Like banging your head against the keyboard

I've been feeling like if I had been doing just that I may have written something better.

I've really been suffering after this huge setback. I've been trying to come up with something better but most of the time I screw my eyes up and pretend like I'm not here. I'm no good, how did I get it so wrong. Of course then I tend to think every idea I get is no good so I can't settle on anything or make any progress.

After the horror of getting such a low mark for something I had poured everything I could into I've been trying to write something else. Something that will get me an acceptable mark in the future.

So one of the problems my tutor had was that my screenplay was set in America. No big shot American producers want to pay a British writer to write about American life. This didn't seem much of a problem when I first pitched a horror western at him. SO Maybe it was just that he doesn't like teen comedies.

So since then I've been working on a number of other treatments. 1 to work on for uni. And others to pitch at an agent we have coming in a few weeks.

The first I'm calling MEN OF WAR. It's my war heist movie. Next up is CRAWLERS. This one is like Critters or James Gunn's Slither. Finally my latest is untitled. It's a slasher movie. British set with the usual cast of nubile young victims. I'm trying to do something a little different from the usual stalk and kill. Add a little bit of a mystery element to it. Just who is the stalker? That kind of thing. Of course I know (the butler did it ha) I'm hoping that I can do this fairly quickly in a way that will intrigue my tutors.

I've been joking that I need a holiday to set it around since Halloween and Friday the 13th are already taken. How about St Georges Day? Of course that then raises the budget as I'd need a cgi dragon. St Paddys day is interesting. The kids could go out underage drinking green Guinness and then a crotchety Irishman could beat them to death with a stick.

I need an event that puts a lot of pressure on my lead early on, like an audition for a talent show. I thought of the idea of setting it around a TV talent show like X factor but then realised how gimmicky and awful that seemed. Of course I be that is exactly the kind of thing a producer would love. Those shows are big right now and the horror genre (particularly the slasher sub genre) is always a surefire way to get a return on your money.

I just can't bring myself to do it.

No maybe a school talent show would do it. Then if I get to a stage where I've met a producer but it's just not quite there for them I can suggest adding the x factor.

Yeah well I may be deluded but I can dream!

Page 13, I'm losing the will to live.

I got my treatment back. The news is not good.

I received a lowly 54. Far less than I expected. Far less than I thought I would ever get. I feel totally destroyed by this.

The main gist of the criticism seems to be that nothing much happens. I mean aside from the fact the tutor didn't like that I was setting it in America. Or that he didn't know what Photon was. Or that it was too long even though we were never given a length to aim for. Nothing of any consequence happened in the story.

Any good news? I apparently have a good grasp of 80s cliches and knowledge of John Hughes films. I mean, is that good? My work was cliched and plagiarised by the late JH?

I mean. OK there was some good news. He liked my last piece. Thought this piece, given how much he liked my last one, would be better. No that's not good news at all, not for this piece.

I worked so hard on it. I thought I had so much going on and had planned so many details. Given all the characters a through line and had good visual keys to show my characters emotions and thoughts. But no, too much focus on details apparently and not enough big things going on. I lost focus of my protagonist.

So reading through the notes he had written on the paper I find one comment, one I've used as the title for this post. It fucking killed me. It was that bad?

So maybe he's right. I was worried that perhaps there didn't seem to be an antagonist so to speak, not one anyway, there were certainly different antagonistic forces, but no villain.

But even if he is dead on the nose that just leaves me questioning how I got it so wrong? What kind of an idiot am I that I couldn't see this? Maybe I shouldn't be doing this at all.

I at least would like to think that it showed that I had put a lot of work in and I had achieved something with the script. I feel like I learned a lot on this one and am a better writer for it. My tutor thinks otherwise. I've gone backwards.

Added to that I didn't get my loan and might not be able to continue with the course and life is just dandy.

The Pinch

This was new to me.

A weird little point in the script that refocused it.

Now I thought that screenplays were supposed to be tight and focused but then I started to read about this new point in the structure which refocuses it. I either missed it when I did my first screenwriting course or it was never mentioned.

I think I just figured out what it means.

The problem I had had was I thought the FP was the introduction of a ticking bomb or something else that raised the stakes. I was thinking, tightening my plot meant reminding the audience of just what was going on and then squeezing something else into it. Terrorists have taken over a building and our hero has to save them. But now let's focus it by reminding everyone adding a countdown. In fact let's make the ticking bomb the second FP, something to to "speed up" the 2nd half of Act II, let's make the first FP the terrorists killing the first hostage. These guys mean business!

I've always said that when it comes to learning about screenwriting (or anything), it's best to read as many books as you can. Something about seeing the same thing written in a few different ways makes it sink in and click a bit better.

I recently realised that my turning points aren't about things happening but about decisions my character makes - and not just makes, actually does something about. Action not dialogue, show not tell. The turning point isn't the cave in, it's the character deciding that the best course of action is to go further into the cave to try and find another way out rather than sitting and waiting to be rescued.

Now just tonight I was reading up on focus points, trying to figure them out good and proper when I read this line from John Costello's Writing a Screenplay:

"A Focus points loops around the protagonists problem and the plot and draws both lines taught."

Every protagonist needs a problem, something he or she will learn to overcome by the end of the script. But also there is a plot. Whatever else is going on in the script. Your protagonist can be scared of heights or be unable to say "I love you"- both are character flaws or problems. The plot however might be the character pulling a bank job or joining a support group where one of the members is a serial killer.

So lets say our vertigo sufferer is planning a bank job. The only way in is through the roof. Here is where our hero's problem comes into direct conflict with the plot. That is a focus point.

Feel free to let me know if I'm wrong!

So I started back uni this week.

One of the other students had a few ideas for a film, but didn't really have much beyond that. You know like a romantic comedy about a guy who likes dogs. I mean there's nothing there. So we all pitched in with some ideas. You know like well if the guy likes dogs how about he meets a girl who likes cats and their pets don't get on or maybe she's allergic. I felt like we ended up with a neat little idea by the end of it.

It's something I wish we'd do more of. You know even if I ended up doing the complete opposite of what is suggested if it hadn't been suggested in the first place I never would've thought to do the opposite.

I should get my marks for my treatment back this week. The one that I struggled and struggled to start. I hope I got a decent mark, obviously, but you know I really worked hard and thought I had made a good job of it.

I thought this year we had 1 screenplay to write but from what I can tell we have 3. I think we write a screenplay off of the treatment we just did. Then next year we either write a vastly improved (based on the feedback we are about to get) version of that screenplay or a completely new one. Then in the summer we start a 3rd which won't count towards our degree but we will be given feedback on it to take away and use in a redraft. I think this is just to give us fledgling writers a boost up as we embark on our careers as writers with MA's.

So for my next I'm going to do my heist war movie. The worst soldiers in the army pulling a bank job in a war zone. I've been thinking about it a lot this week and come up with some new ideas and I actually have a protagonist now. I need to think more about the political situation in this country and exactly who the antagonist is. Is it the ruthless dictator of this war torn country or is it the General who set them up to be killed? Perhaps they're in cahoots! Things Like that are what I need to finalize. Also I was thinking about setting it in an African country. It'd be a kind of BLACK HAWK DOWN meets POLICE ACADEMY. More of a light hearted action movie than an out and out comedy. Similar in tone to SMOKIN' ACES, BAD BOYS or one of the older, less gritty BOND movies.

So I'm going to have to do a lot of reading/watching of similar movies so I can make it as different as possible. THREE KINGS and KELLY'S HEROES I'm talking to you!

30 Pages?

Who said anything about 30 pages?

I ask this because I looked through my course notes and course handbook and saw my treatment is due in on the 15th but that is pretty much all it said.

I don't know where I got the notion that it had to be 30 pages (or thereabouts).
This is always a problem with me. I just never seem to get the details totally right. I'm never where I'm supposed to be when I'm supposed to be there. I never manage to have the work ready when it's supposed to be ready for. Well hopefully this time I will!

As it stands my treatment runs in at just over 20 pages which seems to be its ideal length. having looked at other treatments they seem to be about that and it's not as if I have a lot of padding in mine. I've just written what happens in the order it is seen on the screen.

I still have some bits to add, I'm still figuring out the through line of those pesky scenes with the customers playing the game. Trying to integrate it and make it all relevant and pay off. I'm almost there though. Not much is needed for me to reach the stage where I could safely say I have a first draft.

Of course, even then I'm going to want to go in and redraft it. I don't think any writer's first draft is ever really a first draft, it's just been the first draft they feel comfortable with showing anybody and even then it has that "First draft" label meaning "This still very early and very rough and I want to make some improvements but have a look at it and see what you think, let's see if your ideas for what needs improving mesh with mine". They don't really mean that. A first draft is the very best work a writer thinks they can produce. All it's waiting for are a pair of unbiased eyes to take a fresh look and see what a writer is too close to it to see.

So I'm almost there. I've solved a few problems I didn't realise where there along the way and I'm hoping the work I've put in shows on the page.

I've also just pulled out my career development loan forms from my folder and have them half filled in. All the easy stuff is done. My name and address. I reckon I got 100% in that part of the test! Now just to fill in the rest, the hard bit. I just hope I manage to stay on topic with the essay question.

Actually it's not that bad. I had expected to see pages and pages and pages but it looks pretty much like they just want to know who I am and how much I want. After that it's down to the computer. And I really hope the computer says YES!

Remember how I said I hadn't had any other ideas for movies distracting me from what I was doing? Well I did. I've always wanted to do an ordinary man in extraordinary situation action script. Not some ninja or ex special forces soldier who just happened to be in the White House when the terrorists took over. Just some guy, muddling through as best he can. He jumps through a window out of the 2nd storey and he gets hurt! Really hurt. So by the end of the movie he should look a complete mess.

Hmm on an aside I wonder if putting White House and terrorist in this blog flags it to the NSA or something? Now there's the start of a script. A guy at home writing a story about how a secret society actually runs the government and how they are brought down by a group of young freedom fighters. His story is actually closer to the truth than he would ever believe and too close for the comfort of the bad guys who seek him out to silence him. He manages to escape them and realises the only way to survive the ordeal is to fight back which leads him to destroying the secret society - mirroring the plot of his story. Is there already a film like that? I'm thinking of THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR but I know that's not quite it.

I shouldn't think about it too much. I have other scripts that need writing first. However if you are a Hollywood (or even Bollywood) producer and would like to buy the idea off me I can be reached here. Sinister government agents need not apply!

How goes my treatment?

Quite well thank you very much!

I am now up to 17 pages. Still only half way to the 30 required but I'm quite pleased with what I've got. I have gone about this in what I think is the correct way. I had a 7 page full treatment. Start to finish. I went through expanding it to 10 pages. Then to about 13 and now 17. It feels much more organic to expand on what is written in this way. It's not like I have 10 pages, and that's my 10 pages, the first 1/3 of my treatment. 10 pages was the whole thing.

It was less daunting this way. I had everything figured out already, I knew where I was going with it, I just had to fill in the gaps. It was bit like zooming in on a map. Every time you x10 more details pop up out at you.

I stopped once to rewrite a second improved step outline. After having gone through and re-wrote one from the first treatment I then wrote an improved version taking into account all of the changes I had made during my first extension draft. Then I used this step outline as the guide to write my next extension draft". I think I'll have to repeat this step every time I expand out my treatment to take into account the "global changes" I'm making as I go. By global changes I mean things that need to be foreshadowed earlier and paid off later. Adding a scene in the middle might mean earlier and later scenes need to be altered and when this happens I need a new step outline.

It feels good doing it this way. It feels right. I don't know if this is what other writers do but it works for me and that's what counts.

So 17 pages and I'm up to my second turning point of this latest longer draft. It takes place about halfway down page 14. Extrapolate that out and I should end up with 20 pages by them time I have finished this latest extension draft. Pretty much where I expected I would be. Once I have that done I need to turn the treatment into a treatment. It pretty much reads like an outline rather than a treatment. Treatments seem to be a bit more entertaining than outlines do. Bill Martell has a couple of his own to download which is what I'm going off of. Add a few snatches of dialogue and really go into the scene and I should be well on my way to 30 pages.

It's really all about the page count so far. I just get the feeling that an insufficient page count will make it look like I haven't put the work in. I really have! I've come up with some really good stuff during these rewrites. A great sequence of scenes, almost a montage, of what happens to the characters after their big falling out. I've managed to end each scene or vignette with an image or sound to tie it into the next. I've got some great visual cues to indicate my protagonists changing mental state. A memento from his ex which he holds to be of less and less importance as the movie progresses.

Of course there must be something I've skimped over, right?

Yeah of course. I haven't really gone into detail with the customers of the place my characters work at. I know I want them to feature heavily and have an arc all of their own. You know like some mean kids who come along and are complete dicks to everyone who get their comeuppance at the end. I definitely want some people who come along, and enjoy themselves so much that later on when their help is needed they can really come through for me. It's just figuring out how to show that and keep it integrated with the main action.

I also haven't gone into any detail as to what happens when characters "play the game". That's all I've put. "they play the game". I mean these are kind of like action scenes so they should show character and character development. It's like a whole extra headache but at least I know it means the material is there, in my story. I just have to bring it out.

I've had a few of these headaches. How do I show this character's progression or how do I integrate this subplot with the main action. They cause many a furrowed brow but I always feel really good when I have figured them out. Solving these problems almost makes having them to solve in the first place seem worthwhile.

I haven't been bursting with any other ideas of late. No giant robots or mutant monster mayhem tales to distract me from the task at hand. Which is definitely a good thing. Although I have been having a few movie dreams lately. Dreams that seem more like a movie I'm watching rather than something I'm living through. Last nights was another zombie apocalypse.

I think when I've finished this treatment I'm going to go back to TOMB OF THE VIKINGS and extend that to feature length. It's a pretty good story and I could definitely see someone wanting to make it. It's an action adventure with supernatural elements featuring a strong "real world" female protagonist. I don't describe it as a horror because it's not one. The same way Underworld isn't a horror. In fact quite a few of the so called horror movies that have come out in the last few years are really just action movies with a few horror tropes thrown in.

In fact TOMB... is quite family friendly. It would stand shoulder to shoulder with a Lara Croft or Indian Jones movie, in fact I seem to remember when I wrote it I was very much thinking about THE MUMMY.

Anyhow, that's not for a few weeks yet, best to finish what's on my plate before ordering a second course.

Trolling on

I now find myself 10 shoddy pages into a 30 page treatment. What a miraculous turnaround.

To be fair, most of it was already written. Much of what I'm doing is expanding on what was already written in shorthand. Trying to make it sound less like rough notes on a story and a little more treatment-y.

One thing I'm about a third of the way through is a step outline. Literally, I'm going back and forth between this and that. I had done this originally and used that to write the treatment but now I can't find it, if I even kept it. It's really useful to have all this information on one page, especially as this is an old piece and I am re-discovering it for myself.

The beginning of my second act I though was a little thin. Truth is it's just that the protagonist seems to go away for a little while. I had thought of this as a one character piece. I want my hero to be a real catalyst for change, with his grubby little mitts all over everything that happens. Which he is, but I see he's less involved than I'd hoped. Rather than try and shoehorn him in, I'm just going to cut these scenes back. Put less of them on screen. I just hope I have enough material...

So after a little juggling I have what looks like a decent step outline. A few things have moved around, but not very far, It's like one of those puzzles, you move one black but then you need to move another to make the picture look right.

I discovered last night that Prom night isn't the last time that American kids see each other. They still have school and exams to go, then they don't even have a leavers ball! It's just nothing until graduation, which is the true last time these people will see each other.

This was a problem for me because I had my script opening just after the Prom (or even during it). The leads girlfriend dumps him and heads off to Europe. He has to get a job so he can afford to go off after her. So easily fixed. Just forget the Prom and have it take place the day after a house party. But then I noticed character problems.

So this guy is so infatuated with his girlfriend (ex girlfriend) that he gets a job to save the money to rush off to Italy to win her back. He gets a job, but it is terrible and he has to quit. All good so far. We see this guy is a quitter and has given up on the job. But if he was such a quitter why didn't he just give up on his girlfriend? Also, at work, he meets another girl. It's the thought of losing out on this girl that convinces him to go and get his job back. So he wants to get his job back to earn enough money to go and win his girlfriend back and yet the thing that really convinces him to go back for the job is the idea of winning over another girl? What a mess!

So I'm keeping the ex, added to his financial straits it puts him at a low place to begin with. His ordinary world is now a low place. He's unlucky in all aspects of his life and a quitter. The end of the movie will put him in a completely different place. Now I can make the return of the ex another obstacle in his relationship with new girl. There are plenty of others, why not one more. One planted in the first scene which will pay off late in act 2 to be resolved (with our hero and love interest finally getting together) in act 3.

Yeah, now we're onto something. Now to put it on the page.

Work and Panic attacks

I keep having these really tense moments. To describe them as panic attacks is overstating. I am the cool, calm, collected centre of the universe. My feathers are rarely ruffled, but I do occasionally find myself pausing before breathing.

What could it be that causes such a robotic and emotionless stone any degree of worry?

I keep thinking I may never make it as a writer. I mean, what if I don't? Never mind the shattered dreams and all the rest of it, what the hell else am I going to do? I can't do anything. I am rapidly approaching my 31st birthday (although still am mistaken for a 21 year old ladies!), unqualified for anything much, unable to do even less and damn near unemployable, it seems.

I have 2 terribly underpiad DJing jobs, but I had never intended to be a DJ, I just sort of fumbled through it until I found myself being a few people's "go to guy". But the young guns are rapidly coming up behindme. These kids actully like the music they play (although learning fast, as I did, that people have no taste). Pretty soon I may be shit out of the luck I've been coasting on there.

Not only that I am chronically disorganised and as I am about to head into year 2 of my MA I still have not sorted out any means of funding. Yup, that's right. I won't even be allowed back in if I don't fix this. Which means a trip to the bank, to beg for money. Maybe I'll take in my marks and see if thatimpresses them any. "Look I got good marks! I may make it and be able to pay this back one day!"

So I sort of realized it's write or die for me.

So what do I do? Do I start scribbling away at the treatment I need for my MA? My actual coursework. No. Of course not. I start writing a prose novel which will probably be terrible. I did thisonce before. It was about a bunch of lads on a night out. Students. Dazed & Confused meets Swingers. It probably wasn't that bada story, but I shouldve written itas a screenplay. Imean the whole time I was writing I was thinking about the movie adaptation rather than the book anyway, but this was before I realised I should try screenwriting. In fact I think I did start to adapt it - but by adapt I mean rewrite it in movie format, rather than restructure into movie structure.

I saw a friend of mine on Facebook has an interest in movies and is starting to write a Zombie thing. Some kind of multi part web series. I don't think he's ever tried writing before. I've offered my help so we'll see where that goes.

So back to my treatment. My MA coursework.

I took a look at a short treatment I did a while back and realized just how much work I have to do. I mean shit loads. For 30 pages. So What I'm going to do is turn this short treatment into a longer treatment. I just have so much work to do that I need something I've already started just to give me a helping hand.

It's set in 1986 and I was discouraged from writing it because I saw the trailer for ADVENTURELAND and thought this was quite similar but having now seen the movie I realize mine is different enough to warrant an effort to write it.

Now to work.

I ain't got time to bleed... or to write it seems.

I've suffered from a severe lack of motivation lately. I've not had any inclination to do any writing for a while. I blamed being frustrated by struggling to choose a script idea for my MA coursework.

I've picked one now. Mostly by a process of elimination. I had a number of ideas but as always, most of them seem similar to things that have already been done, or are being done. The "winner" is a teen alien invasion comedy. Untitled as of yet. It's about a group of kids who a re working the night shift at a fast food restaurant when an accident causes an alien spaceship to crash land, releasing a nasty parasite which attaches itself to the hapless populace (what the hall are haps?), turning them into enraged cannibals (kind of like zombies - but not) who gorge themselves on unaffected humans (or hell a stray cat will do), as their stomachs swell with the growing litter of parasites inside them before they explode sending viscera and more parasites in all directions.

My heroes are the last people on earth you would want to be stuck with in an apocalypse. Mankind's last hope aren't our last hope because they're the cream of the crop, chosen for a daring mission, they're the last people you'd ask.

The theme is generally about finding good qualities in places you wouldn't normally look. About misjudging people. People can surprise you. These losers and underachievers are finally forced to step up and make something of themselves (hmm remind you of anyone?).

There are a couple of elements I'm still unsure about. I had a big part of their survival hinging on pot. The parasites won't attach themselves because these kids are all stoned (via a mishap with a big bag of weed and the air conditioning). Now, I'm not a pot smoker. I don't drink, smoke or do any drugs - and I'm a vegan (if you're interested!). I thought this kind of added something thematically. It's not as if I like stoners myself so it makes the characters, even in the writers eyes, the worst people to survive the apocalypse and they have to prove themselves, not just to the audience, but to me!

I could see the story goals being about trying to find another supply of weed to help them survive the alien invasion. You know I can see that working. I thought maybe the only vehicle they could get hold of would be the one used by the local special school. Good for a cheap very un-PC laugh.

But still... stoners. A stoner comedy. Yeark!

I also have an eclectic bunch of alien bounty hunters who will, in parallel, be kicking ass and taking no names. It was this group that really instigated the initial desire to do this. I could see a group of 4 aliens done as puppets, not CGI, driving a huge open top jeep I was gonna call "The Killtruck". Now, they seem pretty superfluous.

To me, they were a much funner version of the bounty hunters from CRITTERS (which was one of the influences for this film, also NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, SLITHER, ALIENS, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, ARACHNOPHOBIA - and pretty much any 80s mini monster movie!).

I suppose though, I only have a treatment to deliver for next term. I mean, I'm supposed to be working on this for all of next year so I'll probably include them and then over the next year debate with my tutors over what value they bring to the story.

Time will tell.

In the meantime I'm diving straight into another script. This one is heavily influenced by PREDATOR , ALIEN and THE DESCENT. It's about a group of mercenaries who are accompanying a scientist on a field test of a new piece of kit which uses echo location to map cave systems. They're in Afghanistan and they think they're trying to establish if a cave links to another network of caves on the other side of the mountain.

Very soon things go wrong. If it all went according to plan it'd be a crap movie. They're attacked by Taliban fighters, trapped inside the cave and then the bodies start to go missing. Something is in there with them, stealing the corpses.

Halfway through the cave they come across an old Soviet research station. That's their way out but it's also the creatures (because - sorry to spoil it for you - there's a whole family, a brood) home.

The idea is that the creature is an alien. It's because of these creatures and their technology that the Soviets really invaded Afghanistan back in the day. That's also why our guys are there. Although they don't know it the field test is a smokescreen. The mercs are working for a PMC who have come across a piece of intel that they decided not to share with the government, rather get their hands on the stuff for themselves. Only, they didn't know there was a family of lizardy aliens still living there.

This is the first time I've really tried to write a movie on a budget. I've been really thinking of how I can do this on the cheap. Using sound and other things to suggest the presence of the alien without having to show it. Thinking about where stock footage of planes taking off etc can be inserted to make it look like a bigger budget was used, but then keeping all of the actors indoors.

I've got the beginning taking place aboard a Hercules. I'm sure there must be one sitting in a flight museum or with no engines in a scrapyard that a bunch of guys can sit in and pretend they're being flown over Afghanistan, right? What about the Afghan caves? I took a look at some pictures and compared them to Crank Caverns in St Helens. No one will know the difference (once the graffiti has been cleared off) and also there's the Russian base. That could be filmed in the basements or service tunnels of so many buildings. The "behind the scenes" part of the Mersey tunnel maybe.

There's a few tricks I want to use to show the alien without showing the alien. Like the motion detectors from ALIEN and ALIENS. How about JAWS? They made a whole sequence where the guys were chasing a bunch of yellow barrels on the water. Even the godawful JAW 4 had the great idea where the shark had a heart monitor but it was short range so anytime the shark got close they could hear its heart beating. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. Shine a bright light in someones face, have said someone look up, look amazed... you've got yourself a UFO!

One thing I would hope to avoid with it though is a lot of that green night vision stuff. I'd hope whoever made it (who knows, could be me) would use lights to illuminate the action so the alien could be further hidden in shadow.

So I'm unashamedly writing a tough guy action movie. The guys all rip the piss out of each other on the plane. It's a really funny opening. I find if characters are funny it seems the audience likes them more. Then I'm going to kill half the cast as soon as possible. That'll really get you on your toes, wondering who will make it.

I'm quite enjoying coming up with names for the characters. Lots of nicknames that define their personalities. I usually struggle over the names. This way of doing it doesn't really feel any easier but is a lot more enjoyable. Like calling a guy Rodney because his real name is Dave. It's an ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES JOKE if you didn't get it. I actually decided not to use that one.

I'm being a lot more forthcoming with details in my blog than I used to be. I keep reading things from other writers and bloggers who say its pointless because no one ever actually rips anyone else off and you never know who's reading, giving a few more details might get you a query.

I'm thinking of getting in touch with the Wirral International Film Festival people. Try and get involved as a volunteer. It'd be good to build some contacts, get involved and just to bloody do something! I had thought it was on over the summer, it'd really give me something to do - activity is a good motivator after all - but its not on until the winter. Maybe I'll do it anyway.

In other news I'm on a diet. My years of inactivity and love of biscuits has put me at my heaviest ever. I'm not really fat or anything, I have a bit of a belly but I keep seeing photos of me taken at the clubnight I work at (Revolution at Liverpool's O2 Academy!) and I look a right fat fuck. Honestly, I don't look that bad in the flesh! Anyhow, I dieted a few years ago and got to the point where I was losing over a pound a day. So I know I can do it. Eat lots of apples, drink lots of green tea and all my meals are either brown rice (really that's it - bot of soya sauce), home made soups (bouillon/vegetable stock with lentils, onion, carrots or tomato - whatever is in the house) and porridge made with water and no added sugar. Also having high fibre cereal (with soya milk) and the odd few hob nobs - they make me poo! It's a miserable diet. Really depressing but it works. I think its having an effect already. I didn't weigh myself before I started but I did take a few pictures of myself. I'm not going to show you the befores until I have the afters!

Back to work

Turning point

I haven't done any writing this week. I am a terrible person.

I've been thinking a lot about it though. is that any better? I was thinking about turning points. I always struggled with them because I always thought that your protagonist had to make a decision to go on their adventure at TP1. Now, when I watch movies it often seems more like the turning point just happens to them.

In THE DESCENT TP1 occurs when the cave in traps the women in the cave. However in STAR WARS TP occurs when Luke's aunt and uncle are barbecued. he makes the decision to go with Obi Wan then. Well he always wanted to but it was his responsibilities that stopped him. Maybe that's more to do with the heroes journey though. He refused the call and then he is railroaded into it.

The real complicated stuff is integrating everything, making everything relate back to the central problem. In STAR WARS it's all about the droids. The stormtroopers have a Lars bbq specifically because they're after the droids.

Maybe I'm over complicating it. If it feels right, if it's satisfying, if it's what I want, is that enough?

So it's all this thinking that has had me off writing. I have to resolve these issues before I can carry on writing. I mean what's the point in doing it if it's all wrong?

I sent a script to LIME PICTURES. They make HOLLYOAKS. I am desperate for money and no one wants to give me a job type job so I thought maybe I should try and get a job doing what I want to do. Because writing isn't really a job. I mean it's not is it? It might be hard work but it's not a job. Data entry is a job. Loading biscuits is a job. Jobs I've done.

So I got a reply saying they'd read it and let me know. I think what happens is they send you a premise (apparently it's "A fridge is delivered to Hollyoaks") and a list of characters and I'm supposed to write a scene. But I mean what then? What's supposed to happen at the end of the scene? Who actually owns the fridge? Who is supposed to end up with it? Do I even need to resolve any of this? Am I supposed to decide before I write the scene who owns it and write from there or does no one own the fridge and the characters are just arguing on who gets to keep it?

I have a couple of people I can ask about this but I'm not going to do so until I hear back from LIME. My tutors can give me the advice. The guys who came in from HURRICANE FILMS said they'd give us advice and ROY BOULTER even used to write for HOLLYOAKS.

I'll be honest. I don't actually like HOLLYOAKS. I don't watch any soaps any more. I don't even watch much British TV. But maybe that's a good thing? Maybe they would like a new spin? Or maybe (more likely) they think they're doing pretty well as they are and want someone who can deliver more of the same (and do it better).

My girlfriend has threatened me not to ruin HOLLYOAKS because she likes it and she doesn't want me to destroy it. As if I would. I might try and drop in a Star Wars joke here and there ha ha

I would assume there will be an interview too. What if they ask me about HOLLYOAKS? What if they want to know what my favourite characters and storylines are? I have one answer already. What do you think HOLLYOAKS greatest strengths are? And I'll say comedy and cleavage. When my girlfriend is watching HOLLYOAKS (I'm usually trying to sleep at this point or showering) I usually manage to laugh at something that happens. Also there's usually a girl in their underwear in every episode. Most of the time they do it in that opening dream sequence thing.

It's a real shame they don't make GRANGE HILL any more.

However ALL3MEDIA who own LIME also own the company that make SKINS, again not something I watch but I reckon I could write it.

I should write something for this CBBC series thing they're doing. Maybe that's what they need. Right here in this post. A new GRANGE HILL. The brief is the 6-12 age range. GRANGE HILL in a primary school?

I'm rambling now, just thinking out loud. But that's what this blog is, just somewhere to record my every idiotic thought.

Getting on with it...

Procrastination and moving onto the "Next thing" have always been a real problem for me. I have ideas thick and fast and always seem to be juggling a few at a time.

I'm supposed to be writing a script for my MA. The one I pitched to my tutors was the horror/western BLOODRUSH. I haven't even looked at this one since I pitched it to them. Instead I've tinkered with an older idea, a stoner alien invasion movie. Not so much a comedy as a movie with a few wisecracking characters. This is the one with the alien masturbation. Then I started a new movie. 5 girls and 1 guy in a log cabin. Sounds like a fun way to spend a week. Then I had to go and throw in a murderous BIGFOOT.

The whole alien masturbation thing works. That whole chunk works. The only trouble is it's all superfluous, it has no story function. What was useful was that in writing those scenes I felt like I got t0 know those characters. Seeing them walk around and do their thing really helped me get a feel for them. Maybe it's something I should do for all of my characters in every film. I should write a scene just so I can get to know them. Hell the scene could even be used to audition actors if it ever gets made (I can dream).

So it works, what's the problem? Cut the scene out of the movie and we're missing a few laughs and not much else. Maybe their entertainment value would be reason enough to keep them in. Maybe. What would be better is if the scenes performed some function other than giving the audience a laugh. Maybe later on in the movie some ball bearings are required. Presto, my alien gets his schlong out and fires a few cum pellets. Suddenly a scene of gratuitous alien self love becomes a plant for later on. Sadly I can think of no apocalypse scenario that would require the use of ball bearings.

As for Bigfoot. Do you know how few movies there are about Bigfoot? I suppose it's because we all think of HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS when we think of Bigfoot (Sasquatch and Yeti however - they sound foreign and therefore must be evil). I remember one that scared me as a child. Terrified me. An American family staying in some sort of cabin in the woods (actually looked a lot like a Butlins chalet). Not much happened that I remember except a teenage boy getting thrown through a door. SNOWBEAST scared me when I was younger too. I watched that again a few months ago and quite enjoyed it, at least I did until the other half pointed out to me that I was copying at lot of the sound effects and music out loud.

So I'm wondering what tone I should take for the movie. Should I try and be serious (which to me means boring) or go all out CABIN FEVER on this? I have 5 girls and 1 guy. I can get at least 2 sex scenes out of that. Boy girl and girl girl, maybe even a girl boy girl. Maybe more. I could have the girl the guy did it with killed and have him move on. When faced with death at the hands of a psychotic mythical simian offshoot I think all bets are off. I've got to be honest, I enjoy the all out approach more. I like sex and violence and sarcastic characters. You're supposed to write the kind of movies you want to see, movies with your own voice but I honestly think I'm too obnoxious for a modern cinema audience.

OK I'm being needlessly harsh on myself. I'm just playing.

I have "trapped" on my old computer I can no longer turn on a few films that are totally different to the kind of thing I do now. A story about a family who come together over a life (baby) and a death. A family with a secret of sexual abuse. It's about how the oldest son is frightened by the prospect of becoming a father who willingly to becomes that father to his own siblings when his mother dies and he discovers why his older sister left home like she did and what has been happening with his younger sisters. No giant robots in that one.

Another is a road movie. A mismatched couple. He's a criminal, she's a rich (ish) policeman's daughter. She picks up a stray kitten and then soon picks up a young prostitute deciding to mother them both. The road trip (I believe it had something to do with a drug deal) goes bad, the kitten dies because they leave it in the boot and forget about it and eventually so does the young girl. The kitten was like a symbol for the girl. Once the kitten dies those paying attention will soon see that she's not far behind. So we at least have a schoolgirl in that one, but she's not an assassin or a mutant killing ninja.

The last was about a guy who constantly makes the wrong decision. As he gets poorer and poorer he spirals further and further into the criminal world. Eventually he runs away with the money, thinks he's found peace but soon he loses both that and his lady in one spectacular swoop. His last act is to call the people he stole the money from and let them know where he's going to be. They come. They kill him. So it was a kind of suicide.

At the time I was really into Larry Clark and I thought these dreary depressing movies were the only ones likely to get made in Britain. It seems all the arts council is interested in is reminding us how grey and shit life is. Now I'm all about entertainment. I like indy films, I like to think of myself as quirky, left of centre and part of the counter culture but dammit I went to be making JERRY BRUCKHEIMER movies! I want to write movies that defy the recession with the amount of stops I've pulled out.

I'm going to have a Japanese schoolgirl drive a real car through a real building with real explosions going off whilst chased by giant aliens. As the camera passes the building I want to see boobs in at least one of the windows. The car will emerge through the other side and crash into some evil ninjas, slicing them up with it's razor blade bumper, blood and body parts flying everywhere. The car will then transform itself (via seamless cgi) into an armoured battle suit for my schoolgirl who will battle with, hell, anything!

For the moment though its back to Bigfoot hiding in the forest. With the "the less you see, the more scary it is approach". It's all going to be mood, suggestion and aftermath. I better get writing.

Alien Masturbation and Emily Booth

I've had a little step outline hidden away for a while now. I find it best if I leave new ideas alone in a draw to germinate before having a go at them. I decided it was time for this one. I also decided to just cut loose with it. No planning, to just sit down and write, just for the hell of it. I know it's not what you're "supposed" to do, right? But techniques are all just tools, not rules, and I want to be a writer because it's something I enjoy doing, so every now and then I want to let rip and have some fun.

Anyhow, somehow I've ended up with a scene of an alien masturbating to some alien porn.

How does this just happen?I had my aliens on their ship and they were all in separate rooms, doing their thing and I wanted to characterize them. I suppose, looking back now I should have put them all in the same room and had them conflicting and reacting differently (but in character) to the same thing but I didn't. Shoot me. I blame this on EmilyBooth.

They showed a bunch of Emily Booth movies on Zone Horror this week and for my sins I watched a couple. Well actually the only one I watched all the way through was Jake West's Evil Aliens. Cradle of Fear and Pervirella I just skipped through and realised I wasn't missing much but a load of crap and few tit shots. Well in Evil Aliens there's a couple of Alien/Human sex scenes. It must've filtered through. The thing is I don't want to be writing some stupid crappy spoof movie. I want it to be funny but funny like CRANK or CRITTERS or PLANET TERROR. I mean a guys dick falls off and turns into a monster in that, but it doesn't come across as some cheap piece of crap. But I suppose that's in the production values. Like I have a grasshopper alien, but I want him to be a puppet and not some crappy Sci Fi channel TV movie CGI embarrassment. Sigh. I suppose we have no control over these things.

I watched a Sci Fi channel movie this week. DECOYS. Title had nothing to do with the story. Unless the boobs were the decoys. Distracting you from the alien appendages. The synopsis described the aliens as having chest tentacles which made me thing straight away chestacles, but sadly no one in the movie said that. Why do they make these Sci Fi channel movies? Is someone making money out of crappy movies that no one watches? It's like they just don't care or something. I don't think anyone is going to sit and watch them and enjoy them in 20 years the same way I sat and watched GHOULIES this week. Or even CHILLERS.

I recorded a bunch of horror movies from Zone Horror and skipped through to about 54 minutes in to see what they were like. If I didn't like the look I just deleted them. My girlfriend didn't understand why I kept CHILLERS which she thought looked the worst out of all of them but I put it on and she got hooked. Yes it was crappy, the story and script and effects sucked, but somehow I still enjoyed it, more than any of these Pterodactyl or Giant spider movies you get the Sci Fi or Horror channels making these days. I'd like to think I'm not just suffering from nostalgia.

PLANET TERROR I absolutely loved. It just reminded me of all those old horror movies from the 80s and yet its a new movie. What are they doing wrong these days? Remakes? No way, I prefer the remade TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and THE HILLS HAVE EYES to the originals. And FRIDAY THE 13TH was good too. It's not the big horror movies that suck, its these lower budget TV ones. The ones which are supposedly produced by people with genuine love of the genre's they're working with as opposed to studio executives who just want to make money.

Ah ignore me, it's early and there are men banging in the house.

I'm writing this one on Celtx as opposed to Scripped which I had been using but I just find to be bloody awful. It's annoying that I can't work out what my pages are but what the hell, I'm only writing it for shits and giggles anyhow. I'll just export it as a PDF and work off that for my rewrite, the one where I try and fix all the structure. Saying that though I have got plenty of stuff in my opening which I know I can use to pay off later. Little seeds planted in act one, to nurture in act two and have bloom in act three.

I pitched a comic idea a week or so ago to a friend for him to illustrate. The kind of thing we can shop around. I could use it to illustrate my writing and he could use to illustrate his...err...illustrations! He still hasn't gotten back to me about it yet. I did a little research on the ever reliable wikipedia to find that a similar idea called BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL exists. I decided to change mine from 1000 bad guys to 666 to make it different (vastly! ha ha) also, mine doesn't involve magic worms. I think it's pretty goo,although I would. It already has a lot of depth and quite a bit of mileage in it.

In swine flu news, if you break out in a rasher just rub on some oinkment.

Things I'd rather do than write.

It seems I would rather watch a load of crappy films as "research" than write. I mean how am I supposed to write a moody atmospheric neo-noir if I haven't yet seen the (allegedly - I hear) craptacular MAX PAYNE? It just feels like I can't. And I can't sit here and watch it on the very publicly displayed comp because it looks like every now and then it's gonna get rude and you just know that'll be the moment someone walks past and then everyone thinks I'm looking at porn.

Other things I'd rather do include reading (more research) and gardening. Every now and then I spend 15 minutes in the garden. I turn my compost or pull out some weeds then walk soil all over the floor. I have an onion planted at the moment. It had sprouted in the cupboard so I figured I couldn't possibly fuck it up. Also some garlic cloves had sprouted so they're in there too. How do they grow, are they vines? I put some strawberries in some pots and I think I see the first couple of shoots. I planted some tomato seeds on a whim last year just to see what would happen. It was too late in the year but surprisingly I actually got some green tomatoes. I didn't eat them though.

Metal Gear Online. It's so much fun and so frustrating. I'm a level 10. Not great but it's OK. I have a live in girlfriend. 1 television. I can't play much when she's home so I have to play when she's out or asleep. Also when she is home we tend to do things together, ie not sit at the computer writing. It's a conundrum.

Piss about online. Instead of writing my own movie I read about other peoples. I see what's coming out in 2 years time or read about anime's I haven't seen. I spend hours gaining all this useless knowledge in the hopes it will filter through and make me a better writer.

Another thing I'd rather do than write THIS script is write the NEXT script. The newest idea I've had that just seems so much better than my current one. They always seem better.

I managed to trim a whole page off of TOMB OF THE VIKINGS just by merging paragraphs and rewriting the odd line to shorten it. Go me. I'm not going to add anything more to it though. My new ideas can wait until the rewrite. My other half is going to go through it for me and see if it makes sense to her. She liked the last version so hopefully this one will meet her seal of approval.

I had a thought about WAR MOVIE too. I often have a trouble with theme. People always want scripts to have a theme. I mean what's wrong with robots fight aliens or here's what happens when lots of cool things blow up? Why does it have to say something more? I mean I get that it elevates the work from trashy entertainment to art. The problem I have is when I try to add theme I tend to substitute one thing for another. I do allegory instead. Like let's write a film where aliens invade and we fight back only its really a film about Iraq I've just swapped everything over.

I thought maybe for WAR MOVIE I actually would have the heist element. I didn't want to but it makes sense. The guys are useless and aren't involved in the war at all. They just want to collect pay cheques until they can leave. Then they hear about a hidden cache of gold. Suddenly there's a chance to get rich and they get involved. Substitute gold for oil and we have a social commentary on US motivations for the invasion of Iraq.

Pitch meeting (and the aftermath)

Today was my pitch meeting in uni. I had to pitch my idea for a feature length screenplay (the one I will be spending most of next year writing and re-writing) to both of my tutors.

Well it didn't go that great. I sat down and said "right..." and felt myself go bright red. I felt like I had to go right to the guts of my story and so I skipped over many of the nuances and details. Like my opening. I missed out a few of the 2nd tier characters and then had to fudge in the missing bits.

I have a step outline done of this treatment so far. Which is fine. We're not really expected to know the while thing just yet. I'm a bit thin on the second half of act 2 (of a 3 act structure) which is the 3rd quarter of the movie.

So I have these US Marshalls and these bandits, with a young journalist thrown into the mix. It's a western. Then you add vampires. Only they're not you know the wine-drinking, poetry-reading faggy Anne Rice vampires. Fuck them and their skinny, long-haired, goatee-bearded goth twat fans. And your fat self-harming girlfriend to boot. No, my vampires are just beastly. Literally. Feral. Like big pale rats. I'm trying to think of a vampire movie with these type in. FROM DUSK TIL DAWN. The reapers from BLADE 2 or like the chiropterans from BLOOD: THE LAST VAMPIRE.

Anyway, the tutors want the Vampire incorporated more into the story. There's a lot going on and the vampires felt tacked on to them. In the original concept the vampires were just cannibals, I changed them to vampires and then tacked all of the other stuff on, the bandits and the treasure.I suppose I must have spent so much time and effort integrating them I've pushed that stuff out.

I felt quite bad coming out of the meeting, really feeling disheartened about my story. I know it's not that bad, I'm just feeling the sting of criticism. You know how it is, you think your story is great, perfect, but it isn't. You show up with your best effort and it isn't good enough, It's disheartening. But I'm not giving up. They made a few suggestions, but ones I think would change the story too much.

One idea was to have the town populated by vampires. So it's an odd town, where a lot of the people only come out at night. To me, that gets away from my feral vampire idea. Also they didn't get how it all related to each other, and maybe that's because it didn't. I knew I wanted the villain to be controlling the vampires in some way, and I knew I wanted my protagonist to be after some sort of loot (but not necessarily gold or money - maybe secret papers). But, this being the movies, I need to make their goals conflict in some way otherwise it'd be easy for them to say "you do your thing, I'll do mine" and get on with it.

And why Vampires? Why not Apaches or Mexicans or a rogue band of confederate soldiers? My answer was simply why not? Why not vampires? They thought that it could just as easily be any of those as vampires which to me was reason enough to make them vampires. Or werewolves. Or zombies. Or witches.

I'll get to work on it in a few days, once the dust has settled. I still have to hand in my 60 minute TOMB OF THE VIKINGS. I've "finished" but I've had a few ideas. I'll have a look and see. I think I'm going to keep at it even after it's handed in. Get it up to feature length. I think 90 minutes is enough (and more appealling) for this type of film. It's a fun horror adventure. A shorter length means the cinemas can show it more times a day, thereby making more money off it. That's the economics of it. It's not just gotta be fun, watchable and all that jazz, it has to be saleable and that's one of the things the buyers will be thinking of.

In the realm of new ideas I played a demo of BAD COMPANY on my PS3 this morning. It was pretty good. I mean, I'm not really a fan of 1st person shooters (I like to be able to see my guy) but I did enjoy all the character stuff. I thought I'd like to do a war movie about the worst squad in the army. They're all stupid or accident prone or out an out criminals. Like I had the idea of an angry guy called Styles they call him hostyles. Or one of the soldiers is a stoner and starts to panic when he hears about mandatory drugs testing. He keeps trying to get peoples piss for the drug test but the test is actually done on their hair. Which is a relief because being a soldier he's bald. So the drug testers decide they'll take one of his chest hairs or his pubes but this guy has shaved the lot. He thought it'd give him a smaller radar signature.

You know shit like that. I'm just thinking out loud here. I better think of a title for this so I can tag this blog for future reference. Maybe SHIT COMPANY, KELLY'S ZEROES, GOON PLATOON or THE CLOD SQUAD... ha ha maybe not. I'll just tag it as WAR MOVIE for now.

And I'm done

The first draft of TOMB OF THE VIKINGS is complete!

I'm still to do an actual full read through of this thing and tidy up the spelling and formatting any any other "cosmetic" errors but I'm done. 67 pages. At 6:43am.

So that "symbolic gift" I needed became something a little more practical and more of a symbol of other things in the story than I originally intended it to be. My heroine's Mum hates her wearing hoodys so I made the gift be a hoody from the (secret) boyfriend. It's white, inspired by Joan of arc, which also prompted an impromptu haircut. Also he gives her a survival knife, which she uses to cut her hair. I may change that though and just have her reach for the sword she uses to chop the Viking up. Anyway, the heroine's mother eventually says that it was nice of the boyfriend to buy it for her, which is kind of an acceptance of their relationship (you know, now that he's dead!) and of the choices her daughter has made.

My meeting last night was a no show. I was there, a little late, but I had my dates all wrong. My meeting is on Thursday. Unfortunately I'm doing an in-store at the PUMA shop in Liverpool One. I'm DJing some kind of silent disco. So I'll have to re-arrange that.

I just changed my ending. Not my ending, you know the denouement. Bittersweet. Not quite the cheese-fest I had (it even had a sunset!).

I'll have to get some sleep so I'm ready for work tonight. I'm DJing Revolution and it's a wrestling theme night. Sadly, I haven't any lycra to wear.

The missus is in bed. Been there all night. Unlike me she went to sleep at a sensible hour. I went shopping on the way back from my imaginary meeting and then cooked it when I got in. The rules are that whoever cooks, the other one does the washing up. Anyway we struck a deal whereby if I did the dishes she would make me 4 cups of tea at my demand, so long as she wasn't asleep. I agreed, we shook on it. I decided to make a cup of tea before I got started, that way later on when I was working I could just shout her and wouldn't have to break my flow. Anyway, time for my first cup of tea came and she was fast asleep.

I got conned.

You live, you learn.

To do list

Got to finish a couple more scenes on TOMB OF THE VIKINGS.

Rahman family leaving their home. Rahman family in the car (possibly combined with preceding scene). Vikings discussing their plans. Viking attack on Osborne house (still need that symbolic gift!). Viking flashback.

61 pages (so far). Only 1 page over(so far). Feel pretty good about the shape it's whipping itself into.

I also have my 1 page selling document for BLOODRUSH to complete. I have a meeting with my tutor tomorrow. I think I'm going to write what I think he wants and then ask at the meeting what he actually wants. Hopefully it's the same thing, if not, REWRITE!

Off to watch a movie on TV with the Missus.

Frowning friends and villainous obstacles

Something occurred to me whilst watching ALONG CAME A SPIDER. As Michael Wincott is trying to kidnap a little girl dressed as a fat Englishman (Wincott that is, not the girl) he is almost caught several times. It was the most tense scene in the movie.

It clicked.

You have to throw obstacles in your villains way too.

We spend so much time making it difficult for our hero that we don't really think to turn up the heat on the villain too. Instead they sit back in their old abandoned warehouse and toast incompetent henchmen in the boiler room. That's not enough. It's not enough for the hero to keep progressing on his quest, overcoming obstacles and such. The villain should have more to contend to than that. Maybe a traffic warden puts a clamp on his getaway car. If you were really clever you would have the clamped car then function as a clue for the hero. Keeping it all "integrated" (see last post).

I had a scene in a thing I did a little while back that I hated. I was just writing stream of conscious just to see where it would take me. My villain escaped from prison and met up with his old crew who were all very happy to see him.

Scenes like that suck.

All that crap in LORD OF THE RINGS where they get to Rivendell and the Elves are arguing and Wizards shout but no one puts our hero in jeopardy nor does he come into conflict with anyone. Yeah Gandalf and Elrond have a nice little debate about if Frodo should go the rest of the way but he's not even in earshot. In the end he just volunteers and everyone else accepts it.

It gets worse. He has a nice time listening to poems and eating Elvish food (recuperation for the body AND the soul no less) and then they all get shiny presents and magic cloaks. Nah, Tolkien should've cut all of that and had them go straight to Lothlorien. They were much better with their "not in my back yard" attitude to the fellowship.

So back to my scene. Let's just imagine it was my hero and not my villain. He meets his friends and they're all smiles and hugs. No conflict. No drama.

It would be much better if his friends were pissed off with him about "something" (which, of course, we'll integrate). If allies were reluctant ones. The guy who greats you with a smile, he's the one you've got to worry about. What exactly IS he smiling about? He knows something you don't, that's what it is. He knows your hero is about to get double crossed, that if the hero knew what he knew the hero would think twice about trusting him.

So my deadline for TOMB OF THE VIKINGS is less than 2 weeks away and I have less than a week to complete a "1 page selling document" (which I assume is just a short treatment) for BLOODRUSH, which is what I'll be doing for my full length. Better get back to it.

Integrating action, symbolic gifts and execution

I woke up today from a very strange dream where I had been taken prisoner by a society of intelligent monkeys. In that dream-way everything changes but it's as if it never did, the tree house they had me in became a coach. One of those huge starliner things, the type bands go touring in only this one was full of cages. It almost added some back story to the dream, giving an indication of how they ended up there. Steve Guttenberg was in my dream too. He was trading with them whatever itis a human village trades with a simian society. Anyway, the bugger wouldn't help me and I had to escape myself. Thank you Mahoney!

It made me think of a post Lucy Vee did in her blog about movies with similar premises being totally different works all depending on their execution. I thought well there you go - you're wrong, my dream was just PLANET OF THE APES. You can't do intelligent primates without it just being PLANET OF THE APES.

But then I thought more about my dream and how I would adapt it into a movie. I suppose if you had it so the apes were already on earth, hiding away in some jungle or on some tiny pacific island that would be different.

Enough of that nonsense. Back to TOMB OF THE VIKINGS. I have, as you know, started my script earlier, pissing all over the "get in late, get out early" guide the screenwriting books throw at you BUT I have introduced my protagonist much earlier so maybe this is an exception to prove the rule.

The problem I'm having is making this action a part of the story; "integrating the action" as Bill Martell says. At the moment it's just a scene to show our heroine kicking the bejeesus out of a lot of burly men. So whilst it does "show character" it doesn't "move the story along". She's at a historical re-enactment on the Isle of Wight, her home. Being punished for fighting in school. As the Vikings were a man short she has to step in. The Anglo Saxons get a bit rough and things kick off. My heroine goes suitably medieval and is about to get trounced by the more numerous Saxons when they realize she's a girl and they back off. Vikings win, which is at odds with the history they were supposed to be re-enacting.

A couple of scenes on and she's out xmas shopping. Her Dad who was at the re-enactment has let her off for saving him from a good beating. She's buying a present for her boyfriend. Her secret boyfriend. Her parents want her to concentrate on her studies, not boys so it's all kept hush hush. The present she buys is photo album. She's had it filled with pictures of the two of them for him to take away with him when he goes to the mainland. She's scared he'll forgether, go off with some English floozy (the place is full ofthem). The last space is empty, something to fill in the future their future together. I'm pleased as piss with this, I think it's quite clever. Easily amused.

Anyhow, originally I had him give her a Samurai sword. Illegal on the mainland, not so on Wight. She's an action hero. She's going to use this to chop up undead Vikings (who regenerate/put themselves back together). Now however I'm not sure. I really want him to give her something sybollic not just practical. He lives in a big old manor house, there's suits of armour and antique swords on the walls she can use to chop people up.

So her arc is going from her being self reliant and never asking for help to admitting she can't take everything on herself. Her secret fear is that her boyfriend, the one person she does rely on I suppose, will leave and forget her. What kind of present says that? Perfume?

So back to my integrated action. My original introduction for the heroine was to have her out shopping for this present and then seeing her geeky twin brother being picked on by some bigger guys. She climbs a roof and drops some rubbish on them and then they chase her. She outruns them, jumping off the roof of a multi story car park onto the roof of a neighbouring building all using her super parkour skills. It's all very NOW. This chase now ends up on the museum roof. She has a slight accident, breaking a skylight and cutting herself. Her blood awakening the Viking leader. It ties her to the action and connects her to the protagonist in a way she never was in my earlier version.

My problem is if these 2 scenes following on so closely is just overkill. 1 scene to show she can fight and bites off more than she can chew. Another scene to show she can do parkour and bite off more than she can chew. Both times to protect family. Also, her brother is being picked on by a gang who want him to make drugs for them using his super geek brain. He's a chemist whiz, so now at the end when they need someone who's a chemist whiz to make a bomb for them he's the man.

I've decided that at the end, my heroine will ask for help. She'll send her brother off to get it and he'll return with a load of islanders, including the Anglo Saxons whose respect she so very violently earned in the opening. Great, a pay off, just what I needed to make my new opening relevant, but what of the drug dealing bullies left with egg on their face by my heroine? Redemption or ruin?

Problems, problems. The good news is whereas my 30 page original was actually 38 1/2, I so far have 58 pages of my 60 page rewrite and I'm almost done. A little rejigging and I can start a rewrite.

First Post

I've not had a blog since Diaryland way back in the day. I think I did start a Livejournal once but then never wrote in it. I decided to get back into it, just to log my screenwriting process. You see, I'm doing an MA in screenwriting at Liverpool JMU.

I'll be honest, I love some stupid movies. I mean, I don't think PREDATOR is a work of art but it's rock solid entertainment from start to finish. Of course, I also love some not so stupid movies. Like BRICK, which I could watch over and over again. I wouldn't say I'm "into" Anime, but I do like it, a lot.

So I'm probably going to attempt to write big action movies with robots and monsters in them. My protagonist will most probably be a Japanese schoolgirl wielding a gun that weighs more than her whole family (although to give her a bit of back story she'll probably be orphaned).

I'm currently working on TOMB OF THE VIKINGS. It's a horror with some action but I'd say it feels somewhere in the GREMLINS ballpark. I got a pretty good mark for it as a half hour feature(I got 69... 70 is a distinction - DANG!) and now I have to turn it into an hour long script. I'm feeling pretty good about the changes I've made so far.

I start a little before my half hour opened but introduce my protagonist earlier too (in an action scene that shows character) and I turned my climax into my act 2 ending (kind of). Also made my protagonist responsible for the whole "big bad" (my god BUFFYSPEAK infiltrating my everyday vernacular) which links her and the antagonist inseparably. Made her relationship with her brother a lot less cosy (conflict is drama) and killed off her Dad (raising the stakes).

Expanding the Viking's back story has made them more sympathetic, but that's not revealed until later on. You've got to keep them scary for a little while haven't you? Anyway, now they feel more like they were tricked into becoming undead monsters - denying them entry into into Valhalla - by Fenrir, the Norse wolf god who has taken human form and hidden himself on earth to escape from the other Norse gods who want to destroy him.

So I kind of know what I'm doing there. Well you know how it is, after all the planning you suddenly realise that A didn't quite lead to C by passing through B. It'll all come out in the rewrite though!

So now I'm thinking about my next assignment after that. A full length feature. Got a few. Anyone with any preferences?

1. CRIMEA - A JAWS/ALIENS/THE HOST on the Mersey/Williamson tunnels.

2. BLOODRUSH - A horror/western in the same tone as PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN about Vampires. Think ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 but in the old west and add some pale bat-like creatures that don't look very human and suck blood.

3. YOU DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS - Actually I don't have a title for this one yet. It's about a family of Rednecks. The Son, Father and Grandfather all having the same name and there's a sister called TEXAS. She has some sort of run in with aliens and area 51 but escapes and calls the boys up and they get in their Mustang or Hemi' and go off to save her. SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT meets X FILES via JOE DIRT.

4. PHOTON - I think I may put this on the back burner for a while after that movie ADVENTURELAND came out because it looks like exactly the same thing but mine was set in an 80s lazerquest place. I'll go see ADVENTURELAND before I decide.