John August

QandA

Shot an indie pilot. What’s next?

Film Industry, QandA, Television, The Nines, The Remnants

questionmarkBack in 2005, you were generous enough to offer me some thoughts about whether to go to NYU or USC’s screenwriting program. Now, a few years down the line, I am a freshly minted Tisch graduate hoping for some advice on a different topic.

I recently won a modest grant to shoot a half-hour pilot that I co-wrote with a fellow NYU alumna. We assembled a cast of young actors, brought in a skeleton crew, and shot the pilot over six long, exhilarating days this January.

Now, as we wait for the final cut of our show to return from the sound mixer, we are working out a way to get our episode into the right hands — and we aren’t exactly sure whose hands those should be. Independent financiers? The networks and their web initiatives? Talent agencies? Given how new the idea of independently produced episodic work is, there seem to be very few resources for how to go about seeking distribution for a project such as ours.

I know you recently worked on your own privately financed web pilot, and thought you might have some particular insight into how two young writers can best proceed with an independently produced pilot.

Any guidance you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

— Isaac Aptaker

answer iconCongrats on your degree and your pilot. I’m glad you realize you’re not “done” in any meaningful way. You’re about to start a sprint that will hopefully become a marathon lasting your entire career.

You and I are in pretty much in the same boat. We’ve both just finished a scrappy little pilot that could become a series, ideally one that works a little more like independent film than standard television.

This concept of “indie TV” is almost at a point where we can stop putting it in quotes. Give it a year or two. In the meantime, we’re going to be forging some new ground. We both need to find two things: money to make the show, and a way to distribute it. The latter is easy; the former is more challenging.

Big media conglomerates dominate traditional television, both broadcast and cable. There are plenty of other outlets for people to see your show, from basic (YouTube) to more complex (specialized web, cable and satellite networks). The common theme is that none of them are going to be able to pay you the upfront money you need to make the show the way a typical TV network would.

Obviously, our situations are a little different — I have more credits and contacts. But it’s the premise and execution of the pilot that matters most, so a year from now, you may be the one with an actual series.

Let me talk you through what we’re doing, and how it might apply to your show.

1. Don’t dismiss standard TV altogether.

We made the pilot for a web series, but if a network (likely cable) loved it and presented a compelling case for doing it with them, we’d certainly consider it. For all the freedom a web series gives you (flexible running times, interactivity, simplified production), there’s no competing with the money and marketing muscle of a network. For example, South Park started as a Christmas card video, which spread virally in pre-internet Hollywood by videotape. Done today, South Park could easily be a web show. But would it be nearly the same phenomenon (and cash cow) if it didn’t have Viacom behind it? Probably not. ((It’s worth pointing out that Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane is betting on the web. He’s doing a new show directly for the internet, partnering with MRC and Google for advertising.))

Particularly if your pilot resembles a traditional TV show, you should get it in the hands of people who work in traditional television. Use anyone you can at Tisch to reach out to television agents, managers and executives. Yes, you’re hoping they love you and want to represent you as a writer/director/whatever for your future career. But the immediate focus is whether this pilot could be a show.

2. Think about how you’ll make money, and how others will, too.

You can do a pilot for very little money because it’s a short time commitment for everyone. For my pilot, I brought in longtime accomplices and newcomers eager to make a relationship. But all the things you can skimp on for a three-day shoot become necessities when scaled up to a series, so you can’t expect a crew to work for praise and Quizno’s.

You’re going to need money. And whoever gives you this money needs to have a reason to believe it’s worth it.

For our show, we’re going to be targeting several big advertisers, trying to find one who will sign on as the exclusive presenter. Like the BMW films, our premise lends itself to very direct product integration. The money to make our show would be a trivial portion of a brand’s ad budget. ((This is working under the assumption that we’re a web series, but the beauty of a deeply-embedded advertiser is that it doesn’t particularly matter what format or medium the show ultimately takes. If it shows up on the torrents, even better.))

For a web series, advertising can also be handled by a distributor or accumulator, some of whom give content creators a cut. That’s been the way many web shows have been handled so far. Chaotic? Absolutely. And I have no idea what the best practices are, or whether you can realistically expect to make money from it.

If you think you’re headed towards traditional television, your best bet is to target production companies with shows on the air that resemble what you’re doing. They’re most likely to have the contacts and experience to find the money needed. They’ll take a big percentage, but they’ll earn it.

3. Make a lot of screeners. Distribute them.

You don’t know who is going to be the crucial connection in getting your pilot to series, so there’s no benefit to keeping it a secret. If someone expresses any interest in you or the show, get them a DVD as soon as possible. Make it look professional, and follow up. Encourage people to pass it along.

I’m torn whether to recommend putting it online at the start. While it’s convenient to send a link to something, it makes it feel less exclusive. Even in 2008, there’s a sense that if something is already on the internet, it’s no longer valuable. So at least in the first wave, I’d try to keep it on physical media.

We’re at roughly the same stage of production: we finished the sound yesterday, and do final color correction this week. For me, it’s been great to explore what’s possible at budgets well below The Nines, relying on desktop software rather than specialized suites, and trying to remain agnostic about brands and workflows. If we end up doing a series, the pilot process will have taught us a lot about where to spend our money and time.

How to explain quantum mechanics

How-To, Words on the page

One of the more common challenges faced by a screenwriter is how to explain a difficult concept that’s important to your plot. For instance, in Jurassic Park, we need to understand how the dinosaurs came to be living on that island, so that when they start running amok, we’ll feel like we’re grounded in some sense of reality.

I haven’t read Michael Crichton’s novel for Jurassic Park, but if it’s anything like his others, I suspect he spent five or more pages detailing the cloning process in exhaustive detail. You can get away with that in a book. If a reader becomes bored, she can skim ahead a few paragraphs until the story begins again. But the movie viewer is hostage, ((More specifically, someone watching a movie in a theater is hostage. On video, there’s nothing to stop a viewer from zipping ahead during dull explanations.)) forced to endure whatever information is presented, whether interesting or not.

Since the boring bits of a movie are generally the first things to get trimmed out in an edit, these crucial explanatory moments are likely to get dropped unless they’re written extremely carefully, in the (often misguided) theory that no information is better than boring information. So let’s look at some Best Practices when explaining something in a script.

Keep it short. No, even shorter than that.

As the writer, you may know exactly how the Thessalactan Grid enables transdimensional travel, and why there’s a 34-second delay before the Quantifier engages. I’m sure it’s fascinating and well-reasoned. But the audience doesn’t care. Or, more precisely, the audience doesn’t need to care, because all that really matters to them is how the hero is going to get off the space station before it blows up.

HERO

How does it work?

SCIENTIST WOMAN

It creates a well in time-space that bends…

HERO

WHICH BUTTON DO I PUSH?!

Give them a guide…

While the cliché of a wise old man (think Obi-Wan or Gandalf) is rightly avoided, ((One of the appeals of the Captain Marvel mythology is that the first thing Billy Batson’s wizardly mentor does is die.)) there are smart ways to use a supporting character as explainer-of-things.

For starters, make sure the character has a function beyond exposition. The Day After Tomorrow was frustrating on many levels, but I liked that Dennis Quaid was both hero and explainer. (You could say the same about Jeff Goldblum in just about every movie.) A villain is another classic choice: since he knows what he’s trying to do, he’ll likely have a concise way of explaining it. Just avoid mustache-twirling, and “before I kill you, let me just explain…”

When possible, let the hero pursue the Answer Man, rather than vice-versa. Nothing screams exposition more than a character showing up simply to explain something. If getting an answer is an explicit goal for your hero, we at least have a sense of forward progress.

…or just let the characters figure it out for themselves

No one teaches Spider-Man how to use his powers. A large chunk of the first movie is spent watching Peter Parker explore his strength and web-shooting prowess. Similarly — but less successfully — the hero of Jumper finds he’s able to teleport, and receives no training or guidance until quite late in the movie. ((The lack of any instructor or context-setting becomes a real problem once the villains are introduced. Poor Samuel L. Jackson is forced to announce his motivations, but they’re so nonsensical that we’re forced to conclude he’s either (a) lying or (b) bat-shit crazy.))

If characters need to learn something for themselves, try to build situations that are both organic and progressive: you want to build upon simple, relatable discoveries. A great recent example is the videogame Portal (from the Orange Box), in which the player has to learn how to control a physics-defying device. While there’s a disembodied voice who seems to be offering guidance, she’s actually just a comedic menace. The real learning comes from carefully-designed levels, each with a specific (but unstated) teaching objective. ((The game is worth it just for the developer commentary. And the cake.))

In screenplay terms, this means letting the characters experiment. The first Narnia movie would have played very differently if the children had landed in the snowy woods without any sense of how to get back; the quest to return home would have felt obligatory. By letting them cross back and forth, the movie silently sets up its rule system, and lets the story chart a different path.

Take away the questions

Often, the best way to answer questions is to remove them from consideration. For instance, the make-believe science of precognition in Minority Report raised a huge number of causality issues, which you could easily spend the whole movie trying to address.

But it was meant to be a thriller, not a head-scratcher, so I added a scene in which a skeptic (Witwer) catches a glass ball just as it rolls off a table.

KNOTT

Why did you catch that?

WITWER

Because it was going to fall.

FLETCHER

You’re certain?

WITWER

Yes.

JAD

But it didn’t fall. You caught it.

Witwer smiles a little, starting to catch on.

JAD (CONT’D)

The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn’t change the fact that it was going to happen.

WITWER

It’s the same with the murders.

FLETCHER

The precogs are showing us what’s going to happen unless we stop it.

Like time travel, foreknowledge of the future is always going to involve paradoxes and gotchas. But by showing it as something visual and physical, we’ve preempted endless questions about the physics and ethics of their legal system. While we’ll learn more about how it works (by meeting the precogs), the ontological overhead has been reduced to a ball rolling across a table.

It’s like…

Such similes and metaphors can be a screenwriter’s best friends. How do you explain a margin call? “It’s like you’ve been buying stock with a credit card, and suddenly you have to pay the bill.” How are you going to catch the subatomic weapon? “Picture a net, but made of magnetic waves.” Does a clone have a soul? “Absolutely. It’s an identical twin, just born later.” Or, “No. It’s like a bad photocopy.”

Roll tape

Speaking of clones, in David Koepp’s script for Jurassic Park, he packaged all the how-we-did-it information in an animated film strip. In Dodgeball, the rules of the game are established in a black-and-white educational film about the history of the sport. And in Lost, the Dharma Initiative’s training films provide both crucial information (“keep entering the code”) and intriguing clues about what’s really going on.

Obviously, it’s not always possible or appropriate for your characters to stop what they’re doing to watch a film. But if it makes sense in context, it’s worth considering. Just keep it entertaining, and brief.

“Entertaining and brief” is good advice no matter which method you choose for presenting difficult information. Done artfully, the reader should never sense that he’s being told anything. It was just story. To that end, avoid scenes which could be summarized, “Hero learns…” That’s a tip-off that your character is listening rather seeking, observing rather than participating. “Discovering” is an action. So are “confronting,” “exploring,” and “testing.” Put your characters to work, and the audience will never realize they’re getting an explanation.

Test screening questionnaires

Film Industry, Projects, QandA, Resources, Television, The Nines

questionmarkWe have the first cut on a historical drama we eventually want to try to get on History Channel or Lifetime. It’s about a group of young Quaker Girls who create an anti-Rebel/Pro-Abolutionist Newspaper in the middle of Confederate Virginia.

We want to have a test screening to determine plot comprehension, pace, etc. Where do we find an example of a test screening card or form we can “borrow?”

— Drew
Virginia

There are several companies that do paid test screenings, and I’m sure each has a template and a standardized methodology. But you’re not interested in statistics, and don’t need to compare your movie with other historical dramas of the last five years. You just want to make your movie better. So you can safely make up a sheet of your own.

Here’s what you want to include:

  1. First question: How did they like it? You want to get a sense of (a) what changes the people who liked it feel are necessary, and (b) whether there are any changes that could win over the people who didn’t really like it. ((Often, the folks who don’t like it will never like it, but it’s worth hearing their opinion so you’ll know what to expect.))

  2. A space to list the things they liked most.

  3. A space to list the things they liked least.

  4. A space to list any moments they felt it lagged.

  5. Ask if they ever got confused — and when, and why.

  6. If you have specific areas of concern (music, narration, whatever), you can either make those open answer questions, or give some sort of 1-5 grid for circling.

  7. A big thank you at the end, because they are doing you a huge favor watching your in-progress project.

You want your viewer to be able to fill this all out in less than five minutes, so that means no more than two pages. Your best bet is to photocopy it on card stock, two sides.

In the Downloads section, I’ve included the form we used for our second test screening of The Nines. Feel free to use it as a template. ((The second question, “Given a pair of magical scissors, is there anything you’d snip out?” is the one I always wished people would ask me.))

Because you’ll ask: Yes, it was strange test screening a movie in which a significant plot point concerns the test screening process. But it was a big help.

Ultimately, you may still want or need to do a more professional test screening. For instance, if you sold it to Lifetime, they might need to know how their audience responds to it, so they can tailor their advertising appropriately. But for the early stages you’re in, I’d save your money and do it yourself.

Scripting a short film

Genres, QandA, Story and Plot, Words on the page

questionmarkI’m about to get cracking on my submission for a prestigious short screenplay competition. I wondered if you had any advice specific to writing shorts? If you were judging a shorts competition, what would you be looking for?

— Kirsty
York, UK

A short film, like a short story, can’t waste any time. You need to give us your principal characters and establish their motivations immediately. There’s very little stage-setting before you get to the inciting incident and the ensuing complications.

The hero’s fundamental problem/challenge/obstacle needs to occur by the time you get to the 1/3rd mark. So, if your short is meant to be three minutes long, the big event needs to happen on page one. If it’s a 10-minute short, it happens around page three. It’s not that you’re worried about your reader getting bored before then — if you can’t entertain us for three pages, there’s a problem — but rather that if you delay any longer, your story is going to feel lopsided: too much setup for what was accomplished.

Beyond that, I wouldn’t worry much about traditional structural expectations. Funny almost always works better than serious for a short, because there’s not enough time to create the narrative movement you expect in drama. But there are exceptions. The Red Balloon for example. And I loved Walter Salles’ chapter in Paris, je t’aime, which was simply a sad rhyme. ((That said, it probably wouldn’t have stood out in a script competition.))

So think funny, or poignant — but only if French.

I’ve put the script for my 1998 short film God up in the Downloads section. ((The short is a bonus feature on The Nines DVD.)) It’s 30 scenes in 11 pages. A lot of story happens, quickly. But many successful shorts take the opposite tack: they’re essentially just one joke, fully exploited. Todd Strauss-Schulson’s Jagg Off is that kind of short, as are most of the SNL and Will Ferrell videos you’ve seen.

For the competition you’re entering, however, I’d be careful not to submit anything that felt too much like a comedy sketch. If I were a judge, I’d be looking for a script that doesn’t seem like it could end up on Saturday Night Live. (Or the British equivalent.)

Good luck!