I finished the new short screenplay on Thursday night and, at the time, I was very pleased with it. Now I haven’t seen it for a couple of days, I’m starting to doubt myself. Still I shall leave it until next weekend before I give in to the urge to read back through it. Then I’m going to try David Ball’s working backwards technique through it, see if it stands up.

It’s a very dark little story and I can’t think of a title for it yet, but I like it, and I felt very moved by it while I was writing. We shall see…

I’ve been reading David Mamet’s ‘On Film Directing’ which is another interesting read. He seems (at least when he gave the lectures in the book) very keen of the Eisensteinian notions of telling the story through the cut, through the juxstaposition of images.

However, I’m still struggling to get my head round how this actually works for films with dialogue. I get what he’s saying but it only seems to make real sense if there is no sound and you are telling the story through images alone. I suppose it’s a way of structuring scenes that allows you to keep dialogue to a minimum, freeing it up to become a tool for subtext or irony. The real story is in the images.

I was watching back through SToA this evening with his words fresh in my mind, and there is actually very little I could think of changing, not that I could now anyway.

Perhaps more will become clear as I work through it (it’s only short, I started it last night and I’m halfway through it already – I was starting to find Mackendrick a little of the slow side the past few days so I thought I’d take a quick break from him).

I’ve spent this evening ploughing through my Screen International 2006 Festival Guide, working out which ones would be suitable to submit SToA to. Cannes is definitely the first port of call, with its deadline of March 15th. Thing is, if, and that’s a huge IF the size of Jupiter, it got selected, I’m going to have to work out how to get my paltry MiniDV film onto Hi-Def or 35mm…