do you see anything on my head?

the answer is no. know why? because my hat is off to jesus beltran, writer-director of the grass grows green.

hearing about a successful* filmmaker with a background in engineering is even more exciting than hearing about one from ohio. a lot more exciting, really. none of us choose where we’re born, but engineering to film is a strange path. so i like knowing that mike judge did a little cube time before getting into animation, or that primer’s working-in-the-garage scenes felt right because director shane carruth has been there.

still, is anyone truly surprised to hear that the creator of beavis & butthead was an engineer? in some ways it would be surprising if he wasn’t.

but there’s not a hint of the geek world in jesus beltran’s the grass grows green, a simple, elegant, character-driven short. the film (available on iTunes) does the seemingly impossible, taking on the most political of subjects without falling into any of the usual “political film” traps.

catch a great interview with beltran on the new blog PrizeWriter.



* successful, adj. having finished a film of any length that i personally liked.

frenzied

twenty-nine days and 20,025 words after the starting pistol, the script frenzy site attached a “winner” banner to my profile. i was beat--there had been some serious catching up in that last week--but i had a completely new script.

it took me a couple of days to even look at what i’d written--20,000 words is one thing, but how many would be worth keeping? but now i’ve moved my new script over to sophocles, which makes it a “real” script in my workflow. (i wrote the june script in scrivener--script frenzy just felt like more of a mac thing than a windows thing. go figure.) i’ve been through the new script a few times, had a week to process the frenzy, and am editing like mad.

so what did i learn?

regular writing rocks the free world. yeah, this should go without saying. if you wanna be a writer, you gotta write. but before the frenzy i had never tried the word-count trick. and i loved it. before june was even over i was working out ways to add doable but aggressive freewriting to my regular schedule, eventually settling on a goal of 500 new words every other day. (20K in thirty days works out to 667 words a day, which can get painful if you let a few days' quotas stack up.)

you can write some decent stuff under the gun. my june script was flabby--what do you expect when you’re rewarding word count--but as i’m editing it down, i’ve only gone back to my pre-june script twice for content i missed in the new version. i’m rewriting a lot in this pass, but this script is so much closer to what i mean than any previous attempts.

there is no one screenwriting tool that does it all. june really solidified my attachment to the two writing tools i use. i still think of sophocles as my “real” screenwriting program. moving my 20K to sophocles this week and formating it there made it an official script in my mind. meanwhile, scrivener has become my freewriting tool of choice. all of my notes are there, and i’m using it for my 500-word assignments. somehow even the process of booting into windows to port things from one tool to the other feels right--a change of environment for a different type of writing. now if i could only stop typing apple-C in windows and ctrl-C on the mac side...

i kind of like my characters and their world. and thank goodness. they're going to be with me for a while. more on this in future posts, i'm sure.