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.

It's a Wrap!

Last weekend we wrapped up the principal filming on The Ex-Factor.  Astonishingly, as they planned, they filmed 90 odd pages of script in just four filming days.  I haven't seen any of the footage, but from past experience and from what I've seen of the filming, I think it's shaping up to be what I wanted it to be. I designed the show to be as easy to produce as possible, but the extent that the production was streamlined was shocking even to me. The first shooting day they shot all of the studio scenes, which was about half of the script.

Comedy is hard. Also, hot and sweaty.

Armed to the Teeth

The result of my recent participation in the 2011 Boston 48 Hour Film Project was just posted on YouTube. This was the one that I recently live blogged about.


My contributions to the film are as follows:

• Wrote a script that they didn't use (see live blog).
• Gave comments to the guy who wrote the script, basically amounting to "This makes no actual sense. That might be a problem." I said this as constructively as possible. To his credit, the guy changed the end of the script to make everything intentionally a joke as opposed to unintentionally a joke, which was an improvement.
• Procured props and costumes and gave actresses a ride to the shooting site.
• Got pizza.

Making Bullion

"Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes." - John LeCarre


This past weekend Malarkey Films shot two days worth of The Ex Factor web series.  The script for The Ex Factor, as it stands now, is 91 pages or the equivalent of a full-length screenplay.  After the first day of filming they had filmed approximately half of it.  They expect to finish shooting next weekend.  Even though I had written the web series to be as simple to produce as possible, the efficiency of the process they've developed is kind of astonishing.

I was able to sit in on the first day of shooting, in which they shot all of the Studio scenes.  The extreme speed is made possible by how they're shooting the studio scenes.  The two actors are shot by three cameras.  They run through the scene a few times, first playing the scene as written and then a few times improv-ing their way through the beats of the script.  In the editing, they'll choose among the takes to create the full episodes.

A few days before we started filming, the lead actress asked me if I minded that the plan was to stray from the words I slaved over for so long. It's a real question.  The final result will almost assuredly not contain many of the lines that I liked, ideas that I included, things that have been important to me that I've been working on for a year.  As I sat in the back of the room watching the scenes being run, there were times that the final result resembled my script in only the most cursory ways. It brings to mind the John LeCarre quote that started this blog with.  Is this something that I can live with?