May 29
Being typically unable, or more likely, unwilling, to go to sleep last night I eventually found myself cruising through the random tall grass of the internet while questing for adventure. Before too long I landed on familiar ground over at NaNoWriMo.org. Imagine my surprise when I found that while November is the official WriMo, June plays host to Script Frenzy – NaNo’s somewhat illegitimate and adopted half-brother.
My calendar confirmed my already sneaking suspicion: June comes after May.
The contest begins this Friday!
Script Frenzy is similar to NaNo in most respects. One month to create one masterpiece (… of shit). The key difference is that while November was the Age of the Novel, Script Frenzy focuses obviously enough on writing a script. Be it a stageplay or a screenplay the final result must be a complete and workable script. Contestants can work in teams, which is nice, and the ultimate wordcount is set at a paltry 20,000. Please, I wrote my final 20,000 words in a week – though arguably they weren’t very good words.
I am not going to offer any kind of free money offer, but I still intend to participate in this. Last year my roommates and I spent a long and laugh-riddled night crafting an ingenious plot for a romantic comedy, and later on we even half-joked about taking a script-writing class together to see it to completion. Ever since that fateful night we have offered regular updates for the plot of our movie (as well as our equally awesome, though unrelated, sitcom). I figure Script Frenzy offers a unique opportunity to try and actually put our ideas to paper and have some fun with it. The end result will obviously suck – cite: Purple Elephants – but I am sure the process will be its own reward.
Plus, it can’t be any worse than Failure to Launch. (“What?! You still live with your parents?!”)
I linked up my NaNo account to Script Frenzy so once we get going we will be posting all of our updates there.
In addition to the actual script there are tools for uploading movie trailers, soundtracks, and movie posters. This should be fun.
** Update #1 **
I just found and downloaded a free program called Celtx that seems to be an all-in-one script writing utility. I haven’t played with it much, but among other things it allegedly allows me to store my project on a remote server and then provide real-time collaborative access to just about anyone who wants it. I don’t expect any of you to be as excited about this project as I currently am, but once I get going if anybody wants access to the project (either to help out or just to follow along) let me know. You will need to download the utility (10mbs – and it’s free), but that seems to be the only requirement.
** Update #2 **
Bill and I have created our project through Celtx and fleshed out a largely complete plot outline. Our ending is still up in the air but we have come up with three potential ‘alternate’ endings to choose from. The product is still in an obviously primordial state, but we are both feeling really good about the overall story. It was actually a little bit hilarious as we sat around our living room, my laptop open, taking turns going on excited and incomprehensible idea rants. We threw our ideas back and forth and every so often one of us would shout “No! Dude, that is straight up She’s All That!”… or some other romantic comedy. Along the way we had to both man up and admit that we had seen more than our share of chick flicks. Also pretty hilarious is that instead of wasting time coming up with original names, we assigned each of our characters the name of a character in Harry Potter. More than once we had to stop writing because it was inadvertently funny when we were brainstorming about what would happen next between Harry, Hermione, and that douchebag Draco. (on a related note: other than Hermione there aren’t a whole lot of girls at Hogwarts)
Our idea is fairly original – read: I haven’t seen a movie or read a book with a similar plot – and hopefully things stay that way. It will be a minor nightmare to fall in love with a truly original idea only to learn that someone has already done it. No doubt that will be the case (there aren’t a whole lot of genuinely unique story lines left), so I guess our primary goal is just to make our version better than all the others. No matter, we have a great jump on things and with the rough (perhaps low-reaching) goal of writing one scene a day, we should finish this in no time. I just hope that we can keep up our enthusiasm.