Showing posts with label tips. Show all posts

Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe S5E3P5

Final part of Charlie Brooker's interviews with great writers




My notes on this section:

  • 2nd and 3rd drafts are much easier. The first is the hardest. Some people do 20 drafts!
  • A lot of what you write will be binned, but you have to ignore that.
  • You have to re-write and re-write. You're honing it each time and making it sharper each time. 
  • People don't seem to like writing!

Watching this reminded me of a great quote by Steven King. He said that 'with the first draft you are telling yourself the story, with the second, you are telling others'. Now I'm paraphrasing here - I don't know his quote directly, but it was a very useful thing to hear.
Advice

Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe S5E3P4

Part 4 of Charlie Brooker's interview with top screenwriters





My notes from this clip:

  • Avoid exposition in dialogue - "i'd rather be confused for 10 minutes than bored for 5 seconds"
  • If you want to see an example of goos stage direction, read the screenplay for Ultimate Force. I tried to find a link to it, but couldn't! Might want to try the script for Lethal weapon
  • Action direction is important, but don't make it lengthy. The action directions should be as exciting as the story.

Someone once pointed out to me that in supermarkets it should be '10 items or fewer', not '10 items or less'. Once you see an error like that, it sticks out. It's the same with bad dialogue.  After watching this clip, bad dialogue in the future will stick out like a sore thumb. 

Soooo, if you are a writer, it's a great thing. If you're not, you might not want to watch!
Advice

Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe S5E3P3

More tips from some famous writers!






My notes from this clip:


  • How do you avoid cliches for stock characters? Well, sometimes cliches are great because they are funny.
  • When creating characters you can base each character of 3 or 4 people. Usually people you know, but you can base them on actors 
  • Once you pick an actor that matches a character perfectly, you can read with lots of other actors to see who gels. [They did this on Twilight after casting Kristen Stewart.]
  • A technique for writing dialogue is to write it, then keep removing words. As long as it still makes sense, remove dialogue until it is as tight as it can be
Black Mirror

Screenwriter Career Tips


To complement Charlie Brooker's videos on screenwriting, here are some tips by guest writer John Halas

Are you seeking a screenwriting career? If you are determined to have a screenwriting career, there are two key survival elements you must endure. The first to screenwriting success is learning how to earn money and work as a screenwriter in the marketplace. This refers to searching for paid gigs where you write for other people and earn a living from that.
The second key element to having a screenwriting career is establishing your voice and creativeness as a screenwriter. This is where you get to write your own work and develop your own story ideas and then sell them to a producer. Now a lot of novice screenwriters will make the mistake of thinking they have to choose only one element. The truth is you should never limit yourself to just one.
If you want a screenwriting career then you should be writing your own scripts as well as scripts for other people who are paying you. That way you can make money and get as much experience as you possibly can as a screenwriter. Remember this is the profession you have chosen, so you should be devoting your time to screenwriting. If the paid gigs are taking up a lot of your time, then try devoting at least an hour each day to writing your own screenplay. If that is not possible, try writing one page of your screenplay each day. After 100 days, you will end up with a 100 page script of your own while consistently working on paid gigs throughout this time. Remember, this is screenwriting survival. You have to use every bit of time you can to work on both elements, even if it is 15 minutes per day.
How to Start a Career as a New Screenwriter
If you are a new screenwriter seeking a screenwriting career, then you need to learn about the film industry first before marketing your script to anyone. The best way to learn about the film industry is to read books, attend film festivals, make contacts, and learn about film contracts. The next thing you want to do is have a professional in the industry, like another screenwriter, review your script. This isn't going to be someone you are selling to at this point. This is someone who is going to give you their objective opinion about your screenplay and then provide you with feedback as to how it can be improved. Let this feedback serve you as a tool for learning from your mistakes and becoming a more knowledgeable screenwriter as a result.

Of course, there is nobody who is going to be a perfect screenwriter. The rules of having a screenwriting career are not set in stone, which means many screenwriters might have different opinions about things like formatting, sluglines, scene structure and so forth. What you want to do is focus on the basic rules that everyone agrees with and then choosing your own path of writing that makes sense to you. Later on if you come across a producer that wants their script written in a particular way, you will know how to accommodate their wishes.
Source
career

How To Sell a Screenplay to Hollywood

Some interesting advice - a lot of people are trying to make comics these days just to break into Hollywood. We believe comics should be good and that usually means working with people who know and appreciate the medium.

By John Halas


Wondering how to sell as screenplay to Hollywood? Putting your screenplay online on Amazon Kindle is a great way to sell a screenplay to Hollywood. This is another strategy that is someone difficult to implement, as it very much involves playing a sort of "long game" and seeing how that ultimately turns out.
Basically, the underlying idea here in terms of how to sell a screenplay to Hollywood is that you novelize your screenplay and make the novel available on Kindle. The idea here is that, if the story is any good and the characters really pop, people will end up loving the novel and buying e-copies of it like crazy, thereby driving up the "buzz" about it and making it much easier to learn how to sell a screenplay to Hollywood.
If a literary property has a high enough buzz, a copy of the book will inevitably end up on the desk of some producer, and in a perfect world, they would end up calling you and wanting to option your book. The good thing about this strategy is that, when they ask if you already have a screenplay ready to go, you can tell them that you indeed, already do, thereby helping you learn more about how to sell a screenplay to Hollywood.
This would definitely be another avenue where social media is incredibly helpful, so you'll definitely want to do the following here:
1. See if you can get small bloggers to interview you about the work that you've been doing
2. Have your friends and family review the book for you online
3. Build a fan page on Facebook for the project
4. Use your personal network of friends and family to tell the world about the book
It is much easier to sell a screenplay to Hollywood when you can say that it is based on a best-selling novel. However, one word of caution here - screenwriters do not often make great novelists, as the two could not be further apart, so if you are going to go down this road, I would highly recommend that you collaborate with an experience novelist so that you do not short change yourself in the process. This is, of all the strategies that I can think of, the single most complicated one, so please do keep that in mind before you make any effort, at all, in an attempt to implement it, as it is complicated, tedious, and is probably the lowest in terms of the risk/reward ratio scale of work to rate of success.
Hollywood

Mistakes amateurs make in lettering.




10 top tips for lettering from Kelly Sue!




See the tips here 
comic books
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