My Next One Will Be Better

Whilst I’m still in the middle of my mad affair with Twitter, I’ve created a Scribomatic account you can now follow to get alerts of all the new blog posts from around the Scribosphere.

Follow @scribomatic.

Not sure of it’s of any use to anyone, but here are the top 20 posts in terms of click-throughs from the widget over the past couple of months:

Bear in mind that these click-throughs are probably only a small percentage of the visits to any of these blogs, but it’s good to know that the Widget is doing it’s job. 

If you think there’s any worth in them, or would like to see them published more regularly, let me know…

A screenplay in under two weeks!

A complete(ish) first draft of ‘Return to Earth’ (working title) is sitting there glowing at me lovingly from my screen.

It needs much work, and some of the scenes have characters spouting gibberish until I do a bit more research and fine tune the detail, but the story is there.

It’s only 87 pages long, but as I was aiming for 90 and being as concise as I possibly could be, I’m more than happy.  I can think of at least two new scenes that could go in if needs be.

Think I’ll do a first pass rewrite v. soon to correct as many mistakes a possible - especially with the layout of the moon base which I only really got fixed in my head last Friday, and then stick it away for a few weeks to mature.

Hello.  My name is Andy Coughlan and I’m a Twitterholic.

There, that feels good.

Being somewhat addicted to Twitter these days, it’s been bugging me for some time why it is that so few screenwriters appear to be on there.

Having had Scribomatic running for some time now, it’s clear to me that Screenwriters like to blog - we love it.  At its best our blogging is educational, entertaining and enlightening, at its worst it’s irritating and condescending.

But whatever we put on our blogs, the act of writing our posts doesn’t really help our own screenwriting. Blogging, as a writing form, is far more akin to traditional prose writing than it is to screenwriting.

Screenwriting is about being concise, of excising all waste.  Every line of action and dialogue must move the story forward - if it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be there.  We all know that (I hope).

Now with Twitter you only 140 characters to play with, so every Tweet you write is a fabulous exercise in concise writing. Over the past few weeks my grammar and vocabulary has been constantly challenged and my use of redundant phrases and repetition exorcised like never before.

It’s really paying dividends with the new screenplay I’m writing.

But even more than that, it’s fantastic for building relationships.  Far better, I would argue, than posting comments on each others blogs. I guarantee you’ll meet up with interesting and intelligent people… if you want to.  I certainly have.

I’ve hardly checked my feed reader in the past few weeks, in part because I was annoyed I couldn’t go to Cheltenham and didn’t want to read about the fantastic time everyone was having, but mainly because Twitter is such a vibrant and interesting place to be.

It’s happening, right now, right there in the timeline. A lot of people I follow announce their latest blog posts into the timeline as well, so the need for feedreaders diminishes further. And with apps like Twhirl it’s there all the time on my desktop. I don’t have to go surfing around to see all the comments sections of peoples blogs to have conversations.

I’m not saying we should stop blogging, but I suspect that if more of us tweeted, the overall quality of the Scribosphere would go up.

So this is a call to all the screenwriters I know, jump in - the waters warm. And when you’re in, you can follow me here.

In fact, if you’re already on Twitter, or after you’ve joined, post your details in the comments section here so we can find each other…

Useful Links:

Twitter - the big daddy and the place where most people are.  Yes, it’s had its problems over the past few weeks, and the Fail Whale has been making regular appearances, but last weekends upgrades appear to be doing the job.

Jaiku, Pownce, Identi.ca, Plurk - Pretenders to Twitter’s throne, each with their own subtle twist (I like Plurk’s timeline, I’m not worried about file sharing).  If you’re unsure which to pick, stick with Twitter.

Twhirl - A great desktop app.  Also works with your Friendfeed account, posts to Jaiku and Pownce as well,  and they’re just introducing Seesmic integration (more on that in another post soon).

Tip:

Don’t follow too many people to start with - there is a tendency for people to be a bit gung-ho and follow the world and his wife, then drown under the weight of Tweets coming in.  Try to keep the number of people you follow less than your number of followers (difficult to start with, easier the more useful tweets you post and interesting people you follow and talk to).

Futher Reading:

Michael Leis at New Media Buzz has an excellent post on Microblogging and Screenwriting which elaborates on a lot of my points above.

Image via Wikipedia

Looks like I’m through to the quarter finals of the BlueCat screenwriting competition, with my slightly (well, very) dodgy first draft of The Trimes. Not sure how it’ll fare against the remaining 536, but it’s good to have got this far.

On another note, in an astounding display of procrastination, I’ve been working on a little side project for the past few evenings which, if I could be so bold, I’d like to ask your help with.

It’s a little web site mashup type thing which you can find over at http://waydig.com and I’d be ever so grateful if you could test it out.

My main concerns are:

• Does it make sense?
• Is it too difficult to understand?
• Does it work?

Any feedback will be gratefully received (e-mail andy@waydig.com)

If you’re a documentary filmmaker and you fancy a quick shot at fame on Channel 4, there’s a new competition being launched next month with your name on it.

To celebrate the release of Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, Channel 4 are looking for UK filmmakers to make a three minute documentary about your home town.  The winning films will screen both on Channel 4 and at the Branchage Film Festival.  You could even win a holiday to Winnipeg!

The competition kicks off on the 1st July, check out the competition home page for more details, and to set yourself a reminder.

To get you in the mood, here’s the trailer for My Winnipeg.

Think I might have a go myself…

Tom tagged me on the seven-songs-that-have-shaped-my-world-recently meme…

1) Radiohead - All I Need:  I cannot stop listening to this song.  When I hear the opening refrain I get this big deep satisfied smile on my face.  I have no idea why.  I just gets me…

2) Mozart - String Quartet No 1 in G: The first movement of this string quartet just blows me away every time.  I’m hoping I can use this in my Sci-Fi film.

3) Ludovico Einaudi - Svanire: Another one that gets me deep down every time I listen to it.  Beautiful and melancholy.

4) R.E.M. - Kinda lost interest in R.E.M. after ‘UP’, but Mr Richards stood out like a sore thumb on their latest album: Catchy, slightly bonkers.  Love it.

5) Muse - Knights of Cydonia:  Been learning this one to play with the band.  Possibly the most complex song I’ve ever tried to learn, I don’t think thay play the same chord progression twice and the riff at the end is just monstrous.  Absolute genius.

6) Moby - Ooh Yeah: The latest Moby album really took me back to the late nineties when Play came out. With that and Gia Milinovich getting me excited about the new X-Files movie, there were times when it felt like 1998 all over again…

7) Robbie Rotten - Lazyscouts: A cracking tune (and my current ringtone).  Although it wasn’t in the show, it reminds me of when I took my son to see the Lazy Town Live back in April.   He had the same expression on his face I probably had when I was his age and watched Star Wars for the first time. Complete Awe (and perhaps it was even better for him as Sportacus was already his hero, and there he was in the flesh on stage in front of him - magic!).

I won’t tag anyone specifically because I’m sure all the people I know have done it.  If you haven’t, consider yourself tagged…

Had a minor heart attack last night while procrastinating researching for the new screenplay.  Seems there’s another moon film coming out next year, directed by Duncan Jones and called, wait for it, Moon!

With heart sinking rapidly I flew past the ‘possible spoiler’ warning on IMDb to learn that, thankfully, it’s nothing like my story.

Nice one sheet though.

I also stumbled across this video of an Earth rise which is just to die for… Glorious.

Inspired by the conversation started by Documentally which spread across the Internet over the past few days on being creative (which spanned Phreadz, Seesmic , Qik and Skitch) I thought I’d follow in the footsteps of the Dragon and have a crack at the Waterstones ‘What’s Your Story’ competition before it closed yesterday evening.

The result, ‘The Gap’, came out of musings I had whilst wandering along the seafront yesterday lunchtime, thinking further on my response on the Skitch page:

Clicky to embiggen…

I was quite pleased with it in the end, though it was a little rushed - started it about half nine and had uploaded by half ten in time for the baby’s evening feed.

The only bit, and I’m putting my theologians hat on here for a minute, that I’m not happy with, is ’self-sustaining’.  I was actually thinking of something else, and really, whilst it sounds OK, if I’m to stick to what I wrote on Dietrich Bonhoeffer for my final degree dissertation, then creation isn’t self-sustaining, but sustained by God speaking, which, at the time completely blew me away and has some very interesting ramifications for the whole debate on creativity and creating…

And, strangely enough, the Dragon’s Den vibe rather forebode Loic’s big announcement today…

Woke up this morning to find overnight there had been a fascinating contretemps brewing between two very cool web sites, both of which I’m a big fan of*.

In the blue corner, replete with Raccoon, is Seesmic, run by the ever smiling French New Media Guru and founder of Le Web, Loic Le Meur.

In the red corner (with white flashes) is Phreadz, developed by the one man dynamo and all round top chap,  Kosso.

Rather than explain it all (as it’s quite complicated) Christian (aka Documentally) interviewed Kosso about the situation over on Qik.com - watch it now!

As Christian and Deek point out in the video, I think the whole situation has ramifications for bloggers, filmmakers and musicians that extends beyond two web sites having a bit of a barney, it’s about ownership of content on the web.

Hopefully, the situation as it stands will resolve itself amicably. As Kosso points out the two companies have different agendas, there is plenty of space on the web for both sites without the need for fisticuffs.

It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out.

* OK, if I’m honest, I’m a complete Phreadle, but I’ve always loved Seesmic’s style.

Image via Wikipedia

The new sci-fi moonbase film is now plotted out to my satisfaction (thanks to some useful feedback from Tom, who stopped me taking in a direction that it probably really didn’t want to go).  So now the writing begins.  I’m aiming at 90 pages, mainly to keep the story tight and the budget down.

I’m really on the buzz to get the film made - I’ve been working my way through a new book on Jean-Luc Godard called ‘Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard‘ by Richard Brody, and a good read it is too.  It’s really got me inspired at the moment. I got the first part of the Jean-Luc Godard Collection for Fathers day (amazing how the kids knew what I wanted!) so I’m working my way through his films as I read the book.

I’d already watched ‘Pierrot Le Fou‘ and really enjoyed it.  I liked the way Godard messes with film and isn’t afraid to a) push it to extremes/break the rules and b) get deep and meaningful at times.  I also watched ‘Breathless‘ the other night.  Again, strangely enjoyable, though you do wonder at that stage of Godard’s career how much of the rule breaking (crossing the line, looking into camera, jump cutting etc) was as intentional as Brody makes out it was in his book.