Five Step Script Frenzy Preparation - Step 4

My quick and simple guide to generating and developing a script idea that you can take the distance.

CONGRATULATIONS
We’re over half way there.

Today, we’re going to go over the structure of screenplays in a little more detail so that you can review your scene list or beat sheet and rewrite it, strengthen it, or just make more sense of it.

A screenplay has three acts (or, as some would argue 4, or maybe 10, or maybe 2—we could spend all day—just go with me for now and we can discuss it later).

The first act setups up the main character, their world (the ordinary world), and something that falls out of balance. The first act is also where your theme is introduced. This could be as simple as a scene where your protagonist’s buddy mumbles, waste not, want not, (or something less cliched), and thus your screenplay exploring the depths of moderns societies’ throwaway culture is set to be probed, pinched, and tossed.

The inciting incident occurs within the first act. This point can vary from the opening scene, to the middle of the first act, to the end, near turning point one. The end of the first act is marked by turning point one, an event which thrust your protagonist into…

…the second act. This is the bulk of your story, where you’ll need to build complication after complication as your hero acts to bring balance back to their life.

One trap to avoid, is having the problem, and your hero’s attempts at resolving the problem, remain flat. The problem must get bigger. The actions your hero takes must get larger. The stakes, what’s at risk, must be raised. Rising tension is an industry word that should become your mantra as you plan and write your second act.

Turning point two is when everything is on the line. Your hero has no where to go, no one to turn to, all is lost. They must face the antagonist at this point in the climax. This is the sword fight, the showdown, the confrontation that settles the main conflict raised in act one.

The third act, or resolution, is where the loose ends are tied up. Typically, good act threes are short. You’ve tied up the main conflict in the climax. What act three often shows is the world we saw at the beginning of act one restored. The universe is back in balance.

THAT’S IT (EXCEPT FOR STEP 5, TOMORROW)
Keep working on those scene lists. Brainstorm new obstacles that you can throw at your protagonist in act two. Really make it hard on them and raise the stakes. Make sure you can carry the problem you introduce in act one all the way through the climax of your screenplay.

With a scene list in hand on April 1st, you’ll be ready to show up at the keyboard and shooting through 3-4 pages of script. This in itself isn’t alway easy, but at least you won’t have to stare at the blank page and wait for the muse to show up.

RESOURCE
Celtx (http://celtx.com/index.html) is a screenwriting and production planning suite available for PC, Mac, and Linux machines. If you don’t have a screenwriting program, Celtix is an excellent choice to help you format your script. When I last tried it, it was free, and I believe it still is, as I could not find any pricing info on their site.

Technorati Tags: screenwriting, Script Frenzy

Five Step Script Frenzy Preparation - Step 3

My quick and simple guide to generating and developing a script idea that you can take the distance.

QUANDARIES
If you’ve worked a few ideas through the story points I outlined yesterday, then it should be fairly obvious which ideas are closer to being ready for April’s foray.

If you only have a few story points for an idea, and lots of gaps, then you simply need to develop the idea more. Ask yourself questions, like:

What attracted me to this idea?
What is my hero trying to get?
Does this raise questions, such as, will the hero succeed, will he find the truth, will he stop the bad guys, will he find his father, will he realize he’s not wearing pants, etc.?
What stands in the hero’s way? Is it a significant challenge?

This is a very small list and I’m sure you can come up with more. If you’re idea is thin, and you need to develop more story, sit down and ask yourself all kinds of questions.

Hopefully, you were able to develop one or two of your ideas into full stories, or if not, you’ll be able to do so by asking yourself questions.

SCENE LIST/BEAT SHEET/(GRONE) OUTLINE
I know, outlines, who needs them? Isn’t that against the spirit of Script Frenzy? How can things be frantic if you have them planned out?

Don’t worry, we’ll leave plenty of room for distress. At the very least, pound out the major beats of your story. Take the seven points you outlined yesterday, and add in the significant events, challenges, and arcs, that brought your story to those points.

Go into however much detail you’re comfortable with, but don’t write more than 1-3 sentences for each beat.

Also, you’ll need to decide on what level of detail you’ll use for your outline. You can make a scene list, that lays out around 30-45 scenes, or you could write in story arcs, that layout 10-15 major arcs, or stages. Most arcs will be comprised of multiple scenes.

To use American Beauty as an example again, when Lester blackmails his boss and applies at the burger joint, this might be an arc called, Lester gets a new job. The scene list would read:

1. Lester blackmails his boss for a severance package.
2. Lester goes through the drive in at Smile’s; decides to
3. interviews with the manager for a position (with the least amount of responsibility possible).

Take your favorite ideas, work out the beats, and re-write your logline as necessary, as you discover new and interesting ways to shape your story.

FAR BETTER ADVICE THAN MINE
I thought I’d add a few places to gain wisdom, from writers with much greater credentials than my own. These are two of the best web resources I’ve run across:

WordPlayer.com - (http://www.wordplayer.com/) - Read the Column section for loads of advice from the screenwriting team that wrote Pirates of the Caribbean, Aladdin, Little Monsters, and more.

JohnAugust.com - (http://johnaugust.com/) - Screenwriter of Go, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and more. If you scroll to the bottom, you can use the tags feature to read all the posts on the Writing Process. Also, the download section is priceless.

Technorati Tags: screenwriting, Script Frenzy

Five Step Script Frenzy Preparation - Step 2

My quick and simple guide to generating and developing a script idea that you can take the distance.

SORTING THE IDEAS
When I asked you to create your ideas yesterday, I said a logline typically has the following:

1. a protagonist
2. with a goal/want/need/desire
3. and an antagonistic force

Thus, your hero has a desire, which is opposed by the antagonistic force, (be it a super-villan, or something less tangible) creating an central conflict. Conflict is the basis of drama. The more conflict, the better.

The stronger your protagonist’s desire/want/need is, the more difficult the goal is to achieve, and the less willing your character is in compromising, thus, the more inherent conflict present, which leads to a more interesting character to write about, more obstacles to throw at the hero, and a better story.

Now, hopefully you have about 5-10 ideas or more, that sound like the makings of a movie.

Flesh through your ideas and look for the ones where the protagonist has the strongest desire or most difficult obstacle to overcome. See if you can re-write the weaker ideas to contain more force.

DEVELOP A DRAMATIC ARC
Review your ideas again and select a few, or all of them if you have the time, and work on developing these dramatic points:

1. Point of Attack — This is where you start your story. Who is the story about, what’s going on in their life, what world are we in, and what is the genre? Start as late as possible and as close to the next point as you can.

2. Inciting Incident - This is what happens that changes your protagonist’s life. The inciting incident throws something out of balance. Something that your character will spend the better part of 100 pages trying to regain.

3. Turning Point One — This is often the first point where the protagonist acts. The inciting incident changes their life and they spend 5-10 pages avoiding conflict to get it back. The first turning point is where the hero jumps into the story, accepts his fate, and goes after what they want.

Example: In Star Wars, the inciting incident in my mind is when R2D2 runs away, and Luke meets Obi Wan. Then, Luke spends 5-10 minutes refusing to join Obi Wan to help the Rebellion. Turning point one is when Luke discovers that the Empire destroyed his family and he decides to help Obi Wan and the Rebellion.

4. Midpoint — The midpoint usually marks a decisive change in the actions of the hero. From turning point one to the midpoint, the hero is trying to reach his goal, and is being turned away by the antagonistic force. The midpoint is where the hero comes to terms with the fact that reasonable tactics aren’t going to work. He must act harder.

Example: In American Beauty, Lester spends the first half of the movie reclaiming parts of his identity. He works out, smokes pot, fantasizes about Angela. These are big, dramatic changes, but nothing compared to his second half actions.

Right around the midpoint, he blackmails his boss, blows up at the dinner table (remember when he throws the asparagus against the wall?), and thus, he applies at Smiley Burger for the least amount of responsibility possible. Midpoint. The protagonist is now all in.

5. Turning Point Two — We’re building for the climax now (the confrontation scene). This is the moment where the hero takes their greatest action in a last ditch effort to get what they want.

6. Climax — The climax is the final confrontation between good and evil. This is where the protagonist and the antagonist square off. This is the scene that resolves the central conflict of the entire script.

7. Resolution — This is where you tie up any loose ends, fulfill any promises not yet answered, restore the balance of good and evil. The resolution is typically short if done right.

PARTING THOUGHTS
Take a few ideas and put them through these points. Rewrite as necessary.

Having an idea fleshed out through these seven points won’t guarantee a great screenplay, but it at least helps you eliminate or rework weaker ideas, and find something that should at least be able to carry on for more than 20 pages.

NEXT UP - STEP 3
We’ll settle on a final idea and develop the major sequences of the story.

Technorati Tags: Screenwriting, Script Frenzy

Five Step Script Frenzy Preparation - Step 1

My quick and simple guide to generating and developing a script idea that you can take the distance.

GENERATE MULTIPLE IDEAS
What you need today are ideas. Lots of them.

Ideas to a screenwriter are like rocks to a sculptor. Not all rocks make good material for a statue, just like not all ideas are the basis for great screenplays. Sometimes, on the surface, the idea looks solid, and so the screenwriter plows ahead. Then, somewhere in the work, the idea falls flat and the writing becomes difficult.

Two weeks into a month long competition is not when you want your script idea to crash.

That is why today, your goal is to come up with several ideas, so that like the sculptor, we can pick the best rocks to make our masterpiece.

WHAT IS A LOGLINE?
A logline is a thumbnail sketch of your movie idea. In a sentence or two, a logline details your protagonist, their goal/want/problem, and an antagonistic force.

Open up a word processor or take out a piece of paper and write down as many ideas as you can come up with that follow this pattern:

It’s about a [person] who… wants [this]… and must [do this] to get it… or else, [this] happens.

Here’s an example:

It’s about a [nerdish boy] who wants [to date the hottest girl in school] and must [convince the jocks that he’s cool to win her approval] or else [she’s going to the dance with the football captain].

Pathetic example, which illustrates my point of writing several so you have better ones to choose from. Here’s one more I culled from a real movie:

It’s about a [farm boy] who wants to [join the Rebel Alliance to fight the Empire]. When his world as he knows it is destroyed, he must [help an old Jedi deliver plans for a space station] or else [the Empire will gain control of the galaxy].

Again, a loglines should have 3 major elements. 1) A protagonist; 2) a goal/want/need/problem; and 3) an opposing force or antagonist.

NEXT UP - STEP 2
Write as many as you can today. Tomorrow, we’ll pick the most promising ideas and develop them further, chipping away at the lumps of rock to see what’s beneath. Some rocks will be beautiful portraits of dashing heros, while others will be hideously deformed chunks of chipped rock.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Also, if you have large amounts of free time (who doesn’t), you could check out “The Secrets of Film Writing” by Tom Lazarus. I have field tested this book. It’s a quick read, with good writing and a great structure that builds simple concepts on top of each other. It’s the perfect book to digest right before Script Frenzy.

Script Frenzy

Script Frenzy starts in 8 days.

Spawned from NaNoWriMo, Script Frenzy is a challenge to write a screenplay in a month.

They’re talking my language. I’m not 100% yet because I want to make sure I have an idea that’s reasonably fleshed out (which is kind of counter to the basic principle of Script Frenzy and NaNoWriMo, although, it’s not strictly frowned upon).

I’ve written three features in my life and the script pages themselves were all written in about 7-10 days. Usually, this was precipitated by spending months, or even years writing loglines, beatsheets, revamping everything, and not making any progress on actual script pages.

So eventually, I threw in the towel and started writing. It’s a horrid way to outline (see this post on Word Player), but sometimes, especially for budding screenwriters, it’s the best option.

Thus, I’m working over a few story ideas to make sure I can carry the idea through 100 pages, or at least through 10 major beats. I figure that way, I’ll at least have 30-40 pages of quality if I scrap the rest later—something to build a revamped script off of.

Be sure to check out the Script Frenzy Writer’s Resource page for some free .pdf worksheets, apparently written for High School students. I especially like the “Hollywood Formula” Worksheet. Also, you can find some articles written by pro screenwriters here, in their Cameos section..

Okay then. It’s about a person who…