A movie poster!

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

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)

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!

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

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

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

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.