Interesting article about how to sell a film before it’s even made:
His fans greenlit the picture - Washington Post (external link)
When the times comes to start raising funds for ‘The Player and the Advocate’, these are the kind of avenues I’ll be looking at.
Add comment August 27th, 2006
I’ve been busy over the past couple of weeks on a couple of separate projects, apart from the film. Number 1 is my Certificate in Web Design, which I’m 1/4 of the way through (as a creative person, you can never have too many strings to your bow). I’m slowly getting a handle on CSS, so I’ll be able to make some tweaks to the site soon to include some script excerpts in all their 12pt Courier glory (with correct margin spacing for CHARACTER, ACTION etc).
The second project is a show I’m producing for the Wellington Fringe Festival in February 2007 - ‘Trouble in Tahiti’ by Leonard Bernstein. It’s an opera, very fun, jazzy music, and I hope it will attract a wide audience across the Fringe-goers and the traditional opera-going audience. It’s also a bit of a dry-run for me in terms of running a production from the business side. I’ve worked on a lot of shows doing lighting and sound design, but this is the first time I’ve had to worry about budgets, contracts, marketing etc. So it’s been an interesting experience, and will be taking up more time in the next couple of months while I’m looking for sponsorship and taking care of niggly details, like where we’re going to stage the thing…
Finally, inspired by the treatment workshop (see previous posts), I’ve been writing a treatment for ‘The Player and the Advocate’. It’s been a surprisingly quick process - about 2 weeks from beginning to end. I’ll post the full treatment here in a couple of days after I’ve done a spellcheck, and another readthrough, but I’m really pleased with how it has turned out.
As promised, it really helped me focus on the structure of the story, without worrying about dialogue or descriptions of action. The problem in Act III which had been vaguely nagging at the back of my head suddenly sprang into focus when I could see in the treatment that the minor character subplot abruptly disappeared and never got resolved. There’s still some issues with the change in direction for the main charatcer, but the treatment makes it much easier to spot problems - bite-size paragraphs which can be colour-coded to show which character is the focus, a 10-minute read as opposed to an hour. On my next film, I’m definitely going to start with a treatment first, before starting on the screenplay.
At the end of September, I’m going to have a reading of the treatment at Katipo Cafe in Wellington. It will be open to the public, and I’ll be inviting members from the local filmmaking community as well as friends and supporters to come along and hear it. The main aim will be to get feedback on the story - does it work for an audience? Is it gripping to listen to all the way through? Are there any holes that disrupt the story?
Check back soon for date and time.
Add comment August 27th, 2006
Picking up from where I left off, Tom Strudwick went into some more general points about narrative storytelling in film. He made the point that in a film you’ve got to keep a group of people entertained for 90-100 minutes in a darkened room, and to do that you must “give them what they came for roughly every ten minutes.” If the film is a comedy, that means gags; if it’s a horror, that means scary bits. Do that, every ten minutes, for the duration of the entire film.
Tom’s advice, which I’m now trying to apply to my script, is to identify the key 10-15 scenes in the movie that are needed structurally to move the story forward. He encouraged us to think in terms of the “trailer” scenes, the ones people will be talking about as they leave the movie theatre. Those scenes are the heart of the movie, and everything else is negotiable around them.
It seems like common sense, but identifying those ‘tent-pole’ scenes is remarkably hard to do when writing in screenplay format; hence another reason for using your treatment to lay out your story so you can see whether you have these moments of action occuring regularly.
In addition to the “thrill-every-ten-minutes”, you need to wrench the story in a new direction every 30-40 minutes - a surprise or development which the audience didn’t expect, which sets the character on a new path.
Obviously, if you’re a clever writer you will try to connect these scenes into sequences, and arrange them in order of rising tension so that the climax of the film is the highest dramatic point of the story.
An interesting point he emphasised was not to think in terms of ‘character arcs’. Gradual change is undramatic and uncinematic, and it’s also unrealistic. Change happens suddenly in films - characters snap, fly off the handle, make impulsive decisions.
In my next post, I’ll try to put up a brief story outline of ‘The Player and the Advocate’, and show how I’m trying to adapt some of the lessons from the Treatment Workshop into my own writing.
Add comment August 12th, 2006
I went to a workshop on Tuesday featuring Tom Strudwick, hosted by Script to Screen here in Wellington. Unfortunately, when I registered for the workshop, I misread the title “Developing Film Projects from Treatments” - I thought it said “Developing Treatments from a Film Project”. Fortunately, a lot of what Tom had to say applied in both directions, and I got a lot out of it.
A treatment, for those not familiar with the term, is an exploration of the film in prose form. It’s usually 7-15 pages in length (although some can be much larger), and contains the whole plot (including the spoilers), character descriptions, as well as indications of theme, tone etc. It’s written from the camera’s point of view (i.e. what will be seen on screen), keeps background colour and dialogue to a minimum, and is written in the present tense.
Treatments are generally regarded as fiendishly difficult (check out this article from Wordplayer for a humorous overview) and a waste of time, as nobody reads them.
Tom’s point in the workshop was to rehabilitate the treatment as a story development tool, rather than just a selling document for your film. For a start, in a shorter document, shorn of dialogue and other distracting elements, it’s a lot easier to analyse a story to see what’s wrong. If your main character disappears from the story, it’s easier to spot in a treatment than a 120-page screenplay.
He advised to keep several versions of your screenplay going - one short, one medium, one long - and to keep them all updated: “It’s like looking at your story from different levels of magnification.”
He went on to look at the marketing and distribution angle of the film industry, and how a treatment is used to position and a film project and establish whether it’s viable to be funded. This bit was quite depressing, as Tom counted off the number of treatments he had read over the course of his career (somewhere in the high thousands) and how many had actually got made. He opined that the old genre analyses were breaking down, and that the only genres that mattered were: “comedy, action / thriller, horror and drama”.
More tomorrow.
Add comment August 10th, 2006