| Nick in Space |
[May. 6th, 2008|06:54 pm] |
The shoot I was on all weekend went amazingly well, considering the intricacy and ambition of the project.
The first half of Saturday was spent finishing the set, a reconstruction of the Apollo 11 capsule in which Michael Collins waited while Neil and Buzz were making history on the surface of the moon, complete with a functional instrument panel, removable walls and ceiling, and a perfectly balanced, rotating teeter-totter to simulate the actor floating in Zero-G. As the first two days were light on VFX, I filled in as sound mixer and occasional human puppeteer at the other end of the teeter-totter.
Sunday was more sound mixing and puppeteering, at least until lunch, at which point I was sent home after suffering a bit of a meltdown due to personal issues*.
Yesterday was the big day, though--setting up a rear-projection of the moon passing by the capsule's tiny window. The above-the-line folks were understandably nervous about this, and AFI had been pushing them to use bluescreen, but it ended up looking PERFECT! I can't wait to see it at screenings in two weeks.
I also managed to spend a few minutes geeking out with Harrison Richer, the director, about space and shit. He and I didn't exactly start off on the best terms (our first conversation earlier this year ended with us screaming at each other about independent filmmakers over a nice dinner at La Poubelle), so it was great to speak to him in the relative calm (::cough::) of a film shoot.
*In quite possibly the strangest fallout from this ordeal, I'll be making up the lost time next week in post, doing wire removal on a shot of a floating hotdog.
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| Flickr! |
[May. 2nd, 2008|11:25 pm] |
Just wanted everyone to know that I finally created a Flickr page to document my LA comings and goings (mostly goings).
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| Whew x2 |
[Apr. 21st, 2008|11:24 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  groggy | ] |
The second draft of Mulligan is done, weighing in at a solid 100 pages--roughly a third of them brand spankin' new!
I still have a week of polishing before it gets submitted the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship, and another week before AFI sends it out for coverage.
And then: darkness. |
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| Oh scripts I hast writ |
[Apr. 17th, 2008|05:15 pm] |
To put my experiences at AFI in perspective, here is a list of every short screenplay I've completed in the past eight months, each with the promise that it will get produced or submitted as a thesis:
Screech, Skid, Boom (ten drafts)
Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (two drafts)
Sweet Little Sixteen (five drafts)
Ahab (two drafts)
All it Takes (three drafts)
Reach for the Sky (two drafts)
And here is a list of screenplays which have actually been produced or submitted as a thesis:
Screech, Skid, Boom |
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| BZZZT WRONG! |
[Apr. 11th, 2008|02:35 pm] |
At this morning's AFI cycle screenings, there were two films involving graphic sexual abuse of a female character--one of them a cycle, the other a rough cut of second-year thesis. Besides both films demonstrating serious inability of craft, for some reason the writer/directors (both male) decided to objectify the women who were being abused.
The cycle film had the victim (the main character) tied up in her underwear, and lingered on several close-ups that served no point other than to provide some t&a. It then turned into mindless torture-porn, for which the writer/director was thoroughly harangued. Since the goal was a Grindhouse-ish film, at least it was in keeping with the misogyny of the genre.
The thesis film, however, was unforgivably repulsive. It was about a husband who is given the opportunity to execute the death penalty sentence on the guy who raped his wife (portrayed here as Stock Villain #3), and again turns into a bullshit torture-porn film--this time culminating in a horribly graphic castration scene. We are supposed to feel good about this ending because the rapist "broke his wife", like she was just some property which the rapist defaced. And don't get me started on the fantasy sequence in which the husband sews a prosthetic vagina between her legs as she repeats,"Make me clean again!". My comment card contained the phrase, "fuck you" at least 8 times.
I am so unbelievable happy to not have to deal with student filmmaking EVER AGAIN.
EDIT: I forgot to mention the best part. After the thesis screening, I was selected for the focus group! There was something incalculably satisfying about getting to tell this bastard that he failed on every possible level. |
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| FREE MUSIC! FOR FREE! |
[Apr. 8th, 2008|02:03 pm] |
If you have at least one ear still working and also enjoy getting stuff you didn't earn, head on over to the Achievements in Sound website and download his new album. Download the old album, too, while you're at it.
Matt and I worked with this guy up in San Francisco, and he could really use some fans. I'm pretty sure there's only the two of us right now. |
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| Workschtuff |
[Apr. 6th, 2008|09:24 pm] |
Like many neurotic imbeciles, when I get overwhelmed I reduce my world to little lists. Here is one of them.
Scripts Still in Progress (and the work I'm currently doing on each)
Mulligan (feature -- draft two)
Radio Babes (feature -- draft four)
Man in Space (feature -- scriptment)
Wilbury Lane (feature -- outline)
Raymond Roussel biopic (feature -- research)
I'm With the Band (pilot -- character bios)
Bob the God (pilot -- developing concept)
Grimsby & Fuzzybear (pilot -- developing concept)
...and I would drop them all if I was getting paid to write something else. |
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| Disappointment in action! |
[Apr. 3rd, 2008|12:32 pm] |
Sequence of events:
1. Saw movie poster:
2. Thought, "Holy shit, that looks amazing! I hope it isn't just Romancing the Stone, but with Jodi Foster, and the girl with the spyglass isn't actually the main character."
3. Watched the trailer
4. Discovered it was just Romancing the Stone, but with Jodi Foster, and the girl with the spyglass isn't actually the main character.
Good job, Hollywood. You know what kids are worried about? Jodi Foster's writer's block. |
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| Surveying the wreckage |
[Mar. 31st, 2008|11:04 am] |
Just for fun, here's the structural breakdown of Mulligan:
Act 1: 26 1/8 pages
Act 2: 51 3/8 pages
Act 3: 16 pages
Total: 93 4/8 pages
Inciting incident: page 15 (Eryn meets Kern)
Act 1 break: page 27 (Eryn finds Kern's body)
Reversal 1: page 35 (Town needs to bury Kern)
Midpoint: page 48 (Grimsby discovers Kern still alive)
Reversal 2: page 57 (Kern chases Eryn into woods)
Act 2 break: page 78 (Eryn discovers Kern killed Liam)
Resurrection: page 83 (Liam's body stolen by Travellers)
Climax: page 92 (Kern dies saving Eryn and Liam's corpse) |
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| Joyeux Jour! |
[Mar. 30th, 2008|09:04 pm] |
The first draft of Mulligan is DONE. Done. Done done done done done.
Done. |
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| Kitchen Sink = Drama |
[Mar. 21st, 2008|09:05 am] |
I came home last night to discover my front door plastered in the following notes from my landlord:
"Your neighbors have reported a leak under their kitchen sink. Please refrain from using your kitchen sink until the issue is resolved."
"The leak seems to be occurring behind the wall. A repairman will be entering your home at approximately 6pm to check for damage. Sorry for the late notice."
"The repairman confirmed that the leak is behind the wall. He will need to enter your home again at approximately 8am tomorrow morning. Again, apologies for the late notice."
"The repairman was involved in an accident on his way home, and totaled his repair truck. He will be unable to repair the problem until Sunday."
"Just a reminder, please refrain from using the kitchen sink. Sorry for the inconvenience." |
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| Great Screenplays |
[Mar. 18th, 2008|02:18 pm] |
At AFI, us screenwriting fellows take a biweekly course called The Great Screenplays, in which we dissect the scripts for films that are, as the title suggests, "Great".
The decision of what constitutes "Great" is entirely subject to the whim of the instructor, George Walczak, whose personal taste is for films that depict realistic characters coming face-to-face with their own damaged psyche (Taxi Driver, The Pawnbroker, The Ice Storm, etc). Along with studying these films, George uses the class to try and teach us his own writing process, which involves creating a character with a "shadow side", then allowing the plot to emerge organically as the character comes to terms with this shadow side.
However, as George's process would turn Raiders of the Lost Ark into a story about Doctor Jones confronting his Freudian repulsion to snakes and self-actualized women, I've chosen to ignore it outright.
Instead, I've put together a list of ten screenplays I think it better behooves the AFI screenwriters to study:
Titanic
Jurassic Park
The Lion King
Independence Day
Home Alone
Sixth Sense
Finding Nemo
Twister
Men in Black
Mrs. Doubtfire
According to BoxOfficeMojo.com, these are the ten highest grossing films from the last 20 years, adjusted for inflation and ignoring any sequels or adaptations of already-successful franchises (Harry Potter, Spider-Man, Passion of the Christ, etc). More importantly, there isn't a film on this list that my mom doesn't like.
As one of my fellow fellows put it, "You can be like George and live through forty years of failure and rejection in the hopes of getting an Oscar, or you can work."
EDIT: Before my friends in the comics world point out that this is exactly the sort of thinking that leads to "Mutant Hero X Fights Symbolic Villain Y to win the heart of Large Breasted Girl Z", I want to point out that the average theatrically-distributed film costs tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of people to produce. Demographic accommodation is the price we pay for working in the most populist medium on earth. |
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| Mulligan, Act Two: complete |
[Mar. 17th, 2008|06:01 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  ecstatic | ] |
| [ | music |
| | the tap-tap-tap of the keyboard | ] |
EXT. GREAT SALTEE ISLAND - MOMENTS LATER
Waves crash against the rocky shores of the Great Saltee
Island. Gulls pick and gnaw on the decomposed corpses
of herring in the moonlight.
A particularly heavy wave deposits a large, dark mass on the
pebble-coated beach.
A flock of gulls hungrily peck at the lump. The lump GROANS
and slowly sits up, frightening away the birds.
ERYN
Holy christmas!
Eryn stands and peels some kelp off her face. Around her lay
the shattered remains of her rowboat.
I had twenty-five pages I needed to write during Spring Break, and somehow I managed to do all of them on the first day. |
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| "Mulligan" midpoint |
[Feb. 23rd, 2008|07:39 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  quixotic | ] |
The first gravedigger spots Eryn biking swiftly past, towing
the trunk behind her on a small furniture dolly.
GRAVEDIGGER ONE
Strange times we live in.
The second gravedigger nods and motions to the grave.
GRAVEDIGGER TWO
Some of us, anyway.
The wind picks up.
Now to go back and actually have my main character be a... you know... character. Right now she mostly functions as a way to get all my nifty research spilling out of the side characters' mouths, which leads to her saying variations of, "What does that mean?" more often than I'd care to admit. |
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| NOOOOOOOOOOO!!! |
[Feb. 21st, 2008|02:14 pm] |
I skipped an AFI screening of "La Luna" last night to catch up on some work, and missed meeting Zooey Deschanel, who snuck in halfway and sat in the same seat I ALWAYS SIT IN. Jesuschristalmighty!
As further punishment, I just got back from lunch at Cafe 101, where my meal was interrupted by the entrance of one Ms. Eva Longoria and her fur-lined white-pants-wearing big-sunglass-ed entourage. |
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| In which Jack, Kate, and Saywer discover the underwater "Aquafina Station" |
[Feb. 9th, 2008|08:40 am] |
My favorite provision of the tentative WGA deal, to be (hopefully) approved later today:
"Product Integration: The company will consult with the showrunner when a commercial product is to be integrated into the storyline of an episode of a dramatic series." |
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| been a while... |
[Jan. 1st, 2008|12:05 am] |
On the slate for 2008:
-Mulligan
-I'm With the Band
-Wilbury Lane
-Man in Space
-Ahab
-Leech
-Grimsby and Fuzzybear
-Bob the God
-losing that last 20 pounds |
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| Some Good, Some Bad |
[Sep. 8th, 2007|06:09 pm] |
The Good:
-I'm out of that damned hotel and into a proper apartment, finally. The apartment itself isn't anything special, but it's quiet, safe, and convenient, which'll do for now.
-My first script is nearing completion, and has (I've been told) generated quite a bit of... um... "buzz". People I've never met are coming up to me at AFI and telling me they can't wait to see the film, and for the first time ever something I've created is garnering compliments from strangers.
-I've been approached by several directors who are interested in having me write their next project, which as far as I can tell is rare this early on.
-There's one director in particular that I'm interested in working with: the brilliant and well-traveled Martin Stitt from London. He's a fantastic filmmaker and (so far) a helluva decent guy. We're meeting over coffee tomorrow with another Nick, an editor and also British, to discuss politics, life, women, and possible script ideas.
The Bad:
-I'm a liar. There isn't any bad.
What I've learned about LA:
-Los Angeles wants you to like it, NEEDS you to like it, and apparently the more appalled you are at it the harder it tries to get on your good side.
EDIT: I just found out that there's an ICE CREAM TRUCK that comes 'round my street every weekend! Mickey Mouse Bars, here I come! |
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| HOLY MOLY! |
[Aug. 23rd, 2007|11:54 pm] |
Despite running on only 3 hours sleep after the AFI welcoming party at Geisha House, I just had the bestest day LIKE EVAR.
Classes started today, and after a long, dull morning of form-filling-outing and sun-sitting-in(ing?), each of the directors, producers, and screenwriters pitched their two story ideas for the first cycle (first quarter) film projects.
So...
ONE OF MY STORIES WAS CHOSEN!
Not only that, but my ideas were the first (of few) that were whole-heartedly lauded by the faculty and students. The stories were so well received that I actually got to have my pick of director and producer, and I seriously couldn't be happier with the two who came on board for the project. We already seem to have struck a nice balance of trusting and reasonably critical, and even after just one night it is starting to come together beautifully. If we pull it off, this is going to be a sweet (in the traditional sense) and memorable little film.
If it seems like I'm bragging, I AM. BECAUSE I AM AN AWESOME GUY. WELL SOMETIMES. OK, ALMOST NEVER. BUT TODAY, YES!
Now I just have to WRITE the damned thing... oh god. |
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