The Good

I've had a lot of bad things to say about how this year has gone. At this point I've all but written it off as a disappointment. I have two projects left, one of which is the major end of year project, and I'm putting everything I have into them in spite of how the year has gone. Still though, I'm unimpressed with a lot of things that have happened at that school.

This post isn't about those things.

The film school I'm going to has a great reputation for making industry-ready graduates, not film buffs. I'd say I'm almost in that boat now. I know my way around a film set and gained some valuable experience in the studio doing things like floor managing. With those two things together, I'd say I could walk on to a film set and do a job. If nothing else, that's what I went to that school to learn how to do.

I've also learned a lot about writing. It's been slow, and unintentional, and far less clearly taught than on other writing-related courses I've been on. But I've still learned. I went in having written some stage plays, which were mediocre, and a few thousand words of fiction (the jury's out on whether it's good or not). I wrote my first film script this year, learning all the ins and outs of how one is structured and what software I could use. That's valuable knowledge, even if it's probably freely available on the internet. Those scripts went into feedback cycles, which were varying degrees of helpful. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but between that first script and the most recent one, there's been a huuuuge improvement. At no point have I gone 'I need to do more of this/less of this', but in any case I've improved.

Let's go more in-depth. That first script was for a 48-hour film festival-style challenge. It essentially wasn't a script. We had so little time that we wrote no dialogue whatsoever. We basically outlined a series of gags, put them in order and blocked and shot them on the day. It came out pretty well for a first script, especially since the piece was the longest we'd done so far by a margin of about 5 minutes (the piece was 6 minutes long).

The next script was for a coffee commercial. It was ok, and the concept was great from a sales point-of-view. It fell apart in the performance. That isn't to say it was the actor's fault, he just did exactly what I asked of him. What went wrong is I didn't realise how the performance would come out on-screen. Thanks to that, I've gained a better sense of how to direct actors and how to get the most readable performance on-screen.

Then we did a short drama piece. That went much better. The performances were great, the shots were good, the pace was decent. All up, it was clear I'd improved. I still wasn't particularly great, but a step up is a step up. Still, there was a lot wrong with the piece. It could have been paced better, it was very dialogue-intensive (more on that in a moment) and there was little variety in the shots. The performances carried the piece (which had been my intention), but that's not something I can get away with on every shoot. Don't just make one part good, make all of them good.

So here's the big one for me, the one I'm on the cusp of cracking. All my scripts had been dialogue-heavy (including the one I didn't get to shoot). Dialogue-heavy isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I was avoiding relying on action and visuals to tell the story because I was unfamiliar with it. I write novels, that's what I'm used to. Films are a visual medium, and if I'm not utilising the visual aspect then what's the point of making a film? I should just write it as a novel.

Our next shoot is again a short drama piece, with the key difference being we're running it like a full-scale production. It's not just crews of 5 or so people, it's the whole school crewing the shoots. The script I've written isn't just a story, it's a film. It's taken me a while to learn the difference.

So what comes next? Well I won't make promises, but I have a pilot script for a webseries in the works. We'll see where that goes...