Micro Film

Micro Film - Ep. 5: Writing - Field & Screen

Okay, yes, bad pun for the title… I suspect that that is something we are all just going to have to get used to.

If you are streaming the podcast, the first thing you will notice is that it plays at ‘chipmunk speed.’ Apparently this isn’t a problem if you download it either directly or via feed. Yet another hiccough along the road – the never ending number of technical blips that plague any fledgling podcaster it seems.

If you care (perhaps you too are or will be a fledgling podcaster some day) it apparently has to do with incorrect mp3 encoding so far as Micromedia Flashplayer is concerned (But what does it know?). Though I haven’t been able to check into that yet – and if/when I do it should prove to be the actual cause, then I will fix it, thus rendering this note irrelevant. It seems to me that there ought to be a different explanation though… ‘cause I haven’t changed a single setting and none of the previous episodes suffer that problem. Weird.

Okay… so SHOW NOTES!

This isn’t the first time I’ve written up the show notes for this episode. My first set disappeared into the ether upon uploading, which was particularly galling – this is a huge episode. Nearly twice the length of my longest previous episode, and my guest Sam Dulmage and I threw out an outrageous number of references to give links to. The first upload of notes took hours to assemble… and then disappeared. (Yes, I should have kept a copy. Fuck you.) It has taken several days for me to find both the time and the will to undertake the job again. But that’s actually for the best – if I would have delved into it again after the disheartening disappearance it would have been a singularly cursory effort.

First up, here’s my guest, Sam Dulmage’s personal website. He’s also been primary in the creation of Steam Powered Films.

Sam briefly mentions Joseph Campbell early in the interview. I should probably do an entire episode on Joseph Campbell, his theories – if you don’t know – have been hugely influential to cinema since George Lucas used Hero with a Thousand Faces to help craft Star Wars. Cambells’ ‘Hero’s Journey’ ultimately became as digested by Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey.

At about the 9 minute mark Sam mentions Jeff Kitchen – there will be a link to him further down, and FTX West which I’ve linked to before… and I suspect I’ll link to it again.

Here’s the crappy photo I took of Sam’s wall chart. I really should know better. It’s a camera phone and the light was mediocre – I should have taken a few shots just to be sure of a good one. I think this manages to illuminate the basic idea though if you compare it to Sam’s description. You can kind of see how the post-its are arranged in horizontal lines – the further left they are the later in the screenplay the corresponding events are – and each line represents a different plot thread.

The writing events backwards technique was traced back to William Thompson Price.

A quick video by Ron Becks outlining 3 act structure (so much as one can in 2 minutes) – we mention it, but don’t really break it down. This will help. (In fact, the entire series of videos are of some use, as abbreviated as they are.) I promise I will spend an entire episode on this at some point in the future.

We make passing reference to Stephen King’s process. Don’t take our word for it – go to the source himself, his book on writing called, appropriately, On Writing.

Here is Jeff Kitchen’s site – Development Heaven and his book Writing a Great Movie – not Writing a Great Script.

If you’ve been clicking the links all along the way, you’ve noticed that I’ve sent you to the same site for the books about writing every time, The Writer’s Store. I shall do so again. It’s a good source in general.

Interestingly, I can’t find Richard Walter’s book, The Whole Picture on the Writier’s Store site. Though you can find the DVD there.

Lajos Ergi’s The Art of Dramatic Writing is more about playwriting than screenwriting, but not too surprisingly there is a valuable amount of wisdom that ports over.

Karl Iglesias is the writer who I tend to evangelize about the most – specifically Writing for Emotional Impact. For the record, I think Sam takes my point rather more cynically than is the intent of the process, and I didn’t quite get to the meat of the matter in our discussion.

I do agree with Sam that writing with the intent to affect the audience in a certain manner is creatively corrupt, but once you’ve laid the ground-work and know the direction that your work is going to take your audience, it behooves you to tweak your content – the individual moments, the character arc, the dialogue and so forth to as to get the most mileage out of the emotional journey which you have organically begun to send the audience upon. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is your obligation as a screenwriter to do so. Nobody wants to go see a film that doesn’t affect them, and everyone wants to see a film which affects them profoundly.

It would be intellectually dishonest of me not to mention Blake Snyder here. It’s got to be perfectly obvious that I don’t think much of him from what I say in the podcast – and rest assured I shall take the opportunity to break down the problems I have with his book Save the Cat at some later date. To be fair there are two or three notions in the book that I do genuinely feel are valuable, but talk about a cynical approach to screenwriting… yeesh! The entire premise is to write a screenplay that will formulaically fit the Hollywood mold and thus make oodles of cash. If that’s what you want – go for it, but it flies directly in the face of one of the most beautiful aspects of independent film making… being free of the constraints of the Hollywood machine. Oh and, to be fair, Save the Cat is one of the best selling screenwriting books of recent times… ever, even. God help us all.

Syd Field. Gotta give him props. He’s practically the original screenwriting guru, and Screenwriting is the book that started it all.

Robert McKee is the legendary author of the dense and analytical epic writing tome, Story.

Sam’s pick for best beginner’s book on screenwriting is Lew Hunter’s Screenwriting 434. And my apologies to Viki King I really should have been able to recall her name when I chose How to Write a Screenplay in 21 Days as my pick for an easy reader’s digest like version of Syd Field’s concepts.The Pucks, deserve another shout out for providing the music for the podcast. The Feature Website is Wiki Books Movie Making Manual. Next Episode – More detailed answers to questions from my How to Start lecture from last month. Lastly, here’s a list of the various films Sam and I referenced in our discussion – several we never mention by name, so I’ve added some context from our discussion in parenthesis: