Posts in the Film Making category

UNSEALED screenplay taken down...

Hey folks,

Well, I've taken the UNSEALED screenplay down... deliberately, I might add. I'm going to see if I can find an agent and get someone to make it. I should at least give that a shot, and people might have a few issues with it being readily available online, so... down it goes :)

I'll put it back up after I get a few rejection letters ;-)

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Litty Takes Off...

Well well well... I'm out of original story, and now I'm totally on my own. My 1995-or-so self is no longer in control of this little shebang, and I'm up and rolling.

I've just finished putting together the elements of the plot that should take things all the way up to Act 3 of the film. I've deliberately kept it pretty vague so that I don't lose momentum. And I'm going to do it in stages - write chunks of synopsis, then write chunks of script - so that I don't hit my usual problem of knowing how a story ends and then losing interest in it.

Currently I'm sitting at the bottom of page 24. Litty is talking to other teachers about the drawings that Anna has been doing. And shit is about to go down.

11 pages and a road map of where the story's going to go today. Things are looking promising. Don't know if I can keep this pace up, but if I can... wooooo doggie. I'm either a third or a quarter of the way through. Let's say I get this all wrapped up by October... that gives me a couple of months for second and third drafts (I'll get my script reading crew on it at the second draft point), and then by December I should be ready to shop this mofo around.

Yay! All I have to do that is keep the momentum up now.

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Writing Update

I wrote two more pages on the Little Miss Litty script today. About 10 more to go before I run out of my original material to work from. And then it's all new. And I finally have to figure out what the game the creature wants to play is.

I knew what the game was when I wrote the original story. Not any more though. That has disappeared to the winds of time. (I'm guessing that this is why writing a synopsis is a good thing - if you drop a story for a while, you can go back and pick up your original intent).

So now I have to come up with a new game for the creature to play. I've got some ideas that I'm toying with for that.

On the positive side, it's fascinating watching how the story changes as it moves from the original novel form to the cinematic realm. Thoughts and musings of characters have had to turn into dialogue between two characters. Scenes which worked great as prose (eg. the opening to the Litty in the mossy corridor scene) have had to be completely reworked and turned into entirely new sets of scenes - which all have their own inherent spookiness. And oddly, I don't think they'd have worked all that well as prose.

And frankly, I have to finish this one. My goal is to have the entire script done, redrafted, etc etc etc by December, ready to show to agents. We'll see.

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Back to Writing...

Well, I'm writing again. Its been a while, but I figured that at this time I've got more than enough unfinished stories that are bleating at me to be told, that it's time to crack them out again, dust them off, and actually finish them.

It's really kind of weird, to be honest. The longer I leave a story, the less ideas for stories I have. If I finish a story, then another idea pops up in its place. It's like there's a queue of finite length. (Of course, there's not... it's probably my inner curmudgeon complaining that I can't get anything else done unless I finish at least something...)

So, in that vein, if we look at the unfinished stories I've got (and when I was working on them), they look something like this (note: yep, some of the descriptions are really really vague... that's deliberate... I still need to finish them some time :) )

The Chronos Theorem (1994)

A time travel story set in the near future. I got about 60 pages in, and then stopped writing it because I realized that I'd buggered up the timeline of the story. Time travel stories, apparently, take a bit of prep work. Especially if they loop in and around themselves.

Vampyre Dawn (1995)

Vampires. In Chicago (though I'll probably move it to Seattle now). A man loses the love of his life when he is turned, and is introduced to their society. Warring factions start a battle, and he's in the middle of it all while trying to fit in. First of a trilogy of stories.

Little Miss Litty (1995?)

A short horror story about a school teacher locked in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Fractures (1999)

A doctor who story

The Story Of Yin Yang Man (2000)

He fights the forces of good and evil. And his partner is Feng Shui Girl. Who solves crimes and puts the world to rights by moving furniture. Originally meant to be a graphic novel, it might work as a one-shot film. Hard to plot out simply because if he's fighting good and evil, well, is he good or evil? Neutral characters - while good gags - aren't necessarily compelling.

The Witnesses (2000)

A man has an accident, and discovers that he's compelled to watch events - but that's only the start of his powers. Secret societies. The end of the world. Epic battles. And sadly unfinished.

My Recession (2002)

An architect has been out of work for nearly a year. He spends his last night on earth in a bar, saying goodbye to his friends. The lines between reality and his mental musings blur as the night goes on, until it's hard to tell the difference. (Kind of almost synopsis form).

Dot Comedy (2002)

Two friends working for a dot com get laid off, and in their last two weeks there, use the equipment to fake up a bunch of money. Then they go to Vegas to spend it.

Unsealed (2003 - cowritten with Joseph DeLorenzo)

The script for this one actually got finished. It's about 45 minutes long. Which is all kinds of wrong for several reasons. So strictly speaking, I need to revisit it and make it much longer.

So ... er... what am I doing about this?

Well, I just started turning Little Miss Litty into a screenplay for a horror movie. It'll be a good test case. I'm 13 pages in so far, which actually works out to be about half of what I originally wrote. (You can see that here if you want).

The structure is changing a bit as the format shifts, and I'm fixing up some of the dialogue a little. Oh, and I'm un-Britishizing it as I go. (By the way, if you want to know what the insane asylum looks like, watch Terminator 2. That's what it is in my mind.)

So let's see.. Horror movies tend to be between 90 minutes and 115 or so. So I figure I've got about 13 pages until I hit new material in the story where I have to really start working hard, and then I've got about 74 minutes of fresh material to write. That's not too bad. A pretty reasonable goal.

If I write about 10 pages a week (say, reserve one night a week for it), then in about 8 weeks time, I should have a script ready to break apart and edit the crap out of.

Will it be any good? Will it be sellable? Will it make it?

Who knows.

Will I have fun doing it? Ya sure, ya betcha.

I don't think I want to direct this one. Too much CG to do it on a small budget... better leave that to someone else.

More news as I have it.

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