New horror project: the polish

Posted on by Chip Street

We’ve spent the past few days polishing the script… folded in much (but not all) of the feedback we got, fixed the typos, found some new words that sounded more better.

Still very pleased with the first draft, the structure overall. The polishing is putting that final sheen on it, but it really isn’t getting what I’d call a “second draft”. Don’t think it needed it. Is that hubris? Could be… time will tell. It is after all a genre movie, and it was pretty carefully outlined as such before we set to writing, so we had a clear structural target from the get-go.

Important changes: Continue reading New horror project: the polish

New horror project: more feedback

Posted on by Chip Street

Well, it’s been a while since this series has been updated. We’ve had a series of illnesses, a wake to attend, a short road trip (to attend said wake and then to forget about said wake), some storyboards for a music video to get done, and on and on.

But now we’re back at it.

We did hear from the InkTip lead that was looking for just this kind of script: It was a no-go. I suspect that it was largely a budgetary concern… they wanted to make a movie for under a million dollars but our script has heavy CGI, a house that burns down, another building that blows up, and lots of gunfire. Chances are the synopsis alone told them they couldn’t afford it. Just as well… I think the script deserves more lovin’ than that.

We did get feedback from two more readers (here’s the first set of feedback). Reader C called for a little more back story and a little more humor, but overall:

Great job … I think it is ready to rock.

Reader D was very positive:

GOOD FUN! I would really like to see the movie. Excellent gore levels. I particularly enjoyed the character depth and the complex relationships… Thank you for having strong female characters that are actually friends and not having it become a big jealous catfight over a guy. That is so tired. Overall, it was awesome and fun. I’m impressed.

So the feedback overall is solid. Both readers suggested a small amount of additional back story to help explain the Crazy Old Lady’s history with her missing father, as well as some small clarification on the two female leads relationship… this is similar to what we heard before.

We’re folding in many of the minor suggestions people have given us, and expect to have it ready for primetime within a week.

Thanks for following along!

New horror project: day twenty-one writing

Posted on by Chip Street

And… scene!

Spent a few hours today tightening up some loose ends on the first draft.

Gave the dog some more face time.

Figured out how we could keep the spray can of bear piss, have it still be relevant, then when to get rid of it.

Wrote a new stanza for the Victorian poetry book that explains some of the creature’s mythos.

Toughest thing was that early scene that we’d skipped… a flashback/fantasy sequence that demonstrates the old lady is living in the past, fixated on her father. We’d finished the beginning and end of the scene but were unsure just what events/dialogue needed to be in there to communicate the two points we thought the scene needed to communicate. It was a deliciously creepy scene that we loved, but couldn’t put a bow on.

The longer we struggled with it, we decided that if it was that hard to decide how the scene should say what it needed to say, maybe it didn’t need to say it. So as hard as it was, we CUT the scene.

45 minutes later, an epiphany, and we realized how we could simply and elegantly, with 3 simple passages of dialogue, do everything we needed to do, PLUS foreshadow some later existing points. Luckily, I’d copied it off to WORD and stored it so we pulled it up, made a few changes, and put it back. SO happy. It’s still creepy, still a favorite, and now is perfect in content as well. The whole thing only added a third of a page.

TOTAL PAGE COUNT: 93.5 — or 97.5 — or 99.8 — depending. (Good ol’ Zhura)

So here we are, with a (pleasantly readable) finished first draft in just:

95.33 hours.

Sean’s got about 88 hours.

96% percent of those hours we worked side by side, so that’s man hours, not clock hours. Clock hours we’re at about 95.33.

Full time 8 hour days would put us at about 12 days to complete this first draft from story outline through last word.

Of course, we worked an average of probably 3.5 hours a day, and not every day. So we’ve used about 6.5 actual weeks to get here.

Copies are now out to our favorite readers for some honest feedback. We hope to live with it for a week, read our hardcopies, get notes from others, and jump on the next rev in about a week.

Till then — WOO HOO!

New horror project: day twenty writing

Posted on by Chip Street

Wrote for about 7 hours today.

Finished 11.5 pages of sheer craziness.

Another man dead… this time sacrificed to the beasties by someone else.

A building destroyed in a massive explosion.

Two survivors with a gun in each hand run a gauntlet of creatures.

The lead beastie confronted.

And escape for our heroes.

Plus, we save the last dog.

Fuckin’ A.

We reached the end of our story. 92 pages.

It’s not quite done… there’s one scene we purposefully skipped early on around page 30 that we need to go back and fill in. Just one page, if that.

And a few loose ends… in our fervor to muscle through the action sequences, we neglected to clarify where the dog was from moment to moment. He deserves some lovin’, so we need to sprinkle in a couple references to him.

And somewhere along the way the old lady suddenly was no longer carrying her spray bottle full of bear piss. We have to decide whether she just loses it somewhere, put it in where it’s missing, or just remove it from the story all together. I like giving a character a spray bottle full of bear piss, so I’m hoping we find a way to keep it.

But all in all, it’s DONE (with an asterisk)!

Pages: 92.33

Hours (chip):  89.5

Hours (sean): He says he’s around 85.

New horror project: day nineteen writing

Posted on by Chip Street

Another 6.66 pages today. We’re SO close to being finished we just want to get back at it right away tonight.

But ah, duty calls. Sean had to take his Aunt to the doctor again, and my son has a baseball game tonight.

Then later it’s American Idol Finals!

And Dancing With The Stars results!

Oh lord. Did I just say that?

Luckily, today I read something from John August that made me feel a little better:

[to a reader’s question] Here’s the thing: writing sucks. It’s difficult on a good day, and intolerable on most others. That’s why I’ll gladly answer your question rather than spend these 20 minutes of staring at the scene I ought to be writing.

So I don’t feel TOO bad that I may forgo finishing till tomorrow, that I may see Adam Lambert and Gilles Marini take their respective prizes. I think. Or maybe Kris and Melissa. Or Shawn. Though I may not be able to forgive Shawn for the lame Jabbawockeez ripoff.

Starting Thursday, So You Think You Can Dance will be my excuse.

Anyway, today our characters reached the goal that they’ve been trying to get to throughout the third act. Unfortunately, things are not all hunky dory… not yet. Someone else is dead, another is missing. And someone else is about to die – he just doesn’t know it yet.

Salvation is not forthcoming. Looks like if they’re getting out of this, they’re doing it the hard way…

Alone. With a gun.

Or two or three.

Pages: 82.66

Hours (chip): 82.5

New horror project: day eighteen writing

Posted on by Chip Street

Another day online through Zhura. Got a kinda late start… Sean’s Aunt needed a cast. Long story. Ends with a broken fibula. Another time.

Pounded through 5 pages… saved our heroes from the mountain lion, took them up the mountain trail, and trapped them as the beasties advance. Gave them a harrowing adventure crossing a gorge to get to safety… lost the gun… and ended with a joke.

Interesting note: The “adventure crossing a gorge” was one of the three trials we arranged for our heroes on their journey to safety. We’d promised ourselves no “deus ex machina” moments… that these dramatic road blocks should ring organic and true. (Yeah, I know, deus ex machina is usually reserved for unlikely convenient salvation. I’m using it to mean any unlikely convenient event, good or bad, that clearly simply exists as a plot device).

Anyways, we ended up creating this “gorge crossing” via an old rusted cable/pully/two man bucket type thing. We don’t know exactly what it does, but we borrowed the general idea from The River Wild (who has any idea what that old cable doohickey is that David Strathairn uses to flip the raft?) and it does exactly what we need it to do. So is it deus ex machina?

We think not… our heroes have just passed through an old abandoned mill. We’ve established that the area is BLM forestry land, had been logged (and probably mined) in the first half of the 1900’s, that the old woman was familiar with the mill and knew the mechanism was there. So there’s an organic precedent for the device. We don’t believe it “feels” contrived, because it seems to grow out of the elements already in place in the story… even if we don’t know exactly what the device is.

Nevertheless, we’ve lovingly come to refer to the mechanism as the “rusty plot device”. And it’ll probably always remain so.

At this point my biggest concern is that the pacing is reading as it should. We’re doing our best to keep the left-margin to short declarative sentences, one sentence per line to establish a ‘shot shot shot’ quality, and the dialogue is sparse and without subtext.

We’ve always got future revs in which to edit, of course. But I’d like this first version to be readable enough to send it to the prodco discussed earlier. I know it’s close. But I’m never satisfied.

Added 5 pages today.

Total Pages: 76

Hours (chip): 78

New horror project: day seventeen writing

Posted on by Chip Street

Now we’re cookin’ with gas… 7 pages down today!

We’ve had the truck break down on the road, had to take off into the woods on foot, gotten lost, been chased through a wide open meadow by beasties, come across an abandoned mill, and been trapped by a mountain lion!

Serious shit.

Writing this action sequence has been really interesting… we can fly along, since our outline is pretty solid. We know the sequence of events, and the left-margin, to keep the pacing flowing, is by necessity very Hemingway-esque… no Literary flourish.

The lion advances.

She takes aim.

The cat sniffs the air, growls.

Her trigger finger tenses.

Like that. Very short and sweet.

Similarly, our dialogue through these passages goes quickly, since at this point there is no subtext — when people shout “Look out! Run!” that’s pretty much what they mean. We don’t have to struggle with finding their hidden meanings, with finding subtle ways to communicate unspoken intentions. So the pages are flying by.

Pages: 71

Hours (chip): 75

New horror project: day sixteen writing

Posted on by Chip Street

Good day! 3 more pages!

We got our heroes into the crazy old lady’s house, learned her radio isn’t working, got her Daddy’s old 1940’s pickup running, and have escaped just as the creatures attack.

Now we’re on the road down off the mountain.

Interestingly, a point of contention has been whether or not one could even get an old 1940’s truck that’s been in storage for 60 years to start. I’m of the camp that says “weirder things have happened” — both in this script and in other stories. Seriously, the woods are full of strange semi-mythical beasties and we’re concerned over whether it’s realistic for an old truck to start up? Sean has long since become less critical of the idea. But in deference to Sean (and other similarly critical readers) we’ve long ago agreed that we’d infer the COL (Crazy Old Lady) has been keeping the truck running in hopes her Daddy might come home. We gave her a line (“I’m not allowed to drive, but Daddy lets me start his truck every morning.”) and we’ll dress out the garage with some oil cans and a gas can.

We keep thinking we’re past any real subtext, then finding ourselves in a scene where someone has a secret or a secret is revealed… takes lots longer to suss out those scenes, to keep that dialogue ringing true, and still keep the pacing up where it needs to be at this point. It’s essentially an action sequence, but every line still comes from a character whose backstory and emotional profile has been pretty well defined, so we can’t get away with any lazy writing.

Which is fine — we’d rather be writing a hard story about complex characters than spewing out something cardboard and easy.

Still, we’re looking forward to more action!

Pages: 64

Hours (chip): 71

New horror project: day fifteen writing

Posted on by Chip Street

Two more days of story outline refinement. Didn’t make any huge changes in the outline, but just focused on some greater detail in the events, made sure we understood each character’s motivations and state-of-mind going into each scene.

In the process, discovered two HUGE plot holes (ashamed to admit) but plugged them.

Sometimes you read something over and over again and don’t see the typos… these holes have the same magical quality. Our heroes spend the whole third act in a desperate effort to get to safety and a radio. When they get to that place, they spend their time with a rube goldbergian experiment to help ward off the beasties… but never use the radio.

Similarly, they take off in the end headed for town, by way of a route we’ve earlier established has been compromised.

It wasn’t hard to fix… in our minds eyes we knew kind of why that was, but we realize that we’d never addressed it. So now we’ve addressed it. Both of ’em. Fixed. Phew!

Still, feeling kinda stoopid.

Did end up writing out the dialogue for one passage… probably the last scene in the film in which we’ll have an opportunity to reveal anything about the characters through any real subtext. Last chance for a “real conversation”, in other words, so wanted to be sure we hit any points that needed hitting, yet find an elegant way to do it that didn’t feel forced. It actually worked out quite nicely, and also reveals just a little more mythos around the creatures at the same time. We’re pretty proud of it.

Still on page 61.

Hours (chip): 68

New horror project: day thirteen/fourteen writing

Posted on by Chip Street

Good progress past two days. Got nearly 7 pages done… The cabin has burned down. Our heroes have survived, made their way to a nearby house, and are hammering on the door looking for help. The door is opened and…

We’re in the middle of what we’re calling the “juggernaut” — the high energy run through the third act while pursued by bloodthirsty creatures. This is just the beginning…

Pages: 61

Hours (chip): 63