History 102
There are times when I hate my job. There are rare occasions when I love it. By far the majority of my time is spent in that hazy; in between grey area of ‘it could be worse’ but my job has its advantages. Sure I work shifts and spend most of my time permanently jet lagged, but on quite nights like tonight… Well this isn’t work.
Anyway, we had a scene by scene, why did the project almost die an early death? Well remember that little film making triangle from yesterday (scroll down for a look if you need to refresh your memory) well the guy who was supposed to be writing the script lost his enthusiasm. I suppose we could have been annoyed, but technically he’d never actually agreed to write a script for us in the first place, we’d just kind of assumed he would as he had something of an education in those matters. Needless to say someone needed to step in and fill the void, and for no good reason that someone was me. Only problem was I’d never written a script in my life, I didn’t even have the first clue where to start. Some research was called for.
There are millions of books out there that will tell you how to write a script. Some are huge weighty tomes that can be used to beat an intruder into submission. Others are slick, pocket sized novellas that are perfect for levelling up the errant pool table down the pub. Some have no practical use what so ever. I won’t bore you with details or book reviews, save to say that I read quite a few, and the only one I would recommend is ‘Writing Screenplays That Sell’ by Michael Hauge. It comes in on the slim line end of the spectrum, about 25 pages too thick to sort out the aforementioned pool table. It’s firmly stuck in the 80’s and it hails ‘The Karate Kid’ as the greatest Hollywood movie ever made (so clearly the author knows his stuff) It’s easy to pick up, easy to read, and easy to learn from, and I like easy.
Of course reading a number of books about script writing and actually writing a script, have about as much in common as two incredibly unrelated things with nothing in common and no discernable reason why they should like each other, let alone talk to each other, yet you just know that some how they will inexorably end up screwing each others brains out, before everything turns bitter the recriminations start, the relationship breaks down and the kids (God only knows where they came from, but come they did) end up in young offender institutions… You know what I mean.
Suffice to say that the first draft took a number of months (it would have taken longer if not for a number of quiet nights at work) and when it was finished it made absolutely no sense. There were of course a number of reasons for this. First and foremost was the fact that that 20 page scene by scene was, for the most part, useless. The most exciting problem for the reader however was caused by me not writing the script in chronological order. Now this isn’t a problem in and of itself. Lots of professionals skip about from scene to scene as they write, tweaking as they go. My problem was that since the scene by scene was so bad, the tweaks were kind of, well… large, you know like completely deleting a number of characters from the script kind of large. I figured I’d sort it all out in draft two. Unfortunately I had no idea exactly how much sorting I had to do.
Oh and I still can’t speak German.
Anyway, we had a scene by scene, why did the project almost die an early death? Well remember that little film making triangle from yesterday (scroll down for a look if you need to refresh your memory) well the guy who was supposed to be writing the script lost his enthusiasm. I suppose we could have been annoyed, but technically he’d never actually agreed to write a script for us in the first place, we’d just kind of assumed he would as he had something of an education in those matters. Needless to say someone needed to step in and fill the void, and for no good reason that someone was me. Only problem was I’d never written a script in my life, I didn’t even have the first clue where to start. Some research was called for.
There are millions of books out there that will tell you how to write a script. Some are huge weighty tomes that can be used to beat an intruder into submission. Others are slick, pocket sized novellas that are perfect for levelling up the errant pool table down the pub. Some have no practical use what so ever. I won’t bore you with details or book reviews, save to say that I read quite a few, and the only one I would recommend is ‘Writing Screenplays That Sell’ by Michael Hauge. It comes in on the slim line end of the spectrum, about 25 pages too thick to sort out the aforementioned pool table. It’s firmly stuck in the 80’s and it hails ‘The Karate Kid’ as the greatest Hollywood movie ever made (so clearly the author knows his stuff) It’s easy to pick up, easy to read, and easy to learn from, and I like easy.
Of course reading a number of books about script writing and actually writing a script, have about as much in common as two incredibly unrelated things with nothing in common and no discernable reason why they should like each other, let alone talk to each other, yet you just know that some how they will inexorably end up screwing each others brains out, before everything turns bitter the recriminations start, the relationship breaks down and the kids (God only knows where they came from, but come they did) end up in young offender institutions… You know what I mean.
Suffice to say that the first draft took a number of months (it would have taken longer if not for a number of quiet nights at work) and when it was finished it made absolutely no sense. There were of course a number of reasons for this. First and foremost was the fact that that 20 page scene by scene was, for the most part, useless. The most exciting problem for the reader however was caused by me not writing the script in chronological order. Now this isn’t a problem in and of itself. Lots of professionals skip about from scene to scene as they write, tweaking as they go. My problem was that since the scene by scene was so bad, the tweaks were kind of, well… large, you know like completely deleting a number of characters from the script kind of large. I figured I’d sort it all out in draft two. Unfortunately I had no idea exactly how much sorting I had to do.
Oh and I still can’t speak German.
1 Comments:
Ah - so this is what you mean by a blog. I've got a Livejournal account so it's probably possible to link them, I'll look into it one day.
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