Technical knockout

Oh my, it's been over a month. Sorry to have neglected you but I've been busy.

I have completed ScriptFrenzy for the 6th year but only "technically". Which is to say that the Celtx generation of PDF reached 100 pages (WIN!), however in actual comic book pages I got to about 74 (not really a win). But I learned a lot, mostly that writing a graphic novel is really quite hard. Unfortunately the story began to deviate from my plan almost from the start and I wrote myself into a very dull corner. (I had called this post "Technical win" but that doesn't sound anywhere near as interesting as "Technical knockout".)

Of course, at the same time, I've been doing the Producer thing in order to shoot scene 8 of our steampunk webseries WINTER. More than that we've been going through a crowd-funding exercise and I have been sending out emails to everyone I have contact with (and that's several hundred).

And still doing the day job, of course.

But my mind is heavily focussed on ensuring that the shoot goes according to plan. There are so many things to think about from the producer side, I have been given able assistance from people who've already done it. Without them I imagine I would have been rather lost.

Anyway I'm not lost and it's going smoothly (everything crossed, touch wood).

So, give us a hand and contribute to our project at http://igg.me/p/93585?a=405734

Self, Director, and cast all available for interview :-)

(Oh, and I got a rejection from a very well-respected agency. "Clearly a very talented screenwriter..." they said. Which was nice. "...but no clear distinction from our other writers." Ha! I'm too busy to care - I don't even remember sending them a script.)

(Also went to see John Carter which was really quite good, and Battleship - it's not a deep film, but very enjoyable and does have real characters and real plot. It's also has very well integrated links to the game. I was quite impressed. It even managed to surprise me a couple of times.)

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What's on the turntable? "The Fall of the House of Usher: Arrival" by The Alan Parson's Project from "Tales of Mystery and Imagination".

Celtx forever

Hello peeps. It's been a while since my last major onslaught in this here locale.

As you may, or may not, know I write scripts using Celtx. It's a lovely bit of kit, and free. It's been around for years and is looked after by a friendly bunch of Canadians (is that a tautology?) so is totally solid as a product.

But I'm not trying to sell you Celtx. Well, perhaps I am because I can't see why anyone would want to spend any money on a screenwriting program when they don't have to.

Except there was a reason - but it's just been eliminated.

There was one, and only one, reason to use Final Draft to my mind, and that was if I was suddenly recognised as a great scriptwriter and had to work with organisations too hide-bound and bureaucratic to think that they could use anything else, I'd have to switch.

Because there's no practical way of converting from Celtx to FD and back again.

Or, at least there wasn't.

Enter, stage right, John August screenwriter and tech-savvy person with clout in the industry.

Last week he launched Fountain. All Fountain is is a way of writing scripts using just a text processor (you could use NotePad on Windows). You have to follow a certain style but if you do then it can be understood by another computer program and converted into a PDF or FDX (Final Draft's latest format).

I thought this was jolly good. Though I'd still prefer to use something that formats on screen.

But this week John released the killer Highland which is an application that can convert between FDX, Fountain and PDFs. Yup. John has an application that can take a PDF and turn them into Fountain, and from Fountain you can go to FDX (or PDF).

Which means I no longer need to think about changing to FD.

All that's needed now is for the Celtx team to modify their text importer to recognise Fountain and we're set.

Some people are bound to whine about potential script theft being made easier. Well John does have something to say about that in the blog. I'm not going to discuss it since I agree with him completely.

But what it means for me is that I can go on using Celtx forever.

And that makes me happy.

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What's on the turntable? Unfortunately nothing but recently I have mostly been listening to Nathalie Nordnes.

It all started when... How I got into screenwriting

I have been remiss. It was almost two weeks ago that Michelle tagged me for a meme, for "that moment where you decided that this was something you could/should/would do".

I did write a lot about this back here - nearly two years ago. Gosh. (You could also click the inspirations tag to see everything related.)

In those blogs back then I traced my writing career from rubbish SF novels through poetry but didn't quite get to the screenwriting. So here it is, with contributory factors included to add impressive wordage.

When Blake's 7 had it's final episode I wrote a synopsis of a follow-up story that would "wrap it all up", which was the closest I got to writing a script but I didn't really conceive the actual "writing of a script" in that, it was just "writing a proper ending" to me.

It was 1992 (I think) that I started my epic fantasy novel. On and off it took me ten years to finish, I was not slaving over it day in day out. I didn't suffer at all. But that year also saw the birth of The Daughter. At some point in that time she decided that she wanted to be an actress, I think it had something to do with Buffy and the fact she began Jujitsu at age 5 - she wanted to be an action star (and still does).

But somewhere around 2004 (I think) I was feeling pressure to write something - something we could actually shoot, a short Buffy-esque story to suit her talents. I believe I wrote it on a Word processor and studied websites to get the right format.

So I wrote it. We shot, edited and packaged it with the assistance of family (brother-in-law did most of it). It is never seeing the light of day.

And that was the beginning of the beginning, but not the end of the beginning.

That was also the time that Buffy ceased it's UK broadcast, it was over. And I thought to myself, you know, what if I created Buffy for the UK? Which is where Monsters began, initially just a series bible, the basic concepts, I thought that would be enough - like my Blake's 7 synopsis. And I left it at that, wrote no script for a couple of years.

Until one day I realised that it should be written. It was a part the Daughter could play so I researched screenwriting in detail, found Celtx and began in earnest.

If you want to read the first 10 pages of Monsters as it is now, you can here (click "My work and credits"). And the Daughter did get to play the part, at least in the scenes we shot, which you can watch here.

For me becoming a screenwriter was a process that took 30 years, from rubbish novels through successful poetry, magazine writing and editing, and better novel writing.

Now comes the hard part, who to tag for the meme: Piers, Jason, and Phil.

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What's on the turntable? Not a sausage.

In the cards

Bill Martell, in a recent blog but also in his Script Secrets, talks about one of his writing techniques when it comes to writing features: having got the story idea, setting and main characters sorted out he writes ideas for scenes on index cards.

He doesn't write the ideas in any particular order, he just writes out lots and lots of scene ideas - things that could happen in the story. Doesn't even matter if they are self-contradictory, the key point is to just write out lots of scenes - more than you need.

Having done that he starts to organise them into the film structure. He uses the cards so he can shift them around easily. There will be cards that he doesn't use at all in the end. (As an additional factor he likes to have something cool in each scene - doesn't have to be a big cool thing, it can be a little cool thing - but always something.)

So I thought, for Clones, I would try it. But I used Celtx instead, which has an Index Card facility.

I wrote scene ideas, one in each card and just kept adding. After about 20 minutes I had everything I could think of for the first Clones episode, in no particular order. Then I spent another 20 minutes putting them into an order that felt right. Threw some away, and added some others to link between the ones I had.

Then I read it through and added detail. Finally compiled it into a single text document (manually, there's no feature for that) and I had the skeleton of the treatment for the first episode. In just one hour.

Neat.

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What's on the turntable? "Souvenir from China" by Jean Michel Jarre from "Aero" (courtesy of Spotify)

Celtx Studios

Collaboration is a nice friendly word, all cuddly. It's chocolate where a word like "organisation" is dry flour.

Unfortunately - just like the uncomfortable fact that if you have decided you want people to buy your writing skills you're a business (whether you like it or not) - another uncomfortable fact is that if you are working with other people to produce some end result you are now an "organisation". Calling it "collaboration" doesn't make it any easier - it could make it harder because you may think that it's something that it's not.

The efficiency of any organisation is proportional to the level of communication between the individual team members. And that's two-way communication, not just dictats from on high. Regardless of whether it's a behemoth of a blockbuster or a couple of mates with a camera.

If you work in the same location as your team mates you can chat, discuss and whatever, the person you need to speak to will generally be on hand. But even then it can be hard, there are misunderstandings as well as people's lives getting in the way.

Distributed organisations are a thousand times worse. If the people you're working with are not around you, but scattered across the globe, or even just the country, the level of communication drops, the opportunities for misunderstandings increase. Idle gossip can become a serial killer's knife slashing through the body of your organisation.

So if you are operating a distributed team in an effort to produce some sort of film, you have truly got your work cut out - you have to keep the communication level high, and keep the thing moving.

Celtx is a free screenwriting tool and production tool. From one computer you can write the script, and perform most of the breakdowns you need to organise the actual production. Which is great if you're just one person, but organisations aren't, they're more than one. What can you do then?

This is where Celtx Studio comes in. Celtx acts as a front-end to a powerful online application which not only stores your project in a central location it allows you to create a set of user accounts that other people can use to log in and work with the project.

So you, as the writer, can create the screenplay, the director can produce a shooting script, or a shot list, or whatever. the producer can use the system to assign locations, actors, props to a calendar and have automated call sheets and what not.

All saved in this central location, all available to the people that are given the accounts.

Celtx Studio is not free but the entry level is not expensive ($5/month) which gives you four additional accounts; $15/month for 15 accounts, and so on: $1/month per seat basically.

Using a little ingenuity it's possible to create a communication system using Celtx alone - use specific documents for communicating. Putting things in writing is better than phone calls which are too ephemeral.

That's the theory. We shall see how it works out in practice...

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What's on the turntable? "Soil Festivities, Movement 3" by Vangelis

Done it!

So, this evening my Internet was completely failing to do anything useful. (As I am not at home we are, of course, back to Rubbish Internet(tm) except it's been okay, until this evening.)

And there was nothing on the TV.

So I analysed future probabilities - what if my Internet didn't come back? I must finish the script tonight so that I can upload it tomorrow at work to be sure that I win ScriptFrenzy (I hate failing - especially when it's just words on a page).

So I did.

I wrote the final action scenes involving lots of people getting shot to death.

It was also one of the more poignant scenes in the whole script - plus lots of little twisty turny twisty-turny bits. It all came out in the wash very cleanly, every plot point resolved, everything rounded off nicely.

Not as quickly as that zenith of action writing Die Hard which resolves about eight plot lines in 30 seconds at the end. A masterpiece.

Now Celtx has to send the file to its online PDF creator - which meant I had no idea how many pages I'd written. I needed six.

But come 10:30pm my Internet was back and Celtx told me I'd written 101 pages (not including the title page). I'm a winner! Part of the deal with ScriptFrenzy is that they engage in charitable activities, and I always give - but after I complete the task.

My third ScriptFrenzy win - 101 pages in 15 days. Cool.

Now I have to let it compost for a while before taking an objective look and ripping it to shreds.

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What's on the turntable? "No Expectation Boulevard" by Vangelis from "Bladerunner CD3"

Celtx 2.0 Released

Yes indeedy.

They done some nice work to it but now they've added versioning in their Celtx Studios.

What the buggery does that mean?

It's like this: Let's say you write a draft of your script. Then you write the second draft. The first draft still exists on the Celtx system.

Now you think - what if I completely get rid of that character? Well, you can. The previous versions exist PLUS you can back to an earlier version while still keeping the one with the removed character.

You can compare them to see where the actual differences lie, cut and paste between create as many different "branches" of your script as you want and so on.

But remember Celtx isn't just a screenwriting system (it's also an AV writing system, Comic writing ...) but more than that. It's a complete movie production control system. And every element of it has the same version control.

It does all sort of clever stuff that you need when you produce a film of any length - down to scheduling, prop lists and call sheets, and other stuff you need that I don't know about. All integrated so that your work is kept to a minimum. It also does collaboration so you can have different people working on different aspects of the whole project. Or you can have multiple authors on the same script.

What else? Oh yes, Celtx Studios allows you to create web "views" of your project so that you can give other people access to see parts of your project (like the script perhaps). But still maintain security on your whole project.

The downloadable Celtx software is still free. The new versioning (et al) option, through Celtx Studios, costs $50 per year. I'll pay that just for the versioning, and these guys have been doing all this work for free for a very long time, I don't begrudge them a subscription.

I don't get a commission.

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What's on the turntable? "Song for Sharon" by Joni Mitchell from "Hejira"

Blue in the face...

...and all the way to the tail. Including whiskers.

I've been prevaricating a bit. Spent the afternoon researching on how to write comics scripts (note the use of "comics" to ensure the clear distinction between a script that is funny and a script for a comic - this is important).

And then I tried writing some. Pretty nice actually (and Celtx does it all for you). Considering I never really want to be a Director it's also important to understand that, when writing comics scripts, that's exactly what you are because you select the shot to be used in each panel. (Of course the illustrator might suggest something else, and may well be right, but it starts with you.)

My illustrator, Rob, reads a lot more comics than I do but when I suggested one particular idea he said "nobody's doing that, it sounds great!". Gosh.

My Google Reader had run out of things to read so I thought I'd have a look at some of the suggestions, after rejecting a couple, I found "Blue Cat". Now I know many of you already read him but he's new to me. (I say "him" but no gender is indicated unless an inability to make coconut macaroons is a specifically male trait. Or indeed the ability to make biscuits encourages ignorant secretaries to accuse him of being gay.)

Anyway.

I have been telling everyone that I think the reason Demons was such drivel was mainly because the director is clueless and probably hates "genre".

I was very pleased to discover that from the insider's view, as provided by James and his blue cat, I'm right. Not necessarily in this particular, but certainly in general.

I didn't see the Demons finale but have been briefed on how they, once again, ripped a zombie show from the life of a script with potential.

Back to now: So this evening I want to complete a couple of pages of the Monsters comics script (hm, perhaps I should just call it OGN - "Original Graphic Novel", see I'm getting the lingo) and send those off to Rob and see if it makes sense to him. There's obviously going to be a settling in period, we were being very careful over e-mail saying things like "is it alright with you if I take a directorial stance" and "I don't want to squash any creative vibes but I think..." - have to see how it goes.

Then tomorrow I shall get back to Unit X. I really must finish this first draft, yes I know I said that yesterday.

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What's on the turntable? "Gavotte & Variations" by Sky from "Sky 2"

Hidden talent

In this instance I am not talking about you, gentle (talented) reader.

I have been in That Birmingham meeting and talking with friends (desperately trying to persuade one of them to start writing, he's a clever chap, I bet he could do it).

Then there's my mate Chris in Birmingham. Chris is a bassist, generally acknowledged as one of the best bass players in the country, he has headlined with Jules Holland among others. People come to him when they want a classy bass line on pretty much any type of music. His story is an odd one - apparently he decided one day, in his late teens, that he wanted to play the bass guitar. So he disappeared into his bedroom, and re-emerged a year later, having practised all day every day, a virtuoso bass player.

Despite his current success he's looking for new challenges and asked me if I knew of any other paying gigs for musicians - he's like to compose as well. So I'll be sending him a list of ideas, and if you have any ideas I'll be happy to pass them along.

For a while now I've been wondering whether I could make Monsters into a comic - well, okay, I knew I could and I wanted to. The only stumbling block was an illustrator - I do have contacts who know illustrators but these are professionals and would most likely want paying. How do you find a professional quality illustrator who likes your stuff and is willing to work for nothing?

There's this bloke Rob. I've known him for a few years, his day job involves working with people who need help. He's a jolly good chap. Turns out that Rob used to work as a professional illustrator, the type who says, when you say what you're after, "What style?" That kind of professional.

And he's love to help me turn Monsters into a comic. I've given him a quick brief and we're going to look at styles - he even asked whether I wanted colour or mono. Excellent question, I love professionals, since I'm planning for us to make money out of this, it'll be mono. (Means I can create downloadable PDFs that people can pay for and print out themselves without a huge colour printer bill.)

As has been mentioned I use Celtx for screenwriting. It just so happens that Celtx also has a comic-writing option. So I shall be exploring that.

But I mustn't get too side-tracked. I still need to finish draft 1 of Unit X, might manage that tomorrow.

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What's on the turntable? "Cascade" by Gordon Giltrap from "Perilous Journey"

Using Celtx #2

I did a thing about using Celtx back here. Where I showed that celtx was so easy to use that my 11 year old son could do it after minimal instruction.

I don't really see myself as an advocate of Celtx, it's just that it's pretty good and it's free. (The free thing is fairly convincing.)

Anyway after my flurry of "must write some words" in my Air script, I got down to some more serious planning. As I have mentioned my workspace (such as it is) does not include a corkboard with index cards. But that doesn't mean that I don't use them.

On the contrary, up to now, I've used a piece of software called Storylines which is quite nice, but duplicates a lot of the functionality of Celtx without actually really being able to write a script with it. (You can but it's not straightforward.) And it costs money.

The latest version of Celtx integrated virtual index cards with its main script writing section which means you can plot out your story on "index cards" and have the scenes appear in the script area. And vice versa. You can colour the index cards for the various plot lines. Anyway as previously determined a picture is better than a thousand words, so here are some pictures:

So this was the bit of script that I threw together last night. No comments please, first draft, demonstration purposes only and I already have changes in mind.

The extra scenes were not created on this page but on the next one...



This is the index card page in the "notes" setting which means it's showing the notes that I made about every scene. I have taken the liberty of obscuring my actual notes.

Notice how the scene headings on the left are coloured with the plotline colouring.



This is the scene-content version of the same index card page so you can see what you've written. Flip between them at a click.








I have to say that I really liked the way that works out and I'll definitely be using that feature again in future.

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What's on the turntable? "Samba Pa Ti" by Santana from their "Greatest Hits" album. Even if you don't know Santana (Latin-American rock) you probably know this tune from the breakthrough M&S adverts of a couple of years ago.

That "Once Upon A Time" Moment

It's funny really, ever since finishing "Monsters" I've been rather ambivalent towards the next piece of writing. No rush, not really important, I can take it or leave it. Stuff like that.

Of course there was the non-starter of "One Night in Paris", which didn't help. And I sit around pontificating about how I've been a professional writer for over 20 years and blank pages don't scare me.

Then there was the slow build up of "Air" with that bit of work I did last week and the excitement last night of getting the structure straight.

All this time I've had the opening scene in my head. I've known exactly how this story begins, the images vivid in my mind.

I did a little more work this evening on the plot lines. I had realised my descriptions of the plots were glib. A protagonist is only as good as the intentions of the antagonist. You make the protagonist bigger by making the antagonist bigger. My descriptions were vague when it came to what the antagonist actually intended. So I got those tightened up.

And finally the force of water behind the dam became too much. I couldn't "not write" any longer.

So I launched Celtx, sorted out the various options that I wanted, prepared the title page, and saved the otherwise empty file up to celtx.com (a backup that's guaranteed to be off-site and, depending where you are, in a completely different country).

And then I began to write the opening scene, and a shiver of delight ran through me as the images began to flow. I was excited again, I haven't felt that way in quite a while.

... and then I discovered that what I had been imagining as the first scene wasn't the first scene after all but something completely different.

Writing's full of surprises.

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What's on the turntable? "Heads we're dancing" by Kate Bush from "Sensual World"

Parisian Nights

So, I've just finished my first set of corrections on Draft 1 of "Une Nuit a Paris". I spent the train journey up north on Friday reading through a hard copy, editing and making notes.

And the funny bits made me laugh, which is a good start. The big question is: will it make anyone else laugh. I hope so. I was quite impressed with it considering it only had the bare bones of planning and was written on the very tight schedule of ScriptFrenzy when I had fallen well behind. (Well, there's no one else to be impressed at the moment, writers should be impressed by their own work.)

Then I spent the journey back down south on Sunday and some time this evening making the corrections. It's not a finished draft as there are some facts about a gun that need to be brought out much earlier so they can be forgotten which will make the climax meatier.

I was a little concerned about the clash of genres, it's a rom-com/thriller. The only thing I could think of to compare it to was the Audrey Hepburn/Cary Grant classic "Charade" which also takes place in Paris. Not that I'm suggesting it's as good as that. I wish!

But in Charade the thriller sections are very definitely not funny - while the funny bits definitely are funny. And that's what I hope I've achieved.

The read-through of Monsters will be going ahead in two weeks (ohmigod) I have to sort out how to share out the parts (about 42 speaking parts in total) between 12 people except I don't even know what the male/female split is yet. But I think Celtx's production facilities might be able to help. Then I have to spend a fortune getting at least 6 copies (more would be better) printed up by this Saturday.

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What's on the turntable? "Joanni" by Kate Bush from the "A Sea of Honey" CD from the Aerial collection. Just to be awkward Kate called her comeback double CD by the name "Aerial" and then named each of the CDs as well. Kate Bush is my age and I have always adored her music ever since I was blown away by "Wuthering Heights". She stopped making records to have a normal life and be a mother while her son Bertie grew up. Anyone who also likes Rolf Harris will find him on this album, painting.

Using Celtx

Now that was an interesting weekend.

My son, who will be 11 in August, is changing schools. As part of his end-of-Primary activities he wrote down a "things he wants to do" and the sweetheart put, among other things, "scriptwriter" like his dear old Dad. Perhaps he should have qualified it with "successful screenwriter".

His school did "Alice in Wonderland" as their end of year production, he got to be the 5 of Hearts but that's another story. Their "big writing" for the end of the year had to be something based on "Alice".

The boy decided he would write a movie script. Of course being an 11 year old boy what he likes are guns and action. There's not a lot of that in Wonderland but there's nothing wrong with his imagination and he soon melded an action plot with a classic children's tale, involving the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, world domination, monsters and an ex-soldier. Cool.

So I proceeded to do a script consultation with my son. Script consultancy = "Help the writer find the story."

Naturally his initial ideas were way too big for 10 pages. There was a rather fraught period as he got upset with having to cut back his ideas. So I told him to be a professional and just do it. (I can be so mean.) And he did.

He came back with a compromise that simplified the plot, drew together certain bits that, in his original version, had been separate. And, of course, it was much improved. And he was once again happy. I had him outline the main scenes - just a note about what each of them was, a few words to describe them. Then I had him go through each one and find the conflict. He already understood that conflict could be emotional as well as physical - he explained it to me.

I have to say he's seems like a natural. Point him in the right direction, say go ... and he went.

Then I introduced him to Celtx. Both my wife and I are highly experienced techies, we have computers the way other people have TVs. If nothing else our children are highly computer literate. Still I wasn't entirely sure if he could handle it.

I gave him a quick demonstration, explained about sluglines, characters and dialogue (I told him to ignore parentheticals), how they were used and how Celtx automatically moved from one to another.

Then I left him to it. No problem, he had the first scene sorted within half an hour.

What really got me was that he was asking me all the right questions. I loved it when he said "Is a helicopter INT or EXT?" Brilliant. On dialogue he called me over to ask "How do I make this less corny?" Fantastic. I'd already covered the concept of starting a scene as late as possible and getting out as quick as possible. He'd absorbed that as well.

So, after about 5 hours he had his script. Poor kid. His parents are both editors. And he got the red pen treatment, but he's used to it. We always explain it's not personal and how everyone needs an editor.

Was it a good script? Well, for an 11 year old who'd never written a film script in his life before it was amazing. I am biased, but not that biased. (Another thing our poor kids have to put up with, parents without rose-tinted glasses.) But frankly I was proud, he did quite a job - and the dialogue was funny in places, deliberate humour.

Of course, now I'm concerned. My 17 year old daughter got her fiction work published in real books (when she was 14) before I did (I haven't yet). I now face the horrible prospect that my son might get scripts produced before me.

In fact he was so impressed by the full feature set of Celtx (all the production tools) it wouldn't surprise me if he made them himself. Maybe I'll have to ask him for a writing gig.

Oh yes, and about the parentheticals I told him to ignore. I did tell him when to use them, and he did! Just the once. Little rat.

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What's on the turntable? "Teo Torriatte" by Queen from "A Day at the Races"

Celtx at version 1

The free scriptwriting and film production package "Celtx" has reached version 1. I've been using it for over a year, and I like it a lot though it's unlikely I'll ever use all the film production facilities.

It allows you to create screenplays, stage plays, radio plays, comic scripts and AV scripts. It's intuitive to use and allows output as PDF. It also allows collaboration and sharing of scripts online with as many or as few people as you like. It will print scripts as either A4 or foolscap.

On the production side it generates all the sort of stuff needed by the various departments in as much detail as you need, depending on how big your production is.

It's not perfect, my biggest problem is that the PDF formatting is not absolutely identical to the on-screen formatting so in a feature script there's a few pages discrepancy between how many pages you think you have, and how many you do have.

But this is not too serious. And it's free!

If you haven't plumped for a specific scriptwriting application, plump for this one.

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What's on the turntable? I'm listening to an unabridged reading of "Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham. What a genius.