I know what my problem is - I didn't Cutaway

So, Script Frenzy was pretty much a bust as I wasn't really ready to do another first draft, so I just poked at a couple things.  I eventually decided to go back and do the re-writes I should have been doing all along.  Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced my rewrite notes, so it's taking me a lot longer than I had anticipated.

Last Saturday I took a class with Scott Lobdell (X-Men, Buffy [comics]) on comic writing and screenwriting.  It was kinda amazing just to here about his process.  It seems like he is just constantly coming up with ideas, but more importantly, he's also constantly working.  He told us his story about how he broke into a comics, and it was basically just working his ass off, until they gave him a chance.  He also gave out handouts about the different stages of writing a comic.  He also talked about
At the end, Caleb Monroe (an up and coming comic book writer) also spoke about breaking in.  I think it was he quoted the old saying about how breaking into comics is like breaking out of prison:  once one guy does it, they close off that means of escape.

As I was leaving I grabbed a copy of Hunters Fortune, which Caleb scripted.  The thing I immediately noticed was, like in screenwriting, Caleb kept entering each scene at the last possible moment.  The book opens with Hunter's landlady yelling about how he is 3 months late on rent.  We don't need to see him miss the first two payments, look at his bank account, or turn out his pockets like in Monopoly.  We find out everything we need to know about his normal life in the first two pages: he is homeless, unemployed, and his car is being repossessed.  The story never stops moving.  There is never a wasted frame.
I'll probably end up buying the other book he wrote, something involving Steven Baldwin.  Ever since http://www.restorestephenbaldwin.org/, I've been a little weary of anything involving that Baldwin brother (Although, I did love him in Shark in Venice, one of the movies that inspired my own creature-feature Piranhasteroid!).
I have to include this as well:



AUTHORS NOTE:  I applaud Mr. Baldwin for living his life openly, I just don't think he should be soliciting money for it.

Slow and steady wins the race

After some thought last night, I realized I had already given myself a way to have "patient zero" be fast and the rest be slow.  But, after talking with Matt and Disco, and really thinking about why I chose the location I did for my script, I realized that slow zombies are the best choice.  With narrow hallways and no real escape, there is no need for fast zombies.  Sure fast zombies are scarier, but you kinda lose what makes zombies what they are: the living dead. 

 I may end changing my mind and just making them fast "infected".   But, for now, slow and steady wins the race.  

BTW: I got back into the treatment for this script that I had started months ago and put down.  It's interesting to see all these ideas I had, that I had completely forgotten about (as well as some pretty terrible character names). I'm hoping that by the end of the week I have my treatment done and then I can start working on a beat sheet/outline (possibly right in Final Draft).

Also, since there is no reason why this script should be more than 80-85 pages (a lot of action; less dialogue as we go; keeping that level of tension), I am also going to write a spec for Community.  It will of course involve curling.  More updates on that when I ahve an actual plot in mind.

How fast do you like your zombies?

I should have realized that once I started playing Left 4 Dead that it was a foregone conclusion that I would select my zombie script to write for Script Frenzy.  I debated my ninja script, my panda script and my horror-noir script (and for a moment I even debated my "illegal cross-country road race" script).   But, in the end, the fact that I already had a lot of idea on post-its covering one side of my bookcase (and the fact L4D is so intense) caused it to win out.  Quite frankly I was beginning to wonder if I would ever write it.

Now comes the fundamental question all modern zombie writers have to answer: Fast or slow zombies?

My initial inclination is to make them slow - in my mind it just makes sense.  These people are dead.  There muscles and brains are no longer receiving nutrients.  The inflection is what is keeping them alive.  But, on that same note, there's no rule saying that the infection couldn't be supercharging everything.  And, fast zombies are in many ways scarier than slow zombies.

What I am debating doing is making most of them slow and just a handful fast.  The problem is how do I explain it?  I mean my protagonists are college kids, not biomedical engineers, so any explanation must be readily apparent to them.   Do I even have to explain it?  The problem is that I don't want my screenplay to come off like a video game, where you have a lot grunts to kill and then bosses.

Let me know if you have any ideas.

SCRIPT FRENZY

So, as you may have ascertained, I have not been writing a lot as of late.  Between stressing out about not working and working, I just haven't been getting a lot of writing done.  So, when my friend Matt emailed me about Script Frenzy, I was instantly hooked.
Now, Script Frenzy is brought to you by the same people who do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but instead of writing 50,000 words (I think), you have to write 100 pages of script.  It can be comic book, screenplay, teleplay, or play (I think I got them all).
It starts 4/1 and goes to 4/30.  It may seem like tons of time until it starts, but in actuality, it's not much time at all, when I think about everything I have to do before then:
1) Finish the draft of Heisty that I am working on and probably do at least one polish on it.
2) Figure out which story I want to do next - I guess it's a good problem to have, having a lot of ideas for stories to write about, but I need to pick one and stick with it, which is the hard part.
3) Once I pick the idea I need to quickly write the story, then a treatment and then a fairly detailed outline, because when it comes time to start, 3+ pages a day is not easy when you don't know exactly where your story is going.  This is problem I had with Heisty - I just had a basic idea and started writing, so when the script came out to 60 pages, I just started randomly filling stuff in, and not really thinking about the story.

I've got the notecard app for the iPhone, as well as the screenplay app, so I'm going to go through both of those and my Moleskine, over the weekend and try and figure out which story will be the best, easiest, but most importantly, the story I will be the most excited about writing hardcore for a month.

I'll try and give you an idea as to what kinds of stories I'm considering over the weekend.  Here's a sneak peak: They're pretty much all genre films.