the entire story idea which I’m unwilling to do until this first treatment is written.

At the moment I’ve taken a slightly perverse decision to write a short story, for my own reference, that details the origins of the spaceship in question. It will, of course, delay production on my treatment for the actual script, but it might add some necessary colour and detail into my script that might otherwise be missing.

If you children are very nice I might even post it up at some point.

Work Related Sitcom Idea

Published on December 5, 2009 in Screenwriting, TeeVee, Work and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Recently I’ve had a weird idea for a sitcom bouncing around inside my head. It’s partly inspired by the Ricky Gervais show The Office, and also by the IT Crowd.  Oddly the main part of the inspiration comes from a flippant, throwaway comment that I made at work when I was asked where my managers was.

To put you in the picture, I have a team leader who disappears and reappears at will, and goes out of his way to do as little actual work as possible. He spends much of his time cruising around the country in his car, obstinately checking up on contractors, and smoking more of those hamlet style cigars than can possibly be healthy. I’ve actually sat in the car with him while he diverts calls with such random excuses as “I don’t like talking to that guy while I’m driving, or I don’t like that guy’s accent”. We don’t mind so much as he tends to let the team manage itself, and he only really gets involved with us to authorise holidays and fill out the online sickness forms. In all honesty there’s really there’s no need to even have him in the team other than to act as a buffer between us and the higher management.

I call him The Boy Blunder, but not to his face as he might cry.

Above The Boy Blunder we’ve got what’s euphemistically called a Team Manager. He’s the real brains of the outfit, and we’re convinced he’s some kind of Machiavellian genius.

I call him Pratman, but not to his face cause I’m scared he’ll like it.

We’re lucky if we see Pratman more than once a week. He goes to endless meetings that he seems to generate with some kind of random table straight out of a Dungeons and Dragons Handbook. He lives on buffets, hotel meals and formal dinners. I don’t even think he remembers what his wife looks like cause he’s on the road so much.

His every appearance is like the arrival of a pantomime villain as he crashes in, dispensing orders and demanding reports, actions and updates before cruising off for another week into the great unknown. He rarely remembers from visitation to visitation what he’s asked people to do, and it can be many months before he actually catches up with himself.

I know that this seems more like a rant about management at The Work than a post about a sitcom idea, but I wanted to set you up with some background to the idea.

The idea cam e about with a jokingly absurd idea that came to me after being asked for the sixth or seventh time in a row about where The Boy Blunder was that day. When I said, again, that I had no idea I was immediately asked the standard follow up question of “where’s Pratman then?” Naturally I had even less I dead where the hell he was, so I just shrugged and told them to keep phoning their mobiles till they got annoyed and answered.

So far, so standard.

It was then that I said to my colleagues, “Wouldn’t it be cool if Pratman was actually a super villian like Blofeld, or even Doctor Evil, and was out there somewhere plotting to conquer the world?” They agreed that this was a fairly absurd and humorous idea and I started to think about how it could be made into some kind of sitcom.

I have an image in my head of a group of average, everyday office workers sitting around doing paperwork, filling in spreadsheets and going about their dreary existence working for what appears to be a perfectly legitimate company. Then when one of them encounters a problem of some kind they phone up the kindly, but often absent boss, and the scene cuts to him doing something truly diabolical. It could be anything from robbing a bank, to feeding orphans to genetically modified alligators, but somehow he always manages to maintain the illusion that he’s just out at a conference or something. The humour of course would come partly from the juxtaposition of these two visions, but also from possibly the inclusion of a character that knows what the boss and the company is up to, but somehow can’t quite get his hands on the proof for a variety of comic reasons.

Sure it might not manage a whole series, and the idea might be a bit stretched at that, but if done right and with the right people, I think it would be a hit.

Tippety Tappety Typin’

Published on June 15, 2009 in Screenwriting and Writing. 1 Comment

It’s odd to think about, but I’ve just realised that I’ve been trying to squeeze the same story out of my imagination for more than two years. What’s surprising isn’t’ the amount of time spent trying to craft the story, it’s the sheer amount of revision and refinement that’s gone on since I first put pen to paper. (or fingertips to keyboard if you like).

The core of the story has remained remarkably consistent over the years: two Glasgow students discover an alien spacecraft and have a series of misadventures with it that help them to grown and develop as people.

Originally I suppose the story was a political fable about how Scotland might become an independent and internationally important nation with the right catalyst. The two heroes discover a large mining ship that is abandoned after an infectious and deadly disease kills the crew. They commandeer it and learn to control its systems eventually growing rich by mining raw materials and selling them back on the open market. Eventually the ship is reverse engineered by scientists and used as the basis of a fleet of similar ships. Eventually humanity spreads to the stars and yaddah yaddah yaddah so much so standard sci-fi fair.

Not too bad a premise I suppose, but after I started to write it in prose form it started to mutate.

First of all I changed the two students into tramps so that I could explore the cultural differences that might occur when pair of homeless Glaswegian nutters are swept into a Star Wars-esque universe.  That didn’t go much further than a few test pages after I quickly grew annoyed at my choice to write the whole thing in the vernacular to highlight their humble origins.

Next I changed them back to being students and had the ship touch down in the middle of Glasgow Green. The protagonists ended up there through a series of increasingly unlucky and fairly unbelievable events/chase scenes where they encountered the dying alien pilot. He accidentally gave one of them the biological key to operate the ship before dropping dead. The hide in the ship to escape a gang of neds that are out to get them and end up in orbit. The rest of the thing more or less follows the original premise from there on.

After a lot of though I decided that hiding from neds wasn’t a decent motivation for the characters. They needed some kind of motivation to drag them into the story. Something had to set them in motion and drive them forward. In the end I decided that one character, Dougie, is motivated by a desire to be the greatest DJ in the world and Neil is, well he’s a mystery…

Finally I abandoned writing a prose version and decided to make a screenplay out of the idea. I started out to write it in a serious vein, but have ultimately decided to go down the route of writing a sort of sci-fi dark comedy. Much of the humour will derive from the odd couple pairing of the two protagonists and their conflicting ideas of what to do with the spaceship once they get it. It will also focus on the odd and unusual characters that help or hinder them on their personal quests. I suppose in that respect it’s sort of influenced by watching too many of the Cohen Brothers’ films, but if you have to take inspiration it’s best to use the best isn’t it?

Surprisingly it took many weeks of deliberation to decide how they found the spaceship in the first place. I’ve hidden it with cloaking fields, had it hidden somewhere else on the planet and accessed by teleporters and I’ve even had it sitting under camouflage in the highlands. None of these ideas really seemed particularly sound however and it took a lot of time to come up with the version I finally settled on.

Naturally this was compounded by my desire to make the ship a large machine of 200 metres or more in length. It’s very, very difficult to hide something of that size in a country the size of Scotland. Not impossible, but difficult. In the end I shrank it down to about 30 metres in length instead. Still big enough for the purposes of the plot, but not big enough to cause serious problems if you want to hide it.

At last the script is progressing nicely, and even though it’s only half done, I’m confident that I’ll have it done before the end of the summer this time.

In fact I’ve set myself the goal of having the first draft done by the end of August.

Cities In Flight

Published on February 4, 2009 in Hollywood Movie Machine, Movies, Musings and Screenwriting. 0 Comments

The Hollywood Movie Machine seems to be determined to remake, re-imagine or adapt every book, computer game, novel, short story, play or song ever made. We’ve got the highly anticipated Watchmen movie due out soon, a heretical remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still and even a Far Cry movie from Uwe Boll with a mainly German principle cast.

I find it strange however that nobody has yet tried to adapt the four novels written by James Blish’s that make up the Cities in Flight series. They seem more than perfect for the big screen treatment, particularly the middle two books: A Life for the Stars and Earthman Come Home. The premise of the novels actually begs for a big screen adaptation, especially in the current climate where spectacle seems to be far more important than substance or even plot.

The four books primarily revolve around the city of New York, or more accurately Manhattan Island, which has left behind a polluted and increasingly authoritarian Earth and is wandering through the galaxy in search of work. This bizarre situation is made possible by the use of a MacGuffin called a spindizzy which through the magic of science creates an anti-gravity field around an object. The limitation of the device is that the efficiency and power of the device is inversely proportional to the mass lifted. Therefore it’s far more efficient to lift a city than to move a conventional spaceship. The cities themselves form a vast spacefaring culture where they trade their skills and advanced technology to various colonies and alien empires in return for supplies, food and raw materials. They refer to themselves as Okies in reference to the historical Okies who left the American Midwest during the 1930′s due to a combined effect of economic depression and the infamous Dust Bowl.

The first book They Shall Have Stars describes the development of the spindizzy and its associated effects on Earth. The western governments become more and more paranoid over the potential of the spindizzy and eventually execute the protagonist as a political threat after he reveals the science and existence of the spindizzy to the world. It’s interesting, but essentially a political thriller with a hint of espionage.

In the second book A life for the stars a young farm boy living near Scranton, Pennsylvania is accidentally caught up in the departure of the former mining city as it leaves for the stars. He survives several desperate and ill managed disasters before being traded along with many other undesirables to the much larger and successful New York.

The third novel follows the adventure of the boy and the city of New York itself as it travels amongst the stars in search of work. Eventually they reencounter the city of Scranton which has devolved into what the Okies call a Bindlestiff: a tramp city that survives by criminal activities rather than honest work. At the climax of the book the residents of New York install spindizzies on a planet in an effort to escape an increasingly hostile Earth based empire. The planet itself is thrown out of the Milky Way towards the Large Magellanic Cloud where it ultimately comes to rest.

The final book A Clash of Cymbals seems to run off at a tangent to the rest of the series. The New Yorkers discover that the universe is coming to an end imminently and they race to be at the epicentre of the collapse before another group in the belief that whoever is present at the exact time and space the universe ends will be able to shape the destiny of the next universe after a big bang. Weird is the only way to describe it.

I think a combination of the two middle books would work best. Have the protagonist wander aboard a city just as it departs for the stars and document his adventures aboard as he struggles against a tyrannical mayor. It’s a simple story with plenty of room for amazing visuals effects: it is a flying city after all. Hopefully a decent screenwriter, director and producer will take up the challenge and create a Sci-Fi masterwork that we can all enjoy, but I’ve got the feeling that if, or when it does come a film version will be a steaming pile of crap.

I can dream though.