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Imagine, if you will, an infinite corkboard, that stretches away forever (into virtual space, anyway) and allows you to post notes, ideas, images, videos, and other cool content on there. That’s Spaaze, and it’s one of my favourite web sites.

I discovered it a few months ago and since then the developers have been working hard to make it even better. They even recently implemented a suggestion I made to allow you to change the note format into an Index Card (previously they only had sticky note or the default spiral bound notepaper).

I’ve been using it to plan a short film I’m writing at the moment and it works a treat.

I think you could have a lot of fun with it and create some really interesting site ideas, especially now they have implemented internal linking so you can zip about between areas/sections of the board.

Check it out, it’s very cool.

Continue reading »]]> It was appraisal time at work recently, and whilst having my review it was quite rightly pointed out to me that I tend to hold back on launching a project if I don’t think it’s perfect which often times it can never be. Both at home and at work I’ve left too many projects/screenplays/web sites half finished where I’ve got so far and then run out of steam because I wanted it to be perfect first time. Apparently it’s an INTP trait, but that’s not really much of an excuse.

As it happened I’d been looking through the cool ‘cube grenades’ that Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) has done over the past few years. This one in particular really hit home in the light of that revelation:

So my new ‘rest of my life’ resolution is this: Get something done, be bloody amazing while you do it and don’t worry if it’s not perfect – nothing is perfect and it can always be improved later.

Amen to that!

Continue reading »]]> I’ve been playing a bit recently with Celtx, and finding myself pleasantly surprised by it. I tried it a few years ago and found it a little clumsy compared to Movie Magic Screenwriter and Final Draft and promptly forgot about it.

With Script Frenzy coming round a couple of months ago and not having Final Draft on my work computer, I thought I’d give Celtx a whirl again. I didn’t get very far with Script Frenzy, I think I ran out of steam on page 30, but I have stuck with Celtx for tinkering with other scripts during my lunch hours.

If you’re used to the flow of writing with Final Draft the Celtx takes a little bit of getting used to, there’s a few more hits of the tab keys to get everything just so. Also the default editing view shows as one continuous page, so you need to shift into formatted view to see how much you’ve actually written.

These two minor foibles aside, I really like it. The project oriented set-up means that it’s easy to keep all the information that I usually build up while writing a script in one place using the ‘Novel’ format for text docs and ‘Sketches’ of imaginary props and locations. The whole ‘Master Catalogue’ can quickly build up into a very useful repository of character information and production notes.

The formatting is great, easily on a par with any other professional screenwriting software, and the project management aspects of the programme seem very useful, although I haven’t signed up for a studio account, so I haven’t fully explored all of these.

In fact there’s so much to Celtx, that I still feel like I haven’t really scratched the surface, even after three months of tinkering. The Animated storyboard functionality (which looks fun), the calendar and the production schedule all remain un-twiddled with.

One thing I’ve found very useful is the Celtx: Open Source Screenwriting Beginner’s Guide from Packt Publishing. It covers all of the features of Celtx and is a great way to discover everything that it has to offer. It’s not a bad read too. If you’re getting into Celtx, some of the money you’ve saved not buying Final Draft or MMSW could be well spent on this little gem.

Having spent my hard earned money on both Final Draft and MMSW, I almost feel a little bad liking Celtx as much as I do. But, if you’re on a tight budget, Celtx is a brilliant alternative.

Continue reading »]]> Yes, it’s umm, 2011 , and has been for ages. Well, well, well.

Just been doing some major updating of the Scribomatic web site which I thought I’d shout about. It’s basically the same old site, now all nicely WordPressed up and, hopefully, more useable.

Apart from that, it’s the same old stuff, different year, really.

Progress on all of my projects is painfully slow.  I’ve been working on editing a short demo reel for my good friend Ben Shockley‘s new film project, which is cool. I’ve also been tinkering with some new ideas for films (though once again I find myself in the shadow of Duncan Jones – I swear that bloke is me, 18 months ahead of me ).

I guess really I should actually do something this year, rather than just talk about it.

Here goes…

Continue reading »]]> Things never quite go the way you expect, do they?

Last month, more on a whim than anything else, I applied for a management position within the company I work for, and ended up getting it. And rightly chuffed I was too.

So for the past two weeks I’ve ended up more or less doing two jobs as I tidy up affairs from my old IT Applications position and start my shiny new Marketing Communications role.

Rao and quite a few other people offline have, in the meantime, been asking about Return to Earth. Well, through all of this, I’ve had my thinking cap on, and thanks for some very good feedback from the previous draft I’ve finally nailed what the actual film is about.

I’ve also been playing with Mariner Software’s Contour, which has also made me realise that even though, after all these years, I thought I was starting to get what all this screenwriting malarkey was about, ultimately, I knew Jack. Quite a humbling experience.

Nonetheless, the fourth draft is starting to take shape now and muchly pleased I am with it too.

On top of that, I’ve been encouraged by various parties to make another short film. So, together with Blogger/Twitter friend @draconianone, we’ve been plotting a new featurette.

More details of this will emerge over the next few weeks as the script is finalised. Most of the actors are already lined up (the usual suspects plus a few surprises, hopefully).

Watch out for now customary Twitter onslaught of begging/pleading for finance to begin!

Trust me, it’ll be pure gold.

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It’s been quiet round here of late, but doesn’t mean there’s been no activity chez Cogs. Oh no Siree!

The latest draft of Return to Earth is almost in the bag (I know I keep saying it, but I’ve struggled with the third act – a moment of clarity last week has unclogged the old grey matter though).

I’ve also been busy coding. The latest effort is Geeky Gifts, which I urge/beg/implore you to check out, and perhaps, with the evenings drawing in and Christmas just around the corner, to consider purchasing one or two gifts for your loved ones through the site.

Go on, you know it makes sense. Hopefully it’ll make a film too.

Continue reading »]]> Good luck to everyone doing Script Frenzy this year! If you haven’t quite sorted yourself out yet, get on over to their web site and get registered now…

I wasn’t sure what I should do for it, but thankfully the amazing Lucy Hay produced for me an incredible development report for Return to Earth, so I’ll be cracking on with Return to Earth Draft 3.

Lucy’s report is balanced, fair and honest; exactly what I needed. It’s brought so much clarity to what Return to Earth should be about, I can’t wait to get started on the next draft.

I can’t recommend her script reading services enough. When you get to April 30th and you’re pounding out those last few words, you could do a lot worse than letting your attention, and consequently your script, wander in her direction.

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These past few weeks have mainly seen me flitting between three writing projects. The first, Return to Earth draft 2 – still not quite complete (six pages to go!); the second, developing an idea for a TV series based on the bits I’ve cut out of the first draft of Return to Earth; and thirdly, the just-for-fun adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s ‘The Wee Free Men’.

Now, it just so happened that at the beginning of the week I found myself working my way through the scene in The Wee Free Men where Tiffany finds herself in a dream not too dissimilar to Richard Dadd’s “The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke”.

Being a bit of a fan of the painting (and the song by Queen) I decided I’d do a bit of research to get a better feel for it, and thanks to the nice, relatively hi-res, image on Wikipedia, I printed myself off a few copies, sticking them up next to my desks at work and at home.

This morning, my good friend and work colleague, Adrian Phipps, and I were making a fresh cup of tea and chatting about the painting. Being the knowledgable chap he is (part of his degree was in Art History) we discussed the curious nature of the painting, the precision with which Dadd has placed everything and the strange deformities of some of the Fairy’s depicted in the scene.

Two things in particular jumped out at him. If you take a look at the painting you’ll see the Fairy Feller, his axe held aloft waiting for the sign from the Patriarch, the grey haired man watching him with the huge hat. Just below the Patriarch are two fairies with very squashed heads. ‘Hmm’, says Adrian, ‘those heads look like eyes. And the folds of that fairy’s cloak looks like a nose and the Fellers hat looks like a mouth’.

I looked closely and pointed out that the mound upon which Oberon and Titania stand (just above the Patriarch), looks like the curve of the top of a head, and the coat of the fairy to the left of the pinky-red cloaked fairy looks like an ear.

As soon as we’d seen it, it seemed obvious that Dadd must have intended the face to be there, perhaps just for fun, but it felt too prominent to be a coincidence. All I could see when I looked at the picture was the face and wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before. We found some other possible faces elsewhere in the painting, but none were as clearly defined as this one.

So this evening, I threw the image into Photoshop and messed around with the levels a little. A few things started to bug me:

• Firstly, the pinky-red cloak of the (female?) squashed head fairy, directly below the Patriarchs beard, lacks detail (which doesn’t match the clothes of the rest of the Fairies).
• Secondly, if her head is meant to be an eye, it doesn’t quite tie up with the eye/head of her partner.
• Thirdly, what’s with her partner’s foot? He’s crossing his legs at a very awkward angle.
• Fourthly, the hidden face is almost at the centre of the painting but not quite, it felt a little too far to the right and off balance.

Then I noticed the gold curve that stretches round the right hand side of the Patriarch’s hat.

And I saw it.

The profile of an Ape!

What’s more it’s the profile of an Ape overlaid over the profile of a man’s face, much like Apple Finder Icon.

Suddenly, it all made sense.

• The cloak is the smooth pink part of the Apes face.
• The Eyes don’t match as the Ape’s eye is looking to the right, and the man’s eye is looking forward.
• The awkwardly placed foot of the partner makes up the Ape’s nose.
• When you put the outline of the Ape and the Man together it’s right, slap bang in the middle of the picture, thusly:

Whoah, thinks I. What’s that about? Ape and Man? Evolution?

Now there’s been a lot in the papers and on the radio recently about Charles Darwin, so I knew that he would have been a contemporary of Richard Dadd. I did a bit of digging on t’interweb and found quite a few similarities between the two men.

• They both travelled extensively in their early careers.
• They both apparently suffered from Bi-polar disorder.
• Both had strong links with Kent.
• (You might even argue that they were both murderers, one of his father, the other of religion)
• Dadd painted The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke between 1855 and 1864, Darwin published Origin of the Species on the 22 November 1859.

So would Dadd, locked away in Bethlem in Beckenham, Kent, have known of Darwin’s ideas, perhaps even known Darwin, who after all lived a mere seven miles away in Downe?

Dadd painted The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke for one George Henry Hayden, the head steward at Bethlem Royal Hospital at the time.

A quick Google search revealed records of correspondence between George Henry Hayden and Charles Darwin at darwin-online.org.uk. I have no idea what was in those letters, but it’s not the greatest leap of logic to think that Hayden knew Darwin, possibly treated him, and spoke to Dadd about Darwin and his theories. As a gift, Dadd hid the image of the man and the ape in the painting for Hayden. Perhaps the hidden man is Hayden? Who knows? Pure speculation.

But great fun.

I’m with Neil Gaiman, who suggests that the ‘Pedagogue’ – the little bald, bearded chappy (or Sneebs as Terry Pratchett calls him), is in fact an old version of Dadd himself. I like the way he’s sat right on the shoulder of both the Ape and the Man.

I feel like one of those diabolicals from Umberto Eco’s ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’, which, incidentally, will be my next just-for-fun adaptation.

What do you think?

Continue reading »]]> Return to Earth, which I’d put on the back burner for NaNoWriMo is now back in the forefront of my mind, especially after the interesting news I got from Ben the other day. 

While I was working through all my notes for the second draft, I came to the realisation that even with one and half drafts under my belt, which more or less hit the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet note for note, I really wasn’t happy with it.  

Some of the reasons I could put my finger on – mainly cost and complexity of production, but there was something else… it felt flabby.  Perhaps there were too many characters not doing enough?  Some got given the heave-ho, but still no joy.  

As chance would have it, I’d randomly signed up for Chris Soth’s ‘Screenplay by Phone’ call about his Mini Movie method which, whilst not mad enough to stay up ’til half past three in the morning to dial in, I did listen to via download later that week.

And inspiration struck!

I’m not saying Chris has struck gold with his Mini Movie method; I don’t think he gave enough detail away on the call to say either way, but what he did impart was enough for me.

Now, I love Blake Snyder’s STC! methodology.  It works – some of the best films and books hit the beats spot on. But both of the screenplays I’ve completed in the past year or so just didn’t do it for me.  They needed something more.

So I started pondering whether Soth and Snyder couldn’t snuggle up in bed together, see if the two models didn’t overlap a little.  And whaddayaknow?! They do. Kind of.

It’s not a perfect marriage, but for me, using Soth’s Mini-Movie method (effectively splitting the story up into smaller sub-movies) means my little brain can get a much better grip on the story as a whole.

Now, as much as I like it, I do find the STC! methodology a bit lacking in the middle.  Blake says a lot about how to start and how to end, but I’ve always struggled with the whole ‘Discussion – Break Into 2 – Fun and Games’ bit.  Soth’s method gives that area a little more structure, enough for me to get my head round better.

By adding Chris to the mix, along with my own take on Dramatica, Blake’s key beats are still there, but rather than trying to just satisfy story logic, the story is now looking after itself, driving itself forward with purpose that I’d never been able to capture with STC!s 40 beat structure alone.

It’s worth checking both methodologies out (along with Dramatica), but I guess this kind of proves that there is no panacea for Screenwriting, no magic pill for the perfect screenplay.

It’s just a case of keep doing it until you find what works for you, and then keep going… and going… and going…