Agent 99 - Online story telling

I have knocked together a quick wordpress site for My Inner Orc, which looks set for an October outing in London (Hooray!).

http://myinnerorc.com

The only thing I learnt at the Script Writer's Festival in 2008 was about how co-pros work. I also spent time at the Edinburgh Film Festival last year listening to producers and sales agents talk. This stuff is really important for writers and you need to know how it works - if only so that you can develop the endless patience needed to sit these processes through without going nuts...

Here it is in a nutshell:

- Money comes from all over the show, almost never from one source
- All National money comes with strings and needs to tick boxes

Following on from a longer piece I wrote here on storytelling versus plotting (http://www.agoodstorywelltold.com/content/storytelling-versus-plotting) it seemed like a good idea to take some time to talk about storytelling and space.

After the bad timing of developing an intensely personal project with a first-time director and thinking about getting some money from the NZ film commission to do a draft only for said Commission to go all genre on us and move away from first-time directors and intensly personal stories...

It took a while to get the motivation up again, but I have finally begun to redraft it. I dug out some notes I made with the Producer last year and have started working my way through the script.

Under three headings.... Writing, Web and... The Studio.

Writing

Every year I look back at a list I keep in the front of my current notebook - a cryptic list of titles of projects - and see how many I have moved forward.

This year I have moved 4 out of 8 things forward. The bad news is that 'forward' in this year is another year of no productions. However I don't want to be too harsh on myself (what's the point of that?) so lets look at the good things....

I've been playing around with some images to submit to a web series call - and yes they wanted support material. Click the attachment link below to see a composite...

1. EXT. EMBANKMENT - DAY

From the grapevine I hear a few things…

• An extremely high profile UK director tells a mate that development is ‘clogged’ at the moment - nothing is moving.
• In Australia they are wondering where the many hundreds of thousands of state development money went last year - only ONE film in UK distribution.

Over on Twelvepoint.com one of Julian's regular ideas is that storytellers are paramount - and that screenwriters can/should/might consider writing novels instead. There's two parts to his idea:

1) Storytelling is a separable thing - you can define a storyteller as something separate from a screenwriter or novelist. And following this that screenwriters and novelists are types of storyteller: Species - storyteller, genus - novelist.

2) Commercial reality - the odds are better on novels.

Tagline: When an oil rig drills deep into her heart Mother Nature decides to fight back...

Second draft report

Phew - made it to the end of the second draft of Bitch (only 7 to go then?!).