- 1. Wedding scene
- 2. Courtroom scene
- 3. Auction scene
- 4. Elevator scene
- 5. Person in bed waking up from a nightmare
- 6. On deck of a ship / spaceship
- 7. Jail cell
- 8. People playing cards around a table
- 9. Grand ball / dancing scene
- 10. Hospital / emergency ward
A completely unofficial list, based on my own movie-watching experience. Obviously these scenes work because of their dramatic potential, but they also have cinematic potential.
Keep a tally in the next movie you watch and see how many crop up.
September 14th, 2006
You are cordially invited to the first reading of the treatment for ‘The Player and the Advocate’:
Sunday 1st October 2006
4:00pm
Katipo Cafe, 76 Willis Street, Wellington Central
Cost: free!
There will be nibbles / refreshments available.
The reading should take about 45 minutes, then we’ll take a break for a drink, followed by a Q&A session. I’d like to get some constructive feedback on the story, characters, anything which piques your interest.
I’m making this the official ’start’ of my pre-production effort - from October, I will be actively seeking out collaborators to work on the film, help finish off the script, begin storyboarding, and look for funding.
I look forward to seeing you there.
September 2nd, 2006
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.
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.
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.
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.
August 10th, 2006
‘The Player and the Advocate’ draws on a number of Shakespearian comedic conventions: a play-within-a-play, mistaken identitites, cross-dressing, twinning, mismatched lovers, and so on. It’s not necessary to be familiar with the entire Shakespearian canon - the conventions exist already because they make for good comedy, after all. In my film, I’ve borrowed a number of these conventions and tried to make them work in a modern film setting. I’ll try to outline, with some examples, in a later post exactly what I’m trying to do.
But another interesting Shakespearian convention, this time in the tragedies, is the ‘fatal flaw’. The ‘fatal flaw’ in the hero is the character trait that lead to his downfall. For Macbeth, it’s ambition; for Othello, it’s jealousy; for Hamlet… well, take your pick of introspection, a vengeful nature, thinking too much, not thinking enough… In Shakespeare, characters are moved by grand passions. In ‘The Player and the Advocate’, I’m trying to stick to this convention as well - Oscar is motivated by Revenge to steal the playbook from Gravitas, the director. This grand motive is set in opposition to his second motive, Love, for Amy, Gravitas’ daughter. For Oscar, pursuing one conflicts with the other, and leads to some good juicy dramatic situations.
In modern movies, this type of grand, sweeping motivation seems to be absent. Particularly for male characters in modern films (and I’m thinking especially of the comic-book, superhero movies, and the “idiotic-adult-male-stuck-in-childhood-phase” see Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson etc, which seem to dominate the modern film landscape), what are the main emtoion forces driving them? Almost always, it’s a sense of vulnerability; lack of self-esteem (’Spiderman’), a feeling of being unable to communicate (’Superman Returns, ‘The Hulk’). ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 2′ even spells out this dilemna with a magical compass that “point the direction to the thing you desire most”. Naturally, all the male characters want it and spend the whole movie chasing it, because they don’t have real desires or motivations of their own.
While vulnerability, lack of direction and lack of self-esteem are worthy feelings, and certainly accurately capture a real human emotional depths, they’re not exactly… active. They’re kind of anaemic.
Characters whose main emotional force is feeling “lost” are very hard to put in dramatic situations. They’re reactive, waiting. They’re, in a word, boring.
And in modern films, who are the characters who *are* driven by grand passions - ambition, madness, jealously, lust for power? They’re the villains! In modern films, it’s nearly always the villains who kick off the film: pulling off the heist, planting the bomb, snatching the girl, until the hero is roused into action to fix things. When the antagonist is the more interesting, more active, character in a film, you usually know you’ve got a problem with your script.
So this is one of the issues I’m dealing with in my film - trying to ensure that the main character, Oscar, stays the main character. This means making sure, not only that his character develops the most in the film, but that he is *active* throughout the film, not just bouncing off the obstacles the antagonists throw at him like a pinball. And this means giving the main character, ostensibly the hero, some of the character traits that you mostly find in villains - a grand passion, a fatal flaw, which may lead to his triumph, or to his downfall…
July 27th, 2006
‘Shortbus‘ is a film out of New York, screening in the Wellington Film Festival. It’s screening tonight at the Embassy at 8:15pm, and it’s likely to get general release on DVD (with a very high R rating).
I really enjoyed this film - it’s a perfect date movie (even first-date if your partner is open-minded). It’s the story of a bunch of New Yorkers sorting out their relationship problems, with sex firmly at the center of proceedings. The story revolves around a swingers’ club in Brooklyn, a haven where people are free to explore and be themselves. The sex scenes are graphic, very funny, and non-stop, in every conceivable permutation (solo, straight, gay, lesbian, trans-gender, BDSM, in roughly that order.)
While it’s refreshing to see adult sexuality depicted on the big screen without the usual helpings of adolescent sniggering or gratuitous sexual violence (Hollywood comedies and thrillers, respectively), if this was all that was going on,the film might have been a little repetitive. But the script is also witty and humane in exploring human desires - the director and screenwriter John Cameron Mitchell does a nice running gag for the writers in the audience by overtly contrasting the characters pursuing what they think they want (sexual release, in this case), instead of recognising their needs (love, communication, understanding). If this sounds pretty conventional, it is, but the story is told with sweetness and a sense of celebration at the weirdness that is being human.
The film captures the jittery, melancholic New York, post-9/11 spirit, and interestingly for a New York movie there are almost no scenes shot outside in the big landmark areas. Instead, a cartoony model of the City stands in for the real thing, and the camera swoops around it like Spiderman.
Overall, very enjoyable.
July 23rd, 2006
A quick summary of the history of ‘The Player and the Advocate’:
October 2001, Wellington - woke up one morning with the main plot fully formed in my head. Went to the computer, typed for 4 hours straight to get down all the major character and plot points. Promptly fell back asleep and forgot about it.
May 2002 - departed for New York, script put on the back burner. About 15 pages written.
September 2003 - return from New York, determined to get script finished and produced over the summer…
2004 - pretty much a write-off, actually…
2005 - started working with greater focus on the script to iron out story problems. 1st act complete, around 25 pages written. October: realised the current story wasn’t long enough to be a feature length film. Over the course of an evening and a bottle of red wine, I decided to separate the beginning and end of the story and put in an entirely new middle act. Problems integrating this into the rest of the story kept me busy for the rest of 2005.
February 2006 - negotiated with current employer to start working part-time in order to concentrate on writing.
Present: 82 pages complete, most of the scenes are now outlined with dialogue written, some placeholder scenes still waiting to be filled in. The script is finally starting to look like a feature, rather than a 1-joke short film.
July 22nd, 2006
Welcome to the development website for ‘The Player and the Advocate’. ‘The Player and the Advocate’ is a feature film currently in pre-production in Wellington, New Zealand. This site has been developed as a tool to keep people up-to-date on the progress of the film, and as a way of getting in touch with the filmmakers, should you wish to contribute moral or material support (I sincerely hope you will…)
I have also developed this site (with the help of my wonderful web design sponsor, Alto) to try to lay bare a bit of my writing process. There’s been a resurgence in writing in New Zealand, both for the screen and for stage in the past couple of years. Organisations such as Script to Screen and the NZ Writers Guild are focusing attention on the efforts of the nation’s writers, possibly as a reaction to the flood of special-effects driven movies in recent times (LOTR et al). As a first-time feature writer, I hope this production diary will become part of the discussion and prove useful to people interested in learning about the writing process. I’m certainly not pretending to be an expert (see above: first-time feature writer), but I’m of the ‘learn by doing’ school of thinking, and part of this production diary will be an ongoing reflection on what I’m learning.
On this site I will be publishing excerpts from the script, production sketches and story boards as pre-production proceeds, and hopefully I’ll be able to introduce other collaborators as they come on board. Basicaly, through this site you will be able to witness a digital feature film evolve before your eyes. I’ll be chronicling the challenges and setbacks as well as the triumphs (hopefully educational), but fear not - under pain of death, this will not be a blog about my cats, what I had for dinner, or what music I’m currently listening to (unless it has a material impact on the writing).
Please check out the press kit for more details about the project, subscribe to the RSS feed at right to keep updated, and drop me a line at the email address above to let me know what you think of the site.
I look forward to providing some entertaining and thought-provoking content over the next few months. Thanks for stopping by, and see you again soon.
July 16th, 2006
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