It was a cold dark night, snow was softly falling on the ground outside... in March! Two figures sat in the corner of a dimly lit public house, papers spread across the table in front of them. A solitary half full pint glass with two straws was being supped by one of them. (We are aspiring film makers... cant afford a pint each). The scruffy, unshaven figure turns to his colleague and announces, "What a great idea, and we can blog it as well"
Hi guys! Thanks for reviewing this blog which is going to be all about how we are going to make this short film. We are looking for as many of you to contribute and advise as we make "Together Forever" (Working Title). It is a short film about a young boy who is coming to terms with the split of his parents and goes to extraordinary lengths to prevent it and keep his family together forever. The idea came from a short story Peter put together nearly 7 years ago. At that time we both knew we wanted to make it into a movie, now here we are going to try and make that happen. All of our challenges, successes and failings are going to be openly published so we can learn from our mistakes, request a helping hand and hope the large community of aspiring film makers can share in our experiences and learn from them too.
So the first challenge, how do we turn a short story into a workable screenplay?
Neither of us have written a screenplay before and to be honest, all those images and pictures in our heads of camera angles, set design, characters and dialogue, had to be put on paper, but how? Well the first thing we would recommend is research, if you don't know where to start there will be someone out there who does and in our case it was a book by Blake Snyder titled Save The Cat! This book is an excellent place to start, a very insightful and easy read. From the outset it dispenses with the waffle and takes you straight to what you need to do. At the time of writing we are still trying to nail down a few elements of our screenplay but this book has already evolved our story and the suggested rules in Blake's book has got us to really focus on our screenplay and probably changed it for the better. There will probably several references to that book in our posts
Check out Blake Snyder website here
We bought the book form here
O.K. What now?
Well we had our idea, with Blake's book we discovered some of the screenwriting process, techniques and rules, but how do we physically present it. My god... this is a minefield of abbreviations and yet more rules. Well, I am almost 100% sure our presentation of the screenplay is going to be wrong in most ways, we have concentrated on the content and still to learn the acceptable format. I think this area is another one for our book list! However, there is a piece of free software available from Celtx which has gone to make the process a little easier. It is very intuitive to use and helps keep all those notes we have made in one place. Notes on character, scenes, sound fx and set dressing etc. are all stored in the Master Catalogue with templates to add additional notes to each individual element, ready to be completed and printed as and when required. Although the free version is missing some of those tools and extras you wished you had, for the time being this is suiting us just fine. Once we have released our film we will publish up an example of what our script looked like.
You can download Celtx from here
Well that is probably it for our first blog, but more will follow, including a teaser poster we have made for the film. We would love feedback on what you have read so far!
