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.
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