New blogger on the ... block

(That title really doesn't work very well.)

Please give a warm welcome, ladles and jellyspoons, to Chris Payne who has entered the scribosphere, or is that the directosphere?

Chris was the Director on Monsters, so I have good reason to give him space here. He took my words and turned them into pictures - moving pictures at that. Clever bloke.

On the writing front, (fairly sure I haven't mentioned this) I have finally restarted work on Tec my UK private investigator series. And the first thing I did was look over the notes I'd been making for improving characters - written three months ago.

There was one character, who would be the lead's side-kick, and my notes were a bit thin on the ground. I didn't really know what to do with this character.

So I killed him.

Ripped bodily from the story - which now looks cleaner and less cluttered. I did this with Monsters, there was a love interest who had little other value, he appeared in about six scenes. He and his scenes were cut. It was so much better afterwards.

You remove dialogue that's unnecessary, remove actions that are unnecessary, remove scenes that are unnecessary, remove sequences that are unnecessary, remove unnecessary characters, unnecessary sub-plots, unnecessary gimmicks - and sometimes the entire script is unnecessary. Dump it.

Oh, Chris and I are discussing a new project, it has a code-name you will have seen before on this blog: Winter. This story was one of the first I ever worked on in detail though I think I only ever wrote one draft of a script (lost on the hard drive of another computer).

Then it became the basis for a pitch for a BBC web project last year - it was unusual, and was something that had never been attempted before. But although it was claimed the BBC was looking for something original and different (and it was agreed that this was indeed original and different), the truth was they really only wanted something like that if it was the same as everything else.

(Or the pitch was complete rubbish as an idea, this is possible.)

Anyway Winter is the new project and, unlike Monsters, will be a complete entity. Very early stages, so I'll say no more than that.

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What's on the turntable? "Die Mensch Machine" by Kraftwerk from "Minimum-Maximum"