picture pages!
it’s picture day here at Mike Sucks!
it’s been an up and down week here in the studios. i was having some trouble early in the week, had a bit of a breakthrough and ended up getting a fair amount of writing done, and then had something of a break down yesterday. But, during that productive time i had the idea to post some pictures of what i’m working on right now.
i’m planning on participating in Script Frenzy this year. For those who may not know, Script Frenzy is a month-long script writing “competition”, not at all unlike National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo if you’re nasty.) It begins April 1 and lasts through the end of the month.
Now, Script Frenzy and i have some history. I’ve been trying to motivate myself to participate in this shindig for the past two years and never actually made it out of the gates. One thing that i had gained from those previous outings, however, was one of my favorite story ideas, something i call Venus. Without giving away the farm, it’s a blending of a heist movie and sci-fi. i took hold of the original idea because i figured that if i was going to write an entire script in 30 days, it was going to have to be something that i could pull off with minimal fits and starts. i’m a heist movie enthusiast, as well as a sci-fi fanatic, so these things seemed a natural to combine.
THIS YEAR, however… this year i’m ready. i’ve already made plans to join some other local writers right at the beginning of the month of April, and more important, the part that i’m the most proud of, is that i’ve actually done some prep work. I have a rough outline, i have a character break-down for my protagonist, and i am working with my good buddy and blog partner Q on a design for the spaceship where my characters live.
So these are the pictures i want to show you: pictures of my prep work. i still do a lot of writing with ink and paper, and i think it’s pretty damn funny how these pages end up looking when i’m done with them. so here we go.
this first one is the outline. As you can see, it’s not strikingly detailed. just enough to give me some ideas. i may get more detailed with the outline before i start the thing, but i also may not.
This second picture is of an exercise that my favorite screenwriting teacher in college put together. It 20-ish questions about the character, intended to make you think about important elements of the character’s personality. What i like about this is that it’s not as long and involved as some other character development processes, and in fact it’s designed so that you have to think in short, detail packed ideas.
this is my sketch of what i think the space ship should look like. this was mostly done as reference for Q, and for additional validation of why i write, not draw.
Last pic! this one shows the ridiculously convoluted way that i came up with the rest of the main characters who are the crew of the ship and the rest of the heist crew. the area in red is me mapping out heist movies that i remember off the top of my head, the characters involved and their roles in the team.
So there it is. i hope you all have enjoyed picture day!