First Student Film

Student film shoot. (Commercial demo) I had an idea for a commercial shoot that I wanted to do as a student film. So I take my idea to a local rock radio station. The receptionist’s frigid stare shrunk all aspects of my manhood. I simply told her my pitch and asked if the station had any T-shirts they could give me for the shoot. I mean, this is a major radio station and all I was asking for was 3 shirts. “We don’t do that any more,” was her reply.
“Do what,” I asked.
“Give out T-shirts.”
“So you have no T-shirts.”
“Nope. You’ll have to buy them online,” she snarled.
Well, at $20 a pop I wasn’t about to buy these for a 30 second starving student film. So on to the next rock radio station – a Cox Communication station. In the elevator up to the office, a gentleman asked me if I had won something and was claiming my prize. I told him no and proceeded on giving him my film pitch. He pulled out his cell phone, asked for someone to meet me in the lobby, shook my hand, and left. The Promotions Manager walked up and asked me what I need. I said, “Three T-shirts and maybe a jpeg logo.”
“No problem,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” He came back with the shirts and immediately emailed me the logo. I asked him who the elevator gentleman was.
“The CEO,” he said. Lucky me.

Journey continues...

The contest took an excruciatingly long time to respond back: 7 months. Again I listened to the experts. And wrote another script. And all those millions of ideas went into other log lines and outlines and plot lines. By the time I got my response I had another script under my belt, and 5 fully developed script outlines. My script beat out 75% of the competition, over 3000 scripts fell in my wake. And this was my very first feature script! The thrill of a reader saying, “Hey, this is pretty good,” left me elated and anxious about the finals. Alas, my script failed to place. But I requested the reader’s feedback. A godsend, the feedback gave me the insight of a true film industry professional. In his notes, the reader stated that he would have given the script a recommend status up until the middle of Act II. Then all Hell broke loose. He found several expository mistakes that needed fixing before he could recommend the script. Remember. Show, don’t tell. So instead of throwing in the towel in anger, I did what the experts said. I rewrote the script, leaving in the good stuff that the reader liked and yanked out all the babble, replacing it with a cleaner narrative. And the rewrites continue…

Journey Introduction

This is a journey of self-discovery. A journey to see if I really have what it takes to follow a dream: a dream to create something, and to have this thing affect viewers, for the better. Sure, this sounds egotistical. But what good is art if it has no impact. Every journey begins with the first step. A million ideas have swirled in and out of my head, each a plausible story or plot or scenario. Some I have jotted down on so many lost pieces of notepaper. Some I have played over and over while telling myself that this would make a great story, which I should write. So I wrote, but never completed any story: just sentences that led to nowhere. Then I met Professor Robert West. West taught me to write visually, and not struggle with perplexing prose. He taught me to write stage plays. With that, I found my medium: screenplays. And I wrote. And I research how to wrote better scripts. And I wrote some more. 146 pages! 27,000 words! It was an epic by novel standards. But I finished it. Then I did what all the experts said to do; I rewrote, and rewrote, and rewrote. 3 years later, I finished. I trimmed it down to 126 pages. To my novice eyes, it was perfect. Friends told me they liked it, but what do they know. I submitted it to a prestigious screenwriting contest. You’ll have to read the next blog to see how I did: