Act One = Done!

Yes! I’m very pleased and happy to say that I did in fact meet my deadline and, today, have finished act one of my new screenplay. As a memory-refresher, my aim is to complete one act a month, and have a finished script by May 1^st.

March is going to be the most difficult month. Screenplays follow a formula of three acts, and the first and third acts are each about 25% of the total. Act one sets up the story, and ends with the first major plot-driving event. Act two is the real meat of the piece, accounting for 50% of the total, and is where the story either develops successfully – or crashes and burns. It also ends with the second major plot point – the one that’s going to drive the story to its conclusion. Act three is all about reaching the grand finale and/or wrapping things up.

Screenplays should come in around 90-120 pages, so most ‘act ones’ are in the 22-30 page range. Mine has come in at 27 pages. Act two should be around 50-60 pages, so March is looking very writing-intensive.

Writing this first act has felt very good. I’ve written screenplays before, but working on any project always brings the same feelings of inspiration and purpose. Wrapping up this first act was particularly rewarding, since the way I first envisioned one character dramatically changed (for the better) earlier today. The change of this one character – from supportive boyfriend to just another stressful element pressuring our main character – helps the overall story to make a lot more sense, and the leading lady’s bad choices seem more realistic. Instead of there now being an element in the story that offers her ‘a way out,’ her struggles just got more intense, and the story just got better.

Busy, Busy, Busy

It’s been so long since I posted, but that’s actually a good thing, since instead of blogging, I’ve been networking! My life lately has been an explosion of meeting new people. 

At the center of most of these new people (bursting with creativity over cups of coffee and slices of pizza) is a short film project called “What Do We Care?” A concept of Brooke Allen’s, this is a piece that will be about 5-10 minutes when completed, and which shares some of his cutting edge philosophies on finance.

It’s also turning out to be the ultimate learning tool, since, to see the project completed, I’m organizing a group of these great, creative people I'm meeting who also want to learn more about film-making to tackle it with me. As we move forward, we’ll all be sharing with each other what we know (pretty much everyone knows at least a little bit about one area), and tackling one step at a time in this process until we have a finished product. By the time it’s over, our respective film-making knowledge will have (hopefully) doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled, depending on how much we each have to learn going in.

As for my own feature-length script (of which I set a deadline to be finished with the first act by March 1^st,) making the time for it has been a struggle. Ok, that’s putting it lightly – I’ve barely written a thing. But there’s still one whole weekend between me and March 1^st, and I’m determined, even if it’s a shoddy, pathetic first draft which will need countless revising, to finished that first draft by my deadline!

Met My First Deadline!

The first official deadline I set for myself was to be finished writing a treatment and a pitch for a screenplay by today, February 1st. And – success! Although the treatment I wound up writing was not the treatment I first set out to write… actually, the idea I had back on January 1^st, when I set the deadline, was for a romantic comedy. Now, here I am – with horror.

I’m something of a horror fanatic. I’m not talking about slasher flicks with zero plot. (When I saw the remake of Halloween, I was so disgusted and furious that I ran home to write an article about how much I hated it – which you can read HERE. I was determined to at least earn back the price of my movie ticket by selling my scathing review.) No, I love, LOVE horror movies that are smart, that secretly reference the things that really do scare us in our everyday lives through a clever story. Those have been the kind of scary scripts I’ve tried to write in the past, and, also, the kind of story I want to tell with this new script.

Time to set some more deadlines:

Complete two more versions of the pitch, for a total of three different angles: 
Feb. 16^th.

Finished first draft of script: May 1^st. (On that timeframe, I need to complete one act of a three-act screenplay per month.)

My spring semester is in full swing!