The First Attempt at a Beatsheet

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I’ve been reading this excellent book, written by Alex Epstein, called Crafty TV Writing : Thinking Inside the Box. It’s a really fantastic book for screen-writing, and I’m sure most of you who do screen-writing probably already know of it, but on the off-chance that you don’t. You need to get it. I’ve never looked at television like I do now. I keep going back on all the shows I’ve watched, searching for the patterns described, the templates, the consistency in successful shows. The way they pull the stories through the acts and come up with that final scene. The way they frustrate the hell out of you, but you can’t help going back. I wonder if we’re gluttons for punishment or just overly curious.

Perhaps both.

One part of the book makes mention of a beatsheet.

“A beat is the smallest unit of storytelling. It is a piece of the story in which something happens.”

So basically, it’s beats of pauses, not like a rhythm or anything.

Rambling…anyways…so I thought I’d give it a go. I have this habit of wanting to obtain perfection on a first attempt, and like I’ve discovered, while reading this book, it’s just not obtainable on the first try unless you’re someone uber and even then most of the time isn’t the FIRST draft, only the official first draft. Rewrites are the way!

So keeping that in mind, I embarked on the mass short-cut scene writing, so that I would have something to work with and fine-tune.

And it’s working. I’ve never had a screenplay flow so easily on to the paper. Knowing that quite a few of these will probably be written out and others will be further pushed into additional scenes, doesn’t feel like such a daunting situation anymore.

Instead I look forward to seeing where the characters are taking me, which characters have decided that they want to be core cast and which want to be regulars, and others…that are just for fluff and character. It’s interesting.

What am I learning from this beatsheet? You quickly see how fast/slow the scenes are in your Episode. I’m also noticing the places where I used to add fluff and why it’s not important to have them in the Episode at all. What I thought was important, ended up being explained away in another scene without even needing to outright explain it to the viewers and that’s something I never had visible before.

It’s like it gives you a fresh perspective on the true timeline and a clear goal. My next challenge, will probably be finding the scenes that separate the acts in an interesting way so that viewers stay hooked through the commercial and don’t change the channel.

This is quite a liberating experience for me right now. I’ve been writing amateurish scripts since I was 11, so 14 years now and only now am I truly trying to work on a technique and come up with something to present to the world. If this works out really well, maybe I’ll attempt a spec script! *crosses fingers in hope*

That would be cool.

Have a good day!

A Powerful Ad

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I was playing around in the iPad, testing a new app and then started procrastinating and ended up on YouTube as we all do when we procrastinate, and found this old ad, but I thought it was worth posting. It’s still a powerful ad, even if it’s 3 years old. Enjoy.

Author: Flommivids
Provided by YouTube

Scattered Brained Weekend

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There are times when I become entirely scattered brained and completely incapable of functioning like a normal A.R. human being.

This weekend was one of those times.

I figure, awesome, I need to get up early, because the guy from Videotron Ltd is coming to install my brand spanking new modem to get my Ultimate 30 service! SCORE, I thought. So then, I decided, spontaneously, that I should do the laundry. At 7:30 in the morning.  This doesn’t sound odd, but I avoid doing the laundry whenever possible, and certainly not 1.5 hours before we’re even allowed to use the laundry room.

Anyways, so I throw the clothes in the washer, and let the Videotron guy in. After being harassed by me for an hour with 20 questions as to why there is a little piece on the cable connecting to every possible connection, how strong my signal was outside of the modem and the injustice of their promotional system by reducing our speed in order to convince us to get a higher connection, he finally left. Just me and my BRAND NEW INTERNET. SCORE! I thought, again.

So, I get on my computer and think, this is a great moment to play World of Warcraft. So I log in and I have my Coca-Cola ready at 9:10am and Goldfish crackers ready for consumption. 30 seconds into gameplay…I hit the X in the corner. I’m struggling to comprehend at that point and next thing you know I’m on Big Fish Games playing Ancient Rome, Life Quest, Antique Road Trip USA and various numerous games. For approximately 5 minutes each. So then I figure…let’s try Tetris. I log in to my account on www.tetrisfriends.com and finally I get into a game!

SCORE! For the third time!

Not. After 15 minutes, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I needed to do something else. So I get the laundry out of the washer and put it in the dryer and decide to watch movies instead. So I watch The Wave, an interesting German film about a teacher during project week who teaches his students about autocratic society and uses an experiment to do so. The experiment goes too far and one of the students ends up shooting people by the end of it. True story based in the states. Okay, where was I. So even that, I couldn’t focus on. Next thing you know I’m on the phone to Nova Scotia, Quebec City, Texas, etc. I’m thinking I’m losing my mind at this point!

So I finally decide, after speaking with my mother, that I need a vacuum. Why? Because I grabbed the vacuum while I was talking to her and decided I should do some housework. And re-arrange furniture. And put away the laundry, and do the dishes, litter, feed cats,…my day wasn’t ending. So I left.

I went to the store determined more than ever to accomplish at least one thing on my list to perfection. Obtain brand new vacuum with great power and a nozzle to get to every nook and cranny. This was going to be the simplest thing on my list!

WRONG. While I was standing at the bus stop waiting for the bus to come, I changed my mind. I crossed the street and took the other bus instead, thinking that I’d stop at the mall on the way to the Terminal. I was SO clever. Then I got off at the Terminal and I thought, “Well, I’m already here, I may as well go downtown.” Which eventually led me to the bookstore, which is inevitable. I can’t go to the downtown malls of Montreal without going to the Indigo. That’s just insanity.

So after walking around the bookstore for 3 hours, I finally decided that what I needed, was more books about scriptwriting. Why? Why not programming? It’s much more pertinent and would have a much better return!…I don’t know why, I hope you weren’t expecting a real answer to that.

I get to the counter and sure enough, the chick offers the usual discount card. And after 1.5 years of avoiding renewing my card, I decided that I buy enough books that it merits the 10-40% discounts I could get. So I got it.

I left for a vacuum and came back with 75$ of books instead. Terrible. I cannot be trusted alone. To be fair, all my bills are paid.

So I get home with my brand new books and sit down to read. But then I can’t decide which one. I read the first chapter of each and ended up putting them all down. “Another movie”, I thought! No! Languages! Must learn languages more. Italian, Spanish, German… And so the cycle began…yet again.

Rinse and repeat, and there you have my indecisive, scatter-brained weekend.

Thanks for reading,

Have a great day, evening, night, morning wherever you are!

Born for Drama

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Okay, so I thought this was probably the most hysterical shorts I’ve ever seen. I’m sure there’s many more out there that are funnier, but personally…this had me in fits. I love British humour and even as I write this, I’m already laughing and getting tears in my eyes.

Thank you to my coworker Pierre for this gem!

This was done for the Young Director Award 2010 was created by TBWA Helsinki and directed by Rogier Hesp

Author: AmsterdamAdBlog
Provided by YouTube

Learning Italian (Post 3), Script Frenzy (Day 14) and Southern Gals

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I decided to randomly look at my own blog today and I realize that I haven’t blogged in a week!…I thought that was utterly terrible of me and completely slack, so here I am, writing a post at 12:32 AM.

Learning Italian : I bought a book this evening called 501 Italian Verbs. I thought that having a book of conjugated verbs may help me in establishing a better understanding of the language. It gives really great examples with most of the verbs to be able to know how they’re used, so it’s great! I’m totally loving the experience. I haven’t felt this way about learning something, since I started learning programming.

Script Frenzy : Well, I’m 50 pages into Script Frenzy now. It’s 15 days in and we have another 15 to go. I’m on schedule! I’ll probably hunker down and hack out the next portion of it over the weekend. At least get most of the rest finished. I’m looking forward to getting to be able to go back over it all and make it into a polished piece of art. Fantastic.

Southern Gals : I’ve recently discovered that Twitter is quite a dangerous world. Flying tweets left and right. Everyone vying for attention and sometimes…sometimes you get a random message from someone and you’re thrown for several moments. You wonder if they made a mistake, surely no one responds to a tweet!

But they do!…who knew. So this southern gal, (who shall remain nameless, *cough*GO HERE*cough*) decided that I was deemed worthy of a tweet back! And I’m shamelessly linking you to her website, because I can. *waves banner and gushes in a southern drawl* “I’m her biggest fan, y’all! One day I could even get an autograph on my banner!”

What was I on about? It’s late and my mind is wandering lol. Right, so it was pretty cool to be able to meet someone on Twitter who had very similar interests to me. It’s rare that I get to talk to anyone who thinks anything I think is of interest, let alone it be their idea! So after hours of brain picking and confusing conversations about nothing in particular, I decided she’s cool and is now invited to the inner circle of friends. *crickets chirp in the empty field* …okay, it’s an empty space, but I have to start somewhere!

Okay, I’ll write more tomorrow. I’m too brain dead lol

Have a good day/evening all!

My Experience Learning Italian – Post 3

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Ahh, I think this is now day 4 or 5 of learning Italian and I thought I’d share my improvements over the last few days.

So one of the last things I had a big issue with was the inability to properly process the information and spit it out in written form. Well, I got better at it. The last written submission I sent in only had 1 mistake! It made me so excited! (not in a dodgy manner) And then to make matters even better for me, I finally got out my microphone and decided to record my speaking submissions and see how that went. Apparently I’m much better at speaking Italian than writing it. Not a surprise. I’ve always been better at speaking random languages than understanding them.

But, apparently I speak shyly when I speak Italian, which makes sense, because I haven’t yet learned where to put the emphasis on the parts of the words in order to speak it confidently. I’m just trying to focus on saying it right, before I get overly sure of myself and manage to epically fail at life. Like Post 1 in which I described my failed attempt at trying to be clever by switching words out. What can I say, I learn fast not to make that kind of mistake again.

Small nuisance with the program I’m using is that the speaking submissions tend to use very different words than the lessons themselves, which is really odd to me. It’s like…oh hey 3 lessons later, why don’t we randomly use camion instead of autocarro. Or borsa instead of borsetta. It just messes with my head, I don’t know why they do it. I’m going to assume it’s like when you randomly run into someone in Italy and they’re suddenly using some warped language and they want you to be on your toes just in case!

So that’s all I had to say about that for today, as the days go by, I’m sure that it’ll get more interesting.

Script Frenzy – Day 8

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Well, it’s day 8 and things are finally starting to pick up some more. I’ve spent the majority of day in pain and after much Tylenol, I’m doped up enough to not feel much pain at all, so I’m writing this post. I’m sitting at around 37 pages now out of 100. Hopefully I’ll have a few more before the day is done. The last few days haven’t been too eventful, I’ve been trying to catch up on a bit of sleep and work on a website for someone at work, so I’ve been a little busy.

What have I gotten done in the last few days?…

1) I’ve managed to learn how to pace myself much better. One of those most difficult things that I struggle with is learning to pace the storyline instead of trying to force feed the information to the reader in 5 minutes time. It’s actually kind of satisfying to be able to do that. Now even I think it’s more interesting this way.
2) I’ve learned to drop hints/clues in order to prepare the reader a little better for the upcoming scenes.
3) My bad guys and good guys are a little less clean cut. I tend to be a bit of an extremist when it comes to characters. They’re either really horrible people or really sweet-tooth worthy. Now my bad guys show that they have some feelings beyond anger and hatred and my good guys show a side that shows they have moments where they don’t care who they walk over either.

I guess I didn’t do anything major in the storyline, but it’s an interesting learning experience nonetheless.

Have a great day everyone and I hope that your Script Frenzy is going well.

My Name is Audrey-Rose and I’m a Workaholic

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Hi there,

My name is Audrey-Rose and I’m a workaholic.

At approximately 10pm on Thursday night, I sat staring wide-eyed at the clock and found myself daydreaming about being back in the comfort of my workplace. Why? Because, it’s the long weekend. I should consider myself fortunate that I had the time to work on my screenwriting and started to learn a new language, but as every moment passes, and the hours begrudgingly pass by, I’ve been wanting to go back to work.

The worst part is, it’s not even because I’m stressed out and have something to get done there. No, we’ve gone into Agile mode and things are pretty bloody organised, so it’s most definitely not that. No. I just love to work. I love having a list of things to do and I love getting them done. It’s a little addicting. The problem that then follows as a consequence of such an addiction is that I tend to procrastinate on the things I do enjoy doing, just because it’s all I can think about!

Is there a cure? Probably not. It’s probably one of those things where you get a chip out, try to focus and not go overboard each day and then the day you do go overboard, you tend to revert back to that first chip like a good little failure that you are. Don’t take it as an affront to your inability to stay sober (for those of you who might have gotten insulted from that remark), but I would consider it a personal failure on my part if I didn’t have the self-control and willpower to keep myself on my own leash. There’s just no excuse. I would fail because of one simple fact. Working is fun. I like working. I love the feeling of working. And I’ll work again. Addiction is just insane to try to handle. So long as it feels good to the person, they’ll never drop it.

Anyways, so that’s my random ramble of the day. I thought that perhaps my other rambles were due to the utter lack of sleep that I was projecting at the time, but it would appear that even with sleep, I’m just as mentally unsound. I’ll work on it.

Have a good rest of the day!

My Experience Learning Italian – Post 2

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Ahh, another day come and gone in the lovely world of learning Italian. It’s still random, I still don’t have any sound basis for wanting to learn it, but I can tell you one thing. I love it! I’ve always heard from people, especially here in Quebec, that Spanish is super easy to understand, especially if you know English and French, but personally I’ve always found it a little difficult to get my mind around. Which is odd, but eh. Italian on the other hand…seems like French has a pretty big Italian base to it and is MUCH closer to sounding French than Spanish does. Someone could explain something to me in Spanish and an Italian could explain the same thing and odds are that I’ll understand the Italian more than the Spanish one.

Sorry, I’m rambling a little, it’s pretty early in the morning and I haven’t slept yet.

Yesterday didn’t really have any huge dramatic episodes of corrections, but I also haven’t done the written submission portion of Lesson 2 yet. I’m almost having nightmares in my waken state just imagining the resulting commentary I’m going to be receiving once I do complete it. I can just imagine the grilling. Hopefully I don’t try anything clever and manage to get the singular/plural/feminine/masculine right this time. Now that I understand that the language is styled much like French, this will be much easier for me to understand. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it that way before, but eh.

I’ll be sure to update as regularly as I can. As boring as it all is, it keeps me wanting to push forward and keep learning the language, just so I can rant about the whole experience and enjoy the fact that I’m understanding it more and more :D

All in all. I’m loving this! What a beautiful language.

Have a great day!

Early Morning Day 5 of Script Frenzy

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I’m not entirely certain whether it’s healthy to be up at 3:30 in the morning just to write a script. Personally, I think it’s a little ridiculous, I mean, I should be in bed, sleeping, enjoying dreams and soaking in the rest and relaxation before the sunlight streaks its way through the windows….That’s the logical thought process and yet here I am.

In my defence, my storyline has mutated quite a bit from yesterday. Certain things that had initially been brought up, are no longer in the picture and others are a little fairer. I needed a more distinct difference between the protagonists and antagonists. Before, I had an issue of them meshing a little too much, but hopefully I’ve managed to smooth it out.

So here I am. 31 pages into my screenplay, 69 to go!

Let’s see…what have I learned in the last 24 hours?

1 – There’s such a thing as too much Coca Cola. When you’re talking a mile and minute and manage to have 7 conversations within 16 minutes with the same person, you’ve just surpassed the limit and need to lay off.
2 – Sometimes, you don’t need to create drama where none is need. Sometimes, it’s just better to let the story flow.
3 – When they say that every interaction should have conflict, it doesn’t mean outright conflict. In the case of a scene I was writing, there was a situation that came up that normally the cliché would suggest being argumentative and cause some kind of friction. Instead I made the character reluctantly accept, while making a backhanded comment that would suggest dissension, but much more subtly.
4 – Watching movies while writing is such a bad idea. I wish it were because it wrongly inspires you, but for me it just kind of distracted me from getting any writing done.
5 – Pushing through a scene by writing crap is sooo much easier to work with. You can always go back later and correct it.

So, I hope you all have a good day or sleep when you get there (I can’t be the only one up at this time, who should be in bed)