character « Graham Does Writing

Posts Tagged ‘character’

Red Planet Prize – Dress Rehearsal

Monday, July 26th, 2010

I had hoped to get this out much sooner, but better late than never. I have before on this blog discussed my own troubles with those precious top ten pages. I have even looked at some examples of great openings. The Red Planet Prize (and many readers) judge a script on the first ten pages (although a script reader friend of mine says you can tell bad script much quicker than that). The top ten has to set up the characters, the conflict, the story, the goals, set up the world and establish the style. It is a lot to ask for and it needs to flow.

In this meeting of the London Comedy Writers the main issues saw the principle dilemma of the script not being readily established, we were introduced to characters, but we had no idea what was at stake. In another script there was a rush to get so much information in that the lack of planning showed up, we were bombard with scenes that would have played better being shown over a larger sum of pages. This is often what happens in a unplanned first draft when all the ideas are bouncing around trying to get onto the page.

The best example came from Robin Bailes‘ “Empire”, this was possibly one of my favourite things I have seen in the group in a while. In his first ten pages he fully established a world, what was at stake in the episode and set up the themes for a whole series. The flaw in the script was weighting of the stories, it was unclear who the main character was and what the main story was. Since one character was so extrovert and controlling he tended to dominate the scenes taking focus from a character who had higher emotional stakes. For a successful script we need to be able to move beyond the mcguffin and identify what the emotional journey is, what does that character have to learn and what do they stand to lose if they don’t.

Tags: character, feedback, london comedy writers, meeting, rewrite, Script, writing
Posted in London Comedy Writers Meeting | Comments Off

10% insperation – 90% re-write

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Thinking we cracked the story at the end of my last blog post, it still took a few days to bash the story into shape and get a consensus from the holy trinity that makes up the writing trio.

Finally it was over to me.

Armed with an all new storyline fleshed out with emotional ins and outs I sat down to tackle the new A-story a gusto usually reserved for a last minute mid-night cram session. Throwing the other plots to the side I concentrated solely on the main story that had proven to be such a bitch to get right in the previous weeks.The first step was to take the last draft and throw it out. Start on page one. Start on a blank page. Starting rebuilding the script from the foundations up.

Thankfully, far from being daunting, it was liberating, I was free to explore new areas, new sides of characters and all new scenes. The fact that the re-writing went so fast and so effortlessly is always a good sign, suddenly characters that just reacted to events were now motivated to change them.

Taking the weekend to do other things I returned to the script fresh on Monday morning and read through what was now a faster paced, more emotive script. It was also a script that had about 10% of the last draft remaining in it. Having worked on the script for some months and thinking it was close to what it needed to be, it can be a daunting prospect but throw so much away. What made this easy was knowing that the script is better for it. I know these characters so much better now and just by putting them into a scene I know what they will do.

There is still a bumpy road ahead and there is every chance that many lines I have written will be dropped in favour of better ones, but I am pumped and ready for action. Speaking of which…

Tags: character, rewrite, Script, storyline, writing
Posted in My Writing | Comments Off

Is Good, Good Enough

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

I was hoping to write a article that followed up on my previous blog that covered the importance of the first ten pages, but what at first seemed like a simple correction rapidly began to unravel. The more the thread was pulled the bigger the hole became until the spine of the script collapsed and I was faced with the prospect of massive re-writes.

We quickly identified the problem with the script being related to not seeing a particular character’s point of view. The original solution was to give her more of a voice, however this just led her to looking at the action and having some kind of emotional response to it. She wasn’t really being active and she had no problem to solve or lessons to learn. We took the story out of the script, writing each beat up and then tried to figure out the story based on what we already had. When that failed to bring about results we started to explore what stories we wanted to tell with the character. We threw up ideas, from the predictable to the bizarre, we looked at her wants, her needs, what we wanted her to learn and what dilemmas we wanted to place before her. Ideas that worked tended to be dull, ideas that were exciting were struck down for not being emotionally driven. Often the stakes at risk were not big enough or emotional enough. For example do we really care if someone loses a job they don’t really like?

We often talk about how our scripts have to be the best that they can be and that ‘good’, is not good enough, but we have been at this for so long that we are rapidly getting to a point where we need to wrap this thing up. We had pretty much spent two weeks trying to figure this story out with all the false leads thrown in front of us until finally yesterday after another day of writing up possibilities on the board I started to think of the quote – “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. Maybe good is good enough. I dismissed it just as quickly as I could no longer ignore the problem we had exposed, it had to be solved and a plaster was not going to cut it. Stuck with not even a hint of the right direction to go in, I suggested we go for a walk. Group breaks are not something we tend to take, mainly because we are never ready at the same time, but standing at a dead end we all agreed.

On the walk we discussed what wasn’t working and why we couldn’t crack this story. We boiled it right down to the most basic story.

Act I – Perfect world

Act II – Shattered world

Act III – Repaired but new world

Understanding that, we tried to elaborate on these ideas and things quickly started falling into place. We got back to the whiteboard and threw up the ideas and started to flesh things out. We ended up using many of ideas the we had discussed over the previous days, but we identified the wants the needs, we knew the moments of choice and stakes for the first time seemed high.

We are still not there. The second act still needs more exploration and elaboration, but we certainly have a beginning, middle and an end.

Of course we will rack our brains for reasons why this took so long. Were we too tied to the story, or the restrictions of the plotlines that follow in future episodes? Were we too close to the characters or the script? Did we talk too much, did we get to complicated, too abstract, did we not take breaks to allow our minds to process information? Were there too many cooks? Who knows. When we nail that story lining will be much, much easier.

Tags: character, process, Script, story, storyline, writing, writing partners
Posted in My Writing | Comments Off

Tessa, Adam and webisodes

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

This week at the London Comedy Writers we read the first 5 episodes of Brett Snelgrove’s webseries Tessa and Adam. A simple two hander exploring the relationship between a Brit boy and a Dutch dame. A strong enough premise, but one that needs to focus more on who the characters are rather than the situations they find themselves in. A key difference is a recurring sketch and webisode will be depth of the characters. I would write more about Tessa and Adam, but Brett has written an excellent blog on what he got from the meeting, so you should read that instead.

Instead I will look at the debate about the nature of a webisode and the hell it is.

It is hardly surprising people don’t know what exactly a webisode is, despite the term being around for over 10 years Websters only got around to acknowledging it 2009. Basically put a webisode is a single episode of a series that first aired over the internet, either streamed or downloaded. If you have a whole bunch of webisodes then you have yourself a webseries. It is generally accepted that a webisode will have runtime of 4-15 minutes, but I suspect that this will continue to increase as web TV gains in popularity. Reasons for the short length at the have been to do with budgets, YouTube limits and bandwidth (ie the speed it takes to download an episode). Broadband is now standard and streaming full length shows is no longer a problem, you only have to look at the popularity of BBC iplayer to see that. YouTube now allows longer videos and there are other sites that will stream and host material. Finally cost. This use to be a barrier in creating good quality shows, but digital technology is now much cheaper. For £10,000 you can buy yourself better equipment than is used currently on many mainstream TV shows. Mobisodes are the same thing, although originally coined as show for mobile phones the prevalence of the internet on phones has rendered this a thing of the past.

The next thing you have to understand is that a webisode is a broad term, it is basically a TV show on the web. This means a webisode can be drama, comedy, documentary, hosted, political, animated and even reality.

Knowing this, this should free you up in your writing. The web provides a massive opportunity for people to break through and get noticed. Distribution which has been for so long a barrier creatives has now been shattered. A BBC3 show will be considered a hit for topping 2 million viewers. Meanwhile this episode of Fred has a staggering 37 million views, what makes this more shocking is that Fred is currently the second most subscribed YouTube channel in the world and you have probably never heard of it, much like the number one channel Nigahiga. This shows that your videos don’t need to go viral to be a success, you create characters that people like and then tell interesting stories, the audience will find show if it is what they are looking for.

Hopefully we will be seeing more webisodes in the future as this is an exciting medium ready to be exploited.

So in parting I will leave you with a few different series that are floating around on the web.

You Suck at Photoshop – masquerading as tool to teach photoshop you can enjoy the host’s life fall apart over the series.

The Guild – Streamy award winning sitcom.

Gemini Division – Produced by NBC as exclusive online content the sci-fi drama stars Rosario Dawson and a ton of product placement.

Hardly Working – What goes behind the scenes at College Humour.

Red vs Blue – Now starting up on its 11th season, this web series follows 2 opposing soldiers in the Halo universe.

DJ School – ComComedy launches their first webseries, with hopefully more on the way.

Tags: character, ComComedy, london comedy writers, meeting, webisode, writing
Posted in London Comedy Writers Meeting | 2 Comments »

Cinders and laws of pantomime.

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

It was another packed week at the LCW with people forced into corners as a fresh stock of actors took to the stage. With Christmas just round the corner it seems fitting that this week’s feature script was a modern retelling of Cinderella dubbed Cinders. The finished product is due to be performed in Primrose Gardens, Belsize Park on the 12th, 13th, 18th (adults only special) 19th and 20th of December (more details soon). The big lesson for other writers at the LCW to learn from this reading is how beneficial a polished cast actors are to a reading. Although we try to cast scripts ahead of the meetings, we don’t have the time to rehearse them, so to some extent much of the reading is done on sight. Sarah and Tom took the time to put together a cast who were fully aware of what the roles required and were thus able to give a confident performance.

Moving onto the script itself, there was much debate about traditional pantomime laws (someone said the army had to be involved, someone else said you can no longer throw out sweets as health and safety wants to prevent blindness by Haribo). A phrase often used is “You must know the rules before you can break them”, and in the case of ‘Cinders’ while there was a nod towards the panto genre, there was much that seemed missing. There was no audience participation song, no cries of “behind you you”, very few double entendres and the Ugly Sisters were woefully underused as villains to rile up the crowd and make Cinders’ life a misery. But all of these points are easily fixed in rewrites and after all that is why a script comes to the group.

Structurally the script suffered from a large ensemble cast all fighting for attention. The traditional role of Buttons was split between him and a new character dubbed ‘Narrator’, Buttons came off worse in this deal. Instead of being the best friend and confident of Cinders he just wandered in every now and again giving him very little opportunity to interact with the audience or become a character we cared about. In this humble writers opinion the two characters would be better off if they merged into one serving the duel purpose of guiding the audience and also showing us why we care about what happens to Cinders.

As mentioned before the ugly sisters were underused, they should be more involved in Cinder’s miserable life so we can see why she wants to escape to a better life. However this use of introducing something and not using it to full effect within the story was perhaps the biggest problem. With so many ideas being thrown on the table many of them felt like weird insider jokes rather than tools of story telling. The lesson here is if you introduce an idea, you should pay it off. In Cinders one of the characters can read minds, it is repeated over and over again and in the end the skill is used to find Cinders in the basement… except like a real mind reader, he only claims that she is in there after she burps and someone says “that must be her!” So there was no reason for the character to have this skill. A comparison would a Bond film where Bond gets given a car that can go underwater and then gets in a boat to cross a river. Sometimes these things remain in a script because it is hard to bite the bullet and kill your darlings, but sometimes it has to be done.

On the plus side Cinders is an ambitious project with a very talented cast, there are some fantastic characters such as the Supreme Makeover Fairy (an excellent modernisation of the fairy god mother) who really lift the script up. I have no doubt that the production will have successful run, so stay tuned for details in the near future.

Finally there is no pantomime law that says the army has to be involved.

Tags: character, feedback, london comedy writers, meeting, pantomime, sketch
Posted in London Comedy Writers Meeting | 1 Comment »

Questionable Character

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

After all the work we put into developing our series, we are still surprised by the revelations we have and the mistakes we made. First we had to re-write a major A story in episode 3, episode 1 needed re-constructive surgery on the first ten pages and the main character in episode 2 was woefully underwritten. Since I have already blogged about episode 3, today I will turn to episode 2.

Episode 2

On reading the new draft we were struck by how absent the main character was in the script. So we went back over the pages tracking what the character did and how he was feeling in each scene and how he moved the story forward. Taking those story notes a redraft was done and we still had the same problem. Using Final Draft’s statistic feature we were able to identify that that main character was talking for about 10% of the script, while his friend clocked in at 20% of the script. Imagine Robin over shadowing Batman to that extent and you understand why this is an unacceptable situation. Now we started to question whether we had a bigger issue, did we need to rewrite the storyline or were we missing something.

Before sitting down to write all our storylines we spent many weeks crafting well rounded characters. Sadly for you, our technique is a trade secret that shall only be released when I am drunk and good luck trying to understand me then. However, put basically we try to explore what the character would be like in different situations. So meeting someone for the first time would he be cocky or shy, when things are going well what are the things the character does to ensure that state. All of that provides a great tool when writing, but a problem arises from characters who are more introverted. For the character in question we had used words like ‘shy’, ‘avoid’, ‘ wet’, ‘doesn’t speak up’, ‘good listener’, ‘doubting’, ‘sensitive’ to describe him; many of these words are very inactive making it difficult for us to do much with the character. So we went back to drawing board to explore ways we could make him active. So ‘avoidance’ became ‘avoidance by distraction’, ‘doesn’t speak up’ became ‘ struggles to speak up’. Then knowing the character is heavily defined by his imagination we looked at how that manifested itself in good ways bad ways. So his imagination when used for good becomes ‘enchanting’, when used for bad it becomes ‘makes a crisis out of drama’ or he becomes a ‘romantic fantasist’. All these new words gave us more character to play with making him drive the plot rather than just getting pulled along by the louder characters.

So all that sounds easy, but what you miss is how much we fight over words. ‘Enchanting’ for example was a big battle, we came up with words like ‘captivating’, ‘enrapturing’, ‘magical’ but none of these words said what we wanted. The idea was that character’s imagination is not for show, but people are drawn to him. The other words suggested hinted at manipulation, we didn’t want people trapped by his imagination, rather we wanted the mesmerised, they could leave any time, but they don’t want to. Take that debate and now apply that to every word we came up with and you start to understand why takes a day… or not.

Tags: character, rewrite, Script, story, writing, writing partners
Posted in My Writing | Comments Off

The Daily Grind & other sketches

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Another packed meeting, so let’s get down with what we had.

First up was Joel Soetendorp two-part sketch “Drawn Together“, a clever title that was actually not mentioned (but also shares the name of an cartoon reality hybrid show ). As is often the case with sketches, they go on too long, they are built around a single joke and then padded out because a one page script looks a little sad. However when the script is built solely around a single idea, one page is plenty, any more than that and you have to have worthwhile characters who your audience invest in. Joel’s script fell into this trap with an early punchline that was never matched by anything that followed, but it was a great early gag.

So, speaking of character led comedy, next up we had Brett Snelgrove’s webisode idea “The Knot”. The 5 minute scene presented us with a unique couple in a fun situation, sure it was saggy and needs some rewrites, but he is definitely on the right track. The question is, was it a sketch or was it webisode? Tough to tell, right now I am leaning towards sketch because I got no sense of an over arching storyline for the future, but this could change.

Our last sketch came from Jon Neale and his script “Miss World”, packed with some great gags, it was best explained as a bunch of jokes in search of a sketch. The sketch jumped around all over the place and while it got laughs, the inconsistencies in structure makes it useless in it’s current form.

Our main feature “The Daily Grind” by Shereen Docherty was warmly received following a passionate reading from our actors and as usual it generated much debate. One of the things that gets thrown up in feedback is correct formatting, since Shereen’s script was 1.5 spaced, the 30 pages took just over 20 minutes to read, shorter than a sit-com should be. The page a minute guide is a good one, but personally I don’t care that much on a script which is coming to the group for feedback. I expect them to be too long, or too short because it’s a draft. Even when it comes to correct formatting these are many different styles and at the end of the day as a long as it looks like a script you will be just fine. Of course formatting on Word can be hard, so if you are looking for a free script writing program try out Zhura or Celtx. Next up was the use of named music tracks, this falls into the same category of putting in named products. There is this myth that a prospective buyer of your script will look at your choice of music or use of a name brand and bin your script lest they have to pay out the big bucks to licence them. In reality they don’t care because hopefully your great story, snappy dialogue and fascinating characters will out weigh the mild inconvenience of changing “Coca Cola” to “cola”. This is not to say that you now have a green card to ram your script full of product placement and hit songs, a good rule is only put it in if it helps enrich your script, if you can cut it, cut it. That might sound like I am going back on myself, but that “cut it” rule should apply to everything in your script; if it serves no purpose, cut it.

On the character front Shereen had succeeded in creating some interesting characters, although it was disappointing that on the rare occasion where we have a female scriptwriter we were still lacking in good roles for women. As a pilot the ensemble piece was a little confused since we did know who’s story we were really following. Something we see often in a script at the LCW is the main character just seemed to be along for the ride, things happen to him and around him without him having to make any decisions. The inactive protagonist is a common problem in event led scripts, remember let the characters lead the story, no the events.

Well that is all for this week and just in time as we have another meeting in 3 days.

Tags: character, feedback, london comedy writers, meeting, sketch, webisode
Posted in London Comedy Writers Meeting | Comments Off

Back to the Drawing Board

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

I started writing this blog after countless months of character studies and storylines, so I never got write about those head banging processes, just the tasty side of writing, the dessert if you will. But this week we were hit with a depressing revelation, one of our carefully crafted storylines in episode 3 (also know as the Widow maker) just wasn’t working and what hoped would be a quick fix turned into rewriting the storyline from scratch. On the down side we had to go through that stressful process again, on the plus side it is fresh in my memory so I can write about it.

Day One

We identified problems with the main story, the ending wasn’t working… and the beginning was struggling, luckily we all agreed on those points… this consensus would be rare treat over the next few days.

Day Two

Realising that there would not be a quick fix we turned to our trusty whiteboard (quite possibly our most useful tool in writing this series). We started by writing up the beats of the current storyline, brainstorming ideas what we could do to the fix the problems. We examined character motivations, looking for a way to make a story about subtle manipulation more active, we threw in new devices, altered the story around the plot points we liked from the original. There was loud debate as we all tried to inject our emotional bias into the story. After several hours of head banging we finally ended up with something 2 out 3 of us were relatively happy with. However, this is not how we roll, if there is a dissenting voice, that voice must be heard and quelled. On this occasion it was my dissenting voice, I looked at the storyline and could not get past the fact that what we had ended up with was half our original story and half an all new story. At that point we were at the end of the day, tired from fighting and decided to pick it up the next day.

Day Three

Sitting down we looked at the board, we read out the story and since nothing had changed from yesterday I still wasn’t happy. Whether we like it or not we needed to start from scratch rather than building a new storyline on the bones of an old one. So we started again, this time we knew our in point, we knew the emotion of the our end point and we knew that we could only use 3 characters, since others were busy with their own stories. We wanted Character A to have something over Character B that would be so powerful it would make Character B do Character A’s bidding. We had really struggled to find something we were all happy with, then someone remembered a storyline that we tossed around in the very early stages of the game. The device was perfect and from dissent came universal agreement. The storyline very quickly wrote itself, with the same heated and passionate discussion, but with an agreement that we were all heading in the right direction. It had been another day, batter, bruised and tired, but we were certainly feeling better about it.

Day Four

We looked over the storyline again and were feeling pretty good, it was certainly better than the one we had before, more active, higher stakes and more personal. The ending still needed work and again heated debate came out. One of us can get particularly passionate guy and in the heat of debate he doesn’t phrase himself in the best way (we all have this problem, so I’m not picking on him… well I am, but just in this instant, to even it upm one of us can sound condescending and I sit silence being negative or not contributing anything… apparently.), so sometimes two of can find ourselves arguing with a passionate person who sees is projecting their own feelings on to another character who would not act the same way. In arguing with him about that character we ignore that genuine concern. In this case he could not understand how Character C would not be angry at what Character A had done to Character B, but Character C is mellow and forgiving, it says it right there in his bio next to “hugger”. This was an obvious win for us, but their was a point. Character B would not understand how Character C could be so forgiving and that would need to be conversation those two characters would have to have and it was a beat we had ignored and were not hearing.

And Finally…

Ultimately the writer had mixed feelings at the end of the day, she knew the story was better, but she now faced a 70% rewrite of her script. It is bitter sweet, but hopefully endemic of why this writing has taken so long. Never settle. No matter how frustrating it maybe, we don’t settle, we don’t fudge, we don’t turn a blind eye. When all is said and done this should be the best we could have made it.

Tags: character, process, Script, storyline, writing, writing partners
Posted in My Writing | Comments Off

Feedback received – thank you very much

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Lest my last comments stand alone as testament to my frustrations, I thought I better update with the results of said feedback.

As it happened we both had the same concerns, although the solutions differed somewhat. My instant reaction was to cut the first half of the script, but writing partner, script reader and all round wheat intolerant demi God said, “no, refocus on this character.” Oh, it makes sense when you say it, but this character was hardly in the storylines, so I blame that, rather than myself. This character is the audience’s eyes and we want people to discover our world through her.

Great I can finally get back to work, but the play station is looking at me. Damn it, it is much easier to procrastinate when you can blame it someone else. So now I am off to the park with a print out to look at this character’s journey to see what I can do to make it more interesting.

Tags: character, feedback, procrastination, Script, writing, writing partners
Posted in My Writing | Comments Off

It’s all about character

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

I read the first draft of what is surely going to be a script subjected to an intense bidding war. 6 pages too long, crammed with on the nose dialouge and the feeling that there are way too many “fucks” for a pre-watershed sitcom. That said, I was not bored reading it, but I do have notes… lots and lots of notes. Draft 1.2 is in the works now with each scene receiving suitable scrutiny.

How did we get so far.

The fact is you are walking in at the end of an 8 month process. Almost like a dinner guest watching me drop the parsley on a finished dish. You don’t know the hours slaved away in the kitchen mixing spices through trial and error to find that perfect blend.

So here we flashback to the early days in the process. It was late last year, the markets were crashing as moved quickly towards the recession, America was in a fierce one sided battle for the presidency and I was out of work. My writing partners and I were looking at maybe 4 months to write the next big sitcom… This would be the first of every deadline we set and missed.

We all ready had a setting… lets say it was a school (it isn’t, but the setting is a closely guarded secret and I want to share without giving too much away). So now we need to populate our world with characters, different characters. We want all our characters to have different voices, see things differently and solve things differently. Confronted by a mugger one character might hand over the their wallet, another might run away, another might fall to the floor weeping like a child, basically not every character would do what I would do (Go Jackie Chan on their ass). So with a list of characters we then explore them, who are they, where did they come from, what do they want and how will they get it. 2 months later we had 6 Characters maps and 6 in depth biogs — One of our characters got it on with a rugby player at university and another collected PG tips trading cards; the audience will never know this, but we do. We were ready for the next stage… although at some point down the line biogs and maps were going to rear their ugly head once more.

Tags: character, process, Script, writing
Posted in My Writing | Comments Off