Week 5

What a good week!! Goals for the week that were set = met.

Mentioned in last weeks update 2 films that needed to be watched as research, one of them being American Beauty which was an amazing film (review to be posted in The Reviews of a Short Man blog) and the other was Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (review already posted).

Two completely different films, one good the other not, but that's what I wanted to do. I'll be honest I think I'm gonna watch American Beauty again as I got enthralled by the film so the things I want to be looking out for (structure, changes from Act 1 to 2 to 3, plot points, etc) I didn't even notice. Think I'll watch that on Tuesday and be taking notes frantically.

The other "assignment" was to create a particular character. Scott and I decided to both do one and then compare notes. Now, to begin with we had laid out some foundations of the character just so we had an agreed start point and I must admit as I started working on this I changed a few things, I guess the basics were the same but made what I felt was a pretty big change and had my hesitations if it would work...

Man this was fun, I had such a blast doing loads of research regarding the era, what was going on, major events and how these events would have had an effect on his life. After hours of research and re-writes I felt I had a great character, that made sense and even more importantly complimented our main character perfectly fitting with the story that we're creating.

After completion I fired a message to my writing buddy with a pretty bold statement that I think he will really like what I've done with the character and that the changes I made were really good. A bold statement I say because it's a little cocky of me to assume, but what's done is done.

It's meeting time, and we chat about loads of things, some completely unrelated to our script - but a catch up was in order. As we are chatting I occasionally think to myself I am really looking forward to the critique but that's not to come for a little while. A couple drinks and 2 pools games, something to eat and a bit more chatting (some story related) it's time to get to work and Scott says its time to read, he's been building it up in his head. Oh crap!!

So I sit there is silence, answering the occasional question about the time period or historical events, or just clarifying things due to to my chicken scratch but all signs say things look good. As the review takes place there are a couple pauses to see how some things have an impact on our story.

There's a few comments while reading to the tune of "I like that" or "Yeah, that works". Another page of reading and then... review complete, we talk about a couple things and then Scott says "Man, I just wanted to continue reading.. What was the rest of his story?"

Now don't forget this is the creation of a character leading into our main story so when we write him his actions, reactions, emotions, goals, etc., feel real and flow on the page, making sense and don't feel forced. So I only took it so far, but maybe some day there's a story to be told on it's own.

Good start to the nights work. Sadly, I don't get to read Scott's character creation as he had been working on during breaks at work which is where it was - but that's OK, we go over the similarities and the differences and decide to incorporate some stuff rounding out the character and making one thing in particular flow better, I did have a pretty big decision rushed and it made more sense to time it out better with small actions or decisions leading to the big one.

From there we did a quick review of things done over the past 5 weeks and then move forward, laying out Act 1 of the story and this is where things start to really fall into place. There is a lot of discussion on an opening scene, how does this play out and does it set things up well. As there should be both of us are throwing out idea after idea, changing some of what each other has just said, moving events around, visualising the scene and then we come to a scene we like. Awesome.

Scott notes this down short hand for later reference, and then we look over it a bit more, and make some more changes heavily focused on how this moves the story forward and find ourselves into the next scene, and a little bit further into the following scene...

It's taking shape!!! And as we are setting up a 3rd scene, something changes slightly with the 1st scene and it completely clicks!! I said before we came to a scene that we liked to open... Now we have THE scene and everything about it works perfectly!!

Back to the 3rd scene and now because of how much we like the opening scene, how well it works, there's a small tweak making this scene amazing as well, and I throw something out there as a link to which I get "Holy crap, that's really dark!! Man... dude... that's DARK!" followed by some pretty serious laughter. I think maybe he's laughing mostly out of surprise.

That then takes us to scene 4 and what looks like the end of act 1, with the introduction of... No I can't give anything away. Let's just say our story started with a particular idea and grew from there, evolving as it should and all of what we have done is ground work leading up to where we are in this scene.

All of this might sound like it's quick, but this is hours of discussion, changes, reviewing, taking notes because every time there is a change or a doubt, or something new which we decide would better move the story along the whole picture has to be taken into account. It's awesomely fun!!!!!

So we have Act 1 laid out. Not a bad nights work.

It was legen...