I am a student at Full Sail University. This is where I earned my B.F.A. in Creative Writing for Entertainment. Currently, I am in the Masters Program for Creative Writing.
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My final post. What an amazing year this has been. Thank you Full Sail University!
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The end of this course is the beginning of a career!
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The final scene. There is a rough edit and I will try to iron that out this week, but the scene has been trimmed to what is needed.
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As the end of class approaches, the completed scene takes shape!
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I revised my script to shoot within the time, location and budget constraints.
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The vision for shooting my scene!
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My final creative project in school begins! I am excited, scared and exhausted all at once.
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Adaption and The Art of Sharing A Vision
This month the focus has been on adaption. The process of taking someone else's work and making it your own while keeping the vision of the original work can be difficult.
As a screenwriter, a crucial ability for us when working with someone else’s work is the ability to change almost everything in order to tell a story on the screen that evokes emotion from the audience, while being respectful to the source material.
The key to the process I have learned this month is to step back and look at the beats of your source material. From here you can determine what the main theme the story is presenting and you can cut away on the original story until you come to the essence of the story.
For my project this month, I adapted O. Henry’s The Gift of The Magi. At it’s heart there is a misunderstanding between two people in love that results in an exchange of gifts that become useless to the receiver. I felt that this would be an excellent setting for a romantic comedy and Promotional Gifts was born. Debbie is moving up in her company and has received a promotion while her boy friend Myles has suddenly found himself unemployed. Desperate to show his love (and financial) means, Myles engages in a mad quest for money. Debbie wants to show Myles that he is important to her and each decide that personal sacrifice will be the right course of action.
I am excited about the results of this story as a short screenplay. I will be seeking out an opportunity to see this short on screen.
Reference Free Image on Pixabay - Valentine, Love, Romance, Heart. (n.d.). Retrieved November 19, 2017, from https://pixabay.com/p-1651351/?no_redirect CC0 Creative Commons Free for commercial use No attribution required
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My Mastery Journey - Gamify Edition
In my current nine to five job, I am responsible for completing a number of cases per month. Over the past few months I have start d making a game of it. I record how many cases I complete, per day. The following month, I compete against myself daily, weekly and for the month. This is something a lot of us do and for good reason: we can be more productive when we play. I am currently part of a team looking at ways to bring play into the workplace in a way that would be positive and productive.
I’m not alone in this. If you’ve ever started a meeting with an ice-breaker question or participated in an office pool, you have been playing games at work.
We are more productive when we have fun.
Another example; Chorewars.com. One of the first, this is a website that turns everyday chores into a game. You can create a character and earn experience points with the completion of tasks like doing the dishes or taking out the garbage.
Games and gameplay then becomes a part of what we do, but it also becomes a part of what we watch as well. Reality games like American Ninja Warrior are hugely popular. Football is not only watched, but many people (myself included) watch as we make moves on our fantasy teams. We have turned watching a game into a game.
This can also be a way to learn about games we might otherwise avoid. For example; a web series based on live action role-play; LARPs: The Series is a Canadian web series about a group that participates in the nerdy pastime. Essentially LARP’ing is like playing D&D, only you are the character and you are truly role playing with other people.
In each of these examples, games, social activities, even our to-do lists come together to blur the lines between games and life.
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The Power of Good Branding
At this point in my journey, it is time to start looking at the business of writing. The art is still the essential core of what I do, but once I have sold my words to someone else, I am in business.
What I need to do then, is brand myself effectively.I’ve taken a look at three different brand campaigns that I have personally seen and experienced the impact of.
An insurance company that has employed comedy very effectively, one of the biggest and best being the “I’ve got good news” campaign. In the add, someone would be giving bad news to another person, to finish with "I've got good news: I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to GEICO!"
When an ad campaign becomes so good that your friends will respond to the phrase “I’ve got good news” with the company’s catch phrase, you have effectively branded your product.
This is the best example of a movie allowing the content to speak for itself. The now 75 year old iconic photo of the batman logo
This early teaser poster, my favorite, shows us everything we need. The date to watch, and what we will be watching. Tim Burton and Warner Brothers are able to build hype but at the same time not set false expectations of what we are going to see. We just know it’s Batman!
Finally, I thought about branding as a writer, and that lead me to gaze upon the king of personal branding, in my opinion: James Patterson.
His website, not only sells his products (books, e books, audio books) but shows the many facets of his writing, such as movie reviews, and ties everything together to the image that he has shaped over the years.
While my focus will be screenwriting rather than novels, I can learn a lot from him.
All three in fact. Geico teaches that humor can generate a lot of buzz, Batman 1988 shows that once a character is established, let it take on a life of it’s own, and James Patterson shows that through effort you can tie your writing , your business, together into a package for consumption.
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Month 5: The Webisode
The focus this month has been on the creation of a web series, and specifically a pilot webisode. This has been exciting from the start. I have watched a number of web series; The Guild, LARPs, The Legend of Neil, to name a few, and I’ve always been impressed with how much character and story could be derived from 5-6 minutes of screen time. This month was my chance to dive in and really see some of the inner problems of crafting this efficient stories.
This has been a great learning experience for my career plans. When I first started down the path of becoming a writer formally, with the bachelor program at Full Sail University, my plan could best be described as: Earn degree, write screenplay - profit! What I learned very quickly was a more realistic plan. That there was more to it than just writing a screenplay. I had to write a good screenplay that was both a good story and something that a studio would invest only in. Show business at it’s core essence.
Now, approaching the half way mark in my master’s program, I believe I have evolved this plan to a more thought out strategy. Writing (and re-writing) stories on a daily basis, while also remembering to take care of all the spinning plates I have in my life; family, friends, faith. There is no fast track to success. It’s a daily regimen of approaching this craft as something important to me, and working every day on goals to push myself further in storytelling.
The month’s course was a very close look at what the industry of writing for television and the web will look like. The solo effort as well as the group collaborative effort. Final product: a solid first draft for a web series: Reel Problems, that looks at a group of people working in a small, independent, theater.
Creating the concept for the series and developing characters was step one; but then refining the script into a good story that could be told in the time constraints of a webisode and meet the micro budget requirements was
The hours have been long. Writing and re-writing can be an excruciating at times, but I can see myself doing this for a living. I am already on the right track. What I need to do now is work on the daily discipline, and also to work with our school’s writing center to help perfect the tools at my disposal.
I hope you enjoy Reel Problems when it launches!
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This week I consider ideas for writing in the workplace and at local charities, such as the Boys and Girls Club!
I work part time at a local independent movie theater in Edmonds, Washington. I am part of a small team of people and I do a bit of everything here; selling tickets, setting up the digital projector, line management for big shows.
My daughters have both spent time in the local Boys and Girls Club. This is a great organization and I would like to offer my skills to them to help promote the club this summer.
• Creative Writing Idea #1:
Every year the theater runs a series of horror movies in October. We will start advertising for it this summer, I can write the copy for our posters as well as the local advertising we do.
• Creative Writing Idea #2:
We are trying to bring more live events into the theater which is almost 100 years old. Writing a radio drama to be performed at the theater would be both a challenge and very fun to produce!
• Creative Writing Idea #3:
For the field day event at the Boys and Girls club this summer I will offer to be a part of the group that makes the awards for the various events.
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Mastery Journal Assignment - Art of Visual Storytelling
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Week 7 - What inspired me this week
My inspiration this week was an event, and one of the scariest things to happen in my life. My daughter had a seizure this week out of the blue. This si something that does not run in my family, so needless to say, this came as a shock.
Long story short: happy ending. She is fine and we have all come a little closer from this experience I think,
One moment I am sitting in my favorite booth to write in at a local diner, 5 minutes later I am racing through freeway traffic to get to the hospital. For the next four days my life moves at the pace of a single hospital room. The basics of self-care; food, water, sleep, become the routine when not sitting by and waiting for good news from endless tests.
Slowly though through those days, life starts to spring again. There is work, there is another daughter, there are responsibilities. A balance begins to form between the old world and this new one and for a moment in the middle of it you think that this is the new normal, and life will just be based on coming to and leaving the hospital.
Our story at the hospital has ended well. On some of the nights waiting over my daughter I overheard stories that did not end well. My eternal gratitude goes to the nurses who worked day and night with my daughter. They were part of every story that was beginning and ending on the ICU floor. They are what inspired me.
I am not a caregiver, beyond being a parent. I do not have the fortitude that these men and women have to do what they do and they deserve our praise and thanks. I am, though, a writer. I can walk away from this happy ending story and use these intense moments to share stories that other people can connect to. Stories that could help inspire people to act, or work through the emotions of events like these.
To develop mastery in writing I must take on the task of learning how to be the best writer I can be. I have to develop the skills and expertise of crafting stories the same way that these incredible nurses have developed the skills they displayed in my own happen ending story.
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This is my overall plan to start. I will review this with each course over the next year in my Masters in Creative Writing program at Full Sail University and adjust accordingly.
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