Bournemouth MA Units 1 and 2

I’ve been meaning to blog for a while and talk a little bit about what I have been up to on my Masters degree.

At the moment I am working on two modules simultaneously, though even so the work load is pretty low. It is easily the sort of thing you could fit around a full time job even if you had kids as well (as many of the other people on the course in fact do).

The first module that will be completed is ‘Writing the Professional Script Report’. This is straight forward enough, we simply have to produce a series of different types of reports on feature film scripts provided by the tutor. Some of the reports are documents that the production company would use, so called ‘coverage’, while others are step by step rewrite notes aimed for the writer to use.

The scripts in question have been full of talking points so even those on the course that perhaps aren’t as knowledgeable about script theory as myself have still been able to write reams about what doesn’t work in the script. In fact if there is one take away from doing this module it would be that problems are easily to spot when you are not involved in the script, regardless of your experience or your own taste in screenplays. It has re-affirmed the idea that I should always try to get as many people to read my scripts as possible.

The next module is the bigger of the two. ‘Writing from Observational Research’ This module involves going to a location of our choice and researching it and the people found in it for the duration of 5 days in total, and then write a 30 minute screenplay based on it,with an additional essay explaining how your experiences in the location shaped the story.

This module is exactly the kind of thing that I signed up for the course for, because under my own steam I don’t think I would have ever gone out and researched a location like this unless I was on a paid assignment writing a script set in a very particular ‘world’. The result is in the future if I was to get such an assignment as a writer I would be able to look back on my experiences on this module and use that to get good research. Plus anything that gets the shy writer out from their office into the world world is probably a good thing in the long run.

I have decided I’ll be spending my 5 days in Whitby; A gothic, little fishing town on the North East coast, famous for many reasons, not least of all being the location of the novel Draculaonce he comes to the England. This combined with the ruined Abbey that sits on top of the hill has made it a Goth Mecca, and twice a year 1000s of Goths descend upon the town for the ‘Gothic Weekend’, one of the biggest Goth events in the world.

Sadly both Goth weekends will fall outside of the time I will be there, but thankfully there is more to this town than Goths, including the Magpie Café, regarded the best fish and chip shop in the world, which routinely has queues that last hours. I suspect I will be eating a lot of fish during my 5 days there, plus watching the fishermen on their boats.

Although I have been to Whitby many times before on day trips, I am looking forward to revisiting the place with the specific focus that this module will bring. Even the iconic places like the pier and the abbey will come to life in new ways when I really stop to take them in and consider their story potentials. I already have some seeds of ideas of what my story might be about, but I am trying not to think about them too much because I want to visit the place with an open mind and just see what I come up with while I am there. It is kinda scary because there is always the possibility that this place might not give you any good ideas, but that is part of the challenge I am looking forward to.

Hopefully I will get the research done over the next few weeks but I have had a bad foot of late so I have been putting of going. The deadline for submitted an initial outline of a story is not too far away now though so I might have to bight the bullet and hobble around the place.

Picture credit

Bournemouth Screenwriting MA

This won’t be news to anyone who knows me IRL, but I’ve been offered a place for the Bournemouth University Screenwriting MA and will be doing that for the next 2 years.

It is a distance learning, part-time course so I will still be able to pursue employment opportunities while I am doing it, which is the main reason I went for it. In fact, some of the work I’ll be doing over the next 2 years is the stuff I would have been doing anyways so the work load won’t be too bad I don’t think.

I never completed my undergraduate (Linguistics) degree, so the chance to skip ahead straight to a Masters, and do so by doing the stuff I would have done anyways, that was an opportunity too good to turn down. There is even a chance I’ll get the course fees back at the end of the year, what with the course being one of the handful of Skillset Accredited courses, which basically means they offer scholarships for it.

Aside from a brief understanding of the modules I’ll be doing I’m not entirely sure what to expect, but I am looking forward to getting on with it and meeting the other writers and lecturers.

I’ll blog more about it when the work for it starts shortly

The greatest website you will stop visiting

A while back a friend of mine pointed me towards a really great website http://www.scriptsecrets.net. Actually I think I had already come across the website at an earlier date but I’m going to give him the credit. (Thanks James)

Every day on this site, professional screenwriter William C. Martell writes a tip, or more accurately an article about a different aspect of screenwriting. Every day it is always insightful and interesting to read, so you would think he would be onto a real winner with this site?

Well no. The site is a pain in the arse because there is no navigation. There’s no way to view yesterdays tip if you were out of town; there’s no way to view anything but the very latest article he has posted (Except by manually changing the URL in the address bar). The website frankly sucks.

I emailed the guy about it at the time -

My friend and I just have a conversation about how good your daily tips are, but how insanely hard it is to navigate through those tips on your website. I realise you are a writer first and a web designer second, but now with the ease of on-line blogging tools it would be pretty simple to set up a site for the tips that allowed people to view it by topic or by date or whatever. In fact, I already see you have a blog, could you at least post on there a link to each tip?

He soon got back to me with a reply -

You are missing the very point! Tip of the DAY. Not tips that you can read all in one insane orgy of info and then never come back to the website again.

You MUST go to the site every single day to get the tip. I do not want you to have any other choice, because then my hits vanish and I’m putting up tips for no one.

I think it goes without saying that the guy is wrong with this attitude. Think about how many extra page views he would get if everyone who visited for the first time could then easily go read the past articles instead of thinking ‘Wow this is great, now I’ve just gotta wait 24 hours to read any more’. Think about how many extra page views he would get if all his articles were tagged so they showed up in google if you searched for a certain screenwriting topic. He must be losing 1000s of hits from his misguided attitude.

The reason I’m mentioning all this is because since I joined up for Twitter last week I’ve started following him, so now I will hopefully never miss a daily tip every again. He doesn’t post a direct link to the article in question when he tweets about it, so you couldn’t use his Twitter feed as a way of navigating the past articles, but at least it prompts you to read them before they disappear into the invisible archive. You can follow him @wcmartell

Criticisms of this web philosophy aside, the site is well worth checking out… if you can remember to visit it every day.

Blogging news

I’m one of those seemingly rare creatures; a techie, internet nerd who is not on Twitter; or at least I was until this afternoon. Now I have succumbed to social pressure and signed up. The final straw for me was attending this week’s Story Engine conference where every single speaker there seemed to mention Twitter as integral part of their day. It seems to be a writer and not be on twitter is to be missing out.

You can check out my recent Tweets on the side panel of this blog, or better yet you can follow me @ScriptMonster.

In addition to Tweeting I am also going to try to get back to blogging more regularly. I’ve revamped the theme of the blog, so check it out if you are reading this in your feedcatcher, let me know what you make of it.

Phantom Menace beat-by-beat

People love to hate on the Phantom Menace for JarJar Binks and the annoying little kid, but the problems of the film run much deeper than that.

Doing the rounds on the internet at the moment is a brilliant, joke filled 70 minute break down of all that is wrong with the story of the Phantom Menace, covering everything from the overarching problem of a lack of a true protagonist; through to scene by scene bad choices in logic. This really is essential viewing for anyone who cares about Screenwriting or Star Wars.

Note: Contains some naughty words (as any review of a Star Wars prequel should!)

The other videos after the break.

Celtx 2.5 out

If you read my first blog post about the free application Celtx, I was hoping that it would get feature parity with Final Draft within a year, sadly that never happened, and a few years later Final Draft (and Movie Magic) are still slightly ahead in features. Though you have to take into account Celtx does way more than simply script formatting, acting as a one stop pre-production suite, so to bemoan the slow development of the screenwriting aspect is perhaps a little unfair. Either way, slowly but surely Celtx is getting there, and I’m sure it will eventually get there, when you consider how many years it was between new versions of FD and MM.

The newest version of Celtx is out, with the biggest new feature for screenwriters probably being revision tracking.

Revision Mode can be used to lock scene numbers while editing a script. You can also track changes using colour coded edits.

• Toolbar – a new toolbar will appear when you are in the Revision Mode
• R+ Increments – ability to increment revisions with one click
• Rev Label – you can assign any name to the Revision
• Colour Edits – edits in Revision Mode can be colour coded
• Scene Numbers – nested Locked Scene numbering that supports Hollywood (A/B), Numeric (1.2.1), or create your own template.
• Scene Fixer – provides an easy way to manually fix any scene numbers
• Display Marks – choose between ‘All Marks’, ‘Current’, or ‘Hide’ to track colour edits
• Omit Scenes – omit any scene
• Reset – resets the script back to standard editing mode

Celtx might not yet be the best screenwriting application money can buy, but when you consider it is free and gets the job done just fine, it’s hard to knock it for anyone who doesn’t wanna invest £165 in an application just to write scripts.

You can read about all the new features in 2.5 here.

Friday the 13th, Remakes and How I Love Romance

I’ve always had myself down as an old fashioned, romantic kinda guy, but I never really thought it was represented in my movie watching habits. I guess because when you think of romance in movies you think of god awful romcoms that no one should watch. But in recent years I have become increasingly aware that actually I love a bit of romance in my movies, generally when it’s mixed in with the main story rather than being the focus of the plot.

Like one example of a movie that made me realise this was War Games, a thriller about a kid hacking into the nuclear defence system, but when I watched it a few years back the thing that made me really enjoy that movie were the scenes were he was trying to impress the cute girl by showing her his computer and the subsequent bond they form. Had the girl not been involved in that movie and it had been his kid brother or something I just wouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much.

Now we have all seen movies where they tack on a romance subplot just because that is the thing to do, and of course I’m not suggesting every movie should have a romance element. But I do get a kick out of them when they are done well. In fact quite often the fleeting romance moments are some of the few redeeming moments in an otherwise crappy film. I’ll find myself bored out of my brain, and then you will get a man and a woman on-screen together with a bit of chemistry and suddenly I feel myself smiling against my better judgement. I’ve even caught myself doing an excited clap as two leads kiss in a movie which up until then I have hated with all of my heart. I just can’t help but be made happy by seeing people in lurrrve.

I watched the Friday the 13th remake last night and it was so terrible that aside from a couple of funny death moments that lasted about 3 seconds each, the only remotely interesting part was the estranged attraction between the guy and the girl. Sadly this stuff only had a couple of very brief scenes before it went back to the brain-dead awfulness, and it was hardly chemistry leaping off the screen either (I’m talking about real tiny scraps of entertainment here), but during those fleeting moments of romantic tension I suddenly found myself perking up, thinking ‘Maybe this movie won’t be a chore to watch after all’. I’m such a sucker for romance!

Since I have brought up the remake of Friday the 13th…

I’ve long wondered whether I should write a blog about remakes, but there’s not much to say really. We all know the trend is shitty, and is more about money than creating good movies. What is there for me to add? I kinda have a ‘meh’ attitude to the whole thing. Though it does pain me to think about having to prefix all conversations now with which version of a movie we mean. Hopefully 20 years from now everyone will take it for a given you mean the original one and not the remake (because they are so shitty).

The interesting thing about the Friday the 13th remake is the original movie really isn’t that great. It’s not like in the case of Halloween where Rob Zombie took a great movie and turned it into a stinking turd. Friday was always the sucky slasher movie that had a reputation and popularity far outweighing its artistic merit. There was actually a feeling that maybe this Friday the 13th remake might improve upon the original one, but that turned out to be a big fat no.

This movie is pretty much an amalgamation of the first 4 Friday movies (because as everyone hopefully knows, Jason isn’t the killer until the second movie and doesn’t wear the iconic mask until the 3rd, which itself has always intrigued me; imagine if other iconic characters took 3 movies to become fully fleshed out!). You might think that by taking the best bits of the first 4 movies you would have a greatest hits package that is awesome, but you would be wrong.

This movie is such a train wreck in places, and so incredibly dull and generic in others that it makes me wish they had just taken the first movie and used that as a solid basis for this remake. The original had at least the conceit of having an interesting plot interwoven with a murder mystery. I really can’t stress enough how terrible this movie is when it makes you long for them to copy the original Friday the 13th. (And not even the worlds best will they-wont they romance could have saved this turd either.)

But like I say, there is almost no point discussing remakes. This movie made enough at the box office that they will do a sequel and there is nothing we can do about it. I tend to not bother with remakes, and I suggest you do the same.

Psycho

There is perhaps one remake that is interesting to discuss, that would be Psycho. It is interesting to me because they aimed to do a 100% shot for shot copy of the classic. Some might say this is actually the most pointless of all remakes as you already have the original with all the same shots so what is the point… at least Rob Zombie attempted something new when he completely ruined Halloween.

But in terms of an experiment, I think director Gus Van Sant‘s idea was pretty interesting.

- Take a movie that old people think is amazing but young people don’t bother to watch because it is black and white and old. Recreate it shot for shot to ensure it is has all the elements that made the original one so critically acclaimed, but do it in colour with recognisable actors so young people will not have any reason not to see it.

As a concept I think that is really interesting, but there was a few problems with Van Sant’s reasoning.

Firstly, Psycho was not a multiplex horror/thriller that was going to appeal to a young audience in the 90s and beyond, no matter whether you do it in colour or not. Just the pacing of it and the character interactions, it is not something to appeal to brain-dead teenagers. In fact, the only people who would go and see this movie where the ones who liked the original.

Secondly, he didn’t actually do it shot for shot – and I’m not even talking about the few little bits he changed when I say that. What I mean is if you compare the two movies side by side he might have the camera plonked in the same place, but often he missed the hidden subtext Hitchcock put in each frame. On a directing course I did a few years back one of the sessions was showing the same scene in different versions of a movie, starting off with different versions of the same speech in Hamlet adaptations, but it ended with the course lecturer showing a side by side between the two Psychos, and even though Van Sant had the camera plonked in the same place he completely missed all the subtle stuff going on, like Bates having an additional reflection whenever he was acting creepy.

Psycho was a worthy experiment, but the results came back negative.

Maybe he should have added more romance?