Point & Click

I managed to get the number of Unread posts down to less than 200 when I add a few new feeds – and phwappp as the Unread posts leap gaily to 315. Fine. I can keep up with my essential daily reading out of the way. If I don’t sleep.

Enjoy.

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Point and Click

  • Mr T over at Unkreative has finished – well, 98% finished – principal photography on 5. Onwards with post it is. Don’t forget to cruise some nice pics here.
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Making Stuff Up

Nothing can surpass Alan Moore’s description of where ideas come from in his ‘Behind the Painted Smile’ article that accompanies the V for Vendetta trade paperback. The boys at How to Write Screenplays – Badly have an outrageous methodology which is just begging to be taken up en masse.

But for me, it usually starts with ‘what if?’

What if a bunch of ninjas were to arrive in some suburban kitchen, intent on silent death, but are thwarted by a teenage girl and her grandfather?

What if our story starts with some crazy-eyed guy running down city streets, going faster and faster, until he dead-ends in an alley… and his gasps for breath turn into sobs of despair?

What if… yeah, you know the drill.

For every idea that I explore, countless others don’t make it onto the page. There’s any number of reasons why they don’t get used: it’s a cliché; I’m being lazy (and I know I’ll pay for it later in the story); I’m being wanky; it adds nothing to the story; and whatever other reason I make up at the time.

The cliches and stereotypes I try to forget wholeheartedly. The straight-up stupid ones do a fancy dance and flash a bit of leg before they’re exposed to be straight-up stupid ideas.

And the rest of them, including homage-worthy situations, conventions, archetypes and stereotypes, they go into a holding pattern, waiting for a story for which they’d be the perfect ingredient.

And a few of those morph into ‘what if?’-type ideas. At first they’re patient, pacing back and forth, unwilling to be ignored, until some other ideas attach themselves, elevating their combined mass into A Story.

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Quick Updates

Time enough for some quickies this week:

–  5, Unkreative Artists‘ next feature, is shooting as I type this. I helped out with the script over a development and pre-production schedule of just over six months. Unkreative principal, Mr T, needless to say, is a legend.

–  Hunting the Phoenix, directed by Daniel Power and written by Victoria Cleal, screens at the Academy Cinema on Saturday 25 November at 9:00pm as part of the Jameson Show Me Shorts film festival.

–  And finally, the boys at How to Write Screenplays – Badly are on hiatus due to life and work commitments. I miss them already. If you haven’t visited them – and shame on you – allow me to introduce them via their post on horror films.

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