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.
This weekend is the National Film Challenge, the bigger offshoot of the 48 Hour Film Project. With the team I made the finals with last year on the sidelines with a different project, I decided to put together a team of my own for the first time. I've now done so many projects with temporary groups I was able to get, as far as I know, everyone we need to have a complete film team. Whether we'll be any good or not, God only knows. This is a pretty disparate group of people whose only connecting thread is that I worked with them once. Actually, some people will have just answered a posting on local film message boards, so I'll meet people on Saturday who may play vital roles. And many of the people involved will be doing their roles for the first time, including the director.
But since I'm in charge this time dammit I'm able to impose together a creative process that I respect rather than the usual clusterfuck of total unmanaged chaos. I've written about this before. We are going to have a civilized writing session and come out of it with at least one good idea. That much I know.
Oddly enough, there's not much for me to do in the week coming up to the Challenge. I've had a practice writing session with most of the prospective writers and also the director who needed some convincing that this was a good use of her time but was glad when she actually participated. I've printed out the necessary forms and added team members to our mailing list. But aside from that, it's sit and hope that the criteria we receive doesn't break us.
Here is the script I wrote in our practice session. We simply replicated the situation that we're going to be in on Friday and gave ourselves a character, prop, line of dialogue, and genre that we had to include in a filmable script. The character was Dr. Moskowitz, psychoanalyst. The prop was a hammer. The line of dialogue was "He wasn't THAT weird". And the genre was Superhero. If that doesn't scream the final scenes of "Dr. Horrible"... We only gave ourselves an hour to write, so it's the barest of a bare bones rough draft. Still, it's a good start and we thought up in discussion afterwards with a much better ending (that I didn't bother to actually write since it was practice anyway). Most importantly, we're all in agreement with how the writing portion of the NFC should go.
Now, watch it turn into a clusterfuck anyway, just because. The best laid plans of mice and men....
PS, if you happen to be in the Boston area and want something to do this weekend, drop me a line. You could be part of our film.
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