Yo, Dre, thats the Formula

Ok, granted, it's been a while since I updated. And not for any good reason either, it's been a slow week. Perhaps because I spent way too much time on xtranormal, creating the highly topical emotive drama 'Moving On', a tale of love, rejection and the human condition. Or possible a brutal dissection of three close pals struggling to retain the friendship dynamic when separated by 5000 miles and a transatlantic time zone.

A total waste of time? Not when you see the beautifully crafted scene structure that has gone into these 1-2 min episodes. I'm clearly learning something...

Actual writing, meanwhile has been slow. A half-remembered quote from 'Californication' - being a writer means setting yourself homework every night. I've read all my course texts, started redoing the assignments I did last year, and somewhere along the line, managed to turn a one page dialogue exercise into an idea for a feature film. This wasn't supposed to be what I was going to work on while over here - I thought, a few short plays. A short film script maybe. A TV Pilot. Instead I've spent every waking sunny day on Venice Beach writing 30 pages of plot and character arcs, mythic-based scene structure, for a feature story that I can't decide if anyone will think is worth watching. Gradually criss-crossing the elements of the story and seeing what possibilities those frictions throw up, gradually shaping the narrative. Leaving dialogue to the end, which goes against instinct.

It's a good exercise though. You can read and re-read the principles, but they only click when put into practice, and I can certainly say this, once you've put the magic goggles on, and started to understand what they show you, it's impossible to see the writing in TV and movies as you once did. This means you can immediately see the holes in your own, and other amateurs stuff. But it also has given me a much richer appreciation of great work in TV and film, and led me to realise the standard of stuff is overall much higher than I expected, even the shows I don't like. I've now realised it's not just Sopranos (6:40 - 'what are those, tic tacs?') and The Wire that create great character arcs and needs. The bar is definitely very high.

I'm not sure what I write over here will ever make the cut, but I do believe that I've turned some corners in my understanding of the craft of dramatic writing, and that is definitely something I look forward to applying to a maybe more realistic debut.