29 June to 5 July, this is your captain speaking.

It took a few days to recover but I’m back in the driver’s seat for A moment in the sun, gearing up steadily now that I’m fuelled up with enough ideas and fixes to get busy with a second draft.

This is a wordcloud of the latest outline from Saturday night. I’ve tightened things up, paid more attention to pacing and building emotions to a climax, made the worst contrivance in the script feel a lot less contrived, and generally hammered the story into much better shape than it was when I left for Melbourne. I’ve done some thumbnails for the new introduction and they’re looking promising.

Rather than Gronky being this indefatigably merry soul that nothing bad really happens to, he will instead fear and suffer and throw frustrated tantrums. I’m not planning a Shakespearian master treatise on human nature – five minute slapstick-inspired shorts can only do so much – but having both characters mostly keep it together all the way through the piece doesn’t work. The pre-Melbourne version of the story doesn’t come close enough to realising the comic potential of the film’s premise.

Did I jump the gun and rush into layout before the story was ready? Maybe but I didn’t know it at the time. Am I kicking myself over it? Nup. I had to see that story in front of me in motion before I could tell what was wrong. Quite possibly with more experience I’ll need less in front of me to know whether something will work, but for now I’m a newbie at this and that means doing newbie things and learning from my mistakes. So it goes.

Meanwhile I’ve still got another week away from the timesuck and energydrain of the old dayjob. If I can get excited enough, this could be a very productive week. We shall see!