We just finished our first week of
summer semester.
By the way, London was too great for
words. If I ever get around to it, I’ll publish my entire paper
journal on line so everyone can read about it, because I did manage
to write quite a few words about it. But you’ll just have to wait
until then.
So, this semester we have TV Writing
and Feature writing and later on, at some point, we’ll be writing
the scripts for next fall’s D1 short films.
TV writing is great. Our professor has
written for Magnum P.I., Different Strokes, Chips, and more. He’s
really, really great. He knows so much. This week was a whole class
on formatting, which was really helpful. I learned a bunch of
techniques I never even thought of using before in my scripts, like
intercuts to show certain things and how to write a proper montage
and stuff like that.
We also read a lot of pieces from
Chandler novels, the hardboiled detective stories from the ‘30s,
and wrote adaptations of scenes, where we had to include all kinds of
different techniques into our adaptations, like montage, flashback,
intercut, subjective point of view, and more. Yesterday, we got to
write our own film noir scene, an original. It was so much fun.
I love film noir and have always wanted
to write one, so I got a little overzealous and wrote 7 pages when 4
was the maximum, so I did a lot of cutting. But I included every film
noir cliché I could: dark alleys, brick walls, rain, a confidential
case folder, even frosted glass on the detective’s office door. All
the good stuff. And a femme fatale, of course.
I had a blast. I might expand my story
into a full length noir. I’d love to. My femme fatale is named Vera
Malloy and she’s really rich and has balls and all kinds of fancy
events and there’s a secret man named Nolan Greene who we’ve only
ever seen so far with a black umbrella obscuring his face. Oh, and a
corrupt detective at the NYPD. And it takes place in 1939. Of course.
Our homework for TV class this weekend
is to watch a TV show he assigned to us, one episode, and track the
times at which the first act ends, the prologue ends, the
commercials, start and things like that. I’m really excited to do
it. It’s homework, but it’s totally the best kind ever. And the
show I got, The Killing, is one that I’ve had in my instant queue
for a few years. I hope it’s good!
Feature writing is going really well,
too. Our professor for that worked in development for Warner Bros.
and Harpo Studios before teaching at FSU. She really knows her stuff.
We’ve been trying to figure out what we want to write, so we all
sent our ideas to one another and gave awesome feedback. It’s been
really a workshop class, which I wished our last one would have been.
It’s really helpful, and I’m super excited about my idea. I can’t
wait to start writing.
