Some very good tips on screenwriting
Some very good tips on screenwriting from @briankoppelman:
6. Of the many supposed rules of writing, the only one that’s legit is ‘write every day.’
and
60. Many of us have what gamblers call leak – a habit or enthusiasm that knocks us off course. Figure out what yours is and close it.
(via)
Words Fail Me is an official selection at the NYC Web Fest
More good news on the festival front!
We were accepted to the NYC Web Fest, which takes place November 13 & 14, 2015 in New York.
They haven’t released the schedule or the location details yet but you can get updates and check out the other great series on their website.
Words Fail Me is an official selection at the Brooklyn Web Fest
Awesome news! We were accepted as an official selection of the Brooklyn Web Fest. We will be screening episode 1 on Saturday, October 10 at 5pm, at DUMBO Made in NY Center by IFP, 30 John Street, Brooklyn NY 11202.
Robert will be speaking on a panel the same day at 4:30pm, on creating a meta web series.
Process & production notes on the web series
I wrote up a series of blog posts on the writing, directing, and production process of my web series, Words Fail Me. You can find them individually on the site and I’ve assembled them all in one place here:
- Notes on Pre-production and Planning for a Web Series
- Notes on Directing for the First Time
- Notes on Directing Improvised Scenes (on camera)
- Notes on Soliciting and Interpreting Feedback on Videos (or other creative work)
- Notes on Editing Improvised Video Footage
- Exporting to ProRes from Adobe Premiere on PC
Creativity vs. imagination
Unlike creativity, imagination is an appreciative skill with an external locus, rather than an instrumental capacity with an internal locus. To notice a pattern in current events that could serve as a premise for a movie is imagination. To be able to develop that premise into an actual screenplay with compelling characters, fresh dialog and an engrossing plot is creativity. You feed creativity by making things. You feed imagination by being curious about things beyond your own shadow.
Write what you feel bad about
Budding writers are told write what you know. They should be told write what you feel bad about.
Exporting to ProRes from Adobe Premiere on PC
When I was working with the colorist on Words Fail Me, he asked me to export my sequence in ProRes 4444 format. ProRes is an Apple format. And I was working on Adobe Premiere on PC, which as of July 2015, doesn’t natively support exporting to ProRes.
There is a solution however–a company in Spain, Cinemartin, sells a plugin called Plin.
Once you download and install it, it adds a menu item under File in Adobe Premiere and you can now export to ProRes.
A few things about it:
- A few times it froze and I had to cancel the export, restart Premiere and start over again until it worked. It froze on me 2 or 3 times total.
- There is a bug that some people have mentioned where it won’t work if you don’t have enough disk space (1 terabyte) on your C Drive it won’t work. I only have 250 gigs on my C Drive and it worked fine.
- Their website isn’t generally user friendly and I think their English probably isn’t great.
If you’re OK with all that, then I recommend the plugin because it works well. The alternative would be to find someone with a Mac and export from their machine, but that’s a bit of a pain in the ass, unless it happens to be your roommate or you have one at work that your company doesn’t mind you using for this sort of thing.
Notes on Editing Improvised Video Footage
General Notes
Working with completely improvised dialogue was probably similar to editing a documentary. The story has to be assembled and rewritten from what was captured.
Adobe Premiere’s sync function works well about 75% of the time. It’s more convenient to use than Red Giant’s PluralEyes but not as reliable.
I always back everything up to multiple devices and at least once to the cloud. If a fire or robbery happens, I’ll only lose a day of work. Same if DropBox or Google Drive loses everything.
Part 1 – Surveying the footage
For each episode, I opened up my outline on a 2nd screen and created sequences in Adobe Premiere for each of the story beats.
Then I went through the footage, cutting clips and filing them away on the sequence related to their beat. This was easier on some episodes than others. As I watched, the story changed and I rewrote the outline and reorganized the sequences, sometimes 7 or 8 times, until I got to the end of the unlogged footage and had everything sorted into a beat sequence.
This was the most mentally exhausting part of the editing because it’s slow, it involves a lot of “writing” and it because at this point I was watching footage that was slow and having to watch it for very specific issues of content, then decide where to put it, and then possibly rewrite everything based on what I was seeing.
When I was done, I had six or seven sequences in Premiere, one for each beat of the story.
Part 2 – Putting together the beats
Once I had the raw footage sorted into beats, I would work through the individual story beat and massage that. These sequences would have anywhere from 30 seconds (for an intro or outro beat) to 15 minutes of material.
I would comb through them and start to piece together a rough story for the beat, moving any material that I didn’t like or didn’t want to use to a “discards pile” sequence so that I could go back to it later without searching through one of the raw clips.
This took a long time as well, and it also triggered some rewriting of the beats. Occasionally it would spawn new beats as I realized that more than 1 major thing was going on in the sequence.
At the end of this part, my beat sequences would still be rough, but they would have a few minutes of the best clips for a given beat and a lot of discarded clips that I left on the timeline (just in case) but separated from the good footage.
Part 3 – Rough Assembly
The next step was to drop the various beats into a master editing sequence, which would eventually become the rough cut. This first assembly would clock in at a more manageable 15 to 25 minutes, depending on the episode.
Then I would start to watch the rough assembly, making bigger cuts as I went through it, and sometimes rewriting the story beats again. Sometimes one beat would have a good transition to another beat, so I would want to get the good transition lined up. Or sometimes the story just played out differently than I imagined, and the order had to be re-arranged.
This part was more fun than the previous part, but still involved a lot of writing work.
After I had the story solidly in place, I would go through the sequence over and over, cutting away the fat and the things that didn’t work. I cut beat repetition (when the same joke or story beat or tactic was used again without any variance in emotion, tactic, tone, physicality, etc.). I cut extra space at the beginning and end of clips. I cut out frivolous words or false starts to sentences (although I left some of these in). And I cut anything that just didn’t work or seem to fit the story.
After doing this for a while (hard to say how many hours this part took, somewhere in the range of 3 to 8), I would export a rough cut.
Part 4 – Getting feedback
I wrote a separate post about getting and interpreting feedback here.
Part 5 – The final polish
This is the most fun part. By this time, watching it 50 times in a day wasn’t so bad because the story was flowing and the only things that remained to be cut were things that I loved but had to go anyway.
I tackled the feedback and made any changes based on that. I didn’t take all of the notes and I paid special attention to notes that came up for more than one viewer – if multiple people are saying the same thing, it’s probably not a matter of personal taste.
Next, I worked on the pacing. I developed a specific style for WFM, using a lot of jump cuts and quick cuts, stacking the lines of dialogue on top of one another. It’s not naturalistic, but I think it works well for the medium and keeps the viewer moving through the story. On the web, 5 minutes is a long time, and I wanted to keep viewers on their toes and make sure that there was enough novelty from moment-to-moment that would tickle their brains and keep them engaged.
Did I succeed in that? I’m not sure, but I did my best. And it wasn’t just about pandering to a web audience. I really like the style I used and it was a good way to manipulate a long story in a short time frame.
Once I was done the final polish, I didn’t lock the picture. Instead, I slept on it for a night and came back to it the next day to give it another pass. If I watched the whole thing without making any changes, I locked picture and sent it off to the colorist.
If I made a lot of changes in the final pass, then I would sleep on it again because I knew that I might look at it differently the next day. If this happened three days in a row, I locked it anyway and shipped it off (otherwise I’d still be tweaking some of them…).
Notes on Soliciting and Interpreting Feedback on Videos (or other creative work)
I sent the rough cuts to a variety of friends and family. I chose people that I knew had a good sense of humor, but with some variation. I told them I was looking for feedback in general and I asked them these specific questions:
- What did you like about it?
- Where does it stall out or lose your attention?
I learned those questions from Andy Miara, a former sketch-writing teacher I had (also the best writing teacher I ever had!). When we performed our rough drafts in class, he often asked those questions to get things started (before moving on to some really brilliant and specific notes).
I love asking those questions for a few reasons:
- They are easy for anyone to answer. Anyone can point to the places that they enjoyed and the places that were boring. They might not know why they felt that way or what to do about it, but that’s OK, it’s up to you to figure that out.
- They are non-specific enough to elicit honest feedback. It’s a lot easier to say “this part was slow to me” than “this joke sucked.”
- They don’t put pressure on the feedback-giver to be “constructive” or give a solution. Many nice and decent people have learned to always offer a solution whenever giving criticism, which is probably a more civil way to offer criticism at work or in a relationship, but it’s not going to help you here unless they are also a writer/editor/director/etc. Again, it’s your job to figure out the solution, not theirs. If you are getting feedback from someone with a lot of experience doing what you’re doing – in that case they may offer more specific feedback, but there is no pressure to do so.
And the last thing I said was something along these lines: “you have permission to be honest and don’t worry about hurting my feelings. I’m looking for some feedback to make this project better, so please don’t hold back!”
This helped me get some really solid notes on early rough cuts, without feelings being hurt.
BTW, I tried using Wipster on one of the episodes but nobody except one person used it. Emailing a PW-protected Vimeo link was much more effective in getting responses, although I was kind of bummed because I liked the Wipster interface. I think it had something to do with the fact that Wipster didn’t hide one person’s response from the other people, which made people more hesitant to leave public feedback.
Interpreting Feedback
Once the feedback comes back, you’ll have a better idea of what’s working well and what’s not working well.
Figuring out why they answered a certain way is your job. If everyone says that a certain part stalls or loses their interest, it might mean that you need to cut it completely, or that it needs to be changed in some way, or perhaps you’re trying to deliver a payoff that hasn’t been set up enough in an earlier part of the video.
When I got the feedback for the first few episodes, the general feedback on each episode was that “it starts slow.” I wanted to set things up nicely and give it some room to breathe at the beginning, but everyone was saying “get to it quicker.” So I cut a lot of material from the beginning, leaving just enough to understand the basic facts of the situation before moving into the heart of the matter.
For positive feedback, i.e. “this part was really funny” or “I really liked that part and the way it was edited,” you have some valuable knowledge. For me, knowing what not to cut was just as important as knowing what to cut. If something was working well, then I could keep it and even add more of it to the edit.
The final episode of Words Fail Me
I released the sixth and final episode of my web series, Words Fail Me, today: