Sitcom Pilots - Introducing Characters Early

After much procrastination, the time has finally come to tear apart the script to Dead End Job (sitcom pilot), and do a massive re-write.

With the BAFTA Rocliffe Forum competition deadline around the corner, we have set our deadline and hopefully the motivation and pushing force needed to get this rewrite off the ground.

The pilot has been sitting in the ‘drawer’ for a good half year since receiving some great and very useful feedback and now Taro and I are finally ready to tackle it - we have a board, post-it notes, and most of all, lots of notes and ideas on how to make it stronger.

One of the feedbacks we received was that our first scene only establishes a couple of the main characters and one of the ‘rules’ of sitcoms is to introduce all the main players right at the beginning, so adding a new character half-way through could be confusing.

I read somewhere that the pilot for Taxi managed to do this in a very creative way, by having a broken phone from which people could call anywhere they wished for free, we got a glimpse into all the characters, whilst still adding a little drama when Alex calls his daughter, whom he hadn’t seen or heard from in 15 years.

I recently watched the pilot to Friends and that was pretty excellent too, and if you haven’t watched it during one of the many re-plays, I recommend watching it right away. Now. Go!

Right, so as you hopefully noticed, we get introduced to all the characters from the go and through very clear dialogue, get a sense of their identity, all this whilst also setting up the Ross and Rachel saga that will carry the series through 10 seasons.

Based on that, how can Taro and I make our characters stronger and immediately tell our audience who these people are and what they are searching for? 

Before we start re-writing, and this is not procrastinating, it’s research, we have decided that we will be watching as many sitcom pilots as possible in the next week or two. Coincidentally, look what just popped up on my Twitter feed this week:

I took the opportunity to Storify the interesting conversation that followed between Bitter Script Reader and his followers on Twitter.

Lots of food for thought, and hopefully the more pilots we watch, the more we’ll start to see a pattern emerge and if we’re lucky it will be so engraved in our memories that writing might as well just happen by Osmosis. 

Feel free to make me any Sitcom recommendations, it would also be great to watch some that maybe break the rules and are still great.

I Propose a Challenge

It is now March, 3 months into a new year and I’ve been nowhere as productive as I’d like to have been. At the beginning of last year, hardly a day went by when I wasn’t writing and by the end of April I had completed 2x sitcoms, one feature, and had blogged 3-4 times a month. So far this year, I have done a lot of reading, even more thinking, but very little writing; blogging has also slowed down drastically.

I've always worked better to deadlines and without any in sight, I have decided I need a challenge. To all of you out there who need the extra motivation, I propose the “A Page A Day Challenge”. 

It is very simple and is exactly what it says on the label: write a page a day.

I realise one page a day doesn't sound very helpful, especially for those of you who aim to write 4 pages or more a day. How often though do we procrastinate the writing because we don't have the time, only to find that we've spent half an hour on Twitter or Facebook instead? However, if you do sit down thinking just one page, chances are by the end of the page you'll be in the zone and just carry on without even thinking about it. See what I've done there?

It's like when you sign up to the gym and never go; the minute you've passed the barrier of actually getting there and changing into your sweats, you might as well work out for an hour rather than 10minutes and it's always really invigorating.

So, if like me you need a challenge, just follow the link A Page A Day Challenge and join in the fun - because writing is fun! 

Happy New Year!

It’s been too long since I last posted on this blog and I am fixing that right now.

As much as I’ve been eager to write for the last couple of months, life happened and writing just didn’t fit into the madness.

Thankfully though I’m back. A little late to the game, but January isn’t over yet, so my writing goals for this year start now.

My goals:

• Keep a blog – even if it’s not a script, it keeps my mind thinking, keeps me ticking and most of all, keeps me writing
• Finish a sitcom – I got some very constructive feedback on Dead End Job last year but never got a chance to re-write – that needs to change.
• Film a short – I think it’s finally time to focus on one short and take it to the next level.
• Write a feature – After completing a feature last year during Scriptfrenzy, I am looking forward to doing it all over again, but this time with a little more prep and a better outline
• Plan out a webseries – possibly too ambitious to fit this into the year, but I’ve got an idea that’s been brewing for over a year and need to get at least a draft and a plan down on paper.
• Collaborate – not only would I like others to get involved in some of the above, but I also hope to get involved in other people’s projects. The one thing I have already done this year is read other writers’ scripts. I plan on doing a lot more of this and getting involved in filmmaking.
• Read more – scripts, books, articles, anything. Just keep reading, learning, getting inspired
• Dream on – whilst I still have the power of imagination and am able to with simple thoughts create intricate and fantastical worlds in my mind, anything is possible!

Overall, I aim to have fun and enjoy my family and as long as we’re all still laughing together, everything else can always be, in true writer fashion, procrastinated.

What are your goals and what are you going to do about it?