Time to revivify or at least reanimate this hibernating topic thread.
Given some recent discussions about new fanfilm series trying to get off the ground, what’s come up again and again is that just about every fanfilm production I’ve ever seen suffers from issues that can be traced right back to the screenplay.
It’s the cheapest thing to fix, as its raw material is the writer’s imagination and skill, however, it’s not easy to do well at all, as most fanfilm stories amply illustrate.
For the past year I’ve been busy working on a TV pilot script I’m hoping to sell (yes, I know the odds against!) and it’s gotta be one of the most difficult things I’ve ever written because I’m not just writing one story, I’m writing a story that needs to hint at what the series would be. But in the process of writing this I kept running into a wall in the A-story of the script. It was never working for me. Last week I sat down and started analyzing it, and I realized what was bugging me. And it’s the same thing that is at the heart of what’s wrong with most fanfilm scripts, namely: I didn’t properly set up the story’s problem so that the protagonist could/would have to make a difficult decision in order to resolve it.
So, in hopes that this might help some of you fanfilm writers, I’m going to share my notes on what I call…
The PROBLEM of THE Problem
See next post!