We had a story for Nearly a Knight (still known as Smoke and Mirrors at this point) going pretty well. There was still something missing, and we didn’t yet know how everything was going to play out from start to finish, but we were pretty optimistic about it. All that was required was someone writing a first draft.

Enter Script Frenzy 2011. *sniffle* I’m sorry, I need a moment…

(Script Frenzy was discontinued after 2012, sad to say. We miss you!)

Okay, moving on. In case you don’t know what Script Frenzy was (I’m gonna cry here), it was this great little challenge, quite like NaNoWriMo, where you had to write a 100-page screenplay in one month. The month of April, to be precise.

I’d done Script Frenzy in 2009, then taken a break for 2010. I was itching to get back to screenwriting in 2011, and I challenged Rebekah to go for it, too. My script was a contemporary drama called Bellwether, which I may tell you about later. But we’re interested in Nearly a Knight, which Rebekah grabbed for her project. We were off to the races.

Didn’t I tell you? Before Script Frenzy, we had a few more story discussions about Smoke and Mirrors. Not only did Rebekah come up with the current title of Nearly a Knight, but we also jointly rejiggered the story a little bit.

Mortimer’s carnival troupe from the previous version was tossed. They were a bunch of nameless, characterless people who were bogging things down. That, of course, left the evil magician hanging a bit, but we found a better way to work him in.

Instead of heading up the carnival troupe, the evil magician became the henchman of one of the king’s discontented former advisors. This advisor wants the king out of the way and he’s hired the evil magician to get the job done in a way that doesn’t implicate him.

Okay, now we’re up to date. Rebekah and I crawled into our respective writer nooks and banged out two screenplays. May rolled around and I got a look at what Nearly a Knight was like in a completed form.

My reaction? Nothing short of, “Wow!”

She’d knocked it out of the park, considering it was a first draft. Things had changed and characters had been added. The story was solid. Very solid. The magician and his boss had names and had gotten another henchman, and they’d all been ratcheted up several notches to believable evilness.

Not only was it solid, it was funny! And yet, it was touching, too. I laughed out loud reading some truly hilarious comedy scenes, nearly cried at the ending, and then wrote back to Rebekah with a lot of feedback for making the next draft better.

Well, the next draft didn’t happen for a little while. Rebekah got busy with other projects (for some reason, she likes to write novels, too), and I took Bellwether for a second-draft excursion around the end of 2011.

I was having all kinds of trouble with my second draft of Bellwether. The first draft had a lot of extraneous stuff that I had to weed out, and it was like pulling teeth. About halfway through the draft, I began eyeing the file for Nearly a Knight. Soon, I caved and started to use Nearly a Knight as a reward for working on Bellwether.

By the end of the year, I had two screenplays drafted. I sent Nearly a Knight draft 2 out to Rebekah and some test readers, and waited nervously for results.

I shouldn’t have been nervous. The test readers loved it. They nitpicked at details, but overall, they agreed that we had a good screenplay going. Rebekah read through my draft and took notes. While we were in the same place in early 2012, we sat down with her annotated hard copy of the script and all the test readers’ feedback, and we set to work hashing out details on a third draft.

One really cool thing that came out of that meeting was a couple points where I looked at a line or a gag and asked, “Was that in your draft or did I add it?” And Rebekah honestly didn’t remember. To me, that was encouraging. It meant we were writing the same story.

So, armed with notes galore, we left the meeting with plans for Rebekah to write the third draft. In July, she sent me a brand new opening that blew me away. It fixed many of the issues we’d seen with the previous draft and simultaneously brought all sorts of extra depth to the tale.

Then in early August, Rebekah asked me to take a look at the 44 pages she’d written so far. I’m thrilled with how things are going. This story is getting me more excited with every revision.

And now Rebekah is working on finishing the third draft. The process of storytelling continues, and I can’t wait to see what happens next with Nearly a Knight.

Nearly a Knight, at this point known as Smoke and Mirrors, was stuck. We weren’t sure what was wrong, but we knew we wanted to fix it. There was a great story here and we wanted to get at it.

So it shouldn’t come as too much surprise that surrounding our work on A House for Marge in November, 2010, we began once again to explore Mortimer’s adventures with Annette and Buckle.

Things happened all over the place. Rebekah got to work developing characters. She fleshed out Annette very nicely, but Mortimer was a sticking point.

Finally, we realized what was up: Mortimer was unlikeable.

In our original idea, we had a selfish guy who couldn’t tolerate his nephew, was tricking his carnival boss so he could keep extra profits, and was pickpocketing castle guests right and left. And we expected everyone to sympathize with him. Of course it wasn’t working!

Armed with this knowledge, Rebekah jumped into salvaging the poor guy. In the process, he almost lost his nephew, but Buckle held on tight and never quite got erased. That was good, because he ended up providing one of the ways to sympathize with Mortimer.

What we did was reform Mortimer from a shady magician into a scrupulous magician. He was still a very calculating person, and he still had a chip on his shoulder, but his backstory was now completely different. Instead of working as a magician to get money for going back to knight school, he was a down-on-his-luck noble who’d been kicked out of the family castle. Now the reason for saving money was to buy back his father’s land.

The knighthood thing was still around, but it was a little different. Because Mortimer had lost his father’s castle, he was no longer a noble and therefore no longer eligible for knighthood. He was awfully sore about that, especially since he thought he could have made a better knight than any of the selfish people wearing armor in the kingdom.

I said that Buckle became a sympathy point for Mortimer. Well, I mean that he became a point for the audience to connect. Buckle is Mortimer’s sister’s son, and due to some familial issues, he’s traveling with Mortimer. But Mortimer really would prefer to be on his own, without the accident-prone Buckle bogging him down.

Mortimer was no longer trying to con the carnival guys like he was in the original concept, and that made them less useful. They were simply there to give Mortimer some people to travel with. So we made Mortimer their main crowd-drawing act… And the evil real magician whose plot causes Mortimer’s quest became the leader of the troupe.

This made things easier as far as realistically getting Mortimer blamed for the disappearing princess incident. In this revision, Mortimer is pinpointed by the evil magician and forced into participation with the scheme.

We also played with the idea of introducing another villain in the form of an unwelcome suitor who is after the princess’ hand. This guy never quite materialized, but in several story discussions, we thought about how he would be on a rival quest, trying to get to the princess before Mortimer. Ultimately, we tossed it because it felt wrong and there wasn’t space, anyway.

So now we had Mortimer straightened out, we thought. He’d become a likable, down-on-his-luck carnival magician who gets in trouble with a king. His cynicism toward chivalry gets in the way of his quest at first, but eventually he comes around and does the right thing, gaining his knighthood in the process.

And about there is where we left it. Something still wasn’t quite working, but it was better than where we started. It was time to let it rest a little while longer before plunging in to write a first draft.

(To be continued.)

Almost every story begins without a title, and this one was no different. One day, back in November of 2009, we were all sitting around the table after a meal. The conversation turned to new movie ideas and somebody mentioned iSundae. We had sworn off any ideas of a threequel, but it kept on coming up. Something was drawing us to it.

In the midst of the discussion, we started talking about how it was too bad that two of our favorite characters from iSundae II never got a chance to interact in the film. Those characters were Gwenanda and Fonsuger.

In case you haven’t seen the iSundae films, here’s a quick bio of those two characters.

Gwenanda: A ditzy redhead who tends to act before she thinks.

Fonsuger: A cool, calculating villain who prefers clever scheming to doing the dirty work.

We were quite amused by the thought of the sparks that would fly if Gwenanda and Fonsuger ever had to talk to each other. And then we stopped, wondering, “Why not?”

What if we took those two characters, renamed them, tweaked them a bit (most notably to make Fonsuger a good guy), and then made them the main characters of their own film?

It was worth thinking about.

We ran with Fonsuger first. He quickly became Mortimer, a shady carnival magician with a money problem. In the beginning, Mortimer traveled with a small carnival troupe, entertaining at castles. He was in knight school (pun intended) but was forced to drop out before he could finish. The fee to get back in was huge, so he was slowly saving money. Unfortunately, he owed money to the carnival troupe’s owner… And he was also a pickpocket.

Well, our story discussions often quickly dissolve into silliness, and this one was no exception. We had a magician, right? Now he needed a nephew. The magician’s nephew. Ha!

For some reason, we kept that silly idea. Mortimer gained the companionship of Buckle, his young nephew who was traveling with him. Buckle loved the sound of adventures and he wanted to become a knight or a magician, whichever his favorite uncle ended up being.

With Fonsuger’s overhaul out of the way, we turned to Gwenanda. She was given a new name, Annette, and made into a princess’ nanny. Other than that, not much changed. She was already on the right side, so there wasn’t really anything else to do.

Princess? Yes. She was how Annette got mixed up with Mortimer. You see, Mortimer fell in with a magician who worked with real magic, not just those slight-of-hand carnival tricks. That got him into trouble when the magician unleashed a plot to get rid of the king by magically transporting the princess to an island to be held for ransom.

About this point, somebody said that something ought to happen to the king, too. That led to another silly rabbit trail, and by the time we emerged from that one, the king had been turned into a frog and Mortimer had been blamed for the whole shebang and thrown in the dungeon to await the gallows.

Now came the quest. Mortimer was broken out by Annette, who was desperate over the princess’ disappearance. She thought that she could get Mortimer to agree to bring back the princess in exchange for springing him from the dungeon. Of course, she botched it and he got out without making any such promise. But on the way out of the dungeon, they nearly stepped on the king, now a frog, and had to scoop him up before he called the guards.

This was to begin a quest in which Mortimer tried to get out of finding the princess while simultaneously keeping his cartful of money safe from his carnival boss. And that’s as far as the original idea went. Playing on the deceptions that were flying fast and furious between various magicians, we dubbed the new project Smoke and Mirrors.

That’s where we got stuck. Something wasn’t quite working, but we were in the middle of other projects and ideas, so we shelved Smoke and Mirrors for the time being and moved on.

(To be continued.)

Not because they ended too soon, but because there needed to be more. Let me explain what I mean with two specific examples.

The first movie I want to talk about is Flushed Away. It’s a fun little film filled with absolutely hilarious jokes that are pretty much non-stop. It’s also only 75 minutes long before the credits roll.

The problem with this film is that it attempts at various points to make the viewer feel emotion. We’re supposed to feel sorry for poor, lonely Roddy when he gets back to his empty house. We’re supposed to cry when Rita’s boat sinks. But both of these story beats are overshadowed almost immediately by throwaway gags.

Those are just two instances out of several where the movie could have used just a little bit of breathing space. And there’s no excuse not to have it! I mean, the movie is barely 75 minutes long! They had 15 minutes to play with before hitting 90, where most animated movies land nowadays. Even just an extra 5 minutes of room to process the emotional beats would have vastly improved the film.

The second movie I want to mention is The Last Airbender. I know, I know. The movie failed on a number of levels, in particular in its complete and blatant disregard for most of what made the original TV series great. Some of that could have been solved by making it longer.

See, the movie spends little or no time on character development, but it has so many characters running around that it needed to. It also skips important parts of the story with a short voiceover.

And yet, the movie was only 90 minutes long, even though it was an adaptation of 7.5 hours of TV series! Oops!

Come on, you’ve got license to add at least an extra half hour to this movie. Two hours would be a more proper length for the story it attempts to tell, and two and a half hours would be even better, considering the length of the material you’re adapting. You could get away with that, too… The show was big enough, both in fanbase and epicness, to merit an abnormally long movie.

Just think what you could do with an extra hour of wiggle-room! Dial in on the characters. Add real scenes to replace the voiceovers. Explain how bending works. And pronounce everybody’s name right into the bargain!

Now, I’m not saying that every movie needs to be longer, but seeing these two movies has gotten me thinking about how some stories do need more space to be told properly. So don’t always assume your script is overly long. Carefully consider the possibility that it may be too short!

It’s a short that we wrote a couple years ago and then shelved. We haven’t looked at it since, but several months ago I got some feedback on it from some great folks over on ChristianFilmmakers.org. That gave me a direction for improvement. A few days ago, I started to rework the story a little, and now I have a finished treatment. Hopefully, I’ll get going on actually writing the screenplay very soon.

By the way, here’s a Celtx tip. I discovered the other day that you can add a Novel to any Celtx project. So I added a Novel to write my treatment in. Handy to have everything in one project.

So that’s what’s up with us. More later!

Okay, bad news first. We’ve pretty much decided that reshooting our DragonSpell trailer and Rebekah’s neat idea are going to be put on hold for a future time. We’re not abandoning them by any means. We just needed to focus on other projects.

But wait! There’s good news! Ruth and I have finished the Books & Things seminar for Simply Charlotte Mason. We’re excited and very relieved.

Speaking of Simply Charlotte Mason, we’re mostly planning to shoot another video for them in the coming week.

And the Incredibooks Read-a-Thon video is still on the list of things to do. We just need to sit down and figure it all out.

Best news (in my opinion): Rebekah is hard at work on a script we’ve been working on since November. She stunned me yesterday with a page (filled in small handwriting) of backstory research. I’ve been told that there’s more to come.

I’m getting pretty excited about this one. Once we have a better working title, I might do a post with a little more info. For now, I’ll leave you wondering.

But! On Friday we found time to sit down over the Internet and discuss an idea we had in November. I came away from the meeting extremely encouraged with the direction of the project. One thing that came up was all the other ideas we had to play with. We counted at least five story ideas that we might work on later.

Don’t worry, by the way… We’re still planning on doing the DragonSpell teaser. Just gotta get this seminar done first.

Summary

A book on how to write crafty screenplays. Crafty as in “screenwriting is my craft.”

The Good

Lots of examples. The only screenwriting book I’ve read that covers the why of proper formatting, as well as how to write adaptations of books. Good stuff.

The first screenwriting book I’ve read that doesn’t assume you’ve seen all the films in the examples.

Includes advice on how to sell your screenplay, if you’re so inclined.

The Bad

Mild language throughout, with a few spots where some saltier words show up.

Cynicism about Hollywood is funny the first two times, but gets annoying as the book goes on.

Overall

Worth a read for the formatting section. Also, the author disagrees which much of the arguments concerning the importance of structure that were so prominent in Save the Cat.

Read this book to get an alternate angle or theory and become a more well-rounded screenwriter. Or just get more confused as you seek to reconcile the two methods.

We have a new idea that reworks our current script. It’s somewhat different and somewhat new. Some of the biggest problems with the old draft have been solved, but new ones have been added (of course).

We’ll see how it ends up working out. I’m optimistic!

(And keep an eye out for a book review post. I just need to find time to do it.)

We’re trying something different. Rebekah and I are each writing a separate draft. No idea how this will work out, but we thought it might be beneficial.

Nothing much to report besides that. Rewriting on my end has been slow. But I did have a brainwave about half an hour ago. We’ll see how it pans out.