New horror project: "faeries"

Posted on by Chip Street

faeries-poster

Well, that’s it! We spent a couple more hours beefing up some scenes, fixing some final typos, and tweaking the formatting in Final Draft to bring us in at a perfect 100 pages.

As always, we’ll continually refine the text… we’d like to keep looking closely at the dialogue and left margin, to assure we’ve got just the right verb here, just the perfect turn of phrase there… but it’s braces on a pretty smile… tiny incremental adjustments.

So we can officially release the logline and synopsis… we’ve given the script its own page here, and we’ve created a Facebook page for it as well.

Thanks to our readers for all the great feedback and encouragement. Now we’re off to find some good horror screenplay competitions, get it in front of a few good people in Hollywood, and find a producer who wants a fun, classic horror story with a unique twist — The Descent meets The Birds.

Total man hours: 115 (chip) + 105 (sean) = 220

As Sean and I worked side by side most of the time, total linear clock hours: 125

Total calendar time (since we couldn’t get together as often or for as long as we’d have liked): 11 weeks

To see the blogs that chronicled “the writing of”, click here.

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: feedback

Posted on by Chip Street

Well, we’ve gotten feedback from two of our first-draft readers so far.

It was great!! Wow. You guys really put some work into this piece and it shows. Excellent job on many levels … I was intrigued, involved and enjoyed the ride. Felt like a mash-up between Gremlins and The Descent. I don’t think you’ll have any problems getting the right people behind this script!

Of course I lead with the most positive points, and leave out the dumb things he said like “make it better” and whatnot. 🙂 Seriously, he gave us some great feedback, pointed out the weak spots, gave us direction for the second draft but overall, the review was pretty positive.

Then came:

I think it’s a great first draft. No real notes on structure, some scenes need to be a little more kinetic though.

Somewhat more reserved, as you can see. This reader is an asshole, obviously, and doesn’t realize just how groundbreaking this script is. Continue reading New horror project: feedback

New horror project: day eight writing

Posted on by Chip Street

As last mentioned, we’ve reached a place where an adjustment of our outline is in order.

The outline calls for another day at the cabin before the creatures are fully revealed. A day of further development of the character arcs, a ratcheting of tensions between them, some flashback scenes with the crazy old lady (illuminating her back story).

But as the story has developed to this point, there’s been plenty of organic evolution in the characters and their relationships… in other words, the characters needed to say some things and we let them say them. We allowed them to find their own paths, rather than forcing the outline on them. Consequently, although we’re essentially on task as per the story outline, the characters’ awareness of events, and their natural revealing of their subtexts, are further along than anticipated.

And that’s great. It means we’ve allowed the characters to develop naturally. And, it means we’re ready to really hit the big reveals, get the blood and panic flowing, and start the real juggernaut through the second act (which we’re both looking forward to).

So, today we met to review what that “fourth day” in the woods was going to offer, choose which of its story points we can live without, and which story points we must have. We were able to lose about half of what that day was going to deliver. Those things we must have, we found new homes for by folding them (elegantly) into previous scenes.

That means we’re able to get to the (horror) meat sooner. *

And our pacing will be better.

And we’ll be ahead of our outline as regards page count. 🙂

So, here’s where we are.

Page 40. Outline says we should be at about 42.

Hours (chip): 44.5**

* Lest one be concerned that we’re not getting to the “horror meat” soon enough (we’re on page 40!) we’re building something that’s akin to “The Descent“. I looked at that film again just the other day. The first time we see the creatures in the cavern, we’re at minute 50. We’ll beat that.

** Hours are approximate. It’s just my hours. Sean probably has about as many, maybe a few more. So our total man hours may be around 100 (just to keep numbers round). This INCLUDES the hours spent building the ten page outline. That means we’re averaging a page every 2.5 hours. Crazy. This process is proving very efficient (provided the quality is not compromised. From where we’re sitting, it’s not).