March 2007 Archives

31 March 200727 July 2012

Pro Bono or Bust

A while back, Danny Stack posted about working pro bono. It was, of course, an excellent piece – a case for being careful, weighing up the risk, and going in with your eyes open.

I’m with the New Zealand Writers Guild – “no writer should work for nothing”, particularly if you’re already a professional writer.

The following came to mind when I read Mr Stack’s post: casting director Di Rowan – who introduced the world to Anna Paquin and Keisha Castle-Hughes – said in an interview with Onfilm:

“[People] say to me, “Could you just cast this one part? And you’re not going to charge me, are you?” That puts me in a terrible position. I feel like saying, “Hang on a minute, I’ve got a builder here at the moment, I’ll just ask him if he’ll do this day for free and if he says yes, I’ll do your day for free as well.”

Hell, yeah.

25 March 200727 July 2012

A Screenwriting Timeline

Here are the milestones for a typical script:

the what-if? moment (or maybe finding inspiration in something I read somewhere);
gestation;
a prose treatment, usually sprinkled with script-formatted scenes that Just Can’t Wait;
enforced break;
caution thrown to the wind and first draft blasted out by deadline.

Looks easy, don’t it? Idea. Treatment. Script.

Yeah, right.

What is missing from the above timeline is that any and all of those stages are apt to be repeated over and over, usually in full, sometimes – only if I’m extraordinarily lucky – sometimes only partially.

It’s a grind. It’s lonely. And it takes time.

But it beats working for The Man.

17 March 200727 July 2012

Point and Click

Between searching for bill-paying work, and drafting pitches for writing work, all I’s gots for ya this week is more linkages.

John Rogers has a great post on credits arbitration – it’s interesting in an “as you pass a flaming wreck” kind of way. (See also Josh Friedman‘s experience, Being A Play in Two Parts.) For myself, I swear by the excellent New Zealand Writers Guild model contracts, though none of them mention residuals.

John August has an interesting post on publicity. I admit to being Kiwi-bloke-ish in my self-promotion: essentially a “build it and they will come” approach. (This blog and the attendant dfmamea.com site was a tentative step in the self-promotion direction. It’s provided a fantastic avenue for procrasturbation.)

Whilst clearing up my massive RSS backlog (and inadvertently deleting a mass of ‘Important’-flagged ones), I found a wealth of left-field ideas and approaches to film distribution from Tim Clague‘s Projector Films blog. The ideas are a bit scary and newfangled for a conventional and blissful ignoramus like myself, but they’re exciting and exhilarating, and any day now, I’ll understand it all.

And finally, courtesy of this from TeeVee, there’s the Brilliant but Cancelled site which seems to have some neat feeds on a range of shows that didn’t survive transmission on American t.v. It doesn’t have UnSub, Game, Set and Match or Now and Again, but. Hope springs eternal.

12 March 200727 July 2012

Buffy Returns

Thanks to this from the kids at TeeVee, Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans – and that includes the Webmistresse – now have Season 8 to look forward to. Yes – or to the ‘mistresse, sorry – it’s a comic. But Buffy creator Joss Whedon hisself will be deeply involved and here‘s a Q&A with Mr Whedon that’ll whet some appetites.

7 March 200727 July 2012

Point and Click

Congratulatoriations to Joe Hitchcock on his recent betrothal. While his digital feature, Down by the Riverside, nears completion, he’s about to dive into an animated short, The North Pole Deception. Joe was kind enough to help us in our final days of BREAK. Go well, Joe.

Danny Stack at Scriptwriting and Script Reading in the UK kindly introduced me to writer and director Tim Clague‘s Scriptwriter’s Life. It’s almost ridiculously simple and self-explanatory… and a challenge I can’t back away from. (Dammit. I thought this writing gig was gonna get easier.)(Today I learnt that a U.S.P. is a “unique selling point”, as per Mr Clague’s post on pitching yourself and your U.S.P.)

On a completely un-sceenwriting-related topic, courtesy of the avuncular gentlemen at NZBC, may I recommend Paper, Scissors, Rock, which has some acerbic observations about gang patches and gaming addiction, and David Farrar, whose blog been keeping me informed and enlightened, though I suspect he may be of a navy-blue political persuasion.

Finally, some homegrown name-dropping: Luke Sharpe‘s peeps at BunkerMedia are responsible for the new-look New Zealand Writers Guild website. Go check ’em out.This just in: Mr Sharpe is empowering Parnell.

3 March 200727 July 2012

Schedules and Deadlines

The Mamea household¹, for the sake of the adults’ sanity and convenience (and the prevention of corporal beatings), gets through each week with the help of a dinner schedule. The schedule for Term 1 of 2007 is:

Monday – macaroni cheese
Tuesday – baked potatoes (courtesy of The Boy)
Wednesday – vegetarian surprise
Thursday – nachos (courtesy of The Girl)
Friday – pizza
Saturday – semi-planned surprise
Sunday – last-minute surprise

The children’s daily demands of What’s for dinner? are already answered, our (mostly) fixed shopping list ensures we get our core nutrients, and there are no more moments of standing in the kitchen wondering what the hell to stuff the kids’ mouths with.

Adults’ sanity – check. Overall convenience – check. (And no corporal beatings in three years, two months, two weeks, one day and counting².)

Schedules, like lists, provide certainty. Y’know: something to look forward to, or work through, or work towards. Like goals.

Or deadlines.

And schedules and deadlines ensure Things Happen.

Besides being handy for things like moving house (don’t forget the pets or children, in that order) or going on holiday (ensure the selection of travelling music is equal between adults), my writing time is rarely without a deadline – I shall write ten pages of something/anything/everything until noon or I must write ten pages before I am worthy to watch an episode of Law & Order, Season 3.

Some days, the ten pages write themselves…. Well, the pain of typing text onto the blank screen is manageable.

Most days, I stave off the urge to do (long avoided) housework and/or try not to panic as noon approaches at double-speed and/or fight off any number of other procrastinating techniques, and I write and I write and I write.

As long as I’ve done a day’s writing, I don’t get restless, guilty or cranky with family members. Well. Okay. It doesn’t stop me being restless from being pulled out of The Zone (I was in the middle of a great set piece!), or guilty that I didn’t spend more time with family, or cranky (because Who wrote this shit? or It’s so haaard and I hate it and why can’t producers just feel the craftsmanship?”).

Yeah. The writing journey has its moments.

But on any given day, I know what I’m having for dinner.

¹ – I hope my family forgives my possessory credit here. But they’ll understand.

² – Which, incidentally, is the length of time our entire blended family has been together.