Limes with Orange

One of the reasons I haven't posted in a little while is my preoccupation with the screenplay that I'm collaborating on. So I thought a little progress report might be in order.

We've finished our outline!

This was accomplished thanks to several brainstorming sessions and the guidance of a few books (see My Personal Screenwriting Syllabus), with a little help from Mary Shomon's Screenwriter's Master Chart, a scriptwriting software called Final Draft (not essential at this stage, but it's pretty cool) and the inspiration of long, long walks on warm, sunny days (I do my best thinking then... makes me kinda miss my dog walking days).

Our next steps:

1. Filling in the scenes in-between the highlights of our outline, focusing on the action of the scene not the dialogue (though obviously jotting down any brilliant dialogue that happens to pop into our heads).

2. Reading lots of screenplays (I haven't made much of a dent in those 50 screenplays that the experts recommend reading... though I did pick up some very inexpensive copies of the Buffy script books for Season 1... thanks for the heads up, Brian).

3. And just continuing the stuff we're already doing: brainstorming, filling in character charts (I like the Eclectic Writer's Character Chart), reading the many tomes I've collected on the screenwriting process and watching movies with an analytical frame of mind (it's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it).

Labels: film, writing