Script Frenzy: 2007

FINISHED!

2007-06-15T23:49:00.000+10:00

All are finish-ed.

I am done. Whoopee. Hooray for me. I am not nearly as excited about this as I was about finishing Alf Struthers back in November. But this wasn't as long.

I am not an official winner yet, but I am unofficially a winner. Because I am awesome. I have my text file all prepped to submit and everything. I had to take a screenshot to prove it... well, I didn't. But my posts seem a little empty without the pictures, these days. Oh well. Gone are the days of the completely wordy blog. And yes, I did draw the arrow and oval circling bits with paint. That is the goddess of MS programs. Not Windows, I tell you.

I'm feeling as much anticipation as my characters right now...

2007-06-13T20:51:00.000+10:00

Seriously. I have as little idea about what is going to happen as they do. In fact, they probably have more idea of what is going to happen than I do, seeing as they seem to have a plan and I seem to just be scared of what might happen. Also I am a small number of pages shorter than I thought I would be. Oh well.

I've been busier

2007-06-12T19:22:00.000+10:00

Not so much writing lately as I'm supposed to be studying. I'm still on track to finish by the end of the week, provided I get some writing in today (since I haven't yet). My plot's starting to crumble in upon itself, though. But once it's done I can fix it. I see it as like a temporary house at the moment. Though I don't know who would want to live in a temporary house.

Above is Alice, studying like I'm supposed to be. And below is the first appearance of Zelda, our dear antagonist, though not the big bad. I was happier with her skin tone yesterday. Today I think she looks a bit grey. And the fact that her hair is out and wavy is making me wonder why they all seem to have similar hair. I mean, Shorty's is shorter, but it's still wavy and out. And Alice's hair is wavy and out. And I must've been too preoccupied with Alice, because to me, Zelda could really use a ribbon in her hair. Also, Zelda looks kind of old, I reckon. Possibly skin tone, possibly her make up... oh well.

Passing the three-quarters mark

2007-06-10T23:32:00.001+10:00

Why yes, you have heard correctly. That is absolutely right. I am three-quarters, seventy-five percent of the way, one and a half hours, through my script for script frenzy and it's barely been a week. I am so on track it's awesome. I love it. I love my script to death now that I can see that it's actually going to end. I don't think it's awesomely well written (since most of my stuff isn't) but who cares? I write for fun and this has definitely been fun. Not least the pic drawing and the trailer thinking and everything. I almost have an urge to edit my script! Of course, I'll wait until I hit 20 000 before I start cutting chunks out (which I doubt I will do anyway, since unlike Alf's story, Alice's story is in a neater bundle without that extraneous description that barely fits in).

SO HAPPY!!! =)

I had to add the giant crazy-looking face because this post did not look nearly happy enough (after all those posts with pics in them).

Another pic

2007-06-10T00:06:00.001+10:00

Here are Alice and Shorty again, together. This image looks much better smaller since it really rather sucks. But at least they bear a resemblance to their former selves. And I got them looking sisterly together, at least. And you can see Shorty's hair better. Anyway, now I am off to bed.

I've been busy

2007-06-09T19:26:00.000+10:00

I'm over 11 000 words and another picture closer to my goal!

This is Dennis. Alice/Zelda's love interest and all around good guy. I won't say nice, because he might not be. I like his t-shirt. It is awesome.

Hey hey, you're a monkey!

2007-06-09T13:46:00.000+10:00

The title was irrelevant.

So far it has been a little more than a week (okay, so it's been like nine days) and I have a total word count of over ten thousand words, meaning that I am going along swimmingly.

Except that I'm a little stuck, so I started playing around with Photoshop a bit more. I really do want to make a trailer for my movie, even if it sucks. But to do that I need more pics of my characters. And thus I present to you: Shorty, Alice's younger sister and best friend.

A movie poster!

2007-06-03T23:42:00.000+10:00

I've been wanting to make a movie preview, and a poster, but I haven't the time, so I've been holding back.

Anyway, last night, since ELEC is totally getting me down I made a movie poster.

It's only little since I made it for the Screnzy site and they only allow little ones. But yeah, the text at the bottom is silly anyway, so it's a good thing you can't read it.

Stuck in a hostage situation with my main characters

2007-06-03T23:39:00.000+10:00

There's a gunman, who's basically holding up a bank because he thinks it's a great way to get publicity. He's actually a good guy besides the fact that he just threw a guy out the window, since he just wants some attention so that he can tell the world that the evil genius is in fact evil. Sadly for him, no one's going to find out and everyone's going to think he's evil instead.

The thing is, this was going to be a plot device to showcase the fact that Dennis has the power to nullify other people's powers. The gunman was originally just going to be your standard bank robber who would use his powers to open the bank vault.

So, clearly since I've written like a thousand words of this, I'm not about to cut it out in this stage of the game (or I'll never get those thousand words back), so what am I supposed to do?

I'm considering just letting Zelda save the day (by allowing Alice to save the day) and not revealing Dennis' powers. But then, what was the point of the scene. I mean, it came out that Zelda and Dennis used to date, and that the Vice Chancellor of the uni is a bit spacey, and that there's a cop in charge who's not so fabulous... but that's got nothing to do with my story.

Maybe it'll just serve to plant the seed in Alice's mind to be suspicious of Oxford. Hmmm...

Character List (because I am bound to get confused)

2007-06-02T09:55:00.000+10:00

Main Characters:
[ALICE] Alice - 21 year old university student at Darlington University.
[ZELDA] Zelda Kane - Alice's arch-nemesis
[OXFORD] Oxford Taylor - The super-villain
[DENNIS] Dennis Riley - Alice's love interest and ex-boyfriend of Zelda
[SHORTY] Shorty - Alice's sixteen-year-old sister whose real name is Sarah
[PETRA] Petronella (Petra) Fischer - A teenager who has the power to grow plants

Minor Characters:
[VICE CHANCELLOR] Vice Chancellor Porter - named after the principal at Alf's school (Alf from Alf Struthers, my NaNoWriMo novel 2006)
[PROF. MENTOR] Professor Mentor - Alice's mentor
[DAD] Alice's Dad - Alice's dad
[TED] Ted - Shorty's boyfriend
[DS MORRISON] Detective Sergeant Morrison - The policeman in charge of the robbery/hostage situation
[DONNELLY] Jason Donnelly - Head of Security at the University
[GUNMAN] Eric Roberts - holds up the uni bank
[CHIEF] Chief Moriarty - Chief of Police at Alice's local station
[RAINMAN] - The guy who manipulates water
[FIRESTARTER] Pierce - The guy who manipulates heat.
[TELEPORTER] Grimace - the teleporter (female, by the way)
[BORIS] Boris - A man who greets Alice at the Quakers' Bay Cafe. Newly married to Heidi.
[HEIDI] Heidi - A woman, who with Boris, greets Alice at the Quakers' Bay Cafe.
[LITTLE BOY] Jimmy - the boy whose ball needs rescuing
Nancy - Jimmy's baby-sitter/his mother's nurse
[SANDRA] Sandra Roberts - the gunman's wife

Leaping into the Screnzy!

2007-06-01T21:55:00.000+10:00

And so it has begun. I began writing this morning before going to uni since I never do anything before I go to uni anyway and I start at one on Fridays. I told myself I'd write for two hours and figured that'd give me about 1000 words. Well, I got more than that, in two hours and some distraction time so overall I'm thinking it's been a good day's work.

I was going to post my script here like I did with my NaNovel last year, but I realised that it doesn't really work since all the formatting is very important. I was also going to write it on Google Docs before I remembered that. Google Docs is good if you just want to write stuff. Not so good if you want to format stuff, sadly.

That said, I'm not entirely certain how redundant this blog is going to be. Clearly I won't be posting every day since I'm not that usually that way inclined. But since I'll be writing most every day, we shall see.

Not to mention I still want to make a movie poster and a trailer for it.

Oh, and I've tentatively entitled my screenplay: "University Girl". I kind of like it.

Learning about scriptwriting

2007-05-24T22:16:00.000+10:00

So I'm pretty much a n00b when it comes to scriptwriting of any form. I know that once upon a time we had to write them for school. But really, what we generally wrote were like radio scripts where someone was interviewing someone else. So I haven't really any practice, and nothing that I remember.

So trawling the Screnzy site is a good place to start, of course. Which I did. Then of course, I was thinking more about plot than anything else (because for me, that's the killer: finding something that I actually like enough to write about and finish). So I typed "fatal flaw" into Google's blog search, since I realised that my main character is sort of lacking one.

And I've just noticed how often I use the word 'so' in a single blog... perhaps even more than just this blog (though I doubt it).

The point is that I found this awesome website: http://www.unknownscreenwriter.com/

Which of course led me to a tonne of other wonderful resources.

The bad thing of course is that I'm meant to be doing assignments (I'm sort of procrastinating coding this lovely thing called testing on my programming assignment. That's sure to cause trouble later on, but for the moment it'll compile). There isn't enough time in the world to get serious about writing a screenplay that likely no one's going to read when I know that I'll be just as pleased with a dodgy one as not, so long as it's done. For me that's the best part of NaNoWriMo and ScriptFrenzy. The fact that you have to finish it within that time period. I am one of those awful people who is basically a glutton. I cannot do anything without anyone telling me to do it (although sometimes I do listen to myself). I will sleep as long as possible and eat as much as I like and am just thankful that I'm not fatter than I am.

Anyway, I can't wait for Screnzy to start no matter how frantic it's going to be. I just want to write this screenplay even if it'll make a rubbish movie.

A sneekier peek

2007-05-18T23:07:00.000+10:00

This is Alice, the main character in this thing. If I get time, her friends and such will be joining us on the blog pretty soon. And yes, the picture is dodgy. I have very little artistic ability. =)

A Teaser

2007-05-16T18:40:00.000+10:00

I've pretty much got a plot for this thing. It's awesome. As you can see I'm writing it in a Snoopy book I got ten million years ago and have written snippets of the most random crap in since. It's so thin, and I always forget I have it, so it's not actually full up with those random snippets of things. I think it'd be really interesting to chronologically check out the stuff I've written, how it's changed. How it's evolved. But, of course, I write things so out of order it'll overlap in places.

Frenzified!

2007-05-11T08:56:00.000+10:00

Welcome!

Today I got the email to sign up for Script Frenzy. The panic has begun to set in as I've never written a script before, and have absolutely no idea what to write. Oh well. This blog should contain snippets (or more) of my script, as well as my random musings while I attempt to write it in the midst of exams.