Inspirations and Such

My capstone came to me on a drive to Salt Lake last weekend. I'd been struggling with the idea, I believe I wrote about that earlier.

I was looking at the red rocks passing by on the way out of town and started to develop the idea in my mind. But the time I got to Cedar City, I had a pretty good idea going and started writing it down.

At the time, I was listening to Mysterious Universe, a podcast about science and paranormal activity. On that episode, they were talking about a rover that China had sent to the moon and how it was experiencing malfunctions. It was believed it might be a total loss. Somehow, the rover worked its way into my mind, and into my screenplay.

I started to think about influences in my story and I came up with a few. It was easy to see parallels in what I was writing in one recent film, but I wasn't trying to copy it, I just happened to imagine my character as the main actor. I also developed the idea of the clone before I thought of this connection.

Time Crimes is an excellent science fiction film that uses no special fx. Ben Braten introduced me to this and I can't think him enough. It showed me what a person could accomplish without a huge budget and fancy fx.

Moon is another great movie, it had a small budget, but its nothing to scoff at. It is an excellent movie and as I wrote my screenplay for my capstone, I imagined Sam Rockwell playing the part. Mostly because I'd met him recently on a set and could just see him in the roll.

Casting my Capstone

I found a great pair of twins today that might work well for my lead character and his clone.

Duran and Harbor are in my biology class and have some acting experience. I invited them to come to the casting call, but I may have them read sooner then that.

My screenplay

On my way to Salt Lake this weekend, I came up with a much better idea for my capstone project. I've written up the screenplay for it and I'm about to start putting together some storyboards for it this week. I'll post those when I have them put together.

The new story is still science fiction and I finally have a story that I think will impact an audience and leave them with questions to answer on their own.

Once I get the storyboards together, I plan to start scouting for locations, and I already have a few in mind. I'd like to shoot around some red rocks, which we have a lot of in our area. I was also imagining shooting a nighttime campfire scene in a studio or someplace where I can set up a fire ring to use in place of the burning wood.

I plan to use this screenplay at the upcoming casting session we are having in the pre-production class. If I can find someone that can play the roles well, I can really have something amazing to show off my writing and my directing skills.

It all begins with an Ending?

Starting to put together a screenplay isn't as easy as you think. It takes a lot of writing and thinking about what you want to convey with images. I've always written my ideas down in a file I keep online so I can always add to it when I get an idea that I like and don't want to forget.

Once I got the first idea down, and then the second. I was sure that I had something good to work with, but I didn't know how to format a screenplay. So I took a creative writing class and then a screen writing class.

I still didn't have it all figured out though. I didn't understand the format of the screen play well enough. I learned more about it in my screen writing class, but it was hard to remember all of the rules and format it on my own. So I tracked down a program that was free online to use that automatically formatted the text, and tracked all of the characters, etc. in the story. The program I use is Celtx. I highly recommend it.

One important thing I learned in my screen writing class was that you needed to figure out what your ending was. Because if you didn't know where you were going, it was hard to get there, right? Imagine that you didn't know where you were driving, where you wanted to end up, and you set out on a road trip. How would you get there? If you didn't know, you might spend weeks driving around until you finally found the right place. Well, its the same with writing a screen play. If you don't know where you want to go, you might waste a lot of time trying to get it figured out. So do that first.