One Week Down + THE ROBOT MONOLOGUES

The first week of my new schedule is done, and here are the things I’ve learned:

• Small plastic cats and Instagram’s new video function make for a useful stand in for actors, fancy cameras, and editing when you’re just trying to figure out what cuts with what. Instagram probably poached this function off Vine, but being able to record multiple shots and play them together into a short video on my phone is going to be super useful this year. It’s exactly the same as recording on tape and editing in camera like the ol’ days, but much more accessible for when you’re sitting at your desk bleary eyed at 6.45am. 
  

• I’m already bloody awful at reaching my page count per day thing, because I’m one of those people that can’t move on until a problem is fixed. This week I got stuck on a scene with my protagonist in her workplace, and it took about five thousand years of brainstorming/screwing around to finally crack it on Saturday night. That meant most of my actual writing happened today (faithful old Sunday <3). I’m going to have to re-adjust to my schedule to allow for stuff like that, but hopefully Sundays will remain enough of a buffer that I won’t fall too behind on my plans. The clincher? I found another reasonably large problem I need to solve (“Oh hey, there’s like 10 too many scenes in this bit! Poop”) before I can go any further. Round 2, ding ding!

• When your cat vomits in the night it’s unlikely you’ll see it before stepping in it barefoot. 

There you have it, some pearls of wisdom.

Last week, I ended up printing out a script I knew really well (BREAKFAST CLUB) and shotlisting a few scenes. It was a useful exercise but also a dumb one because I know the movie well enough that it’s hard to think outside of what I know already exists. So, this week I’m going to grab a scene from a writer friend and use that as something to shotlist. And with writing, I’ll just continue trudging through, solving problems, swearing and drinking tea (Goal: 12 more pages by end of next Sunday).

Tomorrow we start rehearsals for our Fringe play THE ROBOT MONOLOGUES tomorrow night! It’s a one-woman play starring Emma Smith, it’s on at the Newtown Community Centre on 14th, 15th and 16th February at 8pm, and also at 12.30pm on the 16th February. Here’s the kick-ass poster by Hadley Donaldson:










And finally, three new ideas:

• I’m into anthology films at the moment. I’ve been following the ABC OF DEATH 2 competition, and also the 50 Kisses film. I’d like to see other neat anthologies being made by different filmmakers. Because my head is very much in the robot space at the moment from writing The Robot Monologues, I’d wanna see a series of short films about sentient robots and their roles in society in the future. ABCs of Androids?
  

• In 2012 I wrote a short film called SYNCHRO, about a synchronised swimming team messing with black magic and then brutally murdering their competition in the pool. I’ve been thinking on and off about that for a while. It would be neat to write a feature film around that central idea. I guess it would be a bit like a modern version of THE CRAFT. 
  

• I’d like to write a family film about the newest Ambassador for Earth and her family, who go and live on a distant alien planet earth made contact with and have been sending people to for a few decades. What’s the conflict? Well, the teenage daughter and intermediate aged son aren’t exactly happen to be there, especially when they discover some kind of seedy underground to the planet that hasn’t been revealed to any of the previous visitors from earth (or that they knew about and covered up). If John Candy was still alive he’d play the alien antagonist and it’d all be lovely. Can you tell I miss decent family films? I do. Would this be decent? Ermmmmmm probably not so much ;)
  

Until next week.

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