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.

The Unknown Beast - Writing Horror for the First Time

Horror is a genre I’ve never thought of writing before. I’m easily scared and often close my eyes whilst watching a horror movie.

Recently though, the London Screenwriters’ Festival announced a logline competition. The objective was to write a logline for a Horror film in 140 characters on Twitter and the winner would get a ticket to the festival.

A free ticket is always welcome, so I thought I’d give it a go. Each person could enter up to three loglines, and boy did I find it HARD. Most of the ones I thought of either already existed or just sounded funny rather than scary. In the end, I just about managed to come up with two, and much to my surprise, one of them made it to the 25 shortlisted loglines!

This was it: “When a magic lamp is discovered in a small town, all of their deepest wishes are about to come true with deadly consequences”

This was my other entry (a rather gory one): “When a legless man due for surgery discovers his Doctor's secret toy collection, he must escape or become Jack in the Box”

In order to come up with the loglines, I thought of entire stories and characters. So even though all I have for now is a logline, a little voice inside is considering developing it into an outline and treatment and take it from there.

Following on from that, another competition came up. This time it was the chance to write a “Campfire Story”, in other words, a scary tale. I thought I’d give it a go. Even though it’s not a genre I’m used to, it sounded like it could be fun and exciting to write it up. But I was stuck. I came up with many ideas, wrote a couple of outlines, but nothing seemed to be working too well.

I decided to think of the films I’ve seen and what’s generally the story. Many of them seem to have the same ‘idea’ – Victim is stuck somewhere with no escape and is trying to find a way out (a house/ a room/ a forest/ a spaceship…) besides that there is something or someone threatening them within, hindering their escape. Here are some examples:

• The Descent – stuck in a cave, trying to find a way out, to make things worse, something is after them.
• Blair Witch/ Predator – lost in a forest, trying to find a way out, to make things worse, something is after them.
• Alien / Jason X – stuck on a spacecraft, trying to find a way out, to make things worse, something is after them.
• Evil Dead / Panic Room – stuck in a house, trying to find a way out, to make things worse, something is after them.

There are many variations of the above and it’s not true for every horror, but it works for me as a first time horror writer. It seemed like a good place to start.

Next, I had to figure out, who or what is the threat:

• Alien
• Animal
• Mutation
• Supernatural
• Human Being

Again, the above isn’t an exhaustive list and the “monster” could be a combination of some. As you’ve probably realised by now, I am no expert in horror.

Trying to figure out which one to go with, I was asked what scares me the most, and after some thought, I concluded that people do.

The above alone was not enough, I kept thinking of stories that already exist, and then I remembered reading again and again that many ideas are the same, you just need to re-invent them. When I first read this, I started to imagine various fairy tales from different perspectives, and in fact, that’s exactly what’s been done in movies such as Shrek and The Hunter.

I was suddenly on a roll and started to re-imagine several fairy tales and nursery rhymes. I had my story.

It still wasn’t enough though and again I was stuck. I knew the beginning and the end, but how to get from A to B? After writing about three different versions, none of which were quite working, I realised I was forgetting to set my limits. As Linda Aronson (writer of the 21stCentury Screenwriter) suggests, find the restrictions of the assignment.

So I started over. I looked back at what I had and why they didn’t work and started from scratch. I limited my location, number of characters and props. Suddenly it fell into place. With one contained location, rather than several, it all became neater and more focused. I could focus on the characters and the story rather than the action. Not only was the end result a tighter, punchier script, it is now also a low-budget script.

I am not convinced the result is a true horror, or if it’s at all scary, but it is definitely dark and there is something very creepy about the ‘monster’.

I'll Write Tomorrow, and that's OK

As writers, we love nothing more than to, well, write. Just sit down and let our imagination run wild getting all those thoughts and conversations that we have between our characters in our mind on to paper. As playwright Edward Albee said “A writer is a controlled schizophrenic”. In fact, one of my favourite movies is Girl, Interrupted. The protagonist is a writer who doesn’t conform, and because she is different, she is logically insane and needs to be committed.

We also have to realise though that writing isn’t everything and that we have other needs and responsibilities; and I’m not just talking about the bills that need paying, but mostly about the real characters, not the ones in our minds, but the ones in our lives. They too need love and attention.

Remember when I wrote a script in a month for Scriptfrenzy? Somehow then I managed to juggle a very busy life with writing, and for that month it worked out better than planned, but life isn’t always straight forward and sometimes routine just won’t cut it.

I concluded that if I persisted on writing this week, I would eventually set my house on fire. Fact! Twice in the space of one week I’ve added oil to a pot and left it on the fire for 2secs while checking on the kids. A whole five minutes later I’d either remember or smell it and have to rescue the burnt pot and set it aside knowing that I had been lucky that nothing worse happened. I’ve just done too many silly mistakes this week, things I would normally never do. I have been very distracted and it is as simple as I haven’t had enough sleep.

It’s beautiful outside, but it’s almost too hot, it makes one slow and tired and brain dead. Sun is lethal! Besides that, my children do not like sleeping and at any moment between 4-6am they are wide-awake and ready for the day. By 9am we just need to get out of the house. So this week there’s been splashing, walking, boat rides, scooting, ball kicking, painting, drawing, cleaning, feeding, fighting, crying, watching, splashing, cleaning, reading, playing, laughing. When all calms down and there’s finally sleeping, I sit down and try to write, or end up reading. So when does my brain rest? I suppose it hasn’t and it’s the reason I can’t focus on simple things.

I have finally accepted that this is the only writing happening this week. I’m taking a little coffee break whilst Wall-E entertains my eldest. The princess castle cake I’m making for my niece patiently waits for me to mold it into a castle rather than the big blob it is right now (I took so long to post this the cake is almost ready).

The pressure to write is one I have imposed upon myself and have now declared that it will have to wait until Monday rather than trying to fit in around the busy weekend.

So there you go, tomorrow I’ll write, today I’m going to sleep – and that is absolutely fine!

Wait a minute, I hear cries, nevermind sleep for now.