Who is Driving Your Script?

            The Story Driver

    I was reminded by Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises about a simple concept that most of us over look and it is the same whether you are writing a script for a three thousand dollar film or a three hundred million dollar blockbuster. The question must be asked, “Who is driving your script?
”
    If it is not the antagonist or villain why not?

    We love our heroes so much we spend little to no time with our villains. This means that most of us will create stories that will soon be forgotten. The strength of Nolan’s last two films have been his Villains.
Both his Joker and now Bane are remarkably complex antagonist who in different ways offer almost overwhelming challenges for the hero.

    Take the time to ask the question, What is it that will give my protagonist the most trouble?  What is it that he or she will not be able to deal with? A character who lives in a world of logic and order will be disrupted and or undone by a force that is all emotion or chaos. A character like Batman who depends upon practiced fighting skills and the power of his technology can be undone by a force that is elementally brutal in its approach to everything. 

    There is a saying in the world of boxing, that if you can trick a boxer into a real fight with a fighter the boxer will lose 19 out of 20 times because the boxer depends upon their plans, their technique and their timing. A fighter depends only upon brute force and instinct.

    What is your lead character?

    Understand this and you will be able to create his opposite and once you have created this opposite give him or her or it a lot of screen time. I believe that the reason why we do not give our villains as much times is that we want to identify with our heroes. Stories have always been about can the hero save the world or the girl. On some level we wish to be that hero and at the same time most of us are afraid to spend too much time with our bad guys, but a bad guy well written can change everything.

    Looking back on the movie Silence of the Lambs is there anyone out there who does not wish that we had been able to spend more time with the character of Hannibal Lecter? He was not only repulsive, evil and ruthless, he was also intelligent and charming and honest in a way that few people will ever be.

    I am going to suggest an exercise for you guys. Write some scenes that are off script with or about your antagonist. By doing this you will be spending some time with them, getting to know them and over time this will help you to create stronger characters.

    Face it, that in the low to micro budget film world your characters have to make up for the lack of effects and sets and size of cast. Those characters are the one thing that you can offer to any size production. Create a great and memorable villain and you have traveled a long way toward creating a quality script.

    Okay, good luck guys. Remember to stumble us on Stumbleupon and to tell a friend about this blog. I wish that I could post more often, but right now I am in the middle of pre-production of a feature that I am aiming to produce around November of this year. So I am spending every free moment looking at equipment and talking to possible crew members and working my day job and trying to get my script just right. If I turn in a movie with a script that does not measure up to what I have been preaching here you guys will tell me about it.

    Each day the director/producer me is constantly yelling at the screen writer me. When will we have a final shooting script? The answer to those parts of me is what Hitchcock would have wanted to hear. “Once the script has been written and then the dialogue added we will be ready to make this movie.”

    I know, I know, we have not talked about writing the script with no dialogue and then adding it in a second or third draft. The next post will most likely be about that subject.

    Good bye for now.

All is in The Name

                Your Script, The Name Game


    There is an expression that many Christian ministers use, “Name it and
claim it.”

    Many of use start a script with Untitled written at the top. Looking back on the scripts that I have finished and the ones that I have not, the ones with a name reached the finish line far more often than the one’s without.

    But the title will change many times once it is done.

    Yeah and so what. That is the future and this is now. Living in the now you need to consider the name game. One of my favorite saying of all time from a really bad movie is spoken by a knight. When it is suggest that he may get lost in this new strange land he is visiting his response is that a man with a purpose can never be lost. The name is the purpose, the direction that your script is going to travel.

    During those muddy thirty to fifty middle pages of your script that name is
the true north that you will travel toward.

    The Sicilian sounds like a nice name for a film, but can that title steer your on a true course as easily as The Godfather. When in doubt, what is this movie about?

    The Godfather?

    Who is under attack?

    The Godfather.

    Who must hold the family and the business together?

    The Godfather?

    Who are they trying to kill?

    The Godfather.

    If the family is to survive who must Michael become?

    The Godfather.

    After all the bullets stop flying and the smoke and dust clears who is left standing?


    Love him or hate him. See him as a villain or hero. What is his name and the name of the film?

    The Godfather.

    Do it with most great films or even good films.

    The Exorcist, The Birds, Titanic, The Jerk, The Hangover, The Artist, Dumb and Dumber, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Avengers, Alien, Unforgiven, The Sixth Sense and countless other films.

    You are stuck in the middle of act 2 of your screenplay and Dorothy, the Scarecrow and Tin Man are standing around wondering what to do next. That is easy. There is a yellow brick road. Get back on it and sing that song again. We are off to see Tokyo? New York? The sales at Target? No. The Wizard. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The Reality Test

                Your Script, The Reality Test

        One of the biggest problems that I have noticed in most horror and or action films is that they by pass the basic act of establishing reality. The art of the horror movie is to subvert reality. Or in other words you have to construct a real world before you can de-construct it. I have seen too many movies lately
where the screenwriter hurried passed the basics to get to what they believed to be the heart of the story.

    Let’s talk about the opening of the movie the descent. We get introduced to the lead characters in the opening scene. We are shown not told that they go on adventures together. We get a glimpse into the dominate relationship in the movie, Juno and Sarah.  We see the lead character lose her husband and child in a horrible car accident. We see all the friends gather together at the hospital to check on the one who has survived. We see them a year later. Time for another adventure that they hope will help heal their still damaged friend. We see all of this in the first fifteen minutes of the film and if not for all of this real world business what happens beneath the earth in those caves would not nearly have the same impact.

The  Descent

    Getting to know the characters and the world that they live in can only make the horror more intense when we watch that world being picked apart. The movie that did this better than any other was of course The Exorcist. We get almost a half an hour of real world before we are slowly let in on the fact that something supernatural is happening.

    I am going to agree with Neil Marshall on the fact that Deliverance is sort of a horror movie. Call it a thriller if you wish, but it does follow the rule of establishing reality. Then watch that reality get torn apart by men who see life and death in a completely different way.


    The problem with the majority of horror films being written today is that logic and reason are thrown out the window. Shock and gory replaces real suspense and what are you left with? A film that is seen once, then laughed at and soon forgotten. I want more And I believe that so do you. If you did not you would not be reading this blog.

    Here is what I am going to suggest. You can write your script anyway that you wish, but when you rewrite it I want you to keep your eye on reality.

Does my script occupy a recognizable world?

    But I am writing a walking dead film.

    Really?

    Let’s time travel back to the first one and see if George Romero established the real world first. A brother and sister visiting a grave. The brother is picking on his sister. Real world as can be until the dead guy walks up and then their world and the world of horror films is forever changed.

    Last movie to look at is The Sixth Sense. This film is as well written as any movie ever written. The opening scenes with Bruce Willis and the wife are the scenes that make the rest of the movie possible. It shows you a world that is so familiar and easy to relate to that we never question the reality that his character brings with him until the very end of the film.

    You do not have to do it that well, but well enough so that we know the world that the characters are fighting to get back to. That we can relate to the world that has fallen apart, it is easy to relate to it: after all it looks a whole lot like our own.

Beyond The Writing

                More than Writing is Involved

    We spend so much time and effort on how to write a quality screenplay and not much if any time on why we are writing this screenplay.

    At the end of the day the question that has to be asked is do you love what you are doing? If you don’t and you are doing it only because you have to that is okay. I am not going to tell you that unless you love what you are doing you will do a ass backwards job at it. The purest in the room will say that you will, but some of the best scripts ever written have been jobs rather than labors of love.

    If you are a producer or director and you are the only one that you can afford to hire to write your script then I am here to say that you can do a great job of it. If you are like me, someone whom has been writing most of their lives and love it, you can write a great script.

    The argument that I am working towards is the concept of the business person vs. the artist. If we were here about screenplays in general I would not be doing this, but this blog is about ultra low to no budget screen writing. You have a story that the artist believes demands certain things and you have this voice always whispering that is going to kill the budget. You can not put that in the script, it will cost to much and get cut out later. My response is put it in the script. Get through the first draft by any means necessary and then if that amazing part of the script that also cost far to much to be included has to be cut out, then do it. Cut it out. Find a way to save some of it or to rework it at a lower cost and put it back in later.

    The business person would never include that part of the script, but the writer/artist can not help his or herself. Maybe someday you can or will become both. The greatest filmmaker of all time was Hitchcock, one day he decided to make at the time a ultra low budget film. He founded a story and hired a writer named Joe. Together they crafted a screenplay that had limited cast, limited locations, limited setups, limited need for special effects or even makeup effects. He hired a tv crew instead of his film crew to shoot this movie. He shoot it in black and white instead of color. The name of the movie was Psycho. Some believe that it was his best movie (I think it was Shadow of a Doubt) and he did it will low budget considerations in mind. He did not have to, Hitchcock chose to and with those restrictions came greatness. Limiting location and sets and cast does not limit the possibility of creating something great.

    You can be artist and writer and business person and do something remarkable.Good luck and write everyday.

More About Found Footage

            More on Found Footage

    I have just spend a week trying to analyze what is right and what is wrong with the found footage craze.
    I believe that the craze began with Paranormal Activity. After the Blair Witch there were a few attempts at making found footage films, but that movie was basically a one and done. Even the sequel is not found footage (that was a major mistake on the producers part).

   We could go back further to the first great found footage movie. All the way back to the 70's there was a notorious movie titled Cannibal holocaust. It is so dark and bloody that most fans over look this minor master piece. It is about a band of so called journalist who travel to the Amazon to document a lost tribe only to first create the story they are there for and then later become victims of their own curiosity.

    I believe that curiosity is the key to the quality found footage films. In Cannibal Holocaust these jerks ( I am being kind) keep filming from a safe distance while someone is raped, later while the same thing is happening to one of them and then they keep film while one of their own is being killed. It is a film that shows that the person or persons with the camera does not have to be a hero or likable. You can give that camera to a murderer or a thief or a total coward.

    I say that you can do this because you are doing this. You are picking who holds the camera and reveals the action. We are trying to follow rules here and there are no rules. Anything goes in this new genre.

    I would argue that the biggest problem with this genre is the sticking to the rules of normal films. Look at most of them, they are still stuck in a 180 degree world. They are shot as if there is still a crew of fifty people behind the camera.

    To prepare for this post I looked at a few movies that I had not seen yet. The first one was Paranormal Activity, Tokyo Nights. A sort of remake of the American version. You can see the whole thing on youtube if you wish. I like the pacing of this version. There is a rule about Japanese horror film making. It is said that American’s try to startle their viewers while the Japanese try to disturb them. Their style of filmmaking is to get under your skin and scratch away.



    The other film was one that I had high hopes for, Area 407. This could have been a great film instead of just an okay film. The people who boarded the plane that crashes in this film are much smarter than the ones who crawled out of the wreckage. I would have rather watched a movie about the flight and the crash without the monster portion. All the stuff that happens on the ground reminded me of the playstation 2 games I did not like enough to finish.

    Challenge yourself and your characters to be smarter than the audience. Characters who go out of their way to get killed are characters that no one will remember.

    Okay that is it for now. If you have any suggestions leave them as a comment. If someone disagrees with me so much that they wish to respond in post form I would be happy to post it here if it is well written.
Lastly remember to stumble us on Stumbleupon and if any of you are interested in learning to turn your no budget screenplay into your own no budget movie please visit my new site where I offer advice and tutorials on different types of filmmaking. You can visit it by   clicking here.

Think like A Filmmaker

            Think Like A Filmmaker

    Do I need to learn about filmmaking to be a good writer?

  No. You can be a great writer and never learn anything more than the basic format of a script.

    Is there a but coming?

    Yes.

    But you need to learn something about no budget filmmaking to be good at writing this type of script. You need to understand that it is not like writing any other kind of script. The limitations of your no budget screenplay are fixed. There are certain things that you cannot include in a script because it cannot be done on a budget of under fifty thousand dollars.

    Here are some basics to keep in mind.

    You cannot count on CGI to save you. Computer effects can only do so much. Unless you or the director you are working with is a master at this and can reproduce scenes from the Avengers on his or her Mac you need to keep it realistic. The software required to make it look great will probably cost more than the film’s budget. Final advice on this subject if you are going to write scenes that require seeing a lot of monsters, explosions and space ships just sit back and watch what the sci-fi channel has on any Saturday. This should cure you. There is being cheap and looking cheap and sci-fi channel manages to pull of both.

    Next up is your cast. Do not include more than twenty speaking roles. I would suggest keeping it to around ten or less.

    Why?

    They need to be paid usually. Either up front or down the road.

Secondly you have to feed them. “So what,” you say. So just imagine having to feed fifteen or twenty of your friends sleeping in your living room for a week. They will need bathroom time and they will need food. Lots of food and you (the writer filmmaker)  will have to provide said food at least three times a day. Screenwriters do not usually think about this. The writer producer has too. Food cost money and did I mention coffee cost lots of money and people drink lots of coffee when it is free to them. This is one reason for a small cast of characters. The other reasons are the cost of wardrobe. The cost of transportation for each one of them. The added risk that someone gets hurt on and off the set. An injury to one actor who is in multi scenes shuts down the movie until they are able to work again. Keep your cast small. Here is a clip from a film that kept its cast small and I bet you never noticed.

    One more note on cast. Extras that show up for one day and one scene do not count. You do not usually have to feed them. They are people who just want to be in a movie and are going to be easier to deal with than your real actors.

    I will not talk about location here. I did a post on location. I will mention that one of the best things that you can do is actually see a movie being shot. Watch some behind the scenes tutorials. Visit a set if you can, even as an extra. Get your camcorder out if it shoots 24p and or if you have an iPhone download the filmmaking apps and shoot a scene or two of your script with friends to see how it flows visually. Trust me you will learn a great deal from this process.

    What was that?

    You do not know how to shoot a scene. Fine, I can help you. You can visit my new filmmaking site, (shamless plug coming) it is titled thephonefilmmaker. This site has basic tutorials on how to make a film using the iPhone and digital cameras and camcorders. Also a bunch of short films shoot with each. There will also be advice on where to go and get Apps and or basic equipment to shoot you little test films. To go there you can   click here. 

    Okay I think the next post will be about writing a short film. Good luck and remember to add this blog to your Google plus and Stumble us on Stumbleupon.  It is a way for me to know if this site is worth continuing. It is a way of knowing that there is someone out there that is getting something from these post. If you have a suggestion for a future post please leave a comment.

    Thank you and see you soon.

Busy Work

                  The Busy Work Curse

    Sounds like the title of a bad short film. If you like it then use it, but that is not the subject of this post. Busy work is. Busy work and why it is one of the great curses that afflict every writer from time to time.
    Busy work is the work that you do that keeps you from doing the work that you are afraid to do; writing your no budget screenplay.
    I am busy doing research, can’t write today.
    I am busy going over last years collection of bill receipts, can’t write today.
    I am busy writing the treatment for the new screenplay that I am planning, can’t finish the one that I am working on.
    I am waiting for the hairdresser I found online who moonlights as a demon slayer to come by and get rid of that entity who lives inside my playstation 2.
    Really?
    Seriously?
    Let it go.
    Push all of these excuses aside and make your busy work the actual act of writing. I am guilty of this myself. I have a dozen scripts that have died thanks to the curse known as busy work.
    The only busy work that is acceptable in this universe involves Jennifer Love Hewitt, a dwarf, a camcorder, silly string and Snapple. You figure it out and if your imagination has Jennifer holding the camcorder at any time you are both wrong and sick.
    Busy work is writing.
    Writing is your job.
    We avoid it because if we are good at it we open up and lose ourselves. We are not only revealing things about our characters, but about ourselves as well. That is a scary experience and on some level each of us who write realize this. Not one of us who manage to do this for a living will look back on the experience of writing and wish that we had done it less often. (Do I have to mention Jennifer Love Hewitt again? Why did she have to do that new show? I was recovering from watch the Ghost Whisperer. The medication was working and now its little maid outfits. Why does it have to be on demand too?)
    Okay I am back and that will not happen again. Well again today.
    Here is the perfect counter to busy work.

    Don’t you wish that we could all have an Annie to help us get off of our butts and write every single day?