Agent 99 - Online story telling

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

Well Adrian Mead has moved from book to screen.

Two parts of his series on becoming a professional script writer can be found here: http://www.scottishbooktrust.com/podcasts/video/making-it-as-a-screenwri...

You can download them, which is nice.

While I have a couple of relatively trival issues with the Meda method these are def worth viewing. The basic message is 'It's tough out there, you need a plan'. Which is quite true, but whether you need Adrian's plan or not I'll leave that over to you!

Warning: This is one of my 'are you sure you really want that' posts :-)

Making a full time living as a 'pro' is a goal that many of us will have one time or another. Surely this is the best way to achieve validation of being a 'real writer'. The road is long, the people who will make it are few and those that do are rightly justified in feeling just a little bit good about themselves.

So I sent in a script to the Writer's room - spur of the moment really. I was feeling pretty good about this film - after all it is in good enough shape to attract a producer and director, and it contains my best film writing. Actually I would go further and say this is the script in which I found my visual story telling style.

Last week I got the 'we like it send us the next one' letter with a one page critique as well. I would think this a success - they noticed, they liked it, they'll read the next. But reading the critique I realise I had made a horrible mistake...

I am being a little anti here just for the sake of it, but I wanted to make people think through the permutations when they sit down and think - "You know what, I am going to make a short film, I am going to be a producer..."

So here's some grumpy things to say about short films and some more optimistic thoughts to go along side them!

Update: If you do go ahead here is a useful wee PDF from Shooting People/BAFTA about distribution and marketing (PDF)

First - 99% of short films completely suck

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?

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).

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.