Went to see Chris Knowles at lunchtime today. He is very enthusiatic about filmmaking and I think he’ll do a great job at encouraging it the the area. He also seems to know a lot of very useful people, including one guy I met the day, Dave the Thief, as he was introduced to me, who lives nearby and is apparently a superb sound-recordist.

I’ve probably taken SToA too far for Chris to help now, but he has suggested a lot of avenues for getting the short seen in the local area, which is cool.

I also managed to do my first ever mini-pitch, well not so much a pitch, rather than a ramble about the Architurus effort. Chris and Dave the Thief seemed very interested in the concept, which is mainly all I talked about (hence why it wasn’t so much a pitch). The good thing was I felt very comfortable doing it. Dave even suggested it should be a TV series, which I’ve considered on more than one occasion, but shied away from as I just feel far more comfortable with the idea of it being self contained in two hours of film.

Chris was also talking about starting a Screenwriting workshop in Folkestone, so I might well go along to that.

I also got the extra shot of Vickie I wanted as well today, so I’m much happier about that. Now we just need the shots for the beginning of the film and then re-edit it and do all the sound and we might just be done by Christmas.

Next year.

Today I got SToA out of the proverbial drawer where it’s been collecting dust and watched it for the first time since I showed it to Alex Finbow nearly five weeks ago. Thankfully it was better than I remembered, but it’s so obvious now where it needs improving.

I’ve arranged to go and see Chris Knowles at Kent Screen tomorrow lunchtime which will be cool.

I’m also going to try to shoot an extra shot for the end of the film, one I didn’t get when we were at the flat. I kicked myself at the time for not getting it, but I thought I could get away with it. I’m not, so I need to get it. Should be quite easy. As long as Darren remembers to bring the picture that’s hanging behind Vickie’s head in the Ritual Scene to band practice tonight, all should be well.

Went into town, did some shopping. Came home. Cleaned the Bathroom. Went and hung out with an Oscar winner.

Well kind of. I went to the screening of Wasp, where myself, friend Dave, and 50-odd other people watched the film, which I thought was really quite good. Then we enjoyed listening to Andrea Arnold dish out some very sensible advice, after which a minority of us, including the star of the hour, retired to the Chambers (a subterranean bar round the corner from the venue).

There we chilled for a while and I spoke to a few people, Jo Nolan from Screen South for setting up the meeting with Alex Finbow, and Chris the new head of Kent Screen (previously Kent Hothouse – which I very nearly mispronounced Kent Cockhouse – most embarrasing).

I thought about going over and talking to Andrea but she seemed fine talking to her mates and I really couldn’t think of anything useful to say past, ‘thanks for making the effort to come down all the way from Glasgow just for this and by the way I totally agree with everything you said, I just hope I get an Oscar too’.

As it turned out, my conversation with Chris from Kent Thank-God-it’s-not-Hothouse-anymore went on a little longer than expected during which time Andrea was whisked away for a bite to eat, saving me from almost certainly making an idiot of myself in front of her (I’m not the worlds greatest conversationalist).

So, Andrea, if by some incredible stroke of coincidence you happen to read this humble blog entry, there – I just said.

The conversation with Chris proved far more valuable than I figured it might and he is keen for me to get in contact with him ASAP to update him on the various things I’m up to. He seems like a very enthusiatic man and I think he could be quite a big force in getting the film scene going a bit in this area. In the words of Dr Crabtree, ‘Could be fun!’

One thing I realised today is that I probably need to make another short once SToA is in the bag – whenever that is. I still don’t feel ready to tackle the extra shots and re-edit it just yet, as I’m only just now starting to get what this is all about, really get it into my guts exactly what filmmaking is (at least for me).

The only way I can think of expressing it, and I think it’s what David Mamet was (possibly) driving at in Three Uses of the Knife, is that it is creating in the audience the feeling I get when I watch, say, American Beauty. It’s a magic, it’s something numinous. It’s making an connection with someone you’ve never met on an intellectual and emotional level and then showing them the beautiful hopelessness of life.

At least that’s what I think it should be. Wasp, for all it’s dodgy camera work and cgi, showed it perfectly. It deserved the Oscar.

Now I just have to figure out how to do it properly.

Could take a few years, that one.

Got tickets to go and see Oscar winning short Wasp with director Andrea Arnold and her team tomorrow, followed by a Q&A. It’s all part of the Folkestone Literary Festival, so it should be interesting to see what I have to do to make STOA an Oscar winner (though I guess it might just be a bit late for that now).

The writing longhand is proving very useful and I’m making huge progress on honing the Architurus story right down. Writing with a pen seems to unlock the right side of the brain more, and I’m finding it far easier to make abstract links between different aspects of the story and tie everything together in a much more interesting way.

One problem I’ve found with Dramatica (and this is not so much with the software as how I use it) is that it’s very easy to ‘paint by numbers’ as it were, treating each of the four throughlines as separate entities and ending up with four stories. Obviously you really want to end up with one multilayed story, but I found that sitting in front a screen with Dramatica and Storyview up gave me tunnel vision. Very strange.

Having taken a good week out of my writing time to work on a personal project that I’m hoping will bring me some much needed extra income (enough to fund the first first movie? Hope so!), I’ve spent the past three evenings writing solid. In longhand. Much to my wife’s chagrin as I got ink all over the nice runner on the dining room table. Oops.

Anyhow, inspired by the likes of Neil Gaiman and Robert Rankin, I’m trying to get to at least the end of the first draft without recourse to a PC. This is a bit tricky as, being a Dramatica fan, means a little time at the keyboard. But once that Storyform’s fixed, I’m outta there.

I’m finding the experience quite liberating, especially for brainstorming as I find it quite easy to write down a long stream of consciousness in which I pose, discuss and answer my own questions. Odd, but fun.

I started the brainstorming, trusty Parker Fountain Pen (as used by Robert Rankin to sign my copy of the Antipope!*) in hand, on Friday night as I really wasn’t happy with the way the new draft of the sci-fi script was going. It was fine and I was enjoying the Iambic Pentametered dialogue, but the story itself was lacking… I don’t know… soul, I guess. It just didn’t feel right.

So I started thinking about why that was, and I realised I still had too much going on and the story was trying to pull in two different directions.

Then I started thinking about ‘genre’ and ‘tone’ – what sort of film was I really trying to write here and boiled it down to two answers, a love story with a bit of a murder mystery and an action adventure movie.

I think to myself; ‘Right, which one do I want to write. Which one would I want to go and see at the cinema? Ummm… Both? No, try harder… The first one? Right then do that and stop fannying about.’

So I spend the next fifteen pages of A4 thinking about it, writing down all the ideas I have and why they would and wouldn’t work. Exciting stuff. Then I realise that somewhere along the way I’ve actually ended up with a half decent pitch and a reasonable synopsis of the story… that doesn’t resemble anything that I’ve done so far! Well it does, similar characters, similar backstory, just a very different handling of it.

Then it was back to Dramatica to get the right story settings (took some time but I got there), print it out and now I’m… knackered and ready for bed.

* He didn’t like it – it wasn’t a Biro.

On more than one occasion I’ve had conversations where people have remarked that the only interesting characters in fiction are the bad guys. The idea always stuck in my head as I felt that bad people aren’t normally bad, they are just weak in certain areas or driven by inner demons, which sometimes makes them more human than perhaps the do-gooder heros.

In the past, when I’ve written bio’s for my characters, I’ve normally focussed on external events, (was it Syd Field that came up with the notion that all characters should have had formulative events in their live that affect the way they are, especially in the teenage years?).

It always struck me that this is all well and good, but life has taught me that different people are going to react and be affected by the same event in different ways, that there’s another level of being, subconscious I would guess, that drives people to do what they do. This is where I’ve always struggled to get into my characters heads, as the only person that I know really well – well enough to accurately understand and predict – is me.

As I get older and meet more and more people, I normally find in them certain traits that I can relate to. But I still normally fail to understand fully how and why people will react to situations, when put under pressure. More often than not I’m surprised by what they do (probably because they react differently to how I would react). Consequently I’ve always worried that the characters in my writing are a little one dimensional, just projections of my own ego, all doing probably what I would do in their circumstances.

Last week I discovered the book Nasty Astrology by Richard MacDonald. What an amazing book! It’s not terribly long, but it lists out by starsign (in a very amusing way), everyone’s weaknesses and inner demons.

Now I’m not saying that I live and die by astrology, but life has taught me that there are certain traits shared by people born around the same time of year (though my own take is that this has as much to do with when you’re conceived than born, but I digress).

As you read through Nasty Astrology you instantly recognise your own weaknesses (well perhaps not instantly, I’m still trying to accept that some of what’s in there applies to me), and you start to see the habits and traits of people you know. More than once a wry smile crossed my face when I read about how certain people are and how they have affected me in life (especially ex-girlfriends!).

It struck me that this book could provide meat for hundreds of very real characters. Simply work out how you want your characters to act, find an appropriate star sign and you have a whole host of other inner demons to throw into the mix to create a very real and deep characters. Then you could start to build recognisable people that act in a reasonably consistent way.

Furthermore, because they are consistent, they can then start to drive the plot through their character and their actions, rather than be simply puppets to the contrivances of the plot or whim of the author (especially if you go a bit deeper and work out what star signs don’t get on with who and pitch these against each other i.e air signs vs earth signs etc.).

I’m gonna give it a go anyway… it’s a bit of fun.

Having spent most of last week moving my various web sites, including this one, across to a splendid new server, and if not doing that, entertaining some work colleagues over from the States, it’s been good these past couple of evenings to get back to some writing.

I’m still working in Iambic Pentameter/Blank Verse, mainly because I’m finding a) it’s a great way to get my brain into a higher gear quickly and b) working within the confines of a 10 syllable structure is a fantastic way to weed out dross and redundant phrases. Then, when lines sound a little too over-egged, it’s easy to rewrite them, yet maintain brevity.

The other thing I’ve been doing for the past few days is plan the extra footage for SToA, but the more I try, the harder it gets. It’s a historical shot, and while hiring a costume and filming Vickie on a deserted piece of Romney Marsh was one thing, filming a shot of a hand writing in a triangular book by candlelight is posing all sorts of problems.

How did they light candles in the 18th century? What kind of ink wells did they have? Would the quill have been of a specific bird feather? Finding the answers to these questions has led to more queries; if we get a quill, has it been hardened? Will it actually write? etc…

It sounded so easy when Alex suggested some extra shots at the beginning of the film. Still I think it’ll be worth it. I can understand why Stanley Kubrick spent so much time researching Napoleon – there’s so much to find out if you want to make it even remotely authentic.

One fascinating fact I just found out (that probably everyone in the world knows except me) is that even though people used to write ye, as in ‘ye olde chip shop’, the y was pronouced th, so they still would have said ‘the old chip shop’, and as it probably wasn’t old back then either, it was, and always has been, ‘the chip shop’.