John August

Search Results for: characters

Writing off the page

How-To, Writing Process

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.

Is machinima worthwhile?

Geek Alert, Genres, QandA

questionmarkI’ve been frustrated with not being able to get a project together to direct this year, and have a couple unproduced short scripts sitting around that I kind of like.

I’m considering getting into machinima to animate my films, using software like Moviestorm or iClone. Have you ever considered using machinima as a method of telling stories? I wonder what would happen if an awesome writer got involved in a burgeoning storytelling medium like machinima.

— John
San Diego

Machinima — using videogame engines to create animation — sits smack in the middle of a very geeky Venn diagram. It’s easy to do, but tricky to do well. It’s extremely limited and wildly liberating. And it hasn’t broken out of its niche yet.

So do it. Full speed ahead. But don’t do it because it’s simple. Do it because you want to make something cool.

In considering which projects to do, I’d urge you to think along two axes:

1. **Suitability for machinima.** On one extreme, you have [Red vs. Blue](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NtBX0XEHT0), which uses Halo to make a comedy about characters in Halo. On the other extreme, projects that seem particularly ill-suited for machinima — say, Hamlet — might be especially awesome simply for their outside-the-boxness.

2. **Production values.** Do you want it to look amazing, rivaling something Pixar could make? Or should it be endearingly crappy? Consider a machinima version of Clerks. Just as that movie wouldn’t have worked if it were shot in IMAX, your little project might benefit from some rough pixels.

Readers, feel free to link your favorite machinima examples.

WTF is a beat sheet?

Charlie's Angels, Ops, Projects, QandA, Treatments

questionmarkFirst, thanks for telling me to [buy a new car](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2010/fix-or-ditch-the-car). (I did.) Second, what the frak is a beat sheet?

I’ve taken screenwriting, short-story writing, and novel writing classes. I’ve taken filmmaking classes. I’ve read several writing manuals. Writers and professors all love to talk about the importance of beat sheets. While they are apparently the single most important thing a writer can ever do, they never show examples. And I’ve heard multiple definitions, from a one-sentence description of each scene to a detailed breakdown of every action in the script.

I’m beginning to suspect conspiracy. I don’t think anybody really uses beat sheets. They claim to in order to sound responsible, much like the myth of flossing. Can you post an example of a beat sheet and blow this mystery out of the water?

— Nick T.

Beat sheets are a form of outline. Each major plot point gets its own bullet point (or occasionally, a number). That’s it.

They can be a helpful way of discussing the storyline of a movie.

PRODUCER

What if Shoe and Dog’s dance number at Marvin Gardens came before Race Car discovered the Community Chest? We could get rid of these three beats, including Top Hat and Thimble’s knife fight.

SCREENWRITER

Did you know Inception wasn’t based on anything?

In the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library), you can see a minimal [beat sheet](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/ops_venezuela_who_writes_what.pdf) that Jordan Mechner and I did for our never-shot pilot Ops. It includes a column showing which characters are in any given scene, and which one of us was going to write it.

For the first Charlie’s Angels, I did a series of beat sheets as we debated and formulated. [This one](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/charlies_beat_sheet.pdf) shows a pretty close approximation of what I ended up writing for the first draft. Numbering the beats ended up being a huge help for conference calls.

(Trivia: You’ll notice there’s a villain character named “Lucy Liu,” which far predates the actual Lucy Liu being involved with the movie. That villain character was ultimately played by Kelly Lynch, while Lucy was later cast as the third angel.)

Note that beat sheets are also commonly written after there is a draft of a screenplay. I’ve asked my assistants to do a beat sheet of a script I’m about to begin rewriting so that I’ll have a roadmap of how things are arranged.

Story is free

Indie, Story and Plot, Sundance

One of my frustrations with independent film — and in particular, micro-indies of the past few years — is a lack of narrative ambition.

Flip through the catalogs of any festival and you’ll see movies with fascinating characters and rich settings in which *nothing really happens,* as if the filmmakers took a Dogma vow to avoid plot.

My hunch is that it’s actually a consequence of thinking small. If you’re making a movie on a limited budget, it may put real constraints on your locations, schedule and cast size.

But that frugality doesn’t need to limit your story. Story is free.

Waiting around for things
——

I spent last week at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, working with writer-directors on their next projects. I don’t want to single out any one script — I’m eager to see all of these movies made. These filmmakers are very talented.

But I often found myself pausing at page 45 asking “What’s happened so far?” and “What am I curious about?” And too often, the answer was *not much.*

Some of my red flags:

* Are characters waiting around for something?
* Do they take half-steps, then retreat?
* Do major events (death, abortion, incest) happen off-screen, or before the movie begins?
* Do people talk about food?
* Could you swap a scene from page 10 and page 34 without changing much?

A few of these projects would fall within the loose borders of the mumblecore movement, stories that focus on the sputtering interactions of a few well-educated characters. This is no ding on the genre; I like my Humpday just fine.

But I wonder if filmmakers are looking to mumblecore movies as an excuse for underwriting and avoiding character conflict.

A lot of story can happen even when you’re constrained to a few locations. Hamlet takes place in a few rooms. So does The Usual Suspects. Both Go and The Nines pack a lot into each of their three-part sections. And while Sex, Lies and Videotape might seem low-plot, the story keeps forcing characters to make choices and face the consequences.

In meeting with the screenwriters at Sundance, I challenged them to look for scenes in which characters were talking about things and show them doing those things. Often, the omitted scenes weren’t more expensive than what they would replace — but they were more difficult to write. The beginning of an affair is trickier than showing it mid-course. A trapped child is uncomfortable to write, but compelling to watch.

The writing is always going to be the least expensive but most challenging part of the process. Making a low-budget movie is a study in compromises. Story shouldn’t be one of them.