It was announced that one of the young cousins, suffering through the age of high-school, is fond of illustration. All heads turn my way. Any career advice for the young man? they asked the unemployed “artist” suffering through the age of mid-life.

This is where the state of mind becomes important. See even in the most comfortable of social situations, I’m still usually so wound up that my brain is only running on half-power. This makes for doing things like giving life advice to an impressionable teenager at the drop of hat a little stressful.

So I stalled. Collected my thoughts. Then just went with whatever came to mind second. (Because, naturally, what came to mind first was marry into money).

I told the young, impressionable and doomed cousin that nobody’s going to care about your grades, they’re going to want to see your portfolio so focus on that. But go to school anyway for the experiences and try every discipline, eventually you’ll realize what you love most - even if you never figure out why. And most important remember that rejection is not a measure of the quality of your work, sometimes it’s just not the right fit.

At least that’s what I think I said. It’s what came from my gut so I hope it’s fair advice. My theory on advice is that the adviser is only ever going to be able to speak from their own experience so objectivity is pretty much moot. But that said if you happen to hear something that resonates then so be it, its just a new perspective to consider.

Poor guy. Illustration. Yikes. Even so called fine artists think us illustrators are half-assing it.

Haven is a supernatural series based on a Stephen King novel and executive produced (that’s TV speak for written & created by) by a pair of restaurateurs from Minnesota; Sam Ernst and Jim Dunn.

The Sam & Jim Go To Hollywood podcast (http://ow.ly/2dtBp) contains hours of material that charts the rise of two writers for better and worse in real time. This isn’t revisionist history, or a biography; it’s a real account, spanning years, of the trials and tribulations by these guys learning as they go. What’s more, it’s full of useful insights on the industry and tips for writers by guys who went balls out to achieve their dream and succeeded.

Bravo.

I know, I’m a little late to the party on posting about the wonders of DSLR video innovations but I hadn’t actually seen the short film until recently. Two years ago, this kind of “filmic” video quality was not widely available. Now it’s the consumer norm for parents-to-be looking to upgrade from their old point-and-shoot digital which has suddenly been rendered unworthy to photograph their impending offspring. The quality is actually pretty damn awesome.

I would encourage everybody getting geared up to shoot their next no-budget indie, not to buy one. “Not” because surely, 18 months from now, an even better technology will be built into wristwatches or something and we’ll all want to shoot our next short on that.

What’s particularly remarkable about the DSLR technology is the response to low-light levels. Now, I’m not terribly well versed in anything photographic since 35mm film but it’s always surprised me how crappy video is in low light. You’d think, I don’t know, my digital camera could print to the flash card what I see on the LCD viewfinder instead of stopping it down by five points… But I digress. I guess camera manufacturers wanted to preserve the authenticity of traditional photography by including those most irritating aspects of film technology such as crappy low light response. Regardless, it doesn’t matter any more, because finally these DSLR badboys are finding the light in those dark places. This short I was working on was lit with nothing but a flashlight and my radiant smile.

What was my point with all this? Oh, right. I’ve got some nighttime shots to coordinate for an upcoming project and I was thinking about low-light. Being that we’re not all expectant parents looking to upgrade our point-and-shoot digitals for the latest space technology optics, I’ve been thinking about shooting day for night. Never done that before. I usually hate it when I can spot it in a film but who knows how many times I haven’t spotted it, so yeah, I’ll be sure to report back.

This has been a pretty slipshod post. Sorry about that. It’s a long weekend. Which means substantially less when you don’t actually have a 9 to 5, but oddly enough, it seems to affect my brain in the same way.

Conclusion, if you’re looking at cameras, look at the new DLSRs. If you’re stuck with an aging two year old buick, maybe day for night will work better?

I like this notion. Especially during days when I find my focus to be a little off. It’s a good excuse. Roaming through a bunch of ideas in my mind and not being able to decide which one to focus on can feel a bit like a failing. But I suppose in those instances I just haven’t found the nicest berry bush to work on.

What interested me more about Carr’s notion was actually the flip side to this. I began thinking, if our natural state is to be distracted, that just makes times of extreme focus - like, say, actually writing a screenplay - all the more astonishing. And I don’t like feeling distracted. I like bringing everything home to the fine point of focus it takes to write… Man, I would have been eaten alive in the jungle!

I wonder if the more focused you are when you’re focused, the more disorientating the distractions when you’re between periods of focus. It can sure feel like that. But maybe that’s what it takes to stumble on a new idea. Extremes over mediocrity. Maybe.

I’d contemplate this some more but it requires more focus than I can spare at the moment. I need to go gather some berries… And sprinkle them on my cereal.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about investing. Not about banking but about the entertainment business and where those in it place their confidence.

Someone’s making a film about Mattel’s Magic 8-Ball. Battleship, Monopoly and Candyland too. Children’s games. Remember the first Hollywood remake you ever heard announced? And you thought, if it ain’t broke… Why are they remaking something that was great to begin with? Then sequels and prequels became the rage, or rather, the safe bet. And now with Transformers and G.I. Joe bridging the gap between remakes and action figures it’s no great leap anymore to get to boardgames and toys.

(I got an early glimpse at the new Slinky script - so brilliant! Touching, really.)

What’s the lesson here? Business people want to minimize risk. Ergo, an iconic trade mark with nostalgic appeal, few million dollars in marketing and star power and voila: No risk, no worries, and everybody will go see it because the TV told us to. I get it. It makes sense. Where is it going to leave us in ten years when we’re all out of children’s toys to pervert and the remake of 2013’s Jenga: The Movie has just flopped at the box office, well, that’s some else’s problem.

How do I figure into this? Not terribly well, really. I like writing new stories. Exploring new ideas. But, save for grabbing a camera, going out and shooting something myself - which I have been known to do - I also like to try to get others involved when possible. Namely investors. The trouble is, I don’t own the life rights to the shoe from Monopoly or any other property that harkens back to simpler times.

The closest I have is Minushi. It’s no Coke and Mentos video but it’s always had a following and therefore could be the closest thing I have to a property. I spoke to a literary agent a few years ago hoping she’d be interested in reading a new script I’d just finished writing. I was super amped about it, really knew it would impress. She wasn’t interested in reading. “What about this Minushi movie of yours, why don’t you send me that. That looks like something I could sell.”

Sounds like good news, eh? Yeah, at first. Until you realize you’re talking to a literary agent who doesn’t read. Wow. Score one for “picture’s worth a thousand words.”

People don’t want to know you. They want to know what you can do for them. How you can, as quickly and as painlessly, make them money. Once upon a time, people invested in people. In long term potential. It took responsibility, foresight and yeah, maybe some balls. But it was an investment. Maybe it’s symptomatic of an industry that’s being shaken up like a cup full of Yahtzee dice, but shortsightedness seems rampant. That’s the same kind of behaviour we see in people going down in a sinking ship.

Once upon a time, somebody at Mattel took a chance on the original Magic 8-Ball. Good for you Guy at Mattel in the 1940s… With your cigarettes and your fedora… Your big post-WWII capitalist balls… Good for you, buddy.

But for a purveyor of entertainment, in the broadest sense, the new expedience of this medium recently brought to mind a question. Blasphemous as it may sound, I think that Twitter posts and Facebook status updates can sometimes (albeit rarely) contain as much power and value as the single moral that might lay buried deep within the pages of a book or the frames of a feature film. Take it easy Twitter, don’t get excited, you’re far from breaking new ground on this. The tightly bound truism of a memorable proverb or the artful efficiency of a Japanese haiku has been around for centuries. The difference now is the ubiquity and as I eluded to at the top; the instantaneousness of it all.

And it’s that instantaneousness that brought about my recent question. Should I be tweeting out the good stuff?

I mean, as a writer - as a cultivator of ideas - should I be using these instant thought-to-web tools thereby circumventing their incubation period in my brain? If I’m writing a comedy I’m going to need material. But if I tweet out every hilarious joke or observation that I make (to myself) ten times a day will I be draining my own supply.

Is my brain a renewable resource of entertainment?

During my darker days I may worry that it’s not. But after letting the question incubate in the ol’ noggin for a while I’ve decided that in fact it is. Having a venue where one can instantly reach the fickle masses with one’s writing is a pretty good way to sharpen those skills. The more you output the more you need to work that grey matter to create new ideas, new content. So, I say, yes to tweeting out the good stuff! Yes to keeping the idea nuggets flowing!

For other people, that is.

I’m not big twitterer myself…

… It would be really great if I had something clever to say in under 140 characters to cap this whole thing off…

Hm.

Damn it.

A brief word on formatting. Stick to standard screenplay formatting, you can pick it up easily by reading established industry scripts and fill in the blanks with Google. If you can get your hands on Final Draft, great, if you can’t then there’s a great way to set up Word so that your F-keys will be programmed with the six basic line formats you’ll need in a screenplay (location, character, dialogue, etc). You have to use the Style option (under the Format menu) and pre-program each F-key with 12pt Courier font, the specific margins for each line and whether or not ALL CAPS is necessary. It’s a hack but it does a great job.

As far as the actual writing of the script goes, as before I’m not going to try to recycle all the rules and tips about storytelling or what makes good dialogue. I will simply say, I try to give each character a voice of their own (not simply my voice) and I try to keep action lines to a minimum in the description department. I’ll gladly spend hours crafting one perfectly worded sentence that introduces a character by both describing them physically and giving the reader some background on who they are. Introductions are as important in a script as they are in real life.

And finally, the script is written. Fade out.

Put it in a drawer. Walk away. Take satisfaction in the fact that you’ve accomplished something. Do anything but think about it. Especially about how, in two weeks, when you take it out of that drawer you’re going to blue-pen it to pieces and basically rewrite it.

Rewriting is a whole other post altogether and I’ll leave that for another time.

What I did want to further include here are what I call my assets. The assets are the things I write once I’ve got my “final” draft written and am ready to send my script off into the world. Because there’s something you should know - and I mention this because I think it’s important albeit a little bit depressing, so don’t get too bent out of shape about it, fact of life and all that…

No one wants to read your script.

It’s true. For most people, even (and perhaps especially) people who’s job it is to read scripts, it’s a daunting prospect. So you have to lure them in. You have to shake your assets.

First up - and probably the most difficult so you may as well start thinking about it early - is the log line. Sum up your entire 90 page masterpiece in one sentence. No run-on sentences allowed. And if that’s not a tall enough order, make sure the log line has the tone of your script’s genre (if it’s a comedy, make the line funny; a thriller, the line thrilling; etc). Log lines are a whole other post too - maybe even a whole other blog. It’s like a marketing haiku. But if you do it right, the log line is the first thing that’s going to peak your prospective reader’s interest. Or completely kill it. No pressure.

Next up, the short synopsis or what I think of as the script’s one sheet. I usually break mine up into 3 paragraphs, (1.5 line spacing) one for each act, and try to keep it simple and to the point. Protagonist, antagonist, plot, twists, resolution. I try not to be coy by writing a conclusion that begs for an ellipsis. If you’re giving a producer a one sheet synopsis you don’t want to leave them hanging. Producers usually want to know right off the bat if you’re pitching them a ride off into the sunset or a tragedy.

Also handy is a treatment. Depending on who you ask a treatment can be anything between your one sheet and a 30 page document. But really, if you’re going to make a long winded treatment, then your reader may as well be reading the entire script. Because of the way I proceed in getting to my outline, it’s not a big stretch to transform that into a treatment. It just has to be cleaned up from my personal note taking voice and shaped into a narrative play-by-play of the story without the dialogue.

Assets. The skin over the meat over the skeleton over the heart of that little thought that popped into your head one day while you were out mushroom hunting.

And that is my process.

In part one of this little story of my method I mentioned that my notes would start to form the story in broad strokes. The next step for me is then to beef things up into an outline while refining the details.

At this point there’s really no creative writing going on, per se. This was a big mental hurtle for me to overcome. When I used to write long or short form fiction I just kind of dove in. I guess I even did so in early screenwriting for my animated shorts. It was a little counter intuitive for me to treat a story as clinically as I do now. It’s truly the opposite of spontaneity and for a while it felt to me as the anathema to poetry. But I think that was really just me being lazy. Not seeing that there’s enormous creativity to be had in properly structuring things from the outset. It’s the creative process slowed down.

So the outline: A new text doc on the computer and it’s broken down into short paragraphs. Each paragraph starts with a location slug (INT./EXT. etc) and a short summary of each scene. This is no different than the old school cue card method or the new school old school cue card feature you’ll find in Final Draft. I like the simple text doc method because it’s easy on the forests and I can expand upon the paragraphs/scenes indefinitely.

But wait! There’s something slowing me down. The loose story is there but it’s hard to figure out how all the parts fit together; how to flesh out the details. Why? Because I don’t know who I’m writing about yet.

Who are my characters? For me the outlining process overlaps with my process for creating the characters.

This is where some psychology 101 classes can be really helpful. In the opinion of this humble writerly type guy, writing is all about psychology. Be it tapping into the psychology of the reader (or viewer) or the psychology of one character towards another. We’re really only concerned with the latter at this point:

For this reason, I write a detailed background for each principal character. A biography. I start with childhood and work my way right up to the point where my story begins. I include essential elements that would have impacted this character’s personality: Family life, social circle, upbringing, interests, etc. I usually include some anecdotes too. Experiences that this character has lived through that may mirror some of the experiences they will face in the actual story. The details of these biographies will never make it into the script. They are purely a way for me to design the character. They are a reference guide for later. They help me figure out what motivates the character and can even help me figure out details about their speech patterns when it comes time to write dialogue.

When I was getting set to shoot Refrain I actually found another use for these character profiles. I shared them with the actors. I wanted to give them background on their characters to help them find the motivation behind what was in the script.

So! With my character profiles written I can now plug away further on the outline. These two elements usually give and take from each other. Sometimes the outline may call for a character to an action to move the plot forward but maybe I haven’t crafted the motivation for that action into that character’s psyche profile - no problem, I can just modify that profile to make it fit. The important thing for me is to have a sound psychology for each character and a sound storyline.

There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of books on storytelling. Character arcs, plot points, the hero’s journey, all that stuff. My point here isn’t to go over all of that - it’s simply to describe my process of writing a screenplay. The glib version of everything you’re going to find in those books is this: You’ve got a character, she’s doing her thing, living her life, when something happens. It’s a conflict with her enjoyable day to day life. She is faced with handling this something. It looks like she may be able to cope when things suddenly get worse. Holy shit, she’s in trouble now and things just keep going downhill… Oh no, how is she ever going to get out of this situation? But then, she digs deep, finds something inside her that she didn’t know she had and triumphs. She is changed forever. Screen black.

You can also learn this secret to storytelling by watching any movie that makes it to cinemas.

I’ve got my outline (or treatment, at this point, depending on who you’re talking to and how you’ve formatted it) as well as my (secret) character profiles. I’ve added a skeleton to my story’s heart and circulatory system. Next up: Putting meat on the bones and a let’s not forget the packaging.

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…

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?