Nigh Journal

Archive for the 'Writing' Category

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

MMORPGs: What Would It Take To Tempt You?

I’ve never played World of Warcraft. If I’m honest, I didn’t even know what it was until long after everyone else was a level 55 arch mage. But I’m curious as to what it would take to convince YOU to upload yourself to a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG)

This is pure speculation, but I think the online gaming world would be a different shape had the sequels to The Matrix (somehow) lived up to all their hype and The Matrix Online would have been the perfect opportunity to bring new audiences into Neo’s medium. Regardless, The Matrix Online still went ahead, expanding the story-world for the die-hards and the sci-curious, But it could have been bigger.

But are potential audiences just waiting for their favourite franchise to expand into the internet? As the launch of the DC Universe Online draws close, I’m finding myself deeply considering coughing up and crossing the line into online gaming. What’s tempted me? Not just that you can create your own character to then be mentored by the DC Hero or Villain of your choice, but the stories have also been written by some of DC’s top writers and features voice talent from the DCU cartoons (Mark Hamill as the Joker included).

Sounds a lot like Batman: Arkham Asylum really. So if you played and enjoyed Arkham Asylum, why won’t you be signing up for DC Universe Online? Seriously.

‘cos as cool as that video looks (from my POV, anyway), these MMORPGs seem different, don’t they.

In learning about writing for games, I was taught that describing your game as a list of adjectives is a good way to describe the experience (ie - run, shoot, duck, fly, hide, find etc) Is what’s keeping you offline that they aren’t developing the MMORPG with the right adjectives to suit you? If so, what’s missing? Is it a genre thing? Is the fact that the main examples I’ve mentioned feature flying around and probably thumping people what kept you positively unintrigued? (but there are others)

MMORPGs seem to have it all - serial storytelling, stand-alone missions, social networking and an independent gaming experience. So why are they still a niche thing? What’s keeping you offline?

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Question: Should you Use the News to Narrate?

While watching Stephen Moffat’s first Doctor Who finale the second time round, I noticed one of many differences between him and Russell T Davies’ writing. This was the first series finale for ages which didn’t feature real-life BBC journalists describing the way that the world was now being devastated by Daleks or Cybermen etc. Even without this device, there was no sense that the world wasn’t in peril so I was left wondering…not only, ‘is it okay’ to use the news in storytelling, but do we ever actually need to?

It clearly breaks the ‘show – don’t tell’ rule so could just be labelled as lazy writing. But in his book ‘Save the Cat!’, Blake Snyder described how Stephen Spielberg considers it just plain bad writing: As he explains, in ET – The Extra-terrestrial, if he’d shown the news breaking worldwide of proof of alien existence, this becomes the planet’s population dealing with this news – a very different story to an isolated boy helping his alien friend get home. There are plenty of journalists in ET – but we don’t follow them, the focus stays on Elliott. 

But then I can’t help of thinking of examples I really like of the press covering all angles of particular events. Shaun of the Dead (a script I am increasing impressed with the more and more I look at it!) not only has the Doctor Who-style cameos of real news presenters (and Vernon Kay) but also plays it for laughs by channel-hopping through them to conjoin sentences in funny ways. Crucially, it also clearly shows that the main characters are the ones watching the news – not just us. Too often I think this device is used to dump exposition on the audience – but is it okay to use the news if we are learning stuff alongside the characters?

I can’t not mention a glaring example from my favourite film either. The above cameo-heavy montage shows the rise and rise of the Ghostbusters as heralded by the media. But is the difference that the news actually features our main characters, showing them ‘growing up’? I think it’s interesting to note that this sequence is the only moment of media coverage in the film. When the Ghostbusters take on Dana Barrett’s building at the film’s big battle, the events are not relayed to us by journalists (unlike the dismal ‘narrated’ climax to Spider-man 3) the audience is instead put there right in the crowd, cheering on our heroes!

We see it often enough, but how often is news-narration the most-effective method of storytelling? Is it okay when the characters are learning stuff alongside the audience? Is it okay when our protagonists are themselves the news? Is it lazy writing? Or just a quick and efficient way to get through vital exposition? When is it okay to ‘use the news’?

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

My Favourite Scene about Writing

Nope. Not from Barton Fink, not from The Singing Detective and not even from Adaptation (although I must admit I find Brian Cox’s brief and brilliant turn as Robert McKee far more useful and inspiring than any of his books).

My favourite scene about writing comes from wuxia movie Hero starring Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi and Tony Leung. The scene where a caligraphy school is attacked by the Army of Qin and Nameless (Li) and Falling Snow (Maggie Cheung) defend the students and Broken Sword (Leung) while they continue writing.

To get all artily metaphorical for a moment, think of all of the arrows as distractions while you’re trying to write. You need to consciously send out your inner Jet Li out to protect you from them. Even the bit where Broken Sword’s drawing cane is splintered by an arrow… so he grabs an arrow out of the air and draws with that - that’s just using influences from the outside world to fuel your writing

But mostly, this is just a self-indulgent blog post to say I love this scene and this film in general.

I’m knuckling down with my entry for the Red Planet Prize over the next few weeks so I might be a bit quiet. The story I’m submitting is one that I’ve had in various incarnations over the last few years that everyone has liked the idea of but I haven’t had the script to do that idea justice.

I don’t have the best of luck when it comes to script contests. But even if I don’t get anywhere with this one, it’s not going to be for lack of trying.

Onwards

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

DETECTIVES: There’s no such thing as too quirky!

The copper who uses their special break-dancing prowess to catch criminals. The Private Eye who can piece clues together using hallucinations caused by auto-esphixiation. The detective who is also a duck. I love them all. But how quirky is too quirky?

In my own writing, whether it stars a procedural copper or an accidental investigator, mysteries have always been my ‘thing’. Trouble is, if your protagonist is just doing their job week after week, it can be hard to generate an emotional connection - no matter how many endearing tics they have.

This is easily remedied in a film/one-off. A case starts as professional but quickly becomes personal (Silence of the Lambs, Chinatown, Se7en). But if you’re creating an ongoing TV, web or comic series - surely everything can’t be ‘hey, this case resonates with that traumatic broccoli experience I had as a child!’ But you’ll probably need something if you don’t want your show to simply be a cerebral exercise.

I’ve heard the appeal of the Mystery described as ‘the audience’s desire to see Order triumph over the Chaos of the outside world‘ (like the drunken football fans who chucked our bins all over the street last night. Where were you, Batman?) But where Bob Peck in a one-off story like Edge of Darkness needed to know why his daughter died, the returning series detective needs a more abstract motivation for taking on the Chaos of the world that we can understand and emotionally connect with.

The reason we connect with any of the above more than, for example, Miss Marple is because of this vocational calling that made them a detective. Details aside, this can usually be summed up as one word. Redemption. Ambition. Validation. Even Retaliation. (they don’t all have to end in ‘-tion’ btw )

So it’s okay to pile on as many quirks as you like to make your detective unique. But before you do, make sure you can easily answer the core reason why this guy or gal is a detective in the first place.

Friday, June 18th, 2010

Testing your Characters’ Character.

You’ve probably done the Facebook Quiz that tells which Batman villain/Disney Princess you are (I’m Belle from Beaty and the B… I mean the Riddler, I’m the Riddler!!) But what results do you think your script’s protagonists would get?

In scriptreading, often a character acts out of character so they can steer the plot towards the desired set-piece. This never reads well. Similarly, you can tell when a writer is writing a character who is not like the writer…yet still makes the sort of decisions that the writer would. This doesn’t ring true either.

The Meyers-Briggs test is a personality profiler that categorises you into one of sixteen personality types using 70 ‘yes or no’ questions. It’s quick to do and I’ve become quite obsessed with it of late, profiling everyone I know and finding the results spookily accurate. But whether you believe the entire human population can be categorised so easily or not, chances are your fictional characters can be.

Following my post about films set in a single location, I’ve been working on my own confined script where the protagonist’s decisions/actions will really swing the (hopefully) pressure-cooker environment one way or t’other. My heroine turned out to be an ENFJ categorised as the ‘Idealist Mentor’:

ENFJ = Extrovert + iNtuitive + Feeling + Judging

or ENFJ = or

But the fact that she’s a ‘Mentor’ type doesn’t mean she has to take the Mentor role. Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice and Sam Becket from Quantum Leap are also considered ENFJs, both sharing the same altruistic, externally focussed and positive outlooks and are both clear protagonists. Yet this personality type also has good powers of persuasion and manipulation - so there’s no reason why a ENFJ can’t be the antagonist either.

So TAKE THE TEST - either for your character or even yourself . The results provide a really good abstract character bio that you can then check corresponds with the decisions you’ve made for your protagonist.

I’d love to know if you find they match up (for your character or for you!)

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Single-Location Movies

I know that anyone *funding* a film loves a single-location concept - but what does the rest of the world think? Are they too much ‘like a play’? Or do the restrictions just add to the creativity in storytelling techniques as with Rear Window’s complicit tension or Reservoir Dogs‘ flashback-heavy narrative?

In my opinion, many single-location stories have an ‘ooooh’ concept but only a ‘meh’ execution. There’s an interesting hook at the beginning, a decent pay-off at the end and a lot of treading-water in the middle. I find this isn’t because the characters don’t go anywhere new - it’s because the STORY doesn’t. I don’t think these films are ‘too talky’ by definition - but it’s all too easy to write redundant dialogue that’s simply filling pages until the next set-piece. (Similarly, filling Act Two with chases and jet-setting doesn’t help matters either. If it doesn’t move the story along, it’s still going to be hollow.)

This is why I always use David Slade’s HARD CANDY as my favourite example of a low-budget, high-impact breakthrough movie. Two principal actors, one main location (a nice house), a central as well as a notorious scene you’ve probably heard about even if you’ve not see it (Download the script here)

In Hard Candy, what keeps the pace alive and the drama vivid is that the SITUATION keeps changing, even if the location doesn’t. Far more expensive films could take a lesson. Each sequence provides a revelation or shifts the balance of power between the two protagonists. This is what grabbed me. It’s by no means perfect but, by the end of the film, I didn’t know whose side I was on - let alone how I wanted it to end or how it actually would.

From Hard Candy to The Shining and The Breakfast Club, there’s no way these films are a gimmick. They just seem that way when the writer has come up with a cool location instead of a cool story.

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

Does your script star ‘The’ Woman?

You only need to look at any ‘Best Actress’ category to see the rarity of decent female leading roles in films these days - but what had never occurred to me was a lack of female roles AT ALL. Scriptwriter/scriptreader extraordinaire Lucy Hay recently pointed me towards these statistics which show (amongst other big issues) from 1990-2006, 73% of ALL characters were male.

You can actually see this in a lot of big film’s core casts. You get your identifiable hero, the more interesting mentor/best friend, an idiosynchratic baddie…and look, there’s a woman in it too! Posters for big movies even seem happy to sell it this way:

And, with Hollywood looking back in time for remake inspiration, it’s also increasingly going backwards when it comes to equality of roles. Having Uhura on the bridge in the 60s was a big deal - now it just looks behind the times instead of ahead of them if she’s the only woman there (and you know I hate being mean about Star Trek!) So it’s up to those writing original story worlds to keep moving things forwards.

But this isn’t just about the core cast. Writing decent female lead roles aside (that’s a whole other blog post!), it’s also about fleshing out your supporting cast without resorting to lazy gender shorthand. If we’re imagining characters such as Mayors, Doctors, Chefs, Coppers walking the beat, I imagine most of us (the men, anyway) will have conjured up a bunch of fellahs which is just re-enforcing the stereotypes.

There needs to be more female characters where the point of them isn’t that they ARE female.

If we can balance out our supporting casts with a more equal gender mix, it means that the leading lady doesn’t have to encompass the entire spectrum of ‘being female’. Which surely means we can then write better characters all round, right?

Friday, May 21st, 2010

What’s next for ‘Found Footage’ Movies?

Attending a double-bill of Spanish horrors [REC] and [REC]2 last night, three hours of ’shaky-cam’ can’t help but make me think about the pros and cons of the ‘found footage’ genre. Following two fire-men on a routine call, a two-person news crew quickly find themselves quarantined in an apartment building with the bewildered and increasingly bitey tennants. And it works. Mostly.

But is there anywhere left for this genre to go? By denying themselves numerous film-making techniques by making the cameraperson a character, are film-makers actually forced to be more creative in telling their stories? For horror, I find that the lack of classically-centered shots or cooky angles sign-posting a scary bit actually made films like [REC] or Blair Witch far scarier. I didn’t know when or where some beastie might spring out and clever sound design means I’m always worried the monster is actually behind the camera/’me’.

And while none of the films so far have convinced me 100% that the characters would keep filming, I’ve been very impressed by smart techniques such as the events of Cloverfield’s monster invasion being taped over a previous perfect day of its two leads, effectively providing us with flashbacks and character context. 

But while Cloverfield, [REC] and its ilk provide exhilarating, rollercoaster/ghost train-style experiences, possibly the biggest criticism against this style of movie is in their characterisation. Personally, I thought Blair Witch’s Heather was a really interesting lead. Not overly-likeable and certainly not rich in backstory, but was that important? These movies allow opportunity to really see characterisation through action. In Heather’s case, her almost-dismissive attitude when interviewing the locals in Blair Witch’s opening salvo not only told us what we needed but also snuck in the set-up for the film’s climax as well as Heather’s final monologue to camera.

Similarly, a lot of flak is also aimed at Cloverfield’s mostly-white, middle-class, ‘priviliged’ core characters. I don’t think the makers did this accidentally. A group of people who don’t think the warnings to evacuate the city apply to them and a party who instantly produce their mobile phone cameras rather than taking in the horror around them is as central to the film as the monster. In my opinion, whilst subtle, the 9-11 imagery wasn’t restricted to the destruction of buildings.

But where do we go from here? To some extent the recent trailer for JJ Abrams and Steven Spielberg’s SUPER 8 makes me feel that their film will prove whether this sub-genre will either continue to be innovative or just repetitive. 

What interests me is that a number of these films offer an ‘expanded experience’ online, with the film itself just being one aspect of a bigger story world. But that shouldn’t excuse films from being stand-alone entertainment. With fears of surveillance, increased technology and self-publishing online, if anything, these films are very much ‘of their time’. Great thrill-rides while you’re in the cinema but then you’re done with them. But isn’t that a lot of ‘normal’ films these days too?

But why only horror in this style so far? I honestly think there’s an innovative rom-com to be had in this genre. Has the ‘handheld’ movie run its course? Was it a blip to begin with? Or is this just the beginning? 

Sunday, May 16th, 2010

Support Mr Bojagi (starring Brian Blessed).

For all my talk of writing, some friends of mine developed a script and then went and bloomin’ made it too. With Brian Blessed, no less!

MR BOJAGI is a ten-minute short film directed by Marco Van Belle, written by Kat Wood, gorgeously shot by Alex Veitch and featuring a soundtrack by that Heather Fenoughty lady (who seems to get mentioned round here from time to time) and is an offbeat but upbeat, heartwarming tale of choosing the perfect gift for a loved one…even if it takes a madman with a mind-reading machine to do so. 

On Friday, MR BOJAGI launched online having already heavily toured the festival circuit, picking up the British Lion award at the British Independent Film Awards and Best Short at the London Independent Film Awards along the way. As I type,  MR BOJAGI is already well over 14,ooo views on Daily Motion where the film is being heavily promoted and also features behind-the-scenes peaks with cast and crew.

MR BOJAGI is also a glimpse of a planned feature-film which I’m lucky enough to have read the hugely imaginative first draft of. So, if you haven’t already clicked on any of the links above, please click HERE to support an independent short by some lovely people. And also because it’s good.

There’s a facebook group and the film’s home page for further updates. But, as it’s Sunday afternoon, just sit back and watch a nice film.

Blessed be.

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Too Big, Too Soon - Act 1 vs. Act 3

Contains spoilers for 2012, Open Water and Iron Man (the first one).

I’m seeing it more and reading it more. Film scripts that start with a bang but finish with a whimper. This has always been a problem for Roland Emmerich but watching 2012 recently seemed to take it even further: Act One sees John Cusack whisk his family to safety as California literally falls apart beneath them – Act Three climaxes with…someone fishing a spanner out of some cogs. Oooh.

Working on a low-budget, high-concept(ish) feature of my own, I find myself constantly re-structuring to ensure it doesn’t peak too early or drag in the middle. I fully appreciate how easy it is to fall in love with a neat-sounding scenario that you can easily pitch. But do you find yourself getting vague when asked what happens next, once all your pieces in place? Where do you go from there? (and no you can’t just say ‘…and hi-jinks ensue’!)

A similarly guilty film in my opinion is Open Water. A nightmarish set-up that draws the audience in, asking how can these characters possibly survive? They don’t. And while there are great moments of character drama, the film clearly sells itself as something else. So all the makers managed to do was carry the drama and tension onwards – not upwards.

Even something well-regarded like Iron Man nearly scuppers itself with a plot that can only really end in a scuffle between two metal-suited foes. But that’s not how the film ends – the final seconds save the day/film for me when Tony Stark’s ego announces to the world ‘Yeah…I’m Iron Man’. But this provided dramatic closure for what we wanted to see about Tony Stark after winning us over with his change of heart early on in the film – and it has nothing to do with special effects or even the explosions on the poster.

And while there’s always the chance that your film will be mis-marketed, it’s important to make sure that you’re not mis-marketing your own ending with your beginning and middle. Start strong. End stronger. Yeah… I’m Iron Man.