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!

Meetings galore!

Meeting great new people has been the theme for this past week.

1. First, there was Elissa, who I originally met almost a year ago during a mass interview with Brooke Allen. In mind-blowing fashion, she had made the decision to pick up and pursue her dream the year before, by spending 6 months in India filming a documentary on a girls’ vocational school. Now, she has 25 hours of un-translated footage, and a burning desire to see her documentary completed.

            Being engaged to a native Hindi speaker, I brought Ajit (my fiancé) to our meeting. While 25 hours of translation was too huge a project for him to take on alone, we later got on the phone with Ajit’s mother in India, who recommended a Hindi institute she’s familiar with. The next step is to look into whether or not the folks there can help Elissa out. This, coupled with a few other folks that Elissa has helping to translate smaller chunks of the project, should help her to get the job done. Once we get Elissa squared away with translation, I’ll be helping her to edit her project, learning about documentary film-making and how it works, as opposed to feature films.

2. I also had a fascinating lunch with Brooke and three other folks that he’s working with: Sam, a girl about my age who has been involved with film-making all her life, and Norm and Joan, a dynamic acting couple.

Sam is fantastic. The daughter of a cinematographer who has worked on such documentaries as An Inconvenient Truth, she knows pretty much all there is to know about film-making. She’s also interested in doing a No MFA Project of her own, focusing on writing and philosophy. She’s very generously offered to help connect me with others in the film industry, to help me learn the things I want to learn, and I will be trying to help her with her writing. I feel like we could create sort of a co-No MFA Project support system, helping each other out along our paths.

As for Norm and Joan: Norm I recognized as the dad from a famous Citi Card commercial (you can view it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xvUkHqEDX4). Together, Norm, Joan, and their friend Jon Freda formed the show “50 to Death.” (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=50todeath&aq=f). They’re interested in opening the development of the show up to a larger team, including people such as myself who want to learn about the total process of putting something like this together. (The show, btw, is absolutely delightful, and a great concept – and couldn’t have more charming stars.)

I’m incredibly excited about getting to know all of these people better, and to move forward on all of their/my respective projects. I feel this week has been a true testament to the number of fascinating, helpful people you can come into contact with – if you just ask! 

First-ever sound editing project - complete!

At last!

Managing time is one of the more difficult aspects of this project, as the past two weeks prove. Between crises at work (our shipper lost their TSA license), some frantic weekend wedding planning (I’m getting married next September, in Pennsylvania, which requires the occasional frenzied meeting-filled trip), and life in general, I finally managed to finish editing this file.

This has been a tremendous learning experience. Not just on the basics of sound editing, but myself. As I played and re-played the interview, the more I thought about how I would like to craft my answers in the future, and how I’d like to present myself. Likewise, I had the opportunity to closely listen and re-listen to the thoughts of Brooke Allen, a great mentor, and compare how he presents himself with how I present myself. One thing I noticed in particular is that he’s not afraid to pause and really collect his thoughts before speaking, something which denotes confidence. Since working on this file, I’ve realized that this is a confidence less experienced people lack. They, as I did at times in this conversation, rush to give answers, thinking that to pause will betray a lack of forethought.

Here now is a 26-minute, down-to-the-basics talk about the No MFA Project, where before there was a 65-minute, much less engaging one. More than that, through the advice Brooke offers during the conversation, there is a road map for my next steps, and the next steps of others doing No MFA projects of their own. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be calling out the items that I felt most important, and tackling them one by one.

For now, hope you enjoy - and feel free to leave feedback!

http://www.mediafire.com/?klav1n5vbkc18p9

AUDACITY

What I did: Downloaded Audacity Sound Editing software – for Free!

What I’m Learning: How to Edit Sound (and, by extension… how I sound)

A few weeks ago, I had a phone interview with Brooke Allen, founder of No Shortage of Work (http://www.noshortageofwork.com/) about my No MFA Project. A comment Brooke made last spring was actually the inspiration for this project. While discussing education and how overpriced degrees often wind up being a bad deal for the money, he mentioned that it would be interesting to see what someone who set out to get an education could do if they instead invested their money in gaining other real-life valuable experiences. Since I started the No MFA Project a little over a month ago, he has been full of useful suggestions for moving the project forward.

The idea that I edit our rough conversation and post it online as a sort of virtual radio interview was his – and, so far, it has been the most eye-opening mini-project I’ve undertaken within my larger No MFA Project.

To get started, I downloaded Audacity at http://gofree.com/download/Audio/Sounds/audacity.php?gclid=CO_fv9SLqaYCFUS8Kgod-RKgoA. (Word to the wise – this download won’t work for Macs. I had to borrow my fiance’s Toshiba to do this.)

This sound-editing software is incredibly easy to use. While the “help” feature could be more, well, helpful (it just shows you where the term you’ve searched appears on the menu, rather than explaining how to do something), it’s fairly easy to figure things out. Within moments of importing my audio file, I was editing.

An unexpected benefit of doing this has been getting to analyze how I come across in an interview. Even before it played over my headphones, I knew when I was about to say “Uuuummmm” because of the shape of the sound waves on my audio file. (My “umm” looks like a large cup tipped over on its side. I got really sick of seeing that cup.) I also realized that I have a tendency to repeat words while I formulate my thoughts. It was fascinating to dive into my own language, pick it apart, get annoyed with it, and learn how I’d like to change the way I talk.

Another interesting side benefit of this experience was getting to compare what it’s like to edit sound with what it’s like to edit writing. When what I needed to edit was in my ear instead of on a page in front of me, it required a different set of skills – sharper listening, better memory, and a sense of how something would unfold to a listener as opposed to a reader.

This all gave me the feel of being back in school, and of having my abilities stretched to accommodate new techniques. And - for free!

What started as 65 minutes of raw, unpolished talk is now approaching just 30 minutes of tighter, more interesting back-and-forth. It’s still a work in progress, but I’ll be posting the final results within the next few days for your listening pleasure!

Year of the Script Pitch

Happy New Year!

This is the time of year when everyone's planning for what lies ahead. For my part, I’ve spent this past week loading up on reading material to sharpen my scriptwriting skills (The Art of Dramatic Writing, Hero with 1000 Faces), submitted a script to a director friend looking to do a short project, and discovered a new resource for scriptwriters: the pitchfest.

Pitching scripts was the third thing I mentioned in an earlier blog post about what Tisch does for its students. It was also a skill I wanted to learn for myself, and now I’ve discovered that the perfect opportunity to do so already exists.

At events called pitchfests a writer (for a fee) can pitch her script to a number of industry professionals. Pitchfests range in scope, price, and exposure, but in each scenario, the writer can test-drive her pitches in the real world. If the pitch is in great shape, she might get an agent or a studio to pick up the script. If not, she might learn how to improve (or at least gain the awareness that she needs to improve).

Doing online research, I see there’s some debate over whether or not a pitchfest is a good thing. While the majority of what I’ve found suggests they’re good, I’ve also seen complaints that they’re stressful, that you usually pitch to an assistant instead of a producer or director, and that it’s not really fair to have to pay to pitch your work. However, dealing with stress is a must, and assistants are the people screening scripts 99.9999% of the time, anyway. As for the cost, the fee typically goes toward being part of the overall one or two-day conference in which the script pitching takes place, where writers can also attend seminars and networking events. Since some pitchfests are as cheap as $100, this is an experience that is a must-have on my list. So…

Time to get ready for a pitchfest!

This week, I’ve begun developing the storyline for the next feature length script I’m going to write. Once I have my finished treatment and a pitch I feel is adequate, I’ll be selecting which pitchfest I want to attend this spring.

Deadline for my finished script treatment and pitch: February 1^st.

To learn more about this, google pitchfests or visit:

http://www.scriptmag.com/2010/12/16/best-of-the-rest-pitchfests/

Here’s to 2011!