Sunday, June 3, 2007

Two Glorious Words

As I mentioned a few days ago I was trying to participate in the MoviePoet monthly short script contest for May.

A quick aside to Chris Messineo. Thanx for the reply comment and I look forward to the changes coming to Movie Poet in July. Again a great community of writers.

So...5 Pages. Not a problem. Right? Easy as riding a bike.

Hell yeah, riding a bike up Mount Everest. Give me a break though, K. I am used to at least 100 pages to tell a story. So, I listened to my Snow Patrol (damn they are the best) among other stuff and got 4 pages which seemed to going great. But I knew I had only a page to wrap it up and I still had a few ideas left to add. So I took what I had and eliminated a simple character which chopped of a good page, however it caused more issues because some of what I took out still had to shown which ended up coming out as on the nose dialogue and forced exposition.

So, I went back to square one. I edited the character back in and changed it up some. I also took some scenes and split them up so that some info came earlier so it didn't have to shown in more detail later.

The story is a cops and robbers idea with an interesting twist and something that had been thought up probably over 10 years ago but never got to the forefront of ideas I was working on.
The idea formulated over a simple idea of thinking that saving a child when they are young who ends up being something bad later in life. It changed a little and one of my sisters thought it sounded like an idea Stephen King might use.

After feverishly finishing the rewrite I got done with everything I wanted but had one last scene left and less than a 1/5 page left to stay within 5 pages. This was after cleaning the script up 2 more times. It was basically 10 pm on May 31st with 2 hours to add the one scene, then edit the script one more time down to the minimum convert it to a PDF and then upload it to MoviePoet.

That's where the decision came. I could edit down and maybe it would be weaker but it'd get on the site. So, I made the decision to continue with what I had and forgo posting to MoviePoet.

So, I'm gonna make it looks as pretty as it should and then I might slap it on Simply Scripts. Man, I got short script bug now.

A very bittersweet decision cause I was so looking forward to getting it on the site. In 4 days none the less. But, alas, I put what I wanted and ended with about 6 1/4 pages.

But then came the two glorious words I have ever known:

FADE OUT.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the "shout out".

I'm glad MoviePoet.com inspired you to write your short (even if it didn't make it into the contest). Like I said before, there's always next month.

BTW, I love Snow Patrol.