"Zero" & "IAZM3" update...

Today my 120 page feature film comedy script "Zero" was put in the post for the BBC Writersroom, and perhaps ominously it started to snow.

I'd really love for the folks at the Writersroom to see in the script what I see in it. It's a script that I'm really proud of, and I've really stepped up my writing craft over the course of doing this script. Indeed the first draft was my first real, properly formatted and structured, feature length script - after which I wrote another two scripts (the zombie epic "The End", and designed-for-low-budget horror "From The Inside Out") - and then I came back around to "Zero" (which was then called "Generation Procrastination" - I think this new title is better, and at least it's certainly less of a mouthful).

Coming back to this script really showed me how far I'd progressed in terms of my writing. I immediately set about removing anything too blunt and obvious, and including more subtleties, character traits and so on. I had also found myself much more 'in the heads' of my characters by this time, and over the course of three further re-writes (drafts 2.1, 2.2 and 3.1) I really locked it down to what I wanted it to be, and even though I've been over it meticulously I can still remove myself from it and just enjoy it as an enjoyable comedy with entertaining characters.

I can really see "Zero" so vividly in my head as a film, and indeed that's how I write. A movie plays in my head, and then I write down what I see. I even go so far as to act out the dialogue (as best as I can anyway, not being an actor) to allow me to dig out any troublesome passages that trip up my tongue, and to put in all the inflections in the right places so that whoever will read it will be able to hear the dialogue.

So yeah - fingers crossed dear readers - I would love for this script to be my foot in the door. Goodness knows I'm hungry for the next step.

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Moving on to another update - the editing process for the third and final I Am Zombie Man short is sort of underway. The footage is uploaded and plonked into the timeline, and the various chunks of stock footage have been selected (some Public Domain stuff from the excellent Internet Archive, some my own stock footage I've gathered over the years in general or for other projects). I must make a start in earnest though and get this thing moving onwards.

Aside from that I was also tidying up some of the dialogue files as I'd noticed some extraneous noise I needed to extract.

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First though I've got some clips to gather and send off to go up on the Ethics Online website.