Posted a full trailer for Words Fail Me
A comedy web series about desperate people in absurd situations.
Words Fail Me is wrapped
We shot episodes two through five this past weekend in locations around Bucktown and the West Loop in Chicago. Everything went smoothly and we had a ton of fun. I really couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with. I’m reviewing the footage and putting together a new trailer this weekend and I’m hoping to start releasing the full episodes in May or June.
Words Fail Me — filming complete
Filming is now complete for the web series I created, Words Fail Me. You can check out on-set photos from the filming in Chicago. I’m putting together a trailer this weekend and then editing all six episodes over the next few weeks.
Words Fail Me Production is set for March 20-22
We’ve locked down the actors and the locations for filming the last five episodes of the series (one has already been shot)! We’ll be filming mostly around the West Loop and in Bucktown, including at the awesome Red June Cafe.
Screenplay feedback and accepting that something is broken
I did a staged reading of Begin, a screenplay I recently wrote. It went very well, with lots of laughs in the right places and the audience stayed tuned in throughout the 90 or so minutes of the reading, in large part because the actors nailed it so well. There are two reasons why I love doing a reading like this: feedback from the audience and feedback from the actors.
From the audience you learn where it’s working and where it stalls and where it’s funny and where the jokes land flat. And from the actors you learn if you’ve written roles that are fun or interesting to play. And you can see if the characters come to life when the words are spoken out loud, or does it just feel like someone’s reading some lines? It helps to have actors that prepare and commit to it.
Afterwords, we did a Q&A, where I was asking questions of the audience to get their feedback on some of the story and theme issues that I’ve been struggling with — mostly things that were pointed out as weaknesses by Blcklst readers.
I asked the audience: “I’ve gotten some feedback that said that the reader was not clear about what the theme or the point of the story is. Do you agree with that comment and why” And I saw many heads shyly nodding.1.
A lot of the feedback was related to the main character, about why he was making the choices he was making and how it seemed like things were happening to him, very funny things, but things that didn’t necessarily relate to his larger arc or the theme of the film. This type of feedback is invaluable because it provides another data point, more evidence that this is in fact a problem, not just something one reader had an issue with. But it’s also a bit strange to me, because I know exactly what the theme is, and in my head it’s so obvious that I was worried that it would be too obvious.
But when 20 people nod their heads in unison, it’s hard to ignore. I tried to communicate something and I failed, as much as I wanted to believe that everything was working well. And now that I’ve accepted that, I can begin the work of addressing those issues and with some luck, take it from “a funny movie” to “a really good movie that’s also funny.”
I used to have this feeling, like a fear of putting stuff out into the world because I wanted everyone (or the people I care about) to just say “this is great, I love it, it’s perfect,” so I wouldn’t have to change a thing. But I’ve been braver lately and try to seek out critiques from people that will be honest about the issues in what I write, so that I can make my work better.
It’s really hard to do that and admit that something I love is broken, but I don’t know if there’s another way to improve as a writer (along with practicing a whole lot). And getting there required changing my mindset from “making something good” to “continuously improve as a writer.”
After receiving zero response to my first question, I remembered that I had to tell them that they had permission to say negative things, which opened things up quite a bit ↩
My Adobe Premiere workflow for editing improvised scenes
I’ve been editing the first episode of my web series, Words Fail Me. The actors have a set of circumstances that they know in advance but all of the dialogue is improvised. It’s the first improvised video I’ve had to edit and it’s taken me a while to figure out a workflow that makes sense and isn’t insanely time-consuming.
I should say that this is the first time I’ve done this and that I’m still very new to editing in general, so your mileage may vary. But I’m putting it out there in case it helps someone.
With a scripted scene, you usually have 3-5 takes of the scene for each shot (wide, medium, CU, etc.). So basically the editing is about telling a predefined story using the different shots. But with this shoot, I had a general idea of where I wanted things to go, but the actor had a lot of input and free reign, within the basic constraints that I had laid out. All of that is to say that what we ended up with, story-wise, was a bit messy.
For this episode, we did a wide shot (without sound), a master (medium shot), and a CU. We did a few takes of the medium and CU, but there was no script and the dialogue changed. After each take, we took the parts of the story that we liked and emphasized those moving forward, but we didn’t make an effort to repeat the dialogue verbatim. The story beats stayed the same, but the dialogue changed. The beats within any given take also tended to change–some takes only had a few of the major story beats and they were often in a different order.
That’s challenging to edit because each take is a little different. With 45 minutes of footage, I would have to spend a lot of time searching for what I needed. So, I came up with a solution to break the process into smaller chunks and make it more manageable.
Here’s what I did to simplify the process:
- I reviewed the footage to get a general sense of how I wanted to structure the story (while putting together the trailer).
- In Word, I wrote an outline for the story, sketching out nine beats for the story, and then created sequences in Premiere for each story beat.
- I dragged all the clips onto the timeline and went through all of them, cutting them up into chunks that related to the various beats. If the first two minutes of a clip were related to beat 1, I would cut and paste that part of the clip to the Beat 1 sequence, and so on.
- By the end, I had nine sequences (one for each beat of the story) with five to six clips related to that beat. These were much more manageable chunks to work with (3-7 minutes each). I edited each of these sequences individually to come up with the best possible version of each beat.
- Once I had all nine beats the way I wanted them, I put them all on a master sequence and connected them.
- Finally, I massaged the master sequence to get it to work together smoothly, using the wide shot as a cutaway for any moments where I wanted the dialogue but didn’t want to use the video.1
The nice thing about working this way is that it separates three distinct tasks (‘writing’ the story, searching/organizing the footage, and crafting the actual edit to tell the story) into separate chunks so you don’t have to switch between cognitive modes. This freed my brain up to focus on one thing at a time. And it forced me to figure out how I wanted to tell the story before I started any of the actual editing.
Again, I’m new to this. YMMV. And please contact me if you know a better way or have any tips!
I wish we had shot more b-roll because it would’ve this easier and created some diversity in the imagery. Lesson learned. ↩
Watch the trailer for Words Fail Me, my new web series
Words Fail Me is a comedic series of portraits of self-involved and seriously flawed people who desperately need something from each other but just can’t find the right way to put it.
Set in Chicago, the series rolls up its proverbial sleeves to ask some questions you didn’t even think to ask: what do you do when you wake up to a new roommate, get extorted by your babysitter, or spill CIA secrets to the tamale guy?
The stories are written in advance and the dialogue is improvised by actors that Robert met while taking classes and hanging out at The Artistic Home theatre, as a way to give some serious actors with dramatic chops a chance to do comedy.
Production is by Hannah Welever (cinematography), Erin Turney (sound), and Erin Miller (production assistance). They are all very good at what they do and you should hire them if you need this sort of thing.
Can data help you write a better screenplay?
I saw this article linked from the Scriptnotes Episode 171 blog post but I haven’t listened to the episode yet. I wanted to read it beforehand before Craig goes full-bore umbrage-taking on it, which I think I’m safe in saying that he will.
The post is titled “How Data Can Help You Write a Better Screenplay” and I see a lot of data but not a lot of actionable recommendations (sorry, my day job is marketing analyst).
My first thought was, “what the hell is Sword & Sandal? That’s an actual genre???” I guess that would be like 300 or Rome? I didn’t see 300 but everyone wore sandals in Rome (I know, it was a TV show, not a movie) and they used a lot of swords and large knives and I learned that there were two average Roman-type guys that were pivotal in many major events in Roman history and that is all true because it was on HBO.
My second thought, as a novice screenwriter, was this: “what the hell would I do with this?” So let’s say I scrap what I’m working on now (a weird comedy) and use this data to write something with a higher chance of success.
One approach would be to look at the genres that get the highest average scores and pick one of those. One problem is that we don’t know anything about the people writing in that (or any other) genre. Film Noir gets high average scores but maybe better writers are attracted to that genre. Or maybe that genre draws an older crowd of writers who have more experience. Higher scores in the genre might just mean that you’re going up against stiffer competition, not that the genre is actually easier to work in.
But even if it was easier on average, that wouldn’t really help. Because to sell the screenplay (or to land an agent), you would have to not write just an average screenplay, but a very excellent screenplay. Scoring a 6 doesn’t guarantee anything. No score guarantees anything but it’s my understanding that it takes an 8 or above to really get noticed on The Black List.
Another issue is that the average here is a bit misleading. If scores were assigned randomly, then your expected outcome would be higher if you chose a genre with a higher average. But scores are not assigned randomly, they are given by a qualified reader that reads and rates spec screenplays for (at least part of) a living. OK, maybe that’s not completely fair. Maybe the averages do indicate something about the ease of writing in a certain genre.
But even if a Film Noir is slightly easier to write, it still doesn’t help you. Because the thing is you have to stand out. If the average Film Noir is pretty good, then the bar for writing a remarkable Film Noir, i.e. one that someone will be compelled to pass on to their boss, is even higher than say a Musical Comedy, which on average scores the lowest during the survey period.
So. Another strategy is to pick a genre that has a low average score. Again, you don’t know anything about the writers in that genre. Maybe in Musical Comedy you’re competing against accomplished veterans of Broadway. OK, that’s almost certainly not true. But maybe the Musical Comedy people are very well equipped and still fail to write good screenplays, and so your average attempt will fare even worse. Either way, the big loser is the person who has to read all those bad musical comedies.
The other problem with any of these strategies is that it assumes that you decide to start writing a screenplay one day and then choose what genre to work in, as if picking the genre was something to be decided by big data.
I personally write comedy or some subgenre of comedy, or maybe dramatic stuff that makes much use of comedy.
And I’m 100% certain that the comedy I write will be better than the Sword & Sandal that I’m not going to write, mainly because my main source of knowledge about the particulars of men wearing sandals and wielding swords comes from Rome, Gladiator, a college class on Greek Philosophy and whatever else I’ve pulled out of the ether related to ancient Rome/Greece. So it would be pretty derivative and halfway through I’d realize that it would be much better as a parody, which is to say not that great anyway because parody requires deep knowledge that I don’t have.
I think most people are going to write in the genre that they know and love. Or love and think they know. Not that you can’t write in more than one genre, but I think you get the point. But pushing someone out of a genre they love into a genre they neither love nor know isn’t going to help them write something better. So this doesn’t look like a winning strategy either.
The other data in the article pertains to the flaws most commonly found in scripts. Here are the top five:
- Underdeveloped plot
- Underdeveloped characters
- Lack of escalation
- Poor structure
- Unnatural dialogue
Let’s rephrase these flaws as advice for novices like myself: make sure you have a developed plot, developed characters, action that rises at a suitable pace and to a suitable level, good structure, and natural dialogue.
In other words, the problem with your screenplay is that it’s not good at the things that good screenplays are good at. Be more good. That’s snarky, I know. This list does have some use–I looked at it and it made me think about where the weaknesses in my current script might be.
But it doesn’t really help me improve upon the weaknesses. It just shows where others have struggled. But I think those issues are sort of obvious and that writers struggle with them because they’re all really hard to do really well.
This note I did find helpful, or at least it could be helpful for the first-time writer:
First-time writers tend to go one of two ways, said Kate Hagen, a former reader who now oversees the hundred or so readers at The Black List. They write a deeply personal, pseudo-autobiographical screenplay about nothing in particular. “Everybody basically writes that script at first,” Hagen said. “You have to get it out of your system.” Or they swing for the fences and go in the opposite direction, thinking, “I’m going to write a $200 million science fiction movie,” and plan an entire universe and mythology. Those scripts, Hagen said, tend to fail for entirely different reasons.
In other words, avoid the major pitfalls that most first-time writers fall into.1
One takeaway from the whole thing might just be that writing a great screenplay is really really hard. This insight could help you decide whether or not you want to embark on writing a screenplay or not, or to be less surprised when you write something that sucks, but I don’t think it will help you write a better one.
What might help is knowing that it’s really hard to do well, so if you have the work ethic and commitment to work many hours and improve over the years, you have a good shot of standing out from the pack when you finally do write something remarkable.
Which I think probably goes against the gist of what this sort of article is all about, namely that you can hack your way to success with the help of data.
OK, back to work now.
Should this be phrased as “avoid the major pits that most first-time writers fall into?” Can you fall into a pitfall? ↩
So Good They Can’t Ignore You
I ordered this book by Cal Newport last week after reading about it on one of the blogs I subscribe to. I devoured it in two days (it’s a quick read). It’s very good and there’s something that’s more trustworthy about career advice from someone that does not make his or her entire living out of doling out career advice (Newport’s main occupation is computer science professor).1
I won’t rehash the whole concept because you should just read the book or pick up the ideas for free on Cal’s blog, but basically the thesis is that the advice to “follow your passion” is at best misguided and at worst can be really bad, dangerous advice that will lead you to failure, anxiety, and a host of other problems.
Agreed, from personal experience. Then he goes on to explain that passion is something that is developed once you become really good at something. In other words, craft before passion. And that being really good at something gives you options and control over your career and the opportunity to do fun and fulfilling things.
So if you just start from passion, without the being really good at something, it will not work out for you. It’s one of those ideas that seems obvious in hindsight but that I was completely blind to for most of my working life, and it was fun to look back through various failed business ventures and careers that never worked out and realize that I was committing the exact errors he describes.
Not to mention all the painful rumination I did in my mid-20s (what should I do with my life? what’s my passion? etc. etc.). I didn’t have anything approaching an answer to those questions until I started actually doing things.
I think the big takeaway for writers and other artists is that first you have to get really good (or even great) at what you do. That’s the first step and it might take ten years of diligent practice to get there. But that’s what will give you fulfilling options, career control, and the ability to earn a lot of money.
Here’s a link to it on Amazon.
I’m reminded of when in my real estate days, the sheer number of people who made a ton of money by selling various courses and seminars on how to get rich in real estate, which in hindsight, if you know this amazing secret to making all this money, why would you spend all the hours to put together some special course and then teach the whole world how to replicate your success, when you could just spend your time, you know, making a ton of money from your secret. And sure, it could be a desire to help others, but then why travel the country peddling this course for $395 or $1995 or whatever you’re selling it for–why not just post it online? Oh right, because there’s more money in selling a dream than there is in whatever arcane investment technique that you stumbled upon. ↩
Writing a screenplay (process)
I took my first stab at a feature screenplay in 2009. It was a comedy that would never work as an actual movie, just too many issues with it. But it had its moments.
This was my process back then:
Come up with an idea, write the first 15 pages, realize that I didn’t know where the thing was going, write an outline to figure that out, then freak out and get insecure and buy three screenwriting books and compile all the rules, ideas, and notes from those books into a big document that I probably titled something like “How to write a screenplay,” then rewriting my outline based on all the ‘rules’ I learned.
This time around, I’m doing it differently. No books. I am taking a class though. I’m still skeptical about how much I’m really getting from this class, but one thing I can say about writing classes in general is that they force you to write on a schedule. I tend to get sidetracked a lot with side projects and so having the weekly deadline of a 1-page treatment, then 5-, 10-, and 20-page treatments has helped me keep things moving.
And instead of worrying so much about ‘rules’ this time around, I’m just trying my best to write a simple and compelling story that doesn’t require a lot of plot engineering.
The process of starting with a 1-page treatment, then fleshing it out more and more every week works. It works in that the story is there and now that I have a full outline, the fun part of writing the scenes will not be fraught with the mechanics of getting from A to B.
I don’t know if it will work in the sense of creating something excellent–that’s sort of hard to judge. I’m in love with the story but who knows if anyone else will be.