I want to say thank you to everyone who has given me positive feedback on the preview pages I’ve displayed on this blog and other sites. I’m still keeping most of it close to the chest, so I don’t spoil things later!
I spent most of this week, after going back through the treatment, writing the next two scenes from the prologue. It’s the first time we meet the other co-star of the story; Todd.
I don’t know how many of you own the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but they have a great segment on all three of them that just focuses on the writing of the movie. Each one lasts about thirty minutes and I have found it really invaluable to hear their wisdom when constructing my scripts.
On the Fellowship of the Ring set they discuss the introduction of Mary and Pippin in the story at Bilbo’s party. They explain how they basically made up the scene in which they steal a firework from Gandalf’s stash and disrupt the whole party. The interesting thing about this scene is that they discuss how their goal script-wise was that they wanted to accomplish two things in one moment. Introduce the characters and say something about them. I’ve found that when writing, if you you can do two things at one time in a script you are creating a much more effective script.
The first two scenes after the prologue reminded me about that. I wanted really badly to set Todd up properly. We have to get him very quickly, because the story gets moving in a hurry after that and the character arcs need to be identifiable.
I’ve read back through the scene and I feel pretty strong about his arrival. The difficult part now is writing the dialog of Chloe and Todd together. That’s my next mess to deal with.
Next post I’ll spend some time talking about my actual process for creating these pages. So check back in about two days! Now its time for some chicken.