Wednesday, April 20, 2005
On Writing a Lyric for Joss Whedon's "Angel" Series
On Writing a Lyric [Angel/Angelus] for Joss Whedon's "Angel" Series at first I hated the theme, then it grew on me, then I became OBSESSED with making a lyric for it that expressed both sides of the man/vampire. Now I love it. Miss Spike though, always.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
IMDB Msg Board Writers Shop Talk -- Re: For anyone familiar with Word...
You don't need special screenwriting software to format your script to the Hollywood standard. Word or WordPerfect is all you require.
This will sound semi-complicated, but it's not. Take your time learning the software you have, use the HELP files and PLAY with it, learn what you need to know about it. Word is your instrument, practice with it, and be patient.
This is what can be done with it.
Set up your paragraph [description, character, wryly, speech, etc.] by using the HELP files to tell you how to make double-indented paragraphs for speeches, centered CHARACTER NAMES, and the like. Save your formatting to FORMAT, STYLES. It'll show up on your regular menu ahead of FONT [Times Roman, Courier] and SIZE 10, 12]. The default style says NORMAL.
Once you've set your STYLES [description, character, etc.], whenever you click on a paragraph, then select the style, it will update that text as description, FADE IN, speech, etc. And, if you ever make changes to that style it will update throughout ALL your pages.
STYLES can be setup to AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE, too, so as long as you've changed that text to the appropriate style, it'll change without you having to supercheck.
Great for correcting or moving margins for brads and the like.
This info can be SAVED AS a master TEMPLATE, or you can just make a duplicate file, delete everything except samples of your description, speech, etc, then save it as your SCREENPLAY FORMAT file.
I hope this helps.
Neale Sourna
Remember -- PIE: Perception Is Everything
This will sound semi-complicated, but it's not. Take your time learning the software you have, use the HELP files and PLAY with it, learn what you need to know about it. Word is your instrument, practice with it, and be patient.
This is what can be done with it.
Set up your paragraph [description, character, wryly, speech, etc.] by using the HELP files to tell you how to make double-indented paragraphs for speeches, centered CHARACTER NAMES, and the like. Save your formatting to FORMAT, STYLES. It'll show up on your regular menu ahead of FONT [Times Roman, Courier] and SIZE 10, 12]. The default style says NORMAL.
Once you've set your STYLES [description, character, etc.], whenever you click on a paragraph, then select the style, it will update that text as description, FADE IN, speech, etc. And, if you ever make changes to that style it will update throughout ALL your pages.
STYLES can be setup to AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE, too, so as long as you've changed that text to the appropriate style, it'll change without you having to supercheck.
Great for correcting or moving margins for brads and the like.
This info can be SAVED AS a master TEMPLATE, or you can just make a duplicate file, delete everything except samples of your description, speech, etc, then save it as your SCREENPLAY FORMAT file.
I hope this helps.
Neale Sourna
Remember -- PIE: Perception Is Everything
Re: Putting music in your scripts. Good idea???
F--k the director, and legal's music clearance. You're writing YOUR SCRIPT not the director's, who, by the way, is a hireling, who has nothing to do until you WRITE YOUR WORLD. You are God [see Nick Kazan quotes on such] for that script. If you want everything to be pink. Carnation pink, then it is. You can't help it if they hate pink, or just Carnation pink, or just don't get it pink or no pink. You can't dance hard enough or well enough to please everyone, especially someone you don't know.
Music's the same.
If you just want general mood music -- industrial rock, country western, etc., write that, but if your characters or milieu require specific music for meaning and character reinforcement, write it. A character who listens to George Clinton's P-Funk is not necessarily an Itzhak Perlman fan, and a specific song may say something specific to that emotional moment.
If legal can get the clearance, fine; if not, then they won't and the music director (MD) not the director will find a possible buyable substitute. Contrary to Hollywood's still prevailing idea that white guys can write everything about and for everyone else, without their input or flavor, is bunk. [see white guy written "Blade" BEFORE African American Wesley Snipes retooled it, it was not pretty and quite racist]
An African American, Asian, or Sri Lankan writer will hear different tunes in their heads for their script, the same as language. So, as long as the writer can identify the specific piece so the MD can understand what you're trying to communicate, do it. [see independent films "Love Actually" and "Luminarias" DVDs about their music clearance woes and wins]
It's YOUR SCRIPT, until you sell it away.
Songs can be reperformanced in the style of your favorite piece and save tons of cash. [Luminarias] Or the exact piece you want might become available at a reasonable price for YOUR work, if your production team is persuasive enough. [Luminarias -- Aretha, Ronstadt, film clip from Sam Raimi in "Donny Darko"]
Why should everyone bow and scrape to director's, especially those who can't write or write well for what they did in pulling all the people and film together? But not the writer, who pulled together memorable characterizations and situations for the producer, the director, the actor to get excited about? This year's big Oscar shouldn't've gone just to Clint Eastwood, but also to wonderful Paul Haggis of the exquisite "Due South".
Write whatever you need to write to feel excited, complete, and regretless about your work. Write for the one person you should know well, you.
Music's the same.
If you just want general mood music -- industrial rock, country western, etc., write that, but if your characters or milieu require specific music for meaning and character reinforcement, write it. A character who listens to George Clinton's P-Funk is not necessarily an Itzhak Perlman fan, and a specific song may say something specific to that emotional moment.
If legal can get the clearance, fine; if not, then they won't and the music director (MD) not the director will find a possible buyable substitute. Contrary to Hollywood's still prevailing idea that white guys can write everything about and for everyone else, without their input or flavor, is bunk. [see white guy written "Blade" BEFORE African American Wesley Snipes retooled it, it was not pretty and quite racist]
An African American, Asian, or Sri Lankan writer will hear different tunes in their heads for their script, the same as language. So, as long as the writer can identify the specific piece so the MD can understand what you're trying to communicate, do it. [see independent films "Love Actually" and "Luminarias" DVDs about their music clearance woes and wins]
It's YOUR SCRIPT, until you sell it away.
Songs can be reperformanced in the style of your favorite piece and save tons of cash. [Luminarias] Or the exact piece you want might become available at a reasonable price for YOUR work, if your production team is persuasive enough. [Luminarias -- Aretha, Ronstadt, film clip from Sam Raimi in "Donny Darko"]
Why should everyone bow and scrape to director's, especially those who can't write or write well for what they did in pulling all the people and film together? But not the writer, who pulled together memorable characterizations and situations for the producer, the director, the actor to get excited about? This year's big Oscar shouldn't've gone just to Clint Eastwood, but also to wonderful Paul Haggis of the exquisite "Due South".
Write whatever you need to write to feel excited, complete, and regretless about your work. Write for the one person you should know well, you.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Oh What a Big Gap in the Blog
Been consolidating and moving the websites and all the headaches that entails. So there will be some catching up of articles found to be posted and more.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Why I Write Erotica /Romantica [or How “Thelma and Louise” Validated Me]
Neale Sourna’s Writing Naked 101 – 2005, Jan 26
Why I Write Erotica /Romantica
[or How “Thelma and Louise” Validated Me]
I’d written a damn good non-love sex scene for my screenplay “FRAMES” [www.Neale-Sourna.com\FRAMESintro.htm] between not so ex-lover and bad girl witch, FRAN, and bad boy hero, reluctant psychic, and inadvertent reality transformer, CAMPBELL.
It is a scene which has not changed much in the three major incarnations of restructurings, script renamings, and several smaller top to bottom rewrites.
However, the major love and sex scene between Campbell and his cautious but dangerous telepathic dream girl, MALOY, was another matter. I wrote and entirely rewrote and rewrote it; changing locations, time of day, and how they’d mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically gotten there [natural teleportation via a perilous alternate plain of existence, made by him].
And even how reckless Campbell gets to the true knowledge [mundane and supernatural] that Maloy is not what his eyes, his fears, and Fran’s lies have made her.
Great stuff, but I floundered with my true lovers’ sex scenes, by self-censoring [“My god, I can’t write that.” Or “They’ll edit this all away, anyway, so why put it in there.”] , a la PG-13 versus R or NC-17, and the sillies who make up those wandering rules.
Do you know why I floundered so?
I was uncomfortable and squeamish; thinking it might seem “inappropriate” or “too racy”, and, more importantly, because as I write I normally feel what my characters feel. Which is fine, if I’m not over-filtering their needs and fears through my own, and therefore drowning or smothering their true reality out of existence.
Which says something about me at the time I was writing “TRIADS: The Perfect Mistress,” or “The Perfect Mistress,” which became “FRAMES,” finally, with the help of a few useful [many are not, so choose carefully, AND pray] professional comments from a Hollywood ex-development exec, helping me focus on the story I wanted to write, but had feared to go naked in public, and had hidden from myself, and you.
Which meant I had to get me out of the way.
Because I could write the sexy, antagonistic, clothes-tearing, witchcraft-induced rape of a hero’s body and mind, but not the cozy, intimately erotic “I am you and you are me” deal.
Solution?
Write out a few storylines as self-prescribed short stories and lay on the sex, UNCENSORED, often with a committed couple of some gender in the mix. I repeat -- UNCENSORED, without holding back.
If it scared me or surprised me, I wrote it; and kept it, if that character’s reality.
And as Thelma said to Louise about robbery and freedom in Callie Khouri’s “Thelma and Louise”, “I think I have a knack for this shit.”
Thus, an Erotica / Romantica Writer was born. Or self-made. And finally gave me something to do with all that so-called pornographic content that’d been cycling through my head, in diverse scenarios, since puberty struck with a vengeance at age ten, but now it’s channeled, focused, fun, useful, and a Hell of a conversation starter. Ω
Why I Write Erotica /Romantica
[or How “Thelma and Louise” Validated Me]
I’d written a damn good non-love sex scene for my screenplay “FRAMES” [www.Neale-Sourna.com\FRAMESintro.htm] between not so ex-lover and bad girl witch, FRAN, and bad boy hero, reluctant psychic, and inadvertent reality transformer, CAMPBELL.
It is a scene which has not changed much in the three major incarnations of restructurings, script renamings, and several smaller top to bottom rewrites.
However, the major love and sex scene between Campbell and his cautious but dangerous telepathic dream girl, MALOY, was another matter. I wrote and entirely rewrote and rewrote it; changing locations, time of day, and how they’d mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically gotten there [natural teleportation via a perilous alternate plain of existence, made by him].
And even how reckless Campbell gets to the true knowledge [mundane and supernatural] that Maloy is not what his eyes, his fears, and Fran’s lies have made her.
Great stuff, but I floundered with my true lovers’ sex scenes, by self-censoring [“My god, I can’t write that.” Or “They’ll edit this all away, anyway, so why put it in there.”] , a la PG-13 versus R or NC-17, and the sillies who make up those wandering rules.
Do you know why I floundered so?
I was uncomfortable and squeamish; thinking it might seem “inappropriate” or “too racy”, and, more importantly, because as I write I normally feel what my characters feel. Which is fine, if I’m not over-filtering their needs and fears through my own, and therefore drowning or smothering their true reality out of existence.
Which says something about me at the time I was writing “TRIADS: The Perfect Mistress,” or “The Perfect Mistress,” which became “FRAMES,” finally, with the help of a few useful [many are not, so choose carefully, AND pray] professional comments from a Hollywood ex-development exec, helping me focus on the story I wanted to write, but had feared to go naked in public, and had hidden from myself, and you.
Which meant I had to get me out of the way.
Because I could write the sexy, antagonistic, clothes-tearing, witchcraft-induced rape of a hero’s body and mind, but not the cozy, intimately erotic “I am you and you are me” deal.
Solution?
Write out a few storylines as self-prescribed short stories and lay on the sex, UNCENSORED, often with a committed couple of some gender in the mix. I repeat -- UNCENSORED, without holding back.
If it scared me or surprised me, I wrote it; and kept it, if that character’s reality.
And as Thelma said to Louise about robbery and freedom in Callie Khouri’s “Thelma and Louise”, “I think I have a knack for this shit.”
Thus, an Erotica / Romantica Writer was born. Or self-made. And finally gave me something to do with all that so-called pornographic content that’d been cycling through my head, in diverse scenarios, since puberty struck with a vengeance at age ten, but now it’s channeled, focused, fun, useful, and a Hell of a conversation starter. Ω
Sunday, January 16, 2005
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