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.



If you read my first blog
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
