This week’s image is a test of a new split screen effect.

This week, 8 to 14 December, rewriting kicked into high gear. It was a week of constant reinvention, reassessment, rethink and re-evaluation. It started with “pointy’s new dialogue kind of sucks” and ended with “everything kind of sucks”. On examination, the product of all the work on “A moment in the sun” up until that point wasn’t shaping up at all.

A ground-up rewrite, as drastic as it seems, was inevitable. In amongst having all that fun rerecording scratch and boarding, I lost sight of the basics, elementary stuff like:

• What does Pointy want?
• Why does Pointy need Gronky’s shadow?
• What’s stopping him from getting what he wants?
• What would make the audience enjoy watching Pointy being thwarted? Where does the funny come from?

It’s a rookie mistake, good old “missing the forest for the trees” stuff. So after a week of playing with different ideas and thinking things over, this is where it’s currently at:

• What Pointy wants is to get the hell out of the desert before he melts from the hot ground.
• Gronky’s shadow is crucial because Pointy’s stuck in the shadow of a tiny rock, and the sun’s only getting higher. Gronky’s shadow is all that stands between him and being melted.
• What’s stopping Pointy from getting what he wants is that Gronky, in possession of a large shadow which Pointy could use to escape, doesn’t understand a word Pointy is saying. Gronky has both the intelligence and attention span of a small child.

The potential for conflict is obvious.

• What makes the audience enjoy Pointy being thwarted is that Pointy’s a mean little bastard and Gronky – his foil – is cute as hell.

The current audio play version of the script is just shy of three minutes which is exactly where I want to be. I’m getting better at spotting loose story ends (“how did Pointy get stuck out in the desert anyway? how can revealing that information say something about what he’s like? what will get a laugh?”) and tying them up. This is the stuff that makes screenwriting a craft.

Have an example. Before tweaking, one line of Pointy’s dialogue during a telephone conversation goes like this:

POINTY (O/S):

Yeah, been out here lookin’ for your “living rocks” all night.

(beat)

Do I sound like I found any?

We know from this that Pointy’s friend mentioned living rocks, Pointy hasn’t found any rocks since beginning a search the previous evening, Pointy’s pissed off about being sent on a wild goose chase.

After tweaking:

POINTY (O/S):

Yeah, been out here lookin’ for your allegedly valuable yet completely fictional “living rocks” all night.

We know from this version that Pointy’s friend mentioned living rocks, Pointy hasn’t found any living rocks since beginning a search the previous evening, Pointy’s friend said they were valuable (is Pointy a hapless poacher?), Pointy’s flatly accusing his friend of making them up… and Pointy’s still pissed off about being sent on a wild goose chase. “Fictional” starts off sounding like a swear word, so it gets a fake-out bonus.

Using less words and time to convey more information gives more effective dialogue. Come to think of it, I could probably cut ‘here’ from the version I’ve got too. It’s worth looking for stuff to trim, even down to individual words – every unnecessary second of movie I cut away represents potentially hours of animation, rendering and compositing I don’t have to do.

The story is more or less back to square one then – but my skills and experience aren’t. I’ve turned scripts into voiced animatics plenty of times in the last few months. I’m not sure how much spare time and energy I’ll have over the festive season but there’s a fair possibility I’ll have another story reel completed by the end of the year – hopefully the one I take into production.

(Please oh please oh please oh please…)