We're #2

The "Best Of" screening for the 2012 48 Hour Film Project Boston happened last Wednesday, and since I already spoiled it in the blog title, I'll go right out and say that we finished as the runner up for Boston.  That's great in my book. I was, as the saying goes, "just happy to be there".  In addition, we received awards for Best Ensemble Cast, Best Use of Music (which really, if you had to guess one you'd guess that one), and Best Use of the Required Line of Dialogue. 

Some observations about the evening:

Watch everything I've written that is on the web

Recently a friend of mine posted to YouTube a couple of videos of things I wrote in college.  One of which I wrote about before. That prompted me to gather all of the videos of everything I've written that has found its way onto YouTube onto one big list.

Together, that's nine videos, a combined two hours, four minutes, and fourteen seconds of content, according to YouTube's count. They are:

1. Ourmageddon.  A short film which is a finalist in the 2012 48 Hour Film Project, Boston. A post-apocalyptic buddy musical.

2. Motivations Unlimited. A short film which was a finalist in the 2010 National Film Challenge. A comedy about a romantic advice service.

Ourmageddon: A Musical in 48 Hours

First off, I haven't blogged much recently as I hadn't written much due to life circumstances.  That has changed, and I should be making a few posts on things I'm working on right now, as I'm working on a lot.

When the time approached for the 48 Hour Film Project for Boston, I was pleased to hear from Malarkey Films, the team I've worked with successfully on three previous entries as well as The Ex Factor web series (which is still in editing, believe it or not).  Talking with Jack beforehand, it was a surprise to hear him testing the waters about the idea of doing a musical. Now, typically for the 48 Hour Film Project, you're randomly assigned a genre and most teams dread drawing the musical or Western genre.  This time we were going to do a musical on top of whatever genre we were actually assigned.

Blackout: A Choose Your Own Adventure Story

Last time, I posted about starting to do our writing group's Holiday Project.  This year we came up with a Bingo Card filled with story elements. We each had to use a row, column, or diagonal's worth of story elements into our story.  Yesterday, after four weeks away, we all reconvened to present our writings.  It's always fun to see how eight people with different sensibilities tackle the same problem. Our group has a pretty strong sci-fi/fantasy bent, and the story prompt "A forgotten god who has gone into hiding" attracted four people to use it, two horizontally and two vertically.  The exercise was kind to people. Everyone submitted something at least solid, and mostly complete.

For my entry, I decided to go a little bit over the top. Here's a little hint how:

The Holiday Project - Writer's Bingo

Every year my writing group has a holiday project, a writing exercise that we come up with and do during the holiday season as we typically miss a meeting or two due to people being out of town.  The exercises typically have us each bring in some sort of prompt that we each need to use in our piece.  My favorite projects from past year's projects was when we each brought in a short piece of music to inspire our pieces, and the year we each were assigned a day of the week and came up with a prompt associated with that day of the week. We then had to use every day's prompt in order to write something that spanned the course of the week, beginning and ending with your day.

This year, our writing project uses a Bingo Card as a prompt.  Not just any Bingo Card, but one filled with writing prompts. Each writer will have to use all of the prompts in a row, column, or diagonal in their piece. Each member of the writing group (there are 8), contributed prompts for three of the available 24 spaces with the middle space being "Free".  Two of the prompts required a bit of explanation, so I put in footnotes at the bottom.

We will be unveiling our finished Holiday Projects in January.  If you'd like to play along at home, try seeing what you'd do with it: Holiday Project Bingo Card

My piece?  As always, I'm having a lot of fun with playing with the criteria. I'll post it after it's done. It's... different.

National Film Challenge/Boston Theatre Marathon

Since I last wrote, we underwent the National Film Challenge for 2011.  I promised that this time the writing process would be orderly and productive. And it was!  But then the shooting process happened.  And it was less orderly and productive. As a result, I can't post a properly finished product as such a thing does not exist, but I can post the script.

Chain Reactions: A Short Screenplay for the 2011 NFC

Genre: Film de Femme
Character: Casey Scott, Bicyclist
Prop: Light Bulb
Line of Dialogue: "It's probably poisonous."

National Film Challenge 2011: The Return

It's been quite a while since I last posted, for a variety of reasons.  First and foremost, my wife gave birth to our adorable baby girl this summer, and that's been taking up a lot of my attention, as you'd imagine.  Also, the Ex Factor finished filming, although when it might actually be up where you can see it is anybody's guess.

But despite the fact that I haven't been blogging, I've certainly been writing.  I won $500 as a finalist to the Break.com online comedy short contest on scripped.com which is great. The drawback is that because I'm a finalist, Break.com owns the piece and I can't share it. I only can hope that they decide to film it. I also entered a one page screenplay contest, which was a wonderful exercise in concise writing. Here is my entry, Walk of Shame.

I've also been busy turning my superhero novel draft into a superhero screenplay, and with writing a short script for an actress friend of mine to make into an online short, which may be filmed at the restaurant my mother owns. It'll be fun to turn that place into a high end bistro for the purposes of filming for one day.