Ken Levine Posts "Writing a Spec 24"

This hilarious post imagines a rejection letter to someone sending a spec script to the producers of 24. If you know the show, you will laugh.

http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2007/01/writing-spec-24.html

Great Screenwriting Advice

Screenwriter John August, whose blog I surf to often (I actually set up an rss recently), posted some great advice for aspiring screenwriters: How to write a scene. Among the pearls of wisdom are questions to ask ourselves while coming up with the who, what, and why of the scene. Many of his suggestions become "almost unconscious" with practice, but it's nice to see them written out when you're still struggling with what comes after the slug line.

Free Screenwriting Software

If you're looking for screenwriting software and can't afford the $150 or more price tag of the top brands, give Page 2 Stage a try. It's free!

While I can't speak too much to how well it works, I did tinker with it a bit. I was able to flawlessly import a 120 page script that I exported from Final Draft (as RTF), and then easily edit random spots. P2S has many of the most popular features, such as multiple views (outline, index card, etc.), auto complete for character names, smart tab for paragraph style, and pagination (my favorite :D). It won't make you an award-winning screenwriter, but it will take some of the banality out of creating your masterpiece.

And if you're looking for a complete production suite including development and planning tools, you can try another free screenwriting package called Celtx.

Hell, try 'em both.

In Honor of a Friend

Don Dohler, the producer for Timewarp Films, passed away on December 2, 2006 from cancer. He was 60.

Don was my producer, my mentor, my friend.

I'll miss working with him on film projects, his greatest passion. No matter how much he wanted to take a break, or wait to see how a recently completed project would fair in the market, he couldn't help nurturing a new movie concept. I guess it didn't help that he knew so many people that loved talking with him about movies. How could he not be inspired, or inspire us.

I'll miss our weekly hour+ chats on the phone--which are not uncommon for either of us separately, so imagine the two of us together. My wife, of course, never had to imagine, since I always seemed to get on the phone with Don 15 minutes before dinner, forcing her, groaning, to keep the pork cutlets warm for another 45 minutes.

I'll miss his honesty. A straight shooter, he always said what he meant, and never shied away from what he meant. In the creative business, the worst thing you can do is tell people how good their creation is when it really sucks. If I want someone to tell me my effect is great no matter what, I'll ask my mother (my wife's a straight-shooter too,God bless her). Don always told me the truth, the constructive truth. Even if he didn't know exactly what was wrong, he could still point me down the right path. I'll really miss that.

But, most of all, I'll miss my friend. I hope he's at peace.

Don worked as the managing editor for the Times Herald in Baltimore County. They posted a wonderful article about him:
http://www.timesheraldnews.com/2006/12/08/times-herald-editor-don-dohler-dies-at-60/

Another scene finished

Featured in this shot are actors Darla Albornoz and Justin Timpaine.

Last week I finished what I called the "pivotal" scene. It's pivotal for two reasons. First, the good guys face off against the creature for the first time. Second, it was the most challenging scene to complete. Ironically, though, the shot I expected to be the most difficult of the whole film, a shot that required a major on-screen alteration to the creature, lots of tiny particles flying around, and direct interaction between an actor and the Crawler, only took a day to complete.
While working on the scene, an issue that came up a couple of times, including the shot shown above, was dealing with continuity problems. It's hard enough dealing with them when editing, but when you add into the mix the placement of CG elements after the fact, it opens up a whole other can of worms, or Crawlers in this case. Since we didn't initially plan to use CG for the Crawler, we hadn't planned the shots to the level of detail needed for adding CG. We basically winged it. Luckily, however, we decided to film with traditional editing in mind, as opposed to the style adopted by many newer Hollywood directors, the long, motion-filled shots with no cuts. The traditional way uses frequent cuts from various angles: wide, mid, closeup, etc., while maintaining proper stage direction. Thus, a lot was fixed in editing before we even got the CG elements. But, as you can see in the above shot, while Darla and Justin should be looking directly at the creature's eyes, it appears that Justin is looking at the creatures throat (if it actually has one); they have two different lines of sight.

Oops.

I dealt with this by making a choice: I set to Darla's line of sight. Since she's holding a shiny canister, she draws the eye more than Justin. Well, okay, she'd draw the eye more anyway.

Most of the continuity problems we faced were minor, and for some I did my due diligence as a post-production artist and "fixed them in post". The rest we'll live with as all filmmakers do.

Back to Crawler

After a brief diversion working on Dead Hunt, I'm now back to finishing up Crawler. I'm actually on a pivotal scene, a major confrontation between the good guys and the monster. This one has some serious FX stuff in it; I get to do neat things to the Crawler itself, but since it deals with the plot, I can't give details. Suffice it to say, I get to pay homage to Terminator 2 :)

Authoring the Dead Hunt Screener

Now that Dead Hunt is in the can, we need to make it available to had a pretty good track record with distribution--Don Dohler's reputation plays no small role in that--but we're hoping we have some choices, or at least one really good deal.

I asked Don if I could create the DVD screener that we send out (I've wanted to do that since I got my first DVD burner). He agreed, so I dove in. As I said, I already had a burner, but I didn't like the picture quality of the OEM encoder (Nero), so I had to find a better encoder and an authoring tool. By the way, encoding as I use it here refers to converting the digital video of our movie, which is in Quicktime, to MPEG--the format needed for DVDs. After some online research, I found a solid and low-budget solution in DVD Lab and Tmpeg. Let the fun begin!

I wanted to have a really cool menu (see above--click on image to view the full-motion menu), sort of a collage of all the characters showing really cool expressions, and awesome music. I also wanted the movie to look crisp--at least as good as the edited master stored in Adobe Premiere (That's where Tmpeg came in). And we all wanted the box art to look great, too. That job fell to Rob Long, who did a wonderful job. For the music, I picked my favorite segment from Justin Timpane's score. It actually took only a couple of days to create that cool menu, with the cool music, and the crisp-looking picture. The rest of the month was spent trying to get the resulting DVD to play on Don's DVD player--a first or second generation player. Oh, it played in my new player, all 15 attempts played fine in there; some even played fine in a slightly older player I have, but about 3/4 of the way through, Don's player would choke and die.

So, it was back to the internet to find some answers. The makers of DVD Lab have a forum that provided a lot of help. And VideoHelp.com proved an invaluable resource, complete with some free helper tools. The deal, as I discovered, is that "burning" DVDs on a computer isn't the same process used by mass distributors. They use glass masters, which are more precise. Not to worry, however, most newer DVD players easily play the DVD-R, +R, etc. formats; it's just that older players may have trouble, and since we wanted to make sure potential distributors would be able to view our movie, it had to play on as many players as possible. That's when media and hardware came into the mix.

If you look on VideoHelp, you'll see a huge list of media reviews; that is, reviews of the various brands of blank DVD-Rs you can buy. Apparently, not all brands play well with old players, or with all burners. In fact, not all burners create media that plays well with all players. It feels like a crap shoot.

Ultimately, I discovered that my original burner (an internal Lite-on) was the culprit. When I burned the image to a newer external (also a Lite-on), it played fine in Don's player. Problem solved.