(You may prefer to watch it full-screen, or HD on Vimeo.)
I’ve been promising readers that I’d do more of these screenwriting scriptcasts. And I will. Today’s is nominally about dialogue, but I ended up switching a lot of stuff around in the scene in order to accommodate new — and reduced — dialogue.
Since this scene is much longer than most of these scriptcasts, I’m including before and after versions after the jump.
[Read more…] about Writing better dialogue
I don’t know who “BigSugar” is, but he or she has been meeting some of the same development execs:
A few years back, I did an [April Fool’s post](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/aprilfirst) about signing on the feature version of Goodnight, Moon. This year, I got pitched it. And died a little inside.
As I wrote about in [Why must we have board-game movies?](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2010/boardgame-movies), it’s not that Hollywood is out of ideas. It’s that the industry is terrified of failure, and clings to the safety of recognizable titles. In difficult times, it’s comfort food.
If you’re having a hard time finding a character’s voice, get him talking about something unrelated to the scene at hand.
Let your hero knock back a beer with his college roommate. Have your corporate spy meet-cute a potential suitor at a ski lodge. Pick situations that couldn’t possibly fit in your actual movie. You just want to get your character talking so that you can eavesdrop.
Open a new document and start typing.
It can be a monologue or a discussion between several characters, but go for pure dialogue, no scene description. Let it ramble on for one page or twenty. Again: you’ll never use this, so there’s no pressure to get it right or tight.
Just like a painter will often do sketches and studies before embarking on a major portrait, writing “off the page” lets you figure out what’s interesting about your character before you burden her with plot. It’s also fun. It’s the easy part of screenwriting you imagined before you actually sat down to do it.
Story problems in math rarely overlap with story problems in screenwriting, but today I have one that I could use some help figuring out.
Far away on a distant planet, an intelligent but very paranoid species is constructing a series of terrestrial watchtowers to scan the heavens, making sure no space-traveling enemies sneak up on them.
You can think of these watchtowers as observatories, each one watching a 180-degree (half-sphere) swath of the sky. For this simplest version, you can ignore complications like atmospheric distortion or possible moons.
**Question #1: For complete coverage, what is the minimum number of watchtowers they need to build?**
**Question #2: What would be a *prudent* number to build? If you want to introduce features like atmosphere or redundancy, go for it.**
This planet’s new Grand Ga’loo was elected on a promise of putting the watchtowers into orbit. After his inauguration, he’s assembled a team of leading scientists to figure out a plan for doing so. The current thinking is to have the satellites be geo-stationary (staying fixed over one spot on the planet), but the Ga’loo can be persuaded otherwise.
**Question #3: What is the minimum number of satellites needed?**
**Question #4: How does the number change if the orbit radius is increased? If the field of view is increased?**
Your answers could help some paranoid aliens sleep better at night.