(You may prefer to watch it full-screen, or HD on Vimeo.)
I’ve been promising readers that I’d do more of these screenwriting scriptcasts. And I will. Today’s is nominally about dialogue, but I ended up switching a lot of stuff around in the scene in order to accommodate new — and reduced — dialogue.
Since this scene is much longer than most of these scriptcasts, I’m including before and after versions after the jump.
[Read more…] about Writing better dialogue
I don’t know who “BigSugar” is, but he or she has been meeting some of the same development execs:
A few years back, I did an April Fool’s post about signing on the feature version of Goodnight, Moon. This year, I got pitched it. And died a little inside.
As I wrote about in Why must we have board-game movies?, it’s not that Hollywood is out of ideas. It’s that the industry is terrified of failure, and clings to the safety of recognizable titles. In difficult times, it’s comfort food.
If you’re having a hard time finding a character’s voice, get him talking about something unrelated to the scene at hand.
Let your hero knock back a beer with his college roommate. Have your corporate spy meet-cute a potential suitor at a ski lodge. Pick situations that couldn’t possibly fit in your actual movie. You just want to get your character talking so that you can eavesdrop.
Open a new document and start typing.
It can be a monologue or a discussion between several characters, but go for pure dialogue, no scene description. Let it ramble on for one page or twenty. Again: you’ll never use this, so there’s no pressure to get it right or tight.
Just like a painter will often do sketches and studies before embarking on a major portrait, writing “off the page” lets you figure out what’s interesting about your character before you burden her with plot. It’s also fun. It’s the easy part of screenwriting you imagined before you actually sat down to do it.
I’ve been frustrated with not being able to get a project together to direct this year, and have a couple unproduced short scripts sitting around that I kind of like.
I’m considering getting into machinima to animate my films, using software like Moviestorm or iClone. Have you ever considered using machinima as a method of telling stories? I wonder what would happen if an awesome writer got involved in a burgeoning storytelling medium like machinima.
— John
San Diego
Machinima — using videogame engines to create animation — sits smack in the middle of a very geeky Venn diagram. It’s easy to do, but tricky to do well. It’s extremely limited and wildly liberating. And it hasn’t broken out of its niche yet.
So do it. Full speed ahead. But don’t do it because it’s simple. Do it because you want to make something cool.
In considering which projects to do, I’d urge you to think along two axes:
Production values. Do you want it to look amazing, rivaling something Pixar could make? Or should it be endearingly crappy? Consider a machinima version of Clerks. Just as that movie wouldn’t have worked if it were shot in IMAX, your little project might benefit from some rough pixels.
Readers, feel free to link your favorite machinima examples.