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.