A screenwriter's blog: Josh Friedman

Screenwriter Josh Friedman has a blog, and he talks about his arbitration process for War of the World against hottest screenwriter at the moment, David Koepp. Great entries regarding current working environment/situations/stories of a Hollywood screenwriter.

I should be writing than reading, but I can't help but to be facinated by the real stories told by these working writers.

Big Break! 2005 - Not this year...

So, the result for Final Draft Big Break! 2005 is in. So I eagerly skimmed through the page to find my name. Surely. There must be.

Not. Big Bummer. sigh

I figured I would at least make a semi-finalist list, but my script didn't rise above the cream and the crop--is that how it goes? They sent me a simple email to thank me for entering the contest--they should after taking my hard earned $50 for the entry fee. I'm just bummed out for the rest of the day, thinking I still got a long way to go, perfecting my writing, my narrative skills, etc.

I'm still working on the short scripts, but I got to kick them out so that I can earnestly start writing either Trigger Digits or Belfast Safa to enter for the next year's script competitions. I will budget plenty of time to polish them up and get them out before cheaper, early-bird entry deadlines.

I won't be the greatest writer ever, but I'm trying to become the greatest film director ever. Every great director is/was a writer, therefore, in the grand scheme of things, I need to write well, but I need to direct and tell visual stories. It's disappointing that I didn't make the cut, but it's more imperative for me to make a short to pronounce my presence in the visual narrative world, and prove to myself and to the people that I can direct and tell great visual narratives.

Regardless, anyhow, today, I decided to write at least 1,000 feature scripts in my life time--3 down, 997 to go. If I can make 10 of them into films, I could consider my life to be an enormous success. Besides rearing 3 beautiful daughters, that is. :-)

Working for my writing

I have underestimated how much time it takes to write as well as film editing work I've been involved with lately. Like writing, film editing is slow and time consuming process of understanding the material and presenting it in order to effectively communicate the meaning and the feeling inherent in the material. Now I can understand why professional writers average 5 script pages a day on a good day. Interestingly enough, professional editors averages 5 minutes of footage a day to edit. So plan your work accordingly: cheap, fast, and good--you get to pick only two.

Although I publically claimed that I would've finished my two shorts scripts last week, I'm still laboring on them as I was out of for a good whole week after getting down with cold. The headche was murder that I had to nurse it with good films that I meant to watch. (Sin City was the best dose, by far.) However, I'm back in the game, and I'm more realistic that I will finish one of the short script-I don't know which one, by the next week, and the other in following week. I promised my friend/supporter that I would have my new feature script finished by next month, which puts a quite good pressure on me to pound the keyboards.

Heaven helps those who've done all they can. - An old Korean proverb.

Fuckin' Coincident

I don't read Premiere magazine except for their annual Hollywood Power 100 issue-Gotta know who to smooch to get my films green lighted. However, by some heavenly design, I picked up the October issue of the magazine and read through it. And I came across this little paragraph.

"Yuen Wo-ping will direct the kung fu epic Snow and the Seven, which Pulitzer-winning novelist Michael Chabon has adapted from - you guessed it - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Expect Shaolin monks in place of Sleepy and Dopey."

I'm so fucked!

The basic concept of adapting the fairy tale is similar to my script, Princess and Seven Assassins! This is when I finally finished the script after toiling it for 3 years, submitted to a screenplay contest, rewriting to put on the block for my first sale! FU~CK!

I calmed down little after hopping like a mad man in a subway station-not a good idea during this time of war on terror. Judging by the little info on that paragraph, it's set in China with kung fu masters instead of my modern spin of international world class killers hoping around the globe. Hopefully it won't have a big showdown in New York/Big Apple like mine. (Clever huh?) Still, they took that similar concept into an actual action movie in production is just... incredible. I felt my script had a good hook and now it has somewhat diminished 'fresh concept' for the industry people.

Snow: "A retelling of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" set in British colonial China, where Shaolin monks take in a refuge girl."

Mine: "Inspired by "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", a group of assassins must protect a beautiful princess of Middle East kingdom from persistent assassination attempts during her trip around the world.”

So, I felt little better, and I actually want to see this movie after disappointed by Tsui Hark’s Seven Swords. The lesson here is that if you got a good story idea, write it down, develop it, get it out before anyone else. Stake your claim on the story/concept and if it's good enough to get people excited to get behind it, it will be made into a movie. A good story/concept will always make its way to the screens-I'm dead serious about that sentence. And there's actually a Korean fable about that which I believe it could be made into a nice movie. :-)

Workspace for Writers... in Manhattan

Paragraph - Workspace for Writers, in the middle of Manhattan. I would sign up in a heartbeat as I need an oasis in the busy city, if I had a regular income. Sigh.

I spent last 12 hours trying to redo the audio sync I fucked up last week. My 40 hours work went down the drain, almost because I forgot to do one basic thing. Attention to details! Lessons learned. Experience gained. The show must go on...

1 Scene

One scene at a night. That's my current work schedule for my short scripts. It gives me a clear goal for limited time frame and clear concentration to the emotional truth to each scene I'm writing.

I plan to finish two short scripts before the weekend for a warm up and start cracking on my next feature scripts. I will have the sample of first five pages of each short script by online early next week. Stay tuned!

The cinema often achieves its greatest impact by refusing to show what it is attempting to evoke.

- Wim Wenders

Editor's Guild Magazine: 'Bride' Stripped Bare. "Technologically, this is a movie of many firsts; it’s the first feature-length, stop-motion film edited using Apple Final Cut Pro (FCP), it’s the first feature shot using commercial digital SLR still photography cameras and, perhaps most significantly, it’s the first movie to choose digital cameras over film cameras based on the criterion of image quality.

First assistant Ralph Foster explains that having so many JPEG still frames seems to challenge the system. That demand is unique to stop-motion production. Adding more RAM didn’t help, so to cut down on JPEG overhead, they were converted into QuickTime.

Lucas is running an Apple G5 (dual-2GHz) and FCP 4.5. Although version 5 and Mac OS X Tiger became available during production, there was no switch midstream because of the risk that it might break something in the production’s custom pipeline based on Final Cut Pro 4.5. Final Cut Pro generates XML data of shot information. XML data, which is just specially formatted text, is much easier to integrate into animation pipelines. For Corpse Bride, data wrangler/computer programmer Martin Pengelly-Phillips wrote a utility in Python computer language to convert the XML data into a flattened reel. The shots get validated for naming and length, and checked against the list of known shots in the editorial database in FileMaker Pro. In Python, a series of AppleScripts are created to update the editorial database with the most recent cut.

The FCP project is 80 minutes long at 720 x 480 (offline) and 23.98 fps (for easier NTSC pull-down). Every shot is a folder of images, and each clip is treated as a reel. The EDL is eventually exported in CMX format for 2K conform on Quantel IQ, then output to film on Arri Laser.

FilmLight built software to take a raw file from a digital camera and output a Cineon file with the look of 5248 film stock. Production software incorporated dcRAW and Truelight’s proprietary color transforms. The software took care of resizing and annotation by generating code that directed Apple Shake to produce QuickTime files for editorial and 2K DPX sequences to match the color profile of 5248 film scans. Although the Canon would shoot 4k, the images were wrangled at 2k (2048 x 1365) because that would be the final output with the Arri Laser.

Corpse Bride, along with films like Sin City, lead a trend in using emerging digital technology in ways not intended for feature filmmaking. Whether using gear designed for digital still photography or for HDTV, the visual results are striking.

Digital filmmaking has long been considered a trade-off compared to 35mm filmmaking; digital was cheaper or could do things impossible with film, but at a cost to overall image quality. With Corpse Bride, this is no longer the case." New technologies are expanding boundaries of visual narrative possibilites. Are you up to the challenge?

Moving into Post World

I recently moved into post production world as an assistant editor for a HD feature, basically for the credit and some stipend. Like a starting in production work, you got to start somewhere, and I'm learning a lot of things about my Final Cut Pro HD that I didn't realized. My Powerbook didn't get this much workout since I began editing my reel three months ago, before finishing my scripts. (Yeah, I have a lot of stuff on my plate-can you blame me?)

For last week, I have logged 27 DVCPro tapes-took 8 hours, digitized them-14 hours, and synching sound-40 hours. Since it's a feature, there a lot of footage, not to mention many other elements that are to be included when the editor finish with the first cut, like title, end credit, mattes, SFX, ADR, music, and all important sound post production. The total footage took nearly all of 350 Gig external LaCie drive, captured in full HD resolution. My Powerbook G4 couldn't handle that resolution natively so that I had to render the footage before I can properly view the slates to synch audio. My 1 1/2 year old Powerbook was already showing its age. *Sob& Regardless, the voice of AC calling out "marker!" was my siren call for the throughout the grueling 4 days march of synching sound.

I saved couple of scenes for my reel and practice editing, which promptly filled my 150 Gig LaCie external drive. I already have a list of editing books to acquire after I'm finished with FCP & DVD SP tutorial books. Since this is the first footage that I didn't worked on its production, nor don't know the flow of the story by simply reading the script, I can at least judge the scenes and the performances from the objective perspective as an editor with fresh eyes. This will be an interesting exercise to view and cut a footage where I had no involvement, and objectively try to present the best visual flow of the story as an audience.

Update: Unfortunately, all my work has been naught as the editor realized he should've pulldown first before I synched the sound. He's working on Cinema Tool and I will be re-synching the footage again. Bummer. It's my first time working HD footage on FCP, so every step is learning experience.

Update 2: I found a cool FCP site called, Key Stone's Final Cut Pro, where he talks more intimiately about 24p in Final Cut Pro HD and the DVX 100, and the workaround for pulldown process with Cinema Tool.

Update 3: A lot of people works on FCP yet I'm surprised to find that many aren't knowlegable or experienced with HD stuff...