The Pile
Prologue
I had something to say and forgot it, so I'll just be unimaginative and ramble on about how my writing is going. Firstly, I was flicking through a pile of stuff I wrote last year regarding film ideas that at one stage I thought I'd lost, but what I discoved - much to my surprise - was that while some was really quite awful, other notes & script pages in the pile actually made me go: wow, this isn't that bad at all. It's always good to leave writing for a while and then come back to it as it means you're less familiar with the work when assessing it, whereas trying to judge if something is good or bad the day after finishing a week's worth of writing on it makes it rather hard as you skip over certain poorly-written things that you take for granted, and on the other end of the quality spectrum you often fail to realise the freshness and originality of really good ideas because you've re-read the damn thing too often too recently for anything special to jump out at you.
The Saga Continues
So what I have discovered is that I have an entirely filmable 2-pages-of-refill script that's ready to shoot if I can find 3 willing actors, and this particular script was forgotten about after being written entirely and without revisions during a 15 minute spell of some class early last semester when I clearly wasn't paying attention to the lecturer. I'm glad (and amazed) that it didn't get thrown out between now and then and actually made it into the "pile", and having read over it I can see now that while it's a completely pointless short which is probably more weird than actually humourous, I think I want to make it anyway just because I can (logistically) and I want the practice. So yeah...if you want to act in it, let me know and I'll explain what it's about (ie. very little).
Act III
Aside from that surprise discovery I re-read the material I wrote for my "Untitled Man-In-A Bear-Suit Project" which is, as you may have gathered, about a guy in a bear costume (who thinks he's a bear). Anyways, the part of the script I bothered to write last year is pretty good (maybe 10 pages worth I guess), and as this film is essentially a "sequel" of sorts to the one I'm writing at the moment I can essentially get back to it once I finish my current script with the confidence of knowing that even if I screw up the rest of it, it can't possibly ALL suck.
Everything That Has A Beginning Has An End
So that brings me to my current "Untitled Romantic Idealist Filmmaker Project" which currently consists of about 34 pages which range from "WTF?" to "Meh" to "Possibly Good But Hard For Me To Judge". I guess I can't really comment on the quality because, as I said before, it's difficult when you're still currently working on something to distance yourself from it and give it an unbiased and unclouded judgement. Not to worry, once a certain person finishes a certain project that certain person (assuming they haven't forgotten) is going to give me some feedback on the first 10 or so of those pages (ie. the ones that open the film and thus don't need the entire screenplay's context for a judgement of quality), and based on that feedback (in other words: if it doesn't get ripped to shreds - which I don't mind of course, honesty is all I ask for) I may ask for feedback from a couple of other people to get a wider perspective on where I can improve. I just figure at this stage that if it isn't that good I'd be better to try to improve it before getting more feedback from a wider scope of people. That and it's less embarrassing if less people know it sucks.
I had something to say and forgot it, so I'll just be unimaginative and ramble on about how my writing is going. Firstly, I was flicking through a pile of stuff I wrote last year regarding film ideas that at one stage I thought I'd lost, but what I discoved - much to my surprise - was that while some was really quite awful, other notes & script pages in the pile actually made me go: wow, this isn't that bad at all. It's always good to leave writing for a while and then come back to it as it means you're less familiar with the work when assessing it, whereas trying to judge if something is good or bad the day after finishing a week's worth of writing on it makes it rather hard as you skip over certain poorly-written things that you take for granted, and on the other end of the quality spectrum you often fail to realise the freshness and originality of really good ideas because you've re-read the damn thing too often too recently for anything special to jump out at you.
The Saga Continues
So what I have discovered is that I have an entirely filmable 2-pages-of-refill script that's ready to shoot if I can find 3 willing actors, and this particular script was forgotten about after being written entirely and without revisions during a 15 minute spell of some class early last semester when I clearly wasn't paying attention to the lecturer. I'm glad (and amazed) that it didn't get thrown out between now and then and actually made it into the "pile", and having read over it I can see now that while it's a completely pointless short which is probably more weird than actually humourous, I think I want to make it anyway just because I can (logistically) and I want the practice. So yeah...if you want to act in it, let me know and I'll explain what it's about (ie. very little).
Act III
Aside from that surprise discovery I re-read the material I wrote for my "Untitled Man-In-A Bear-Suit Project" which is, as you may have gathered, about a guy in a bear costume (who thinks he's a bear). Anyways, the part of the script I bothered to write last year is pretty good (maybe 10 pages worth I guess), and as this film is essentially a "sequel" of sorts to the one I'm writing at the moment I can essentially get back to it once I finish my current script with the confidence of knowing that even if I screw up the rest of it, it can't possibly ALL suck.
Everything That Has A Beginning Has An End
So that brings me to my current "Untitled Romantic Idealist Filmmaker Project" which currently consists of about 34 pages which range from "WTF?" to "Meh" to "Possibly Good But Hard For Me To Judge". I guess I can't really comment on the quality because, as I said before, it's difficult when you're still currently working on something to distance yourself from it and give it an unbiased and unclouded judgement. Not to worry, once a certain person finishes a certain project that certain person (assuming they haven't forgotten) is going to give me some feedback on the first 10 or so of those pages (ie. the ones that open the film and thus don't need the entire screenplay's context for a judgement of quality), and based on that feedback (in other words: if it doesn't get ripped to shreds - which I don't mind of course, honesty is all I ask for) I may ask for feedback from a couple of other people to get a wider perspective on where I can improve. I just figure at this stage that if it isn't that good I'd be better to try to improve it before getting more feedback from a wider scope of people. That and it's less embarrassing if less people know it sucks.
posted by Steve @ 2:45 PM
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