With my thoughts turning to the idea of directing SToA, I suddenly realised that my limited experience of stage directing (a long time ago) would serve no useful purpose whatsoever. I understand cinematography, I understand basic composition and blocking. But until now I’ve yet to give direction to a proper actor on a set with cameras and lights pointing at them.

“Panic!” I cry and then pace about for twenty minutes. I know, I’ll buy a book!

So off to Amazon I go and track down, Judith Weston’s Directing Actors: Creating Memorable Performances for Film and Television.

Duly it arrives, and barely am I twenty pages in when I realise that as a writer I’ve overlooked a fundamental part of the equation. Some poor sod has to stand there and say these damned words! And I don’t have a clue (or at least I didn’t) about what is going through these peoples minds while they are trying to ‘be in the moment’.

Yes, I’ve laughed heartily at each retelling of Harrison Ford’s quip to George Lucas about his hokey dialogue, and I’ve even commented myself on the fact that good written dialogue that reads well often comes out a garbled mess when spoken (especially when done with a fake cockney accent). But it had never occurred to me why that might be. Judith Weston, thankfully, has the answer and a whole lot more besides.

I’ve read some useful books in my time, but nothing as perfectly pertinent as Judith’s book has been to me in the past few days. I’ll get her other book, The Film Director’s Intuition: Script Analysis and Rehearsal Techniques, as soon as I’m nearing the end of this one, which at the present rate will be, um, thursday…

Had a second meeting with Nicky today. She had been quite lenient with the red pen I felt, all in all.

One critical flaw in the screenplay she did point out was the lack of a ‘logic’ character – everyone was busy intuitising their way through the story, no one was pointing out that they might all be wrong if they actually sat down and thought about it rationally.

I checked back through my notes from Dramatica and lo and behold, she was right. The character assigned to the reason characteristic had had two scenes cut out, and wasn’t physically present in the other two, (only in the subtext – i.e. one of the characters was speaking on his behalf).

So I’m off in a minute to invent a new character, or at least resuscitate one of the characters I’d killed off from the first draft to create a Miss Logic. I think she’ll be a flatmate, thus enabling her lots of opportunity to criticies in her logical fashion.

Well I had my first ‘production meeting’ with Nicky yesterday. She is very keen to help out with making SToA, and is generally positive about the new draft of the script. She has gone away to attack it with her red pen and come up with some comments.

We’ve agreed the first stage is to get the script really tight. I’m not sure how much needs doing to it, I think it’ll amount to fixing some dodgy dialogue, but that’s no hardship. People seem very happy with the structure, which I’m pleased with, and Nicky was impressed at generally how tight the plotting is.

Vicky, who I’ve speculatively lined up to play the main character Jess, has read it and liked it too, and came up with similar comments to Nicky.

Interestingly, when I wrote the opening scene, which occurs in a library, I had Canterbury University Library in mind (I spent a lot of time there while I was doing my degree). When we were sat there yesterday, Nicky looked up and said, ‘you know, when I first started reading this, I thought it was going to be like Harry Potter, with the library and all, but then when I got into it and thought about the opening scene, I pictured Canterbury Uni Library.’ Mysterious!

I’ll catch up with Nicky early next week, see how she’s got on with her red pen, hopefully she’s been kind…

I’m not sure how it will work with production roles, as we haven’t discussed how we’re going to do it, but I hope that I’ll direct and she will be either first AD or, more preferably, DOP. I’m not sure what her skill set strengths are at the moment, but I’m keen to let her deal with the technical aspects of shoot, as I’m nervous enough about directing, let alone sorting out a crew as well as a cast.

Darren and Amber are keen to help out, which is the music and production design in the bag. Post-production is also more or less sorted, certainly for editing and sound mixing. We just need to sort out the locations, actors, crew and equipment. Not much then…

I think a trip to Kent Hothouse is in order in the near future, once the script is polished, and perhaps we’ve storyboarded it.

Friday saw further fortunate turns of events. First thing in the morning, I discovered that Nicky, the daughter of Angela the administrative assistant in our office, is now working at our place having just left uni with a degree in Film!

So I rushed downstairs and said to her, ‘wanna make a movie?’ and she said, ‘sure do!’. Very cool, I now have a partner in crime who actually knows what they are doing. I promised her a spruced up version of the SToA script by later this week…

Then in the afternoon, I was talking to my stateside colleague, Mr Bill Smith esq in Keene (home of Jumanji and not much else), and he informed that he had worked in LA for ten years and was good friends with none other than one William Sanderson, who’s currently in Deadwood with Ian McShane!

What strange and very small world we live in. Still, I take it that some celestial force is trying to give me the biggest boot up the arse ever, so I’d better take the hint and crack on writing.

I’ve worked out a new storyform for Beautiful People, based on the pitch (or extended logline) that I wrote last week and now I’m just fleshing it all out. Tedious work, but worthwhile in the long run.

Haven’t heard from that chap that Ken mentioned last week yet, but I suspect it’ll be a while as I think Ken flew out to Califormia over the weekend…

There’s a local actor by the name of Kenneth Colley who Star Wars aficionados will recognise as Admiral Piett and Month Python fans will recognise as Jesus from the Life of Brian. More recently he’s been seen in Eastenders in an extended bit part (I don’t watch it but I understand he was playing a freind of Ian Lavender’s character). And apparently he just missed out on a big part in Harry Potter, not sure which though (I suspect Dumbledore).

Anyhow, I seem him often around town and he has always been in the back of my mind to play the part of Mr Widdershins, the Antique Book Shop owner in Secret Thoughts of Angels. Unfortunately while I know roughly where he lives, I don’t know anyone who knows him through whom I might be able to contact him.

Well, I just popped down to see my old boss Ken, and he told me how he’d been chatting to his son in laws’ brother over Christmas, who had mentioned he was keen to make a film about Hythe (my home town, where I both live and work). Ken, top bloke that he is, jumped in and told them all about my writing, film making abilities. The brother of the son-in-law then said he’s be keen to meet me.

Oh, and he’s making the film with Ken Colley!

Let’s see what happens next…

Yay! Version 2 of Secret Thoughts of Angels hits the old drawer for it’s maturation period (I think I’ll just give it a week as I want to get on and make it sooner rather than later). And it’s bang on twelve pages, which has pleased me no end (I’m sure I can shave that down to ten!).

I’m muchly pleased with it, although I’m full of the warm glow of completion, which does tend to paint the world somewhat rosey.

The only slight concern is I have tried Armando SaldaÒa Mora’s idea that to heighten tension, you can hide one of the four throughlines. In this case it made sense to hide the Impact Character throughline ’til the end, so it has much more punch. Not sure if it’ll work or not, it seems to at the moment.

In the meantime, I think I’ll crack on with a bit more Architurus, or whatever it’s called these days.

Now where’s that damned PSR gone…?

Well, I’ve finished plotting the new, improved Secret Thoughts of Angels – sticking more rigidly than I intended to to the Dramatica PSR.

I’ve deliberately erred on the side of caution, because there are a few elements I still need to throw into the mix during the writing phase and I want to ensure that they are put in the right places where they would make most sense.

One thing I started doing with the first draft of Architurus was to drift away from the Dramatica structure too much, to the point where I couldn’t identify which scenes related to which aspect of the Dramatica structure, which caused me quite a few problems when I came to rewrite it, and why I had to go right back to the StoryForm before I could start again.

As SToA is a short I probably could have given myself the freedom to make the same mistake without similar worries, but I wanted to see if I could stick closely to the Dramatica structure without compromising story or narrative flow.

So far I’ve been pleasantly surprised as the structure more or less prompted me to write a very fluid and sensible outline, which bodes well.

The acid test will come later when I take the updated draft 2 structure of Architurus and apply the same rigid set of rules.

One thing for sure is that by sticking closely to the Dramatica structure, I really had to think hard about each element and flesh it out in much greater detail than I had done before. This has produced a much richer story that I feel far more emotionally attached to.

Dramatica, for those that have not used it, is designed to help you write a Grand Argument Story. This involves presenting to your audience all aspects of a situation and/or argument, so that a) they don’t think you are trying to propagandise to them and b) that you, as a writer, really have thought through all the angles, and are presenting them with characters that are acting honestly (there’s a lot more to it than that, but that’s the general gist of it as I understand it).

On the Dramatica mailing list, one of the creators of Dramatica, Chris Huntley, often points out that the software is designed to help you write the stories that you want to write. I think he might be selling himself a bit short, as that is exactly what I did with the first draft of Architurus, but in doing so chose to ignore quite a lot of what Dramatica was telling me because I couldn’t be arsed to put the effort into working out all the details. I didn’t want to accept that there still might be an even better way. Consequently I ended up with a story that was lacking in soul and severely handicapped in terms of subtext.

Obviously the software can’t provide all the answers and there were one or two times in the redraft of SToA that I couldn’t relate what the Dramatica structure was suggesting with what I wanted to happen. But at least this time I had a crack at trying (rather than just choosing to ignore it), and most of the time, eventually I came up with an angle that satisfied both me and the Plot Structure and led to a much better story.

At the end of the day, I’ve learnt that if you want a decent story, you have to put a lot more effort than I ever realised into all the stages of writing; plotting, writing and rewriting.

As the great philosopher Eeyore of Forty Acres Wood once said, “Brains first, then hard work”. I’ll drink to that!

I signed up to the amusingly named filmmaking network, Shooting People, last night as it seemed like a worthwhile venture. Looking at some of the mails I got through this morning from them, it looks like it was twenty bob well spent, with hundreds of people in the South East participating.

Excellent stuff.

Did more work on the short last night working with the Dramatica PSR. One thing I love about Dramatica is that it guides you through writing much more detailed and rich screenplays. I do worry that it could be easy to go overboard and end up with George Lucasitis (or even, dare I say it, Guy Ritchieitis), where the screenplay reads wonderfully, but is impossible for the actors to deliver. I couldn’t put ‘Lock, Stock…’ down when I read it, but cringed in my seat for 90 minutes when I got round to seeing it.

I suppose if I bear that thought in mind, I should be OK.

As I suspected, Christmas proved to be mad, with very little writing time. And in an effort to restore some sanity to my world, I resisted doing anything for at least a week.

The break proved beneficial as I’m really raring to go. I’ve spent the last evening or two tinkering with Dramatica and my short movie, Secret Thoughts of Angels, as, quite frankly , it’s pants.

The excercise has given me some really useful ideas about the structure, which I’m going to develop over the next couple of days. I’ve got the Story form sussed and I’ve broken the PSR out into StoryView.

As it’s a short I’ve taken the two core conflict elements of each quad and focussed on them. This gives me sixteen pairs of conflicts, one which I’m going to make the main conflict of the scene and the other the subtext.

For example:

MC1 – "recollections" (Memories)

Situation: Order vs. Chaos (Main Conflict)
vs.
Circumstances: Equity vs. Inequity (Subtext)

I’ve been thinking about subtext a lot over the holidays. It’s something I’ve not really gotten my head around until now, mainly because it seems to be quite tricky.

I’m sure a lot of the time people see subtext where it isn’t, and miss it where it is fully intended, but the writers are too lazy to correct the readers. Also I get the feeling it’s generally latent in the writers mind anyway, and to force it perhaps makes for a dishonest text. But I could be completely wrong.

Having said that, what Dramatica is telling me certainly seems to fit with what I want to write, so I’ll give it a go. I’m sure this isn’t the right way to use Dramatica, but as it’s a short I figured I couldn’t go too far wrong…

I’m making it my new years resolution to get this thing finished and shot in the next six months, as I really want to get my head round some more of the production process and how screenplays are actually translated onto the screen. It’ll also prove whether my untested theory/hope/dream that I could well be the next Kubrick is anywhere near true or not!