Filmmaking Stuff Filmmaking Stuff provides resources for independent filmmakers. The website includes articles on how to take a story idea from script to screen, including articles on scriptwriting, producing, finance, shooting, editing, directing, marketing, distribution and how to build an audience. Filmmaking Stuff also has articles detailing how to make money making movies – including interviews with Hollywood Producers, Directors, writers and other filmmaking professionals.

In Britain all the film talk is about a low-budget film that’s been breaking UK box-office records. I think it offers some lessons on how to make a successful indie film.

It’s “The Inbetweeners,” featuring characters from the three-season TV show of the same name. That’s three of the UK version of seasons: a total of 18 episodes. The show was successful, but at the end of the 18 the creators and cast felt they couldn’t go on without repeating themselves. (Yes, they do things differently over here…). There’s a US version in production for MTV.

The show and the film feature four young guys: one nerd, one likeable but not very bright guy, one bullshitter who claims great familiarity with the female of the species but is a virgin, and one relatively normal guy with a major crush on a girl who is a social level or two above him.

Lesson One: It helps if you have a variety of characters so your audience can identify with at least one—or see their friends reflected in them. Of course it works best if your group is realistic, not thrown together for audience appeal. Adolescent boys do hang out in little cliques, although maybe typically they’re not quite as mixed as this one.

The stories are all based on highly-embarrassing adolescent moments, many of them gross (vomiting, nudity, farting, etc.). The film takes the boys off to a cheap holiday in the sunshine to get very drunk and try to score with girls there.

Lesson Two: As with the characters, plots in which the audience can find their own experience reflected are appealing. The Inbetweeners reminds us of our own horrible teen, with the advantage that probably ours were never as embarrassing as the ones we see here

The movie has even more gross moments than the series, and that has made it a huge hit with the teen audience.

Lesson Three: Comic or dramatic set-pieces are great because they feed word of mouth. The more that people are likely to say, “You have to see the scene in which–”,the better.

Naturally the film benefitted hugely from already having a loyal audience via the TV series. Shortly before the film was released, there also was a TV special of a road trip the actors took for charity, in which they had to visit as many places with rude names as possible in a limited amount of time. They travelled in the rust-bucket Fiat Cinquecento featured in the series and although they used their real names they behaved pretty much in tune with their characters (fart jokes, etc.).

Lesson Four: The more you can pre-build an audience, the better. Of course having a successful TV series is a huge task in itself, but it’s also possible to create a web series, maybe some events that tie in to a charity, and so forth, to build up awareness.

If you’re not easily offended, have a look at the series and/or the film. You can buy the series DVD or watch it on YouTube. In my opinion, they both demonstrate lesson five:

Lesson Five: It really helps if the product is good.

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Jurgen Wolff has written more than 100 episodes of TV, several TV movies, the feature film, “The Real Howard Spitz” starring Kelsey Grammer, and has been a script doctor on films starring Eddie Murphy, Kim Catrall, Michael Caine, Walter Matthau and others. His plays have been produced in New York, London, Berlin, and Los Angeles. He is the author of 9 books including “Your Writing Coach” and “Creativity Now.” If you would like to find out more about “The Seven Things That Are Stopping You From Writing And How To Overcome Them,” check out Jurgen’s screenwriting website: www.ScreenWritingSuccess.com

Posted under SCREENWRITING

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When writing a screenplay, there are lots of questions you can ask about your characters to get to know them better.

Here are three questions I find useful:

1: What’s the one moment in their lives they would change if they could? If you ask this of real people you get some surprising answers. Yes, sometimes they’re the big events (“I never would have married my first wife”) but often they’re moments that seem unimportant to an outsider. One of mine is when I was 12 and I cheated a friend out of a few dollars. Many years later I still have a sense of shame about it, even though it’s not the biggest mistake I’ve made.

2: How is that moment reflected in their current life? This is interesting to know whether or not it has any effect on your plot, but it’s quite possible it will. In my case, I think that one little incident has made me try to be as loyal and good a friend as I can—not that I always succeed, of course. Sometimes maybe that’s taken me too far in that direction. In a story I’m working on, the father of the protagonist once declared bankruptcy and the fear of that happening again leads him to making some highly questionable moral choices in order to make sure his current business keeps going.

3: In your understanding of the character, what’s one moment they should change if they could? In other words, objectively looking at this person’s life, what moment would have taken their life in a better direction? This may well be a moment the person doesn’t even recognize as being influential—we’re much better at spotting these things in the life of other people than in our own (unless we’ve been through therapy…).

If there’s a character you’d like to get to know better, try these questions. They could also be interesting to ask your friends—or yourself, if you dare.

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Jurgen Wolff has written more than 100 episodes of television, the mini-series “Midnight Man,” starring Rob Lowe, the feature film “The Real Howard Spitz,” starring Kelsey Grammer, and as been a script doctor on projects starring Eddie Murphy, Michale Caine, Kim Catrall and others. His books include “Your Writing Coach” (Nicholas Brealey Publishing) and “Creativity Now!” (Pearson Publishing). For more tips from Jurgen Wolff, also see www.ScreenwritingSuccess.com

Posted under SCREENWRITING

I have a fairly large collection of “pitching sessions from hell” stories, but there was one that stands out because I blew it—afterward.

This was early in my career, and actually the pitching session itself went great. The executive loved the idea and commissioned a script for a TV movie.

I wrote the treatment, which included quite a few vivid character descriptions.

He loved the treatment.

I wrote the first draft.

He didn’t love the first draft.

He said, “In your pitch and in the treatment, your characters really came to life. I don’t see these people in the script. They’re not really coming off the page.”

He was right. I’d focused so much on having my characters hit their plot marks that I’d forgotten all the great plans I had for them as characters.

Fortunately he didn’t fire me and I had the chance to put things right in the next draft. I found ways to bring back the nuances that had made the characters interesting in the first place. The plot worked better, too, because you understood more about why people were doing what they were doing.

Now I find two things useful to think about from the start:

1: How does the character reveal who he or she is?

2: What does the character try to conceal about himself or herself, and how does that come out anyway?

Maybe that second one requires a little explanation. Usually people try to hide what they consider their bad or weak side. A guy tells people he’s over his ex and it was the best thing for both of them that they split. How do we show that he’s not really over her? Maybe he parks outside place for a few minutes every night (how this is presented will tell us whether it’s wistful or menacing).

Another example: A woman makes a point of giving a homeless person money when she’s with her friends, but when she’s by herself she walks past him without a look.

When you work these things out, your script will be richer—and your buyer happier.

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Jurgen Wolff is a veteran screenwriter. You’ll find his screenwriting tips here every week and also on his website, www.ScreenwritingSuccess.com. Also get his book, “Your Writing Coach,” published by Nicholas Brealey.

Posted under SCREENWRITING

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I see that there’s a one day workshop being offered with the pitch, “Who better to teach you to understand characters than EXPERT BEHAVIOR ANALYSTS?”

It’s not my intention to diss the people offering the workshop (which I also why I’m not going to name them)—they are both screenwriters as well as Expert Behavior Analysts and sound like a couple of smart guys with credible credits.

However… If you think you actually NEED to have an Expert Behavior Analyst tune you in to what people do and why they do it, I respectfully suggest you consider another career. Maybe one not involving people.

To me, the best stories come from the heart.

Yes, we have to shape them and we have to make sure they’re ones that will be meaningful to other people as well. But generally they come from some seed of hurt or love or confusion in our own lives. By the time we write them they may have changed so much that nobody else can ever track them back to the source, but if they work it’ll be because they started from that kind of connection.

If you have an extra two hundred bucks (the Early Bird price), there’s no harm in going to a workshop like this. If you don’t, I suggest you spend the day walking around. Talk to a homeless person. Chat with the person behind you in the line at the grocery store. Have dinner at a restaurant and notice how people treat the waiter. In the evening, get together with a friend and let the wine flow and get them to talk about their triumphs and their disappointments—and talk about yours.

If you’re cut out to be a writer, you’ll learn more that day than sitting in a workshop with Expert Behavior Analysts.

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Jurgen Wolff has written more than 100 episodes of TV, several TV movies, the feature film, “The Real Howard Spitz” starring Kelsey Grammer, and has been a script doctor on films starring Eddie Murphy, Kim Catrall, Michael Caine, Walter Matthau and others. His plays have been produced in New York, London, Berlin, and Los Angeles. He is the author of 9 books including “Your Writing Coach” and “Creativity Now.” If you would like to find out more about “The Seven Things That Are Stopping You From Writing And How To Overcome Them,” check out Jurgen’s screenwriting website: www.ScreenWritingSuccess.com

Posted under SCREENWRITING

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An aspiring writer confessed to me the other night that he’s intimidated by the idea of theme. Screenplays, he’s been taught, are supposed to have a theme, which he interprets as a strong opinion about something, like that capital punishment is wrong, or that the sins of the father are visited upon the child, or power corrupts.

“I don’t have strong opinions,” he said. “Maybe I’m not cut out to be a writer.”

Well, to me having a theme just means that your script is about something beyond the mechanics of the plot, but you don’t have to be pushing one side or the other. You can explore the topic by showing how several viewpoints have their own merits.

The classic film “Patton” is a great example of this. Both pro-war and anti-war people have claimed it as obviously being on their side. (If you’ve never seen “Patton,” get a DVD and correct this situation.)

So, I told the aspiring writer, not only are you qualified to write, your lack of dogmatic positions probably will allow you to create more complex and more interesting screenplays than someone who has an axe to grind.

By the way, don’t worry if you don’t know what your theme is before you start writing. Many successful authors have said it’s only with hindsight that they realized what they were trying to express below the surface of the story.

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As a screenwriter, Jurgen Wolff has written more than 100 episodes of television, the mini-series “Midnight Man,” starring Rob Lowe, the feature film “The Real Howard Spitz,” starring Kelsey Grammer, and as been a script doctor on projects starring Eddie Murphy, Michale Caine, Kim Catrall and others. His books include “Your Writing Coach” (Nicholas Brealey Publishing) and “Creativity Now!” (Pearson Publishing). For more tips from Jurgen Wolff, also see www.ScreenwritingSuccess.com

Posted under SCREENWRITING

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter Image via Wikipedia

Here is a screenwriting question for you about screenplays that make history.

True or false?

1. The Cuban Missile Crisis was solved by the X-Men
2. Abe Lincoln was a vampire hunter
3. Jane Austen wrote about zombies

If you rely on movies and current novels for your information, you might say ‘true’ to all of the above (due to “X-Men: First Class,” “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” and “Pride and Prejudice With Zombies,” for both of the latter, the books have been published, the movies are on the way).

If you’re writing one of these mashups of history and fiction, do you have any responsibility to the truth? There has been some backlash to the X-Men prequel from people worrying that kids might assume that the Cuban Missile Crisis was all about mutants rather than Kennedy and Khrushchev.

A New York Times article stated that the producers of the Lincoln film are faithful to history—except for the part about vampires. The premise is that vampires killed Abe’s grandfather and mother so he vows to kill all the evil beings. And he wears a really cool long coat in which he can hide vampire-slayer weapons.

Frankly, the people who are relying on these for history lessons probably aren’t going to know what happened anyway. I don’t think it’s any worse than making movies in which dinosaurs and humans exist at the same time. Your responsibility is to be entertaining. And maybe—just maybe—a few people who see X-Men will look up the real story and some who read Pride and Prejudice With Zombies will also turn to the original, the one without the zombies.

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As a screenwriter, Jurgen Wolff has written more than 100 episodes of television, the mini-series “Midnight Man,” starring Rob Lowe, the feature film “The Real Howard Spitz,” starring Kelsey Grammer, and as been a script doctor on projects starring Eddie Murphy, Michale Caine, Kim Catrall and others. His books include “Your Writing Coach” (Nicholas Brealey Publishing) and “Creativity Now!” (Pearson Publishing). For more tips from Jurgen Wolff, also see www.ScreenwritingSuccess.com

Posted under SCREENWRITING

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Some screenwriters think that just about every screenplay should open with a bang of some kind: perhaps a literal explosion, or a murder, or a chase.

Those may well be good choices for certain stories, but my take on this is that what an opening actually needs to do is to prompt two questions and one feeling in your audience.

The questions are simple:

1. Who are these people?
2. What’s going on?

I’m not saying that your first scene has to answer these questions, just to raise them. They might be answered in the second scene or the third scene, or sometimes not until the very end in the case of a mystery.

The feeling should be some kind of emotional involvement. Often at this point it’s just curiosity but sometimes it’s sympathy—even when we don’t know who is being chased, usually our sympathy automatically goes to the one running away.

Sometimes it’s empathy—a character experiencing something that’s happened to us, too, so we relate. It could be somebody floundering at a job interview, or being asked for a date she obviously doesn’t want to go on, or somebody getting a big bill at a restaurant and realizing he’s lost his wallet.

I think checking whether your opening scene achieves this is a good way to tell whether or not it will grab the reader—and eventually the audience.

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Jurgen Wolff has written more than 100 episodes of TV, several TV movies, the feature film, “The Real Howard Spitz” starring Kelsey Grammer, and has been a script doctor on films starring Eddie Murphy, Kim Catrall, Michael Caine, Walter Matthau and others. His plays have been produced in New York, London, Berlin, and Los Angeles. He is the author of 9 books including “Your Writing Coach” and “Creativity Now.” If you would like to find out more about “The Seven Things That Are Stopping You From Writing And How To Overcome Them,” check out Jurgen’s screenwriting website: www.ScreenWritingSuccess.com

Posted under SCREENWRITING

We all know movies begin with a screenplay. And as a talented up-and-coming filmmaker, you probably noticed that a lot of the movies being made these days are crap. And you probably think you can do better.

The good news is, you’re probably right!

A few years back, I read screenplays for a producer in NYC… And I learned a few things. The biggest lesson I learned was that most screenplays floating around the market are crap. And I’m not just talking about new screenwriters.

I remember reading screenplays from working, established writers that just seemed underdeveloped. Add the enormous amount of material that came from friends of friends and other producers and I was able to see first-hand how much garbage is floating around out there.

So I can tell you, if you have any talent as a writer, the odds are stacked in your favor. Write a good script!

SCREENWRITING

I’m assuming you want to make a movie. So I’m not going to provide too much advice on how to “sell” your screenplay.

That being said, weither you plan on producing your own material or selling it, there are still a few factors applicable to your end-goal. The first thing you have to do is write.  And that means actually sitting down and forcing yourself to put words on an otherwise blank screen.

If this is difficult for you, you might consider finding a writing partner and then sharing a story credit.

Here is the down and dirty lesson for today:

ACTIONS

1. Get some screenplay software. Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter are the industry standard. Or you could do a Google search for “free screenwriting software.”
2. Once you have the software, consider writing a feature script on the cheap. Think in terms of limited locations, with limited actors, with a short schedule that you can eventually shoot with limited equipment on HD video.
3. Consider making things funny. Some people think horror comedy works pretty well.
4. The story should be fun with a STRONG, marketable CONCEPT.
5. The name of the game is FUN. If you can’t have fun, you’re doing something wrong.

Putting the final polish on a screenplay is an amazing accomplishment. But just make sure you’ve created your best work. As they say, you only get one chance to make a good first impression – that same thinking applies to your screenplay.

You only get one chance to grab the attention of a potential actor or department head who may or may not decide to help you with your project. Two screenwriting books you might want to check out are: Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting and How to Write a Movie in 21 Days.

And one more resource (It’s my own) – The Indie Producer’s Guide To Writing Screenplays That Sell

Happy Filmmaking!

Posted under SCREENWRITING

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People always point out that a relationship with an agent is something like a marriage, but without the sex (usually). Which means that sometimes there will be a divorce—at this point, the high profile one is J. K. Rowling dumping hers.

The gentlemen in question has made enough money from her to live the rest of his life like a king but it still hurts to be given the shove.

I don’t know why J. K. split from Christopher Little, but I do know some situations that might indicate it’s time for you to go looking for a new one:

• When they don’t return your call promptly. By promptly I mean within a week, unless there’s a hot deal in the works in which case you’d expect a call back within 24 hours.
• When they take a long time to read your new work.
• When they start telling you how to rewrite your work (that’s not to say that agents don’t have valuable input, but it’s a common disease among agents to want to become writers by proxy)
• When they stop making connections for you.

It’s not all a one-way street, though. Agents also have good cause sometimes to shed a writer. Typically they start thinking less affectionately about clients:

• If they become needy. Your agent is not your therapist or your accountant. They don’t want to know about your financial problems or your personal life—or at least not much.
• If they feel that the projects being offered to them are beneath them. This screenwriter usually is just one step away from trying to become a novelist.
• If they screw up too many meetings by being late, unprepared, insulting to the producer or network person (yes, that happens), or inflexible.

As with real divorces, it’s tough to find a truly amicable one but it is possible. The toughest situation is when the agent who believed in you at the start gets you jobs that take you into the big leagues and then you realize they’re not actually capable of making those bigger deals effectively. Then it’s loyalty vs. career advancement (or money). The late Stephen Cannell encountered this and came up with a generous solution: he switched agents but continued to give his first agent a percentage (I think it was 5%) of his income.

Jurgen Wolff is a screenwriter. Check back every week for a new post from Jurgen Wolff and also check out his site, www.ScreenWritingSuccess.com. You may also find his “Your Writing Coach” book useful.

Posted under SCREENWRITING

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If you can write a good romantic comedy you’ll find lots of people interested. The problem is that it’s getting harder. The reason is that this genre is all about keeping people apart. For instance, here are some traditional methods for making sure the lovers don’t get together until late in the story:

1. Geography – they’re in different parts of the country or the world
2. Age – they’re different ages
3. Miscommunication – they misunderstand what the other has said
4. Differing values – they’re on opposite ends of the political scale, or one’s an environmentalist and the other works for Exxon
5. Feuding families – Romeo and Juliet all over again
6. Coming from different sides of the tracks

However, these days geography isn’t the barrier it used to be, you can fly just about anywhere for a reasonable amount and there are lots of long-distance relationships. Differences in ages are readily accepted. Miscommunication still happens, but there are so many ways the communicate that it’s not that hard to correct it.

There are also lots of people who agree to disagree about values (whether or not to have a child remains one of the divisive issues). People are not as dependent on families or even as connected to them as they used to be so families not getting along doesn’t have to be that big an issue. And the issue of one being richer than the other, which used to be an issue mainly if it was the woman who had more money, also is much less significant now.

With the reduced impact of these issues, if the couple doesn’t overcome them fairly easily it’s harder for us to imagine they are meant for each other, in which case we don’t care very much whether or not they end up together.

The other big problem with the genre is that we’ve seen so many variations of the basic problems that it’s harder to come up with something fresh.

What’s the solution? I think it’s to look more deeply at the things that DO drive people apart these days. What are the things you and your friends are talking about? For instance, how far to go in making your life public via social networking and the consequences if you take it too far. Or maybe the burden of taking care of one’s parents or grandparents when they get older. Or the impact of the economy and unemployment.

One example is “the Gaggle”—the idea that these days young women sometimes have one man in their life for intellectual stimulation, another one for sexual satisfaction, another one to pal around with, etc. That’s a concept developed by the proprietors of the dating blog “WTF Is Up With My Love Life,” and it’s scheduled to be a book and a movie.

There are still rich topics to mine if you look for them!

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Jurgen Wolff offers a new screenwriting tip here every Tuesday; also check out his site www.ScreenwritingSuccess.com

Posted under SCREENWRITING