The Worst Laid Plans

The goal for today was to write a scene-by-scene plan for my script, then to watch every short film ever made, then to rewrite the plan to incorporate everything I've learned about short films. After completing a really super rough plan that barely included anything, I was more in the mood to start writing straight away than sit back and watch stuff. I'm starting on a first draft of the script itself. You know what I've learned so far? Rough plans should be abandoned in favour of very detailed plans. The first scene as written is very different from the first scene as planned-in-one-paragraph. Once I started writing dialogue all sorts of things that were needed in this scene that weren't in the plan became obvious, some of these were even mistakes I knew about in advance and had been trying to avoid.

First time I had a story rejected from 365tomorrows they were kind enough to let me know why. "Show, don't tell" is the maxim, and I'd just told. A screenplay, even more than a short story, should show everything and outright explain nothing. In the plan I'd had the main character, Tom, and his friend mentioning the PopularVote technology here and there but not discussing how it works until about halfway through. That was dumb. Reading through the finished first scene, I realised they should just have their conversation interupted with a vote coming through, and that's that. People don't need to know how it works, that's for geeks who read flash fiction websites. The base story was about PopularVote. The screenplay is about Tom.

Also, it might be longer than I intended. I'll have to do some pre-emptive editing to keep it down. I'm enjoying Final Draft though, it almost makes it look like I know what I'm doing. The "DEMO VERSION" watermarks on the printouts are annoying but no-one will expect me to pay for the full version just for an interview. I've just hit the start of page four and, it wasn't intended this way I assure you, the start of scene four. Scene four is the big one where everyone starts arguing, minds are made and changed, everyone gets drunk and the mood is set for the final scene. I think I'll stop here for tonight, watch some shorts while I eat my dinner. Short films that is, not the clothing. My sister started studying film but switched to fashion design halfway through the first semester. She's doing pretty well for herself now, it seems, but I don't plan on following in those footsteps.

As far as watching every short film ever made goes, it turns out there's a lot more than I counted on. I don't think I'll get through them all today, so I'm going to start with the NUCA FMIP 2011 vimeo channel and see how far I get with those.