Scriptwriter
Yep, I’m a day late, and although normally I’d blame it on Samoan time or some such rubbish, I actually thought I had a whole other week to do it in. But uh-uh.
It’s a work in progress that I’ll add to over the coming weeks. Alu la ‘ia!*.
* – Samoan; Go on then!
As post-production winds down on To’ona’i, Lucy Vee‘s excellent series on genre (the thriller article is a must for such geeks) has been a nice kinda welcome as I catch up on blogs before I settle down to the next project.
Which is… hrm.
Last night, whilst tearing my nose-hairs out over an imminent deadline, I rashly responded to Mr Woods‘ post on the Jules, Ben and Dave Forum guild forum.
Apparently, I’ve got plans.
Chop-chop.
… Once I’ve devoured Aaron Sorkin‘s Sports Night: The Complete Series (thanks TradeMe!).
Issue 2 of the Guild‘s Pitch Engine magazine will be hitting members’ mailboxes and retailers’ shelves soon. Through a providential confluence of events (I was in the neighbourhood), I managed to score an advance copy of the mag from Guild HQ. It’s very nice with lots of scrummy articles and pictures and screenwriterly things.
Why, it’s even got an article of mine that I shamelessly cobbled together from earlier posts here. Unfortunately, some formatting went south with final publication, and for those of you who thought I was like, rilly getting paid by the word, below is how the article was intended to look.
HARD SELL: One Writer’s Handwringing About Pitching
It seemed like such a good idea when I signed up for the Writers Guild DateNight. A lark, even. I envisaged a fun, relaxed evening of sharing ideas with like-minded creatives who would seize on my brilliant ideas and we would all Ride Into The Sunset.
Enthusiasm counts for a lot in this industry. Blind enthusiasm, I suspect, is about as welcome as food poisoning.
DateNight minus 4 weeks through to minus 2 weeks
I had some ideas I wanted to share with the world and DateNight was their chance to become reality. I did some research. For two solid weeks.
The thing is, I hate research – “It’s a four letter word. No – it’s ‘work'” – but professional pride and a growing fear propelled me forward. There was no shortage of advice and suggestions on the internet. And the local library’s growing selection of screenwriting books provided touchstones for my pitching campaign.
DateNight minus 1 week
Despite learning the many ways to pitch-sell-and-close, familiar tendrils of dread and self-doubt plaited my intestines. I buried myself in the process of preparation.
I drafted leave-behinds. Single-page distillations of the project, not only would they succinctly describe the project (“It’s a situational comedy about a jive-talking skateboard”),they would reinforce my verbal spiel in six to eight easy-to-digest bullet-points. They would also include my contact details for that extra touch of You are reading the work of….
I practiced smiling. I’m told that I come across as rather serious and unsmiling. I tried to strike a balance between confidence and humility: Yeh, shucks – I so rock.
Which left the spiel. An interesting observation: instead of writing to be read, I had to write to be heard. And as with dialogue writing, it wasn’t just content I had to worry about, I needed to lure, then hook, my audience:
PRODUCER
Called -.
Enthusiasm was high. I just had to nail the spiel.
DateNight minus 6 days
DateNight minus 5 days
It’s about a jive-talking skateboard and a laidback surfboard.
What if… a skateboard and a surfboard became friends?
DateNight minus 4 days
It’s about a jive-talking skateboard and a laidback surfboard.
What if… a skateboard and a surfboard became friends?
Meet Sammy J and Johnny T – ‘boards for hire.
DateNight minus 2 days
DateNight minus 1 day
DateNight – Debrief
For me, the best thing was experiencing firsthand most of what I’d read or heard about pitching. Okay: they?re not leaping out of their seat, kissing me on both cheeks, and declaring the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I had to remember that the poker face from across the table wasn’t necessarily a reflection on me: I was one in a long, exhausting line of creatives pitching to them over an intense two-hour period.
The most useful sit-downs were where a conversation took place. Once the logline, plot description and themes were out of the way – what else did they want to know? The remaining time was filled up by a Q & A where I showed off the depth of my knowledge. Whether they could do anything with the project or not became almost beside the point. It was energizing to talk about a project with someone who could cut to the chase: what sort of audience was I after? why would they watch it? why was I so hot for it? how would it work?
Even when the going got tough (“Who in God’s name wants to watch a skateboard and surfboard talking?”), it was good to realise in the rush of blood to the head, “I am so talking to the wrong producer”. Just like with your career, you have to move on to your next opportunity – keep moving, keep hustling. Keep writing.
I have survived the gauntlet that is DateNight: I have speed-pitched to a blurry posse of producers. Pitching to a captive handful of people in a room should be nothing.
Day 4
The rough cut thrown together over Days 2-3 was, if I may say so, a decent start. (Editing a twelve-minute short film was a daunting enough project to grind through – but the thought of cutting a ninety-minute plus feature still shuts down various areas of my brain.)
A moment of self-discovery late in the morning: doing the rough cut myself has dealt to a hitherto unvoiced fear of not knowing if I have enough coverage or not, and the paralysis that would ensue. There is never enough coverage – and if you do have enough coverage, there are never enough takes to give you ‘options’. But instead of being paralysed, I was forced to try different approaches like new sequences and new narrative structures – finding new ways of telling the same story.
Where I had started Day 3’s rough cut of 27+ minutes, by the end of the day, I had reduced it to twelve minutes.
Day 5
Twelve minutes can still be an eternity. I’ve sat through ten-minute-long short films that have felt interminable. Although I want a deliberate pace for To’ona’i, I definitely didn’t want it to drag. The cut just didn’t drag for me. Despite numerous trims and nips here and there, they made only a few seconds difference.
Two sets of fresh eyes were railroaded into an impromptu screening. One pair liked the pacing and story and acting. The other pair thought the cinematography was the best thing since sliced pan. The cinematography has been getting such good press, I get a glimmer now of the attractiveness of a possessory credit:
I took the cut to Mr Tripuraneni who pronounced it ‘good’ on arrival. He has since taken over: he’s going to tighten it up, clean up the audio and give it a quick grade. Despite his teasing about giving the whole film a hallucinatory feel – or possibly a Michael Bay-fired blur of images cut to Celine Dion warblings – I never once took the bait. I was too sick of watching and tweaking and watching and tweaking the footage.
He could do what he damned well liked.
Within reason.
Day 6
After I told The Goddess the joke about the sloth who’s mugged by a gang of delinquent snails (when asked at the police station what happened to him, the sloth says, I don’t know – it all just happened so quickly…), she pointed out that after a week of frowning and groaning and sighing at the hired MacBook screen, my mood had lightened considerably.
“Really?” I asked. She gave me Her look.
But I was having so much fun at the time.
Yesterday, I threw clips down onto the timeline just so all my eggs were in one basket. It’s called an assemble edit.
Today, I’ve been trying to make a story out of them. The more time I spend with the footage, the better an idea I have of what I’m doing. It’s tedious work. But it has its moments – I give you a txt-exchange between my post-production whip supervisor and I from this morning:
ME (0828): JESUS ON A STICK I HATE EDITING
HIM (0830): So you finished the assemble edit i presume :)
ME (0831): IM NOT TALKING TO YOU
HIM (0833): No you are not. You are just texting
ME (0833): Assemble was 30+ minutes. Am cutting now. Am kinda sorta maybe getting a feel for things. Slowly. But. Surely.
HIM (0836): You wanted to do the rough cut, so dont you point finger at me amigo. :) Make sure you [EDITING TECHNO-BABBLE.]
ME (0840): Stop interrupting. Genius at work. (Thanks for tip about [TREK-LIKE EDITING TECHNO-BABBLE THAT I ACTUALLY UNDERSTOOD]. A typically excellent idea from yourself.
HIM (0842): Oh yeah i am at work – you didnt have to state the obvious. Now back to the keyboard for you ;).
Just typical of him to get the last word in.
But who’s blogging right now, huh?
The Goddess and I were at the Meola Cafe for lunch earlier today. I found a table – and discovered on the table next to it a wallet that appeared to have been forgotten by an earlier patron. Being the colour I am, I waited for The Goddess to pick it up and hand it in to the proprietor.
The Earlier Patron returned from wherever and sat at the table where I’d found the wallet.
ME
Were you sitting there?
EARLIER PATRON
Yes.
ME
Is that
(The Goddess very handily showed the wallet)
your wallet?
EARLIER PATRON
Yes, it is.
He took the wallet and resumed his coffee drinking.
You’re fucking welcome, dickhead.
UPDATE: Earlier Patron/Dickhead runs the place.
We wrapped today. (Considers executing a little happy dance; thinks better of it in case of total body collapse.)
We had a wrap lunch of sorts yesterday as Mr Eversden and his ever-present assistant, Mr Hall, were no longer required for their lighting expertise – the camera was going to be operated from within the car, come what may. I’d been warned that Mr Eversden could be a bit of a curmudgeon but I found him to be patient and accommodating and utterly professional. Another name to ask for specifically when I can afford to pay full rates.
Today it was just our actors, the unflappable Mr Amosa and the irrepressible Ms Leilua, our grizzled DOP Mr Meikle, and myself. Second unit stuff, I think this is called: getting ‘dirty’ over-shoulder stuff of our actors driving around the city, catching shots of this or that guerilla-styles, capturing moments that may or may not come in handy. It’s always better to have options in editing, than not have enough footage at all.
Our day was five hours long. After four looong days (I’d be up at 0600, out the door by 0630, home by 2100 with production stuff to attend to, followed by bedtime at 0000*), it was… I can’t find the words to describe how happy I was to see my family in the day time. It sounds incredibly saccharine but it’s true of my relationship with The Goddess: time apart is painful.
Sometime this week I’ll post about more specific things – like how could I possibly fill up a day like that with a mere short film, or why in the gods’ name would I do such a thing. Until then, I’m off to bed.
* Yes, this was only for four days. Yes, I am a wuss. And yes, right now, I don’t care. But I’ll remember you said that. I remember things like that.
I was selfishly hoping that we could wrap today. I hoped (not quite prayed, but came close) that what coverage/shots we’d got for the montage would be sufficient.
Mr Meikle, through harsh and bitter experience, knows better than to take the hints of a tiring and decreasingly coherent multi-hyphenate. So we’re shooting tomorrow.
Oh well.
If yesterday afternoon‘s lesson about light-chasing wasn’t enough, today’s shooting certainly drove the point home. You want two people talking outside? Shoot the two of them both in frame (a ‘two-shot’). Then shoot each one individually (‘singles’). Then when you’re in a dark room with just you and a monitor and your awfully precious raw footage, you – and your end audience – are going to expect all those two-shots and singles to be lit exactly the same. Even though you shot them over a four-hour period.
A lot can happen in the Auckland sky in four hours when the forecast is for clouds clearing with possible light showers. Heaps. Bucket loads.
Am buggered so shan’t stay long.
This morning’s set-ups were delayed by technical issues: a car-rig that had to be adjusted for changing light, then compounded by a lens adaptor that wasn’t as rock solid as expected. After five hours of rigging, it was all ditched for hand-held coverage from within the car. The DOP was not happy. I told everyone who’d listen that my next film would consist of two people in a room and nothing else.
As you’d expect, time spent on the morning’s set-ups meant that there was less time for the afternoon’s set-ups. Mr Meikle and his gaffer, Mr Eversden, raced not only the fading light, but spotty clouds, big clouds, clouds with frustratingly uneven breaks of blue, and so forth. Add to that being on the Auckland Airport flightpath, and soundman Mr Rea was forced to pause proceedings when necessary.
No fun at the time. But fun in retrospect ’cause we still met our day (well, I think we ran ten minutes over). So a pretty rockin’ day, atcherly.
Time for noddy land.
