Screenwriters

[hadespussercats]

All I know is, I've always been excited and intimidated by the possibility of storyboarding a screenplay.

I've never done it. Just sketch breakdowns of plays I was designing, back in the day.

Just putting that out there.

Anyway. Rachel, good luck with your writing! Don't tell us anything specific until you are beyond ready.

Yeah I know stage directors and set designers and storyboarders. It's work, hard work and it all works best when the influence is invisible but essential. I'd generally recommend to people that they don't undertake it unless they are really really certain it's something they love doing. There are much easier and quicker ways to fame and fortune.

As for storyboarding. Well I've not done that myself but I have done about 600 pages of a comic (so far) for my own entertainment as a hobby. It's really hard work and when you're demotivated you just can't work.

There is a lot to be said for just sticking to the rat-race.

I'm not in the rat race. I'm a designer and a craftsperson, with a fancy degree and close to twenty years working in theatre. I paint, and I'm watching my kid.

I was just saying that if anyone were working on something and wanted to collaborate informally sometime for fun and maybe someday future profit, I could be into that.

Forgive me I wasn't saying you were. I knew you weren't. I was saying that the arts is a fickle business and though moderate success can be great, in a cost benefit analysis, it can be less effort and more money working in say a call centre rather than spending 18 months working on something speculatively.

Oh, hells yeah.

I think I should have gotten a degree in finance, become independently wealthy somehow and then gone into the arts.

Wouldn't it be great to be rich already?

[Audley Strange]

Emphatically, yes.

[Thinking Aloud]

I used to write "screenplays" (for want of a more accurate term). They varied in format depending on whether I was feeling enthusiastic about sending them off somewhere: I wrote some Doctor Who episodes once (just because I'd had a story idea) but it was during the (long) time the show was off air (I knew this, but sent 'em off anyway!) - these would be the full "Ext. Int. CAMERA pans..." directing layout. I also dreamt up my own fiction series and submitted a couple of samples plus synopsis - had a reply that they'd found it enjoyable, but was advised that budgets wouldn't stretch that far! Still, creating one's own universe is always fun regardless.

As it happens, writing in the present tense, and in "play" format is my favourite way of doing things - I like the reliance on visual cues and dialogue to build character and story (in real life you don't get to hear what anyone else is thinking either - you have to take your cues from what you see and hear), and am just not very good at writing in novel form.

The most recent writing I did in the quasi-screenplay format was essentially a bit of fan-fiction about five years ago - I'd been briefly active on a forum for one of my childhood's favourite shows, long discontinued, and as usual for such venues, the subject of "how would you bring back the show today" was a frequent one. So I wrote a couple of episodes of a "new" version of the show, trying to keep the history and timeline as intact as possible, taking into account whether people were still alive or around on the acting scene to renew or reprise their characters, but at the same time building a new generation of key roles without trying to be too contrived about it. It was pretty well received by others on the forum, and more than one commented that it felt like they were watching an episode while reading, so I was pleased (especially since much of the other fan-fiction for the show was female-orientated romantic-fantasy written around the original lead male character (actually I think was written as fantasy around the actor that played him, to be honest), with the ethos of the show very much in the background).

So yes, I've done a little.

[tattuchu]

I am one. I haven't finished a screenplay in several years, but for many years it took up all of my free time. I sent one or two of my screenplays off to studios and I actually got a couple calls back, which was amazing. The call I can remember with a producer was him telling me that my dialogue was fantastic but I was horrible with plot advancement. He was 100% correct and it's not something I've figured out since. It's something I plan to pick back up soon so I thought I'd reach out to see if any of the other members have experience and/or interest in it

Does your awesomeness know no bounds, woman?
I'm beginning to see what Pappa is always on about

Anyhow, I've no idea how to write a screenplay. Not a clue. But whenever I'm writing one of my stories, I always see it in my head as a film. Reading comics for years helps, I think. I visualize things panel to panel, scene to scene. Comics are kinda like storyboarding, I guess.
What I want to do is publish my stories and then have someone read them and turn them into film. Someone else can do the work of turning the stories into screenplay form, since I don't know how

So do you still have any of these screenplays you've written? I wouldn't mind reading some

[Audley Strange]

I these would be the full "Ext. Int. CAMERA pans..." directing layout. I also dreamt up my own fiction series and submitted a couple of samples plus synopsis - had a reply that they'd found it enjoyable, but was advised that budgets wouldn't stretch that far! Still, creating one's own universe is always fun regardless.
So yes, I've done a little.

Know your audience. If you're going to send off an on-spec script to a T.V. station or a production company don't send a 24 Part epic CGI and full costume extravaganza to someone like STV, they hardly have the budget to broadcast paying adverts let alone anything else. "Don't have the budget" can mean "you're doing something we like, can you rail it in or do you have any other ideas that don't cost much?"

R.T. Davies didn't get to revive Who until he made his other atrocious shows, but he also wrote a couple of publish Who fanfic novels.

[Thinking Aloud]

I these would be the full "Ext. Int. CAMERA pans..." directing layout. I also dreamt up my own fiction series and submitted a couple of samples plus synopsis - had a reply that they'd found it enjoyable, but was advised that budgets wouldn't stretch that far! Still, creating one's own universe is always fun regardless.
So yes, I've done a little.

Know your audience. If you're going to send off an on-spec script to a T.V. station or a production company don't send a 24 Part epic CGI and full costume extravaganza to someone like STV, they hardly have the budget to broadcast paying adverts let alone anything else. "Don't have the budget" can mean "you're doing something we like, can you rail it in or do you have any other ideas that don't cost much?"

R.T. Davies didn't get to revive Who until he made his other atrocious shows, but he also wrote a couple of publish Who fanfic novels.

Indeed - if only I had the time to craft something these days...!

[Audley Strange]

Well Who isn't going to last forever, but it's return was a phenomenon that Beeb did not expect. Same with Potter and Twilight and the Davinci. My current consideration is that writing for kids ahem sorry "young adults" is the best way because most of the public do not seem to develop beyond that stage when it comes to their tastes.

If you have ideas... ruminate! One page a day gives you 365 pages a year. Almost anyone could get that done.

[Thinking Aloud]

Well Who isn't going to last forever, but it's return was a phenomenon that Beeb did not expect. Same with Potter and Twilight and the Davinci. My current consideration is that writing for kids ahem sorry "young adults" is the best way because most of the public do not seem to develop beyond that stage when it comes to their tastes.

If you have ideas... ruminate! One page a day gives you 365 pages a year. Almost anyone could get that done.

Hehe - I always make a note of story outlines, and often bulk them out into quite detailed synopses, but when I actually start writing (I'm the same when recording music) I just go for hours, until I can't keep my eyes open any longer. It's a very intense thing for me.

[Audley Strange]

As it should be. You should get lost in it. You are entering a kind of self made virtual reality if you're lucky. That's the fun part. The hard part is hacking away at it, editing and rereading it until you are sick of the sight of it and want to kill everyone off by page 3. At that point you're about ready to look at starting another draft.

Which is my plan for this evening. I think I'm on to my fourth draft of this thing I'm writing now.

[Thinking Aloud]

As it should be. You should get lost in it. You are entering a kind of self made virtual reality if you're lucky. That's the fun part. The hard part is hacking away at it, editing and rereading it until you are sick of the sight of it and want to kill everyone off by page 3. At that point you're about ready to look at starting another draft.

Which is my plan for this evening. I think I'm on to my fourth draft of this thing I'm writing now.

I actually sometimes feel a little guilty about the unfinished ideas and stories part-written. All those characters sitting there, waiting for years sometimes, for me to get my finger out and tell them what to do next. It'd make a story in its own right (and I'm sure it's been done) - the characters become impatient and make their way into the real world to force the author to get the hell on with it.

[tattuchu]

Dialogue should be the last thing you add to a screenplay. In fact you should be able to understand the story without any at all simply from the descriptions. The medium is sight based and lots of excess verbage, especially exposition makes a script feel clunky and unreal.

That's funny because I always pictured a script as being primarily dialogue, with any descriptions and scene settings and such kept to an absolute bare minimum. In fact one of my stories I did was told exclusively through dialogue and I thought, Oh, this one would make a particularly good movie. It's practically a screenplay already.




So Audley. You said you do stuff for your own amusement. Do you have anything for sale, though? Like, that I could buy?

[tattuchu]

Rachel, so do you have any screenplays I can read or what

[SteveB]

Rachel must be

[rachelbean]

Sorry, I'm just reading through this properly now, I was really drunk when I posted it last night

I actually do know the how-to's of it all, and read all the McKee stuff and went to seminars, etc. I wrote the screenplays "correctly" in that I had them plotted and story boarded before I was writing the dialogue, but the dialogue is what usually starts the ideas in the first place. It's just a bit of a conversation that will pop into my head and things flow from there. I'm not sure that that's a bad thing but it does make it a little harder to work in a formal structure.

Tat, I will share my last couple with you once I've had a chance to look them over this week. I'd love as an exercise to try and convert one of your stories if you'd let me have a crack at it

[tattuchu]

Tat, I will share my last couple with you once I've had a chance to look them over this week. I'd love as an exercise to try and convert one of your stories if you'd let me have a crack at it

Cool. You can e-mail them to me as an attachment if that works.

And you're welcome to do anything you like to my stories. Though god help you