0110: Michelle’s Diary

Michelle has just added her diary entry to the 0110 scribes diaries.

I just know that some elements of that are going to come back and haunt me in the small hours of tomorrow morning.

This post in 3D

As a special tribute to C4’s 3D week (all next week, depth perception fans) here is a special 3D blog post from yours truly.

You’ll need my special FREE 3D GLASSES to appreciate it to the max. Whaddya mean you don’t have any? They’re right in your hands. Follow these simple steps and you too can be in 3D heaven.

1. Form an ‘O’ with the thumb and index finger of each hand
2. Place the middle finger of each hand on your jawline
3. Bend your face down to meet the inside of the thumb-and-index finger ‘O’s
4. Look up again, keeping the ‘O’s against your eyes.

Yay! You’re now seeing in 3D! Better still, you look like a Spitfire pilot! Now run around the room making machine gun noises.

I do this every day. It’s good for the soul.

Script 5 of 14:Dead Poets Society

Oh dear. I’ve been putting this off. Look, Dead Poets Society is a very nice film. Very inspirational. Very Robin Williams. Very Carpe Diem.

But the script is just so dull! It’s just a big pile of disjointed dialogue, a series of vignettes vaguely unified by one or two faint story threads.

I think the problem is that I just never cared that much about the characters. I’ve been wondering why that is, because they portray some pretty fundmental behaviours: heroic inspiration, railing against authority, thwarted love, treachery and betrayal and – ultimately – self-slaughter.

But my question throughout was always why? Why are you behaving like this? We’re given few clues. There are one or two big signposts: the stern father, the nice-but-unavailable girl. But subtlety? No. None of that.

I finally worked out why. What we’ve got here is a case of implicit characterisation. We’re meant to know and understand these young people and this teacher because, hey, that was us back at High School. Remember those New England autumns? Remember those pacts we made at graduation? Remember our authoritarian fathers who demanded that we become lawyers?

No. Sorry. I’m English. I mean, I get what you’re saying here, but it’s not my experience. That’s not where I’m from. I’m understanding it second hand. I appreciate it, but I don’t grok it. Get where I’m coming from?

So is it lazy scriptwriting to rely on the audience’s collective experience to illuminate the story? No, it’s not. In fact, it’s very smart indeed. Great storytellers tap into the psyche of the audience. They know what scares you. They know what inspires you. They know what disgusts you. They know what makes your heart melt. And all they have to do is hint at it and point the way. You make the journey at their behest.

So Dead Poets Society is a classic example of a story that surfs on the collective memory of the United States of America. It probably inspired a whole generation of Americans.

It just doesn’t inspire me. Sorry.

The One-day Script Challenge

Here’s an ongoing challenge. Pick it up and have a go whenever you want.

Write a script in one day.

The Rules
* Any medium: stage, screen, radio, telly, web
* Any genre
* Any duration
* The script must have a beginning, middle and end
* Don’t hassle over the formatting and spelling, just make it readable
* One draft only, no rewrites
* The thing must be readable and performable within 24 hours

The Guidance
* Be happy
* Be brave
* Trust your gut instincts
* Let the story lead you

Writing like this is a bit like dowsing, I suppose. Just wander around waiting for the hazel twig to twitch, see what you find. It might be nothing at all. It might be nonsense. It might be a gem.

Just like you don’t have to have an objective when you go out for a stroll in the countryside, you don’t have to have a reason to write a script. The journey is the destination.

Now my side of the bargain: you write it, I’ll read it. I’ll give a summary script report for every script sent to me, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the story, potential areas for development and an overall assessment. This offer is good for as long as this blog post remains visible within my blog.

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional script reader; I read scripts in order to improve as a writer. But I have had excellent responses from people whom I have read scripts for.

Course, if you don’t want me to read it then fine. Keep it to yourself. Your call.

Whatever you do, have fun with the process.

If you want to Tweet this blog post, here’s the short url for it: http://is.gd/4QKgx. Cut and paste, baby. Cut and paste.

Twitter Mini-break

As I just tweeted, I’m taking a Twitter Mini-break. No more twaddle till Friday. Got things to do, people to see, scripts to read, nonsense to write.

New 0110 scribe diary – Helen

Fellow 0110 writer Helen has just posted a diary entry to the 0110 website.

This is getting more than a little creepy.

Don’t put camera directions in your script

I read a fair few spec scripts written by people trying to break into the screenwriting business. Most of them my own. But when I’m in reader mode, one thing that really ticks me off and is bound to tick any script reader off is the use of camera directions in the scene descriptions. You know the stuff I’m talking about; scripts riddled with PAN, ZOOM and the cringeworthy CRASH CUT.

Listen: you’re a writer trying to sell a script, not a director preparing a shooting script. Capito? All the stuff with the camera angles, that’s not your job. Let the director and the DoP worry about that.

Hang on, I know what you’re going to say. You’ve got to put camera angles into your script to express the images that are in your head. You know how the scene plays out, character A has got to see character B before B sees A. Or whatever.

Describe the scene, numbnuts. Use descriptive words to show what’s going on. You’re a writer, for godsake. Write. You’re allowed to get into the character’s head, at least to the extent that it allows a script editor to understand what you’re getting at, a director to interpret how they’ll shoot it and an actor to, well, work out their motivation (darling).

Look, let me give you an example.

EXT. BUS STOP – NIGHT
We PAN across the undergrowth until we see FARMER hiding, his face sheened with sweat. ZOOM IN on the hammer in his hand.

PULL BACK and we see WENDY waiting for the bus, unawares.

The only thing this kind of writing achieves is to show how crap I’d be as a director. It detracts from the story. There’s no suspense, no tension. Contrary to popular opinion script readers want to read great scripts. They want to be entertained, surprised, intruiged. They want to be carried away with the story, eager to find out more. They do not want to be bogged down by amateur hour camera directions.

How could you write the same scene?

EXT. BUS STOP – NIGHT
FARMER crouches motionless in the undergrowth with white-knuckle grip on his claw hammer. The sodium orange of the street lights reflects the sheen of sweat on his face.

WENDY waits at the bus stop, blissfully unaware of the danger lurking beyond.

Yeah, okay, it’s overheated tosh. But there are no camera descriptions. Any director foolish enough to want to shoot it can easily work out the shots for themselves.

Oh, and please don’t prefix every sentence of scene description with “We see…”.

INT. DERELICT GARAGE – DAY
We see JOHNNY pull a gun on DANNY.

Of course ‘we see’. It’s on the bloody screen in front of us. Unless it’s a radio play in which case you’d be a plonker for writing ‘we see’ in the first place.

INT. DERELICT GARAGE – DAY
JOHNNY pulls a gun on DANNY.

There. That’s fine. Took less time to write, too. Everyone’s a winner.

I saw a great example of this whold subject over at Scott’s Get Into The Story blog, where he uses a scene from Silence of the Lambs to discuss how to write POV shots.

One last thing. Please, whatever you do, don’t insert CRASH CUTs into your script. Look at yourself. Do you look like a director? Do you look like an editor? No? Then drop the CRASH CUTs.

If you can’t drop camera directions from your script then go and make a film instead. A serious, proper film with actors and decent cameras and lighting and sound and music. Doesn’t have to be a liong one. Maybe five or ten minutes.

Once you come out the other side of that you’ll know once and for all whether you’re a writer or a director.

Script 4 of 14: Die Hard

So much for 14 scripts in 14 days. I henceforth rename this project 14 scripts in 28 days just to buy myself some time. Jeez.

Right, what about Die Hard? Corking movie, does what it says on the tin. Action, suspense, heroics, goodies, baddies, guns, explosions. Die Hard doesn’t pretend to be anything other that what it is and guess what? The script is just the same.

From the very first page of the script there’s a sense of “let’s get the boring exposition out of the way as quickly as possible so we can get down to the action.” A few throw-away characters help us find out everything we need to know about John McClane. If you cut him in half he’d have the letters NYPD running through him like a stick of rock. Separated from successful wife. Strong sense of duty. Handsome. Loves his family. Can’t express his emotions.

Okay, whatever. Set up a few more simple archetype characters (cocky limo driver, good cop, drug-snorting wiseass business guy, decent boss) and off we go.

What’s next? Well, we need to make sure that this building, this high rise office block, is locked down. We can’t have hostages escaping or the police sneaking in, oh no. The script does a bit more work on this front for a page or two, locking doors, isolating lifts, cutting phone lines. This is absolutely instrumental to the success of the story. The building has got to be a trap, a closed room. This defines the field of play and the rules of engagement for us.

Wheel on the baddies.

The baddies? We’re basically talking Hans Gruber and a bunch of cannon fodder. Sure, there are one or two mildly interesting baddies but Hans beats them hands down (ha). Hans gets all the best lines. Hans gets all the power. Hans gets all the control. It’s beautiful to read. Even when John McClane begins to shove spanners in the works Hans doesn’t flinch. He’s super-smart, super-cool, utterly in control.

Which makes it all the more satisfying when dirty, sweaty, bleeding, hard-working cop-of-the-people John McClane comes out on top. John McClane doesn’t monologue. He acts. Large sections of the script are devoid of dialogue; just long action sequences punctuated by swearing. Oh, and a few wisecracks.

Ironically it wasn’t one of Gruber’s lines that took on a life of its own outside the movie. It was one of McClane’s:

Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.

Don’t tell me you’ve never heard that line. You know that line.

So the message is this: down-to-earth hard-working heroes who can think on their feet will always overcome cool, intelligent baddies with well-thought-out plans, superior firepower and a room full of hostages.

And even though we know full well that McClane is going to win the day (just like Captain Kirk, just like Clint Eastwood, just like Luke Skywalker) it’s fascinating to watch him do it. Do we ever really think that John is going to fail? Hell no. We know the score. We just want to watch the game.

And what a game.

0110 scribe diary #1

We’re keeping a production diary (of sorts) on the 0110 website. The first scribe post went up today – mine. Go have a look, you wonderful people.

Interweb plumbing

Right, here’s how my interweb is plumbed in.

The wordy, chunky stuff lives here on the blog. Quotes, links and photos live on my tumblr blog.

From time to time I talk nonsense on Twitter.

Also, anything that’s not a reply on Twitter gets automagically posted to the tumblr blog.

Anything that turns up on tumblr then gets reposted to my Facebook wall.

Then everything gets regurgitated on my FriendFeed.

If you want to link up to me on a professional basis, send me an invite via LinkedIn.

I also have moribund accounts on plurk, identi.ca, brightkite, flickr, picasa, last.fm and mento. But none of them have hit the big time, so I ain’t linking to them.

The plan is to route all these pipes through my central HQ website, iamlaurence.com but I haven’t got around to it yet, okay?

I was going to draw a diagram explaining all this, but it all got a bit heathrobinsonesque and I had to go and have a lie down in a quiet room with a cold compress on my forehead.