Don't read this, read that

I don't want to repeat myself so read this:

Screaming Pitch

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What's on the turntable? John Michel Jarre "Equinoxe"

On being a producer

I thought I'd share some thoughts on my experiences, thus far, in being a Producer.

What a Producer does is lead. They're the leader. It's true that the word has become devalued by excessive use in the film industry with all sorts of "producers" but ultimately the Producer is the one that makes it happen.

Which is where I was at about 9 months ago with the webseries WINTER. Or rather that's exactly where we weren't. No producer. Nothing happening. Until I went "if I don't do something this is never going to happen".

And that's the first step, you have to decide to make it happen.

But when you make that decision you become responsible. And if you're responsible that means things can come back and bite you. If you're worried about getting bitten I suspect being a Producer is not a good gig for you.

Personally I gave up worrying about that sort of thing a long time ago. I've made huge mistakes in my life, and I'm still here, living, breathing and having fun.

Get educated

So what comes after making the decision? I'd recommend some education, you have to make the decision first, then you can find out what it's all about. (Personally I think doing it the other way around is prevarication - trying to find out if you'll like it before making the decision is the behaviour of a person who's worried about making mistakes. You will make mistakes, get over it.)

But once you have decided, you do need to know more. What is a Producer responsible for?

That's easy: Everything except the creative decisions. The money, the crew, the cast, the food, the transport, the scheduling, the equipment. It's the Producer's job to ensure everything is in place so that the creative process can happen with the minimum of distraction. So the creative people can do their creative thing without having to worry about lunch.

But you know, I'm also the Writer. I created the original script. Doesn't that mean I have input?

As the Producer? No way. Yes, a Producer needs to control the budget and that may require negotiation with the Director and the Writer (if you haven't got the budget for a free-running sequence through the mall they have to think of something else) - the Director is not allowed to waste money. But the Producer is the one who puts everything in place so the creation can happen.

You have to get the idea of hats. Which one are you wearing? Each hat is different and you can't wear more than one at a time. I'm the Producer or the Writer. But not at the same time.

Sorry, back the point. Education. Well I looked up this guy Eric Sherman and he has a seminar he gave on DVD all about being a Producer (which he is) it's not cheap but it is valuable.

I've bought books, though they tend to be of variable quality: Some are out of date, some are purely US in viewpoint, some aren't worth the paper they're printed on.  To be honest with Eric Sherman's DVD I think I had everything I could get without actually doing the job. The books reinforced certain areas but didn't add anything fundamental. I suppose the main thing they did provide is a way to list everything that was needed.

Essential quality

There is one essential quality a Producer needs: the ability to handle the situations that inevitably arise which demand instant handling. And when I use the word handle I mean "resolve". That does not include panicking, shouting, screaming, running in circles, hiding in the toilet or anything which is simply: resolve.

At our shoot back in May the first thing that happened was the make-up girl called in to say there'd been a family emergency. That was not a serious problem, we could manage without in this instance. Then we discovered one of the leads had no costume. The wardrobe person also failed to turn up and even if she had she admitted she hadn't got all the costume together. (The other lead's costume had been acquired separately.)

It's a period piece and costume is critical.

So we looked at various solutions, phoned someone who was an expert in the period, and with their help figured out how we could create a costume from gear bought from Primark plus a brooch. And borrowed the Afghan shawl from the Cinematographer.

We lost two hours. But caught up by the end of the day.

Since then

We did the one-day shoot on a shoestring - for expensive shoes. Almost immediately after we'd finished my attention became fixated on the full shoot of twelve days in a studio. How much is it going to cost? (A lot.) And where's the money going to come from? And I have a solution to that.

It comes down to this decision thing again. You have to make the decision first. "We are going to make this webseries to professional standards."

The second part is How? Anyone who starts with how and hasn't made the decision will almost certainly fail. If you make the decision then the how will come to you eventually.

It was the Director who put me on the right track for our solution: he said why don't we try to get actor A? I thought that was a good idea but also A might be difficult to get (I'd never dealt with agents before,  and this guy is currently quite ... significant).

So I thought on it: "But if we got actor B first, who's a really good friend of A but nowhere near as big that might give us some extra leverage to get A - and B would be a good attachment in the first place anyway".

See, when you decide to be a Producer you think like a Producer - in terms of packaging and attachments in order to get the finance needed to make the project. If you think you're a Producer and haven't had this change in thought processes, you haven't really made the decision.

Anyway we have been able to attach B. And now I'm working on A. What's it like dealing with agents? Fine, they're human beings too, just understand they want to get the best deal they can for their client.

So when I have A and everything's in writing we move ahead with financing.

There is one little lie you may come across: "things take time". I can tell you this: they don't have to.

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What's on the turntable? "Mobocaster" by Tangerine Dream

Brilliant

It has to be.

Over the past few weeks I've been swapping my writer's hat with my producer's hat for our web series WINTER. And I've talked to people about it, trying to encourage them to join our merry little band of pre-production heroes. (The AD and composer from MONSTERS are on-board and we have two CGI peeps so far.)

And over that time something's started to nag me.

Back in the 1980s the concept of "desktop publishing" was born. The completely new idea that a person could, with a personal computer, design and print leaflets, brochures, magazines, letterheads and a myriad other printed paper products. Hooray! Democratisation of print processes. No more slaves to the designer.

What happens: Crap designs. Everywhere. Graphic design takes training, to do it well requires talent.

And now the Internet and affordable cameras have meant the democratisation of movie-making. Yayyy!

What happens? Crap web series.

Of course there are some good ones, but these are mostly produced by professionals. Because every element of film production takes training and the ability to do it well needs talent.

I'll say here and now that I believe the main problem with web series is the writer-director. Because if they are the same person there's no objective view. "I've written this, I think it's great, I'm going to make it." And they do, and it's not great at all. Maybe it could have been great if it had received proper development.

And then there's WINTER. I wrote it. I'm not directing it but I am producing it. This is very different because producers have to be able to sell. Sell themselves, sell the project. To be able to do that you really have to believe in it.

So, do I believe in WINTER? Yes. Do I think it's ready to really sell to someone. Well, no. You see, right now it's good. Script-wise it's certainly better than 99% of the web series floating about.

But it's not brilliant - not yet. It's nearly brilliant. It needs that extra fillip to push it into brilliant.

It might seem strange, ego-centric or whatever, that I should describe something I wrote as nearly brilliant. But it's a matter of viewpoint. Right now I'm not wearing the writer's hat, I'm wearing the producer's hat. And the producer says "This is pretty damn good - now let's make it brilliant."

Because it has to be.

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What's on the turntable? Nowt.

A word from our sponsor.

Over on the Voidships channel the latest blog about WINTER.

(I've been studying about the producer-ing business - look, ma, I'm a hyphenate.)

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What's on the turntable? "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits

The Mystery of Suspense with a side-order of Sex

Writing 101.

The concept called Dramatic Irony sounds complicated. It isn't.

It's when the audience knows something one or more of the important characters in a story doesn't know. As in Hitchcock's bomb under the table[1], if the audience doesn't know it's there and it explodes, that's a surprise. If the audience does know it's there and it doesn't explode... the fact the audience knows is dramatic irony, the effect it causes is suspense. Though it only causes suspense if it's got consequences, the bigger the consequences the better the suspense.

Bombs generally have consequences.

Suspense is a very good thing, it keeps the audience on the edge of their seat. It enforces their participation and without audience participation a story is worthless.

Mystery is the opposite of suspense, being just something the audience - and one or more important characters also doesn't know. Hopefully the audience wants to know, but they don't and the story hinges on it, then it fails.

I'm getting interested in this stuff because I've nearly finished Winter and I'm heading into the "let's analyse the story scene by scene using screenwriting tools and see how we can make it better" stage.

In Winter I'm reasonably happy with the suspense factor - even though it's based on a mystery. The audience knows that the protagonist has a major secret, it's a mystery although it's almost certainly something bad (good things are seldom any use). The audience also knows that this secret is going to make something bad happen to one of the other characters. Eventually.

And I wrote my first sex scene which was an interesting experience. It only occupies half a page (this is a script after all) but it does the job it needs to do.

But what's even more interesting was how to get the two characters from strangers to making love in 30 pages. For that I did some research and found the 12 Steps to Intimacy[2] which, like all things, are guidelines rather than rules.

Have you written your first sex scene yet? How was it for you?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themes_and_plot_devices_in_the_films_of_Alfred_Hitchcock

[2] http://terryodell.blogspot.com/2010/03/12-steps-to-intimacy.html

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What's on the turntable? "Spare Some Love" by Renaissance from "Prologue"

When I say "Oh dear"...

I realise my empty last posting needs some explanation. I mean I could delete it but where would the fun be in that?

Fun? Not feeling very fun-ny today I must admit. This is not because anything bad is happening in my life, it isn't. Just had a bad night a combination of the weather suddenly turning hot and humid (just for a couple of hours), people just down the way having friends round and making just enough noise to prevent sleep, cats deciding to take objection to other cats, and our dog taking exception to the cats taking exception to each other.

Very sad. So I'm tired, hence the unfunny feeling.

The "Oh dear" was because I was going to make a comment about how I had completely failed to make any further posting about the London Screenwriters Festival. But the inter-tubes in the place I'm staying decided to behave badly and that was as far as I got. Except I managed to post it.

Not very exciting at all.

London Screenwriters Festival

I went to others of the sessions of course, nothing truly major stuck in my mind. Ellin Stein's session on editing down scripts was interesting enough; and the one on a new way of analysing scripts was passingly interesting, though the speaker was primarily selling his products - and his clientele is directors rather than writers.

I can sum up what he said: The key moments of a script are when a character perceives something different in their environment.

I think, on the whole, it's a valid tool for directors, is it a valid tool for writers? No idea. I'll have to try it out.

I had a go at the Pitch Factor on Saturday evening. It was fun and I was rubbish - but considering I wrote the pitch on the back a cigarette packet half a  minute before speaking that comes as no surprise. (I'm lying professionally here. It was a note pad, and I wrote it half an hour before.)

I also had a Speed Pitch session booked, which was also a bit poo. But I was similarly unprepared. No surprise there then.

I went to the Writing Fantastical TV session which had a good panel and the overwhelming advice was - smuggle it in. Of course, as I read elsewhere, it's ludicrous if TV commissioners say "oh that last SF TV series really bombed we won't do any more of those". After all, do they, when a cop show bombs, say "We won't do any more cop shows?" No, they don't.

There was also the Writing for Comics, another good panel and something I knew nothing about, so I was suitably enlightened. Interesting.

And, of course, I met new people and generally had a good time. So I'll no doubt do it again.

Family Drama

So, the Boy has been doing exams (his school push them through early GCSEs) so it's been a bit a stressful time for him. But he has come out the other side safely.

For the drama exam (part of English Language) they had to write their own 5min script based on Saving Private Ryan. Scripts is something we know something about so he got the job in his groups. (Actually it makes no sense, this is a drama exam so he gets nothing for the writing - surely they should just give them a script?)

Anyway, without going into detail, there was much to-ing and fro-ing with this script. He wasn't sure what to do, so we discussed conflict in scenes. His first version barely made 90 seconds. Then he got something sorted that was long enough. Then he found that his part was too short so had to add a completely new sequence into the scene, but we discussed what could be done and came up with something he liked and he wrote it.

I'm currently working away from home during the week so the Teacher (okay, that's potentially confusing - when I say "the Teacher" I mean my wife, not his schoolteacher) helped him clean up the spelling and grammar. And then she wanted to put some additional instructions into the action lines and the Boy says "No, mum, you can't do that, that's director stuff."

There humour. (For the sake of completeness, yes, I know, in stage work the writer is god, so "director stuff" would be fine - but that wouldn't be funny.)

Anyway it all went off well and he got the equivalent of an A grade for the drama part - I'd have given him the same for the writing, but I'm a bit biased.

Winter Blog

I am also instigating yet another blog - just a sucker for punishment - this one is specifically about writing the web series Winter which is going very nicely and I have some observations to make (well, I think they're interesting - others may differ.)

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What's on the turntable? "The Third Hoorah" by Jethro Tull from "Warchild"

A Quick Guide to Webseries

This week I have mostly been watching webseries.

I have observed that, with (very) few exceptions, webseries have the following qualities, in order of frequency:

1. Bad scripts.
2. Bad acting.
3. Bad production values.
4. Bad music.

Any combination of the above, but the first two are the winners by a huge margin and generally go together.

I have been doing this as research since I'm writing one.

The exceptions are created by people who already in the industry.

Comedy helps but only if it's actually funny.

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What's on the turntable? "Man in the Moon" by Yes from "Open Your Eyes"