Week #8 – Catherine McMullen is a gun
On Monday we had Catherine McMullen come in as a guest speaker and she was incredible. She offered heaps of useful insight and advice about writing and industry.
Here are some notes I took:
INDUSTRY:
- Freelancers website – should do resume like that
- Political things in a writer’s room, a person will be there one day and not the next, need to be a valuable contributor to stay.
- Contributing writer – $1000 a day
- In America they can spend 10 weeks alone on research, can spend 5-6 months for full show
- In Australia, can give 4 weeks to write the whole thing!
VR SCREENPLAYS:
- Script form is still evolving
- Written in second person – you
- Closest to doing a play than a film – full takes required
- Sound plays more of an important role than in film – key for triggering interaction
- One camera perspective needs to be considered: quadrant format invented
- Can write to the camera – direction
WRITING:
- Need to earn rule bending – writing to camera etc.
- Need feeling over description, put it in if needed
- Spirit of character is most important
- Conscious casting – open different storylines, with specificity, race informs character
- Draw the READER’s attention, can use – NB eg in The Other Lamb
- Action needs to be evocative, not boring!!!
THE OTHER LAMB SCRIPT:
- Short story to screenplay – done the world work in short
- Can evolve new endings, new characters, changed by a third to a half
- Tone of short story is there
- Specific songs are not good – needs versatility
- Narrators are cheats – untrustworthy narrator more interesting
- Don’t write camera angles – ways to get around it – ‘we see’ rather than close up on hand!
- Lyrical rather than dictative action
- Use personality to express/direct characters/actors
- Big difference between director scripts and writer’s script
- Action beats – has to be a good read
SHORT FORM:
- Cut is down and cut it down again
- Budget to consider – locations – limited to 3?
- Simpler story: 4 part structure
- Outline should take more time, basic structure needs to be there
- Write what you know
- TOOL: Save the cat – when things need to happen for a feature, write treatment – fits roughly, use big beats, general structure