Tyler Gibb - Writer, Director, Editor, Filmmaker

I’m really trying to stick to my plan for sharing my writing process on here but recently I’ve been quite distracted…

See, it’s the beginning of mushroom season! And that means (free) morels! O’ succulent morchella… It’s like Easter all month long. If you’ve never done it, I really recommend mushroom hunting. Perhaps that’s the first step in my writing process - even before the idea stage. The meditation of wandering the woods. But that’s a whole other blog altogether.

First, a little disclaimer:

When I started this weblog - in addition to providing news about my work - it was kind of a public FAQ reference to offset the number of emails I used to get asking me about my techniques. Back in the day those questions of technique mostly concerned animation production. These days, however, I tend to be talking writing with people more than anything else.

It’s getting harder for me to hide behind mere aspirant status in this field but none the less I delve into the following with some hesitation… I’m an autodidact. Which isn’t to say I haven’t spent my share of time reading blogs like this one, just that I have no formal training in this field. So as usual around here the tips I’m sharing are really just my personal process. I’ll leave the how-to guides to the professional educators and crackpots.

Okay, that said, let me jump in:

Whether it’s walking through the woods or driving down a lonely highway my stories begin with that initial spark. The idea.

What’s the idea? Could be anything. Could be a concept, could be a character could simply be something indefinable that I have to start writing about just to explore further.

When I come about an idea that I can’t shake then my next step is fairly simple: I write it down. I open a text doc on the ol’ ‘puter and just write down exactly what the idea is. Sometimes these text docs sit around for years. If, however, I’m really hooked in by the idea then I flesh it out a bit in this note taking form. These are just plain speak, personal notes that would probably be incomprehensible to anybody else.

This is also customarily my research phase. If the idea takes me somewhere that I have little knowledge about - like satellites - then I do some background. This may seem a little like a no-brainer but I’m including everything here for the sake of thoroughness. Once upon a time I may have skipped the note taking stage. However, I’m getting older now and a little more afraid of letting anything incubate for too long in my head for fear of losing it to some burned out synapses.

The note taking process isn’t just good for recording purposes it also helps me start putting together the story’s circulatory system. In broad strokes I start figuring out the stories special moments… You know those moments.

The next thing I like to do once the notes are coming along is identify a theme. Distilled down to one phrase, maybe one word, what’s this story about? Friendship? Finding one’s place in the world? Jealousy? Good vs. evil? With Minushi, for example, my theme could have been summed up as “the meaning of family”. Granted Minushi has a lot of themes (political, literary, philosophical) but the theme that encapsulates the core of the story was “family”.

I put this theme phrase at the top of my notes doc. It serves as a reminder to me throughout the rest of the writing process not to stray from the heart of the story.

The idea opens up the floor to notes and research which allows me to figure out my theme. The heart of the story and its circulatory system are coming together (I guess I’m going for an anatomy type of metaphor on this one). Next up: The skeleton…

Been having a good back and forth with Godheval in the comments section of my last entry about writing. It’s got me thinking about process and over the next little while I’m going to try to post about my writing process. I’m always interested in hearing about the processes of others as well so don’t be shy.

But before I get to that, I’ll share a little bit about my latest experience in the prelude to my writing process: Research.

I do lot of research in the early part of just about any script. Most of that research I do online, as I’m sure many people do. Recently I was looking for information on satellite technology; more specifically Earth observation from orbit. Occasionally it’s sobering and often amusing to be reminded of the perils of this online research methodology. The following is a snippet of “information” I came across online:

“A spy satellite can monitor a person’s every movement, even when the “target” is indoors or deep in the interior of a building or traveling rapidly down the highway in a car […] Besides tracking a person’s every action and relaying the data to a computer screen on earth, amazing powers of satellites include reading a person’s mind, monitoring conversations, manipulating electronic instruments and physically assaulting someone with a laser beam.”

Wait, what?

Diversify.

My cautionary word of the day.

Works for investment bankers, works for me. I’ve stated previously that I’ve got enough scripts and script ideas that I’ll likely never be able to produce them all by myself in one lifetime. Despite the conclusion I reached in that previous post about these scripts spanning a gamut of genres, ultimately this diversity is a good thing. I recommend it.

And remember, you’re reading the thoughts of a man who once spent nearly four years invested in one project. Not something I recommend.

It seems like a pretty obvious bit of advice but it - like many little gems - bears repeating to ourselves every now and then. It’s not worth getting overly invested in one project. You have to have other things going on - and not just to have something else to jump to - but for the health of all your projects. When you’ve just got the one thing then it becomes an obsession (see, four years of your life in trade for a cartoon). And the obsessed tend to lack perspective on things. To put it differently, the more you put into one pot the harder it gets to lift off the stove. And what happens to something if you can’t get it off the stove? It burns and you go hungry.

Better to have a few pots on the cooker.

Not so long ago I participated in a government subsidized program in support of the film industry (Hi, I’m from Canada!). In the application paperwork there was a question among the usual informational fare that stuck with me. The question was: “What do you value most about being a writer?”

I was completely stumped.

I still am. Forget trying to analyze what they might be trying to glean about my personality from such a question, I was stuck on simply trying to comprehend the question itself. What do I value about being a writer? Could it be the low to non-existent income? The lack of having anything in common with anybody in my family or social circle? Or maybe what I value most is having the measure of my hard work gauged - in seconds and without any real pontification - by everybody.

Yeah, there’s lots to value about being a writer. So why do it? You know why. If you’re reading this, you know why. Because you don’t choose “the arts.” Who would? It’s a hereditary affliction and you live with it. That sounds worse than it is. It sounds like a resentful complaint, but it’s not. It’s just a statement of fact.

They gave me three lines to answer the question on the application form. Three things I value most about being a writer. In the end I could think of only one and I wrote:

“The ability to exorcise stories from my brain.”

And really, I don’t know what I’d do without it.

The other day I was listening to some podcast jibjab about Oscar best picture winner The Hurt Locker and its current re-release woes. As has been trendy in recent years, big Oscar winners often get a second theatrical life. It seems however that major US exhibitors are reticent to give Kathryn Bigelow’s flick another shot at the big screen as it has already been released on DVD.

But this isn’t an essay on the closing release window gap that’s going to spell the inevitable destruction of the old way of doing things. *Sob*. Boring. What made my ears perk up during this discourse was when one commentator lamented that it was a shame that without a re-release few people will ever have seen Bigelow’s film on a big screen; “the way it was meant to be seen.”

This was interesting to me because with the cinemascape changing so much lately I wonder how many filmmakers still actually envision their movie on a big screen.

I used to design websites and one thing I learned very early on in this type of media design is that you can’t control everything. You do your best to cover all platforms, browsers, plug-ins, etc but when it comes down to it, your immaculate design doesn’t stand a chance against a computer user with his own control over his screen colour calibration, resolution and aspect ratio. So you do your best to control what you can and learn to accept what you can’t.

When I produce something I do think about the final destination. An obvious example would be where titling comes into play. A small font size on a big screen looks great - not so much when it is downgraded to a smudge on the web version. But titling can be altered for varied exports in post. Shot footage, less so. The notion of a close up or an extreme wide is going to change drastically depending on whether you’re shooting for a theater display or a cell phone. So, like, website design you sort of have to control what you can and accept that your brilliant cinematography and sound mix may not translate too well to, say, the LCD display and previously-loved headsets of an in-flight movie.

I’m not advocating mediocrity or settling for less than what your project deserves. I’m just thinking about the fact that the more the technologies advance - the more multifarious the media become - the more finesse it is going to take to bring out the best in your project wherever and however it is seen.

So will most people lamentably not see The Hurt Locker the way it was intended? That depends on what Kathryn Bigelow intended, I guess.