Animated Halloween movie update

The idea's have been fleshed out and the the next draft is finished.  I believe it's a much stronger piece and I even came up with a possible sequel idea.  The characters have better motivation and are fleshed out even more.  The story is stronger and more work has been done on the villain.  My wife will do another read through (since most of the revisions were done by me) and after her changes, we'll read through it together again to make sure the story still flows.  This one has the biggest potential I think, but it's also the least likely to get made, since it is an animated movie, and there are only a handful of movie studios that could make it.  But I really believe in this one and know it would make an entertaining movie.

Another e-mail to Mr. G.

My other horror screenplay with traps has been rewritten and I think it's better because of it.  Each draft changes a little and hopefully improves the screenplay.  I sent it to Mr. G. so he could read it and see if he had any more suggestions.

Screenplays to Mr. G.

I sent an e-mail to Mr. G. with the finished screenplay of C&C, and the note for him to just take a look at it since it's complete, and maybe the solid writing, and great characters would make the sci fi element a little less jarring.  I also finished the story pitch for the reworked horror idea based off of the same concept of C&C and sent that to him as well.

My other horror movie deals with traps, and Lannie recommended checking out the old Dungeons and Dragons module, "Tomb of Horror."  He remembered it had a lot of traps and might inspire some ideas.  I found a copy on the Dungeons and Dragons website (the web is amazing and wonderful) and read through it.  The Tomb of Horrors is exactly that, the module is basically just one big dungeon filled with traps meant to kill the characters.  Some, you can be smart about, and get through, but there are a lot that would require dumb luck to survive.  I'm glad I was never subjected to the atrocities of that dungeon.  It would have been frustrating and my character would probably be dead.

But it was an interesting read and it did spark a couple of ideas I could rework in my screenplay.

Lannie's comments

I received Lannie's thoughts on the horror movie C&C, and he didn't have any issues with the sci fi element.  He thought it made the movie unique and different.  He also had a few suggestions so I have begun the process of rewriting that one again.  How many projects am I juggling now?  Too many, but that's the business.  If I didn't love writing so much, my feeling of being overwhelmed would turn into outright dread and horror.  But it's my passion so it seems a little less like work, a little.

Halloween Animation

Based off of Mr. G.'s feedback, my wife and I have been looking at his comments and started to figure out which ones we want to use.  We broke it down into four main areas that we're going to concentrate on, and begun to organize the idea's he had for our animated screenplay, and the ones we came up with.

New movie idea

After my pitch meeting I started writing down idea's on the reworked concept idea from Mr. G. about a broken down bus.  I've been researching horror movie cliches, so I can decide which ones I want to incorporate.  I also sent a copy of my horror movie C&C to Lannie (1/3rd of One-Eyed Pictures) to get his take on it and if he had any issues with the sci fi element.

Pitch Meeting with Mr. G.

I had a productive meeting with my Hollywood contact that I've been calling Mr. G.  This is the guy that taught the screenwriting seminar way back in September of 2009.  It was the one that inspired me to focus more on screenwriting, which brought my total up from two to twelve.  I pitched my three ideas again, he gave his thoughts on them, and some feedback for improvement.  He had trouble visualizing the sci fi element to one of the horror ideas.  So he gave a suggestion on a similar concept but a different story all together.  Overall, there is a lot to think about, and it's time for more of the never ending process of revision.  He also said it was Sundance Festival time and then the Oscars, so there wouldn't be much work done until those are over.

A New Year

So it's time to welcome 2013 with open arms and open possibilities.  It will be another year filled with writing and hopefully some video work.  I'm still on track to finish my first novel around the end of the month, or the beginning of February.  I'm working out what my writing schedule will be for this year.  There are always a ton of projects that I'd like to get to, but there are only so many hours in the day.  I'm still hoping cloning will be perfected this year so I can hand out different projects to my clones.

The main course of action will be to finish the novel, then edit it after some time away.  I will hopefully have time to write two more screenplays, I would like to finish a comedy short film idea I've had for a while now, and write up a few more comedy sketches.  Whew, it looks like it will be another time consuming and writing filled year.

Happy New Year from all of us at One-Eyed Pictures!

SNOW!

We got a little snowstorm, so Mr. G. postponed our meeting since he wasn't going into the office today.  That is the life I'm looking for, where I can choose not to go in because of bad weather!  The meeting was rescheduled for January 2nd.

Called Mr. G.

So I called Mr. G. and he said he was still busy on his film, there were sound issues he was still correcting.  But he would be done at the end of the year so we set up a meeting for December 19th.  I'm looking forward to it since I've been working on polishing up the three scripts he was interested in.

WWII - 100!

So I reached the milestone page of 100 on my WWII novel, which means I'm over half way done.  This is by far the longest piece of writing that I've ever done.  It's difficult to judge just how long this will actually be since a page in "Word" is different than a "book" page.  But I'm estimating it should be a little over 300 "book" pages.

We finished the draft of our Animated Halloween screenplay.  It really is amazing how many drafts you can go through.

Happy early Halloween

I'd like to say that we're done with the screenplay, but we're not,  it won't be done in time for Halloween.

I'm still plugging along on the novel and it's been really interesting filling in a lot of the gaps in the screenplay.  I have more time and space to flesh out the characters and give them some nice moments.

I sent a copy of Red Riding Hood and my Vampire screenplay to the critic I mentioned back in June.  I got a hold of her finally and she wanted a hard copy of them.  It will be interesting what a former critic has to say about them.  Hopefully she will like them and give some insight on how to improve them since that's the ultimate goal:  make each screenplay as good as possible.

Novel and Animated Halloween screenplay

The novel is moving along nicely now, but I'm not going to have it finished by the end of the year.  I'm pretty sure I'll have it done by the end of January or the beginning of February.  It's a realistic goal, now that I know how much I'm getting done each day, so I shouldn't have to push it back any more.

We got our feedback to our Animated Halloween screenplay and starting working on the next revision.  Since I'm writing this one with my wife, it takes a little of the pressure off with writing the novel too.  Did I mention that she's working on her second draft of her first novel?  Well she is, so we're just a couple of very busy writers.

A quick note

Just a quick update, the novel is still progressing, and I finished the draft of my Sci-Fi Horror movie.  I need more time for the novel so I won't be working on anything else for a while.  In fact, it's been taking up so much of my free time, there isn't much time for anything else.  My friends probably wonder if I'm still alive or not.  I need to get back to writing.

Serious multitasking

The WWII novel is coming along now.  It has gotten a little bit easier, but I'm only managing a page a day.  That has become the goal now, every day I need to get a page done.  I'm hoping that I'll have this finished by the end of the year.

I finished the latest draft of my Family Archaeology screenplay.  It was a little long so I had to make some tough decisions about what to cut out.  One was particularly heartbreaking since it had a key character moment.  It was hard to replace it with something shorter, but the scene will survive in the sequel.

We gave our Animated Halloween script to a couple of readers so we can get some good feedback on what works and what doesn't.  I always tend to fill in the blanks in my head and not on paper, so it's always nice to have someone look at it, and point out what they don't understand.

I did another quick draft of my Horror Trap screenplay to clean up some of the formatting and started on another draft of my Sci-Fi Horror movie.

Met with Mr. G.

I had trouble getting a hold of my Hollywood screenwriting contact, who I call Mr. G., so I decided to just go to where his office is to talk to him.  Luckily, he was there and had some time to talk.  We spoke about a low budget horror film that he was directing and was getting close to finishing it.  I pitched the screenplays that I have been working on over the last three years.  He said there were three that stood out to him, and possibly a couple more that could work, but needed a better log line and pitch.  Since he was busy finishing his movie, he didn't have any more time and said to contact him again towards the end of the year.

Screenwriter's Bible

I finished reading the Screenwriter's Bible, by David Trottier.  It's a complete guide to writing, formatting, and selling a script.  I received the book as a gift quite a while ago, but finally made the time to read it.  There were a lot of things that I already knew and help with getting started which I didn't need.  But there were some excellent formatting tips that I didn't know about.  So it's time to go through each screenplay for yet another revision, this time focusing more on the format of it.  It's an unbelievable amount of work (especially since I've written so many screenplays now that I have to go back to) but this should make each screenplay look like it's supposed to and give it a better shot of being read.

A week of novel writing

It's been a week now and it doesn't seem to be getting any better.  My wife and Lannie believes it will get easier and some days I'll have multiple pages written and others not so much.  I hope so because I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever finish this beast.

WWII Novel Begins!

That's right, I've finally begun my first novel.  It's an adaptation of a screenplay I wrote that takes place in WWII.  It is completely different from screenwriting.  When I'm writing a script, there are a lot of details I don't have to worry about.  The script is just the blueprint and there are many other craftsmen working on it.  So the details will be figured out by the costume department, the production designer, etc.  But in the novel, I have to figure all of that out.  Now there are a lot of details that I'm sure most people will just gloss over, but I would like to make this as accurate as possible.  For instance, I spent some time trying to figure out a type of tree that would be found in England.  I didn't want to have one that couldn't grow there.

I thought this would be pretty easy since I already have the screenplay to go off of, but with the different style of writing, and the more in-depth research, I don't think I'm going to complete this in three months like I had planned.  I wrote only a half a page today and it was a struggle.  What am I getting myself into?

So I'm writing the novel in the afternoon and working on another re-write of my Family Archaeology screenplay at night.  This presents a unique challenge going from novel to screenplay.  I'll be glad when this is over.

More writing completed

I finished the next draft of my Vampire movie and did a "final" (cough, cough) read through.  There's some great scenes and it has a fantastic ending.  In fact, the main idea started with the ending in mind.

I also completed my Post-Apocalyptic Zombie screenplay.  This one will need a little more work when I go for the next draft.  It's too long and some of the characters were forgotten about.  Now I'm gearing up for August when I start the novel.