After a week or two of malaise and holidays, things are starting to move along now. I finished the re-edit of SToA with new intro sequence at the weekend which looks much better than I anticipated, although I still haven’t worked out the dialogue for the voiceover fully yet.
One thing it has left me is unsure about the very last shot. It’s meant to represent the Alchemist in the intro sequence travelling through time to possess the body of the main character, but as Alex Finbow pointed out, it doesn’t really. It needs more work there. I’m curious at to whether I could just cut it shorter and not bother with it. The new finale to the Ritual scene proper works a lot better than before and may be strong enough by itself.
The Architurus script is coming on really well now. After a couple of false starts, I’m now nearing the completion of a first act that I’m really happy with. There’s plenty of conflict, the characters seem to be finding their feet and it’s tripping along at a merry pace.
The thing that’s really struck home over the past few weeks is that the story must be structured. The only reviews I tend to read these days are those in Screen International (or on Screendaily.com) as these usually tend to be honest critiques of the story. Time and again the underlying criticism of many films is, ‘great story, but lacked structure’.
One of the key things I’ve found is to stick as close as I can to the Dramatica structure, but not to plot in so much detail. Consequently I’m finding it much more fun now I don’t really know what’s going to happen. It’s a bit like orienteering, Dramatica tells me which direction I need to be heading and I have a reasonably good idea where I need to end up, but I have no idea what the terrain is like on the ground till I get there and I have to work hard to fight through the undergrowth and forge a path.
This is quite different to how I did things before, plotting everything in detail. I found that the detail was never enough and the undergrowth was always a lot thicker than I expected and encouraged me to take different (better) routes which I hadn’t anticipated. Eventually (it always seems to be somwhere towards the end of act 2) I ended up walking on a completely different track to that which the ‘detailed’ outline said I should be on. And so, unable to reconcile the two, I berated myself as a bad writer gave up and tried something else.
But now I’ve seen the light, it still isn’t all roses. One downside to all this rigidity is that Dramatica can give you too much structure. With SToA I’m finding I’m cutting stuff out, like the Graveyard scene, mainly because I’d stuck to a rigid (albeit cut down) structure, only to find that I’d repeated myself; not completely – the sentiments expressed were from different perspectives, but the outcome was eventually the same. But at least I had the choice later on to do that, rather than realise I’d not covered enough ground and the film was lacking (and consequently fodder for the critics).
The only way around this is experience and trial and error. Last night I hit a sticky wicket for a while ’til I realised that the scene I was trying to write had a similar set of variations to a previous scene, so I just mashed the two together. Lesson learnt.