Agent 99 - Online story telling

There are people you meet on the way through this creative life lark, some are there for you, some are detractors, some are life-long friends, some are temporary. But how many do you need? How can you tell which are the good ones?

Just back from holiday with thoughts of getting some more direction into my writing - so here's a self-check in on where all my various projects are. A bit navel-gazey perhaps, but believe me looking at my navel here is much better than doing it in the flesh :-)

Great things:

Boy on a Bike (started 2004, three drafts, feature drama)

A coming of age story set in NZ 1980. Has producer and a director attached. Can't name names but it's all looking fucking great at the moment. Applying soon to get money out of the NZ Film Commission for a new draft now director has come on board.

There are many ways to combine real life and scriptwriting - I have done most of them so here are my thoughts on the kinds of jobs you can get and the advantages and disadvantages of them...

Ok, so we are used to thinking of designers as people who sit around stirring pixels on screens to make things look pretty enough to buy. In fact I own a pair of glasses that make me look like a designer - but hold on, I make a large percentage of my living as a designer not a writer. I've earned my designer glasses, damn it!

So being a person who is eternally curious about how things work, and constitutionally biased towards finding communality, I wondered if there were any lessons I could take from my day job back into my writing.

First - what is design thinking?

An answer to a question I posted on TwelvePoint.com

Question:

Can you give us some pointers as to the basic requirements for posting film/video on the web and whether it would be better to do this in a number of short clips as opposed to a longer reel?

Answer:

OK, there're two issues here:

Basic video posting

This is not about how to talk to the chap down the market about your vegetable-selling epic, this is about commercial reality, the cold shower.

If you pop over to the UKFC site they have a section called 'Research', in there is a whole bunch of stuff about audiences and producers and all that (very worth skimming) but the main page I wanted you to take a peek at is called 'Weekend Box Office Figures'.

It's been a long long time since I thought very hard about telling stories online. Back in the late 90s(!) I wrote quite a few 'eFiction' pieces and online interactives. In fact I won a couple of prizes for them. 'The Casino Project' won me Swinburne Unis Postgraduate Award and 'A Thread' won me a new computer care of Country Road (a high-end Aussie clothing label).

Since then I have done zip in this format.

But in the next month or two I am going to start again. Why the long delay?

1. I've been writing plays and movies

One of the nice things that Godin gets to in his book is the difference between quitting and failing. In my own words I think of these as the difference between taking smaller tactical decisions on things that aren’t working (quit) versus the act of giving up completely because you have run out of options (fail).

I wrote this one for a forum question on Twelvepoint.com, but liked it enough to copy it over here. The question was whether is was a good idea to write a treatment or outline etc etc. It is a good thread, but it was frustrating me as words like 'always' and 'never' got used; always write a treatment, always do this and so on. So here's what I wrote back to the thread...
Everyone is wrong, it's only you that needs to be right

A book I picked up recently is Seth Godin’s ‘The Dip’. If you don’t know Godin he’s a bit of a god in marketing circles (boom boom) and writes a lot of clever books that are getting shorter and shorter and better and better. His books are mostly about current marketing tropes, and it would be fair to say that he has invented a fair few of them. But ‘The Dip’ is a little different.