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.