Lately I’ve been writing bigger. That’s what I’m calling it anyway. Big. Bbig.<\/p>\n
When I went from writing short comedy to long form screenplays I immediately started writing scripts that I thought I could manage on a shoestring budget. Small. Small scale. I wrote and wrote and this became my norm. In a country where a 1.5m film budget is what you shoot for and 5m is just obscene, can you blame me? Small country, small goals, non-existent audience.<\/p>\n
But what does a budget matter? How is that the hallmark of a good story or even a good movie?<\/p>\n
It’s not. But it is sort of a type<\/em> of movie from a industry point of view. And that’s been my latest life lesson in pursuing this career of mine. This is an industry. A dollars and cents industry. It’s all well and good to make a movie – hey look at me, I’m making a movie! – but the party’s over unless you can sell it. Period.<\/p>\n See, there’s nothing about that little tid bit in the envelope with your government writing grant. Money from heaven. Ask no questions.<\/p>\n And what’s happened lately, as I’ve worked hard and had good fortune enough to have interest from the film industry<\/em> down South, is that my collection of economical, small scripts don’t really amount to much. It’s like I’ve been invited to a potluck picnic and I’m the guy who shows up with a 2l bottle of Coke. An unrefrigerated bottle of Coke. With no cups.<\/p>\n So I’ve been writing bigger. It’s a hard thing to put a definition on but there’s a marked difference between a script that’s been written with a budget in mind and one that’s been written with abandon.It’s not just a matter of locations, effects, stunts and so on; there’s a language, a tone, that you allow when writing “art” scripts versus the broader appeal necessary for producing material fit for an actual film industry.<\/p>\n It’s got to be big.<\/p>\n Ironically, the closest I’d ever come to writing in this fashion previously is when I used to write those animated comedy shorts, lo so many years ago. Because back then I was writing for the audience. Not for other filmmakers. Back when broad was good, the target audience was wide and the intellectual brow was low.<\/p>\n So that’s been my little thing these days. That and this other thing that I’ve been wanting to announce to you for a long while. More on that… Eventually. In the meantime, go out and see a summer movie. A blockbuster. Revel in it. Marvel at how terrible it probably is. And appreciate just how tricky it is to get that terrible formula right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s time to shed the pretense. Aim high, reach wide and write big.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-from-the-studio","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}