I’ve spent the past few days working on the plot for a sci-fi screenplay. It’s loosely based on the screenplay I worked on last year, but much pared down and changed in so many ways that it warranted starting from scratch with a new title.

I had an interesting chat with Deborah Chesher on the Artful Writer chat type thing last week, and we got round to talking about plotting. I bemoaned the fact that one of my major stumbling points on writing a feature is that I plotted carefully (or so I thought), only to find that as I wrote, I found better ways to tell the story.

Deb pointed out that the mistake I had made (and I kicked myself when she said it, as she was spot on) was that I hadn’t gone then back and revised the plot to reflect these changes. Result: I’d got myself stuck in a big hole and ended up with a weak story that I didn’t know how to finish.

So it got me thinking – how detailed does the plotting need to be? Obviously it needs to be detailed enough to know more or less everything that goes on in the film. At the same time, should it be so detailed that one minor change along the way blows the rest of the story out of the water?

In the meantime I’d been putting my new ‘convert-some-dramatica-reports-into-useful-outputs-for-outlining’ web page. One thing I was trying to keep in the back of my mind was not to put in too many steps, just concentrate on the key plot points. This got me thinking about ‘Backwards and Forwards’ by David Ball (which deals with plotting quite a bit), and suddenly it struck me where I’d been going wrong.

Previous attempts had failed because, in my eagerness to write, I’d not spent enough time plotting – really thinking about the structure of the story, and yet at the same time, I’d put too much detail into the plotting progress. I’d OD’d on the information spewed out by Dramatica and felt the need to use all of it (the new web page I’ve created actually strips out almost half of the PSR information now, and it’s much more manageable).

The result was verbose, unfocussed storytelling, with too many oppotunities to wander off the beaten track. Which I did, time and again. And then trying to go back to the plot to change it seemed like an impossible and pointless task as I didn’t really know where I was by that point, so I’d given up and gone home.

I’d created a plot with weak, brittle bones that could be easily broken, then spent the writing part of the process jumping up and down on it with my biggest pair of Doc Martins and getting upset when it limped away a messy pulp.

So this time I’m focussing on creating strong bones. Overarching plot movements that cannot (and should not!) be veered away from (at least in the first draft). The hero must do action A and then get to Action B. Thus I leave myself the freedom within the writing to create dramatic, taut scenes, knowing I have to get somewhere specific fairly soon and ensuring that everything I write is relevant to the story (well, that’s the theory).

Thus far I’ve ended up with a complete plot for a screenplay which, although not perfect, actually feels like a screenplay plot, rather than a novel plot (which is a first for me!). It still needs work to strengthen the bones even more, but it’s a good feeling to have worked it to this stage (and I even know exactly how it ends!).

One benefit to this more concise form of plotting, is that it’s much clearer where the plants and payoff’s need to go, and consequently more obvious how I can weave elements together to make them more fluid.

If it needs more or less info – I’ll worry about that in the rewrite. The key at this stage is to finish 120 or so pages, and actually have the words FADE OUT: at the bottom of the last one.

Let’s hope it all works out OK…

This put a smile on my face…

Received missives from both Rhode Island and Palm Springs this morning.

Palm Spring springs was a ‘thank you, but unfortunately…’ e-mail. Looks like the competition out there is huge. They did offer a free pass to the film market and parties/award shows etc, which is cool. Not sure if it’s worth thinking about the air-fare to make the trip though (even though the claim that 2/3rds of people attending the film market get industry interest).

Rhode Island was a little odd. Apparently they’ve had all sorts of problems with deluges of last minute entries and cinema’s not confirming availability. So while I’m still not listed, there’s still a chance I’m one of the 150 films on the waiting list.

Looking at the amount of shorts they had a Cannes this year, and the numbers floating around in these e-mails (both PS and RI received over 2000 submissions), the competition is going to be tough.

I think I’m going to have to start boxing clever, and perhaps try more European ones, which is more difficult as there doesn’t seem to be too many of them listed on Withoutabox, which is heavily US centric.

If anyone has any recommendations for European film festivals, I’d much appreciate them. I’ve already got a contact for the Malaga Film Festival, which I need to follow up very soon.

I finally found the (currently incomplete) list of selected films for Rhode Island (it was there on the home page of the web site – how I missed it, I don’t know!).

House of Donn wasn’t listed

Still, they said they were hoping to show 250 or so films, and have only listed 178 at the moment, so there’s still a chance.

I’ve registed HoD with a few more film festivals in the last day or two; Austin, Chicago and the Signals Short Film Fest in Colchester. I’ll also be sending it to the TCM Classic Shorts contest. So that’ll be seven festivals/comps currently considering it. I’m sure I should be casting my net a little wider, but it isn’t cheap this festival business and budgets have always been a little tight funding everything out of my own pocket.

On the writing front, I’ve spent the past few days working a rewrite of a short film another local filmmaker, Kadir, has written. It’s quite interesting, about a Kurdish Iraqi immigrant and the prejudices he faces living in the UK.

Rewriting is a strange thing, I’m discovering. It’s hard to know how to do it best. Do you start from scratch and just write again with a draft outline of the original? Or do you just tweak what’s already been rewitten? I guess, it’s probably both and neither.

Any tips on rewriting would be gratefully received!

I tried my trusted Dramatica-for-shorts method to try to get some idea of structure possibilities, but I’ve yet to marry it to what Kadir has already done. On the surface it looks like there might be some areas to expand the script a little to add some balance to it.

Just gotta keep my head down and keep plugging away, I guess.

I just checked IMDb and they’ve added House of Donn as an entry! Fantastic.

Not much info there yet, my name isn’t mentioned and there’s none of the extra details such as cast and crew. So I’m still not quite a ‘real’ director…

I’m sure that’ll come in time.

No word yet from Rhode Island, but I’ve been checking their web site and that doesn’t seem to have updated yet. The confirmation of receipt e-mail I got from them stated that they ‘planned to announce the line-up in early July’, so they’re either late on the planning, or they just don’t let people know if they are unsuccessful.

This ‘Mercury retrograde’ business is really frustrating.

I’m a bit excited today, as according to my Withoutabox submissions status page, today is the first day that House of Donn finds out if it’s been selected for a festival (Rhode Island). So fingers crossed…

Also, I’ve been invited to help out with a project that’s been bubbling along for a while driven by the guys that helped out on the shoot of HoD.

I think essentially, it’s a kind of web based TV thing, but it all sounds quite intriguing and exciting, and the plans they have to develop it could bring about some enormous boosts to the local filmmaking community, which should dovetail nicely into Roger De Haan’s plans to develop Folkestone (specifically – a university for performing arts in the area) and greatly enhance the possibility of the development of my own dream – a local film studios, much like one Tim mentioned while he was out in Cannes.

It’s still early doors yet, I believe they’re still trying to secure funding and prepare a quite extensive showreel, though with the skill and experience on board the project, I don’t think they’ll have too much trouble. We’re having a meeting at lunchtime to discuss it.

The Digifest thing went really well last week, I reckon we probably had between 80 and 100 people turn up at some point. House of Donn went down really well, so I was greatly pleased about that. There seemed some incredulity amongst the assembled attendees that I’d made the film for as little as I had. As Daz (who was rightly lauded for the music) said, ‘it just goes to show what difference a little time and effort can make to things’.

Hopefully I’ll have an excitement filled update later today…