Today begins my new series, where I will be discussing the process of making a film independently from start to finish. My partner @vachemorte and I wrote the script for our first feature film The Juju Gum Conspiracy together. Our process wasn't necessarily cookie cutter. We often didn't follow the established rules of the industry, so some of the content here may or may not be helpful for other film makers.
We all have to forge our own path, and make mistakes as we go. This has been an incredible experience for us and we've learned things of enormous value from our mistakes, hopefully I can pass a little of that knowledge along while allowing you a peek into our process.
Today I'll be talking about the conception of ideas and how to turn those into a script.
Concept
The original idea.
This is your seed.
The first tiny little figment of what is to come. You need to water it and care for it in the hopes that it will grow strong and take a shape of it's own.
Coming up with our original idea was the result of more than a year of spitballing ideas, talking about characters, scenes, plot etc. and probably a little too much weed:D
As we started feeling more confident about the direction we began jotting down all the best ideas in our little black books. We have loads of these lying around, I managed to find three. When we were bouncing ideas we would often go back to these and reread a little to refresh our memories. Reading our little notes would always spur another round of creativity, and we would expand, change and rewrite. Some sessions were frantic and exciting! Others left us feeling stuck. The gods of creativity are fickle.
Once we had something solidified that we were both in agreement with, we made the decision to begin committing it to the computer. Most experts will suggest you begin by making a beat sheet. There is no one description of how to do this and every writer has their own style but it is essentially an outline of all the important plot points. This may seem like an unnecessary step but it helps immensely to have some kind of structure prepared ahead of time to rely on.
When we had our beat sheet all spiffied up, the time came to start writing In actual script format. I don't know why but getting started on this phase was a little daunting. I had been preparing myself for a while on the technicalities of script writing by reading books, browsing film forums and listening to podcasts. I wanted to do this right!
A few resources that I found useful:
The scriptnotes podcast (listen here:) This is a podcast run by John August and Craig Mazin who are both professional script writers for hollywood. It looks like they are only offering the most recent episodes for free now but if you want some insight into the step by step process of writing, and other tidbits such as payment, how deals are made etc. it's probably worth paying the few dollars to access the back catalogue.
https://writerduet.com/ I am so happy that we found this tool early on! The first few pages of the script were written in microsoft word and I had to program in shortcuts to get the formatting right. That quickly became a frustrating task and after a few searches I found writerduet which was a life saver. It's a little bit like hackmd.io because multiple people can collaborate on one script, add hidden notes etc. and it has built in commands that make formatting a script very easy. Also the basic version is free and has pretty much everything you need.
The Script
After all that preliminary work, it finally felt like the true beginning. All our vaporous and foggy ideas had finally been made cohesive enough to start fleshing out the full idea.
Something magical started to happen in this phase. As I was writing scenes they became crystal clear visions in my head. I was suddenly able to imagine the finer details, like how I wanted the scene to look, or what kind of distinct attitude each character would have. Similar to the spitballing sessions there were times when the scenes almost felt like they were writing themselves. During these spurts of energy we were glowing with excitement!
Of course there is no good without bad. Some scenes got scrapped and rewritten multiple times. I would often stare at the blank page in frustration or just spend hours rewriting what I had accomplished the previous week. Writers block is real, for me at least. Also since we were working on this as a couple we had our disagreements. We're quite lucky in that most of the time our ideas mesh well together, I love his brain and he loves mine. We are in fact two separate entities though and can both be a bit stubborn at times. There was a lot of give and take, and we had to choose our battles. I probably looked like this on some days:
All in all it probably took a few years to have a complete product! I know that sounds crazy but we were also working full time jobs so we could only get to it during the evenings and weekends. The final length of our darling script was 93 pages. It's the longest thing I have ever written in my life and went through so many permutations that I probably wrote ten times that much in total.
After all was said and done, was it perfect?
Not by any means, but it is my first so I will always love it, flaws and all.
page 63 of The Juju Gum Conspiracy
We will be releasing this film on Steemit as a series starting January 8th, 2018. If you haven't seen the announcements click here or here
Join me next week for part two where I talk about the casting process! We have some great footage from the casting that I'm excited to share!
