The short screenplay is now well and truly rewritten. I showed it round to a few people this week, and while I’m still waiting on some feedback, most of it has been positive, generally of the opinion that it’s good, if not a little dark.
The ending, which I really like, has caused the most debate. I did wobble for a while and think perhaps I’d missed the mark and should consider revising it, but for now I’m sticking to my gut feeling and running with it as it stands (plus I really can’t think of anything better that isn’t either cliche or plain nonsense).
So now I’m turning my thoughts to shooting it. I’m still waiting to hear from Ben, that’ll be the first step to see if he’s on board. Then it’ll be a case of finding someone to play the Old Man and a suitable location. If the worst comes to the worst, it could be shot at home here, though I think our taste in decor might not sit too well with the premise that it’s meant to be an old couple’s house.
For those clicking through here from Fun Joel’s recent entry on shorts, my take is that a short can have the same structure as a feature. Both SToA and the new short both have three acts (even though the new one is only 9 pages long). Perhaps that’s the benefit of using Dramatica though, structure starts to become implicit in everything you do.
I was pleasantly surprised when I broke the new short back down into it’s sequences, it had a really nice structure, almost chiastic, and allowed me to see where I could improve it further with visual ideas and timings.
I had a similar experience with SToA. My only problem with SToA is that I tended to do a new scene for each variant of the four throughlines (effectively 16 sequences). I tried to get around it by hiding one of the throughlines, but I don’t feel I was 100% successful.
With the new short I’ve tried to shy away from this and work more at blending various sequences together (in fact I thought I’d gone too far, hence my pleasant surprise that the structure still seemed to be there). The fact that it all more or less takes place in one room makes it easier though.
I like what Mackendrick wrote in ‘On Filmmaking’ – that a short could be seen as a sequence from a feature. Each sequence should have its own logical internal structure, much like that of a feature, and that if you could prove that you can make a short with a decent structure, you shouldn’t have too much trouble making a feature.
I have no idea how true this is, but it seems to make sound sense to me.