Day 36

13:00

Feel totally wrecked today. Didn't go to bed too late, but couldn't sleep. Finished off Rockstar's Bully last night, which is good: I don't have anything trivial to obsess over. I should actually get some work done now.

I spent a lot of time last night thinking about the short film I made last October. It isn't finished yet, because of sound and other post-production issues. So I've been working on grading it this morning: it's a black and white film, but I'm trying to give the footage a "lith print" feel: grainy, deep blacks, sepia tints in the mids, and crisp, silvery highlights. I think it will look different to other black and white films, but it also takes about half an hour per shot. So I'm going to try to work out a way to set up one shot, then write while it renders out, then set up another shot, and so on. We'll see how it works.

18:00

Not cool. Not fucking cool. I had to go out to work out a small mobile phone issue, and it took two hours. And after all that, I have to go back tomorrow. And thanks to AfterEffects, I've spent another three hours today without having achieved anything. So I haven't done any writing today, and I haven't achieved anything else, either.

It seems to take an awful lot of time and stress to get this much not done.

22:30

Okay, it's taken me this long to get those fucking AfterEffects shots out of the way. I've done less than an hour's work, and I don't think I'm going to be able to do four hours today, or 2,000 words. But I'll start now and see what happens.

01:45

Well, miraculously, I did get my four hours in, though I didn't quite make my word count. I've gone through the messy, unshapely plot outline today - all 22 pages of it, and tried to pare it back and start to make it work. I'm starting a new outline which simply follows the most important aspects of each character as I work out what they are.

This hits upon my greatest difficulty with this story: it has five or six main characters, who are with one another through the whole film. I find this very difficult to work with - maybe it just takes more patience and time - but when you follow one - or at maximum, two - main characters through a plot, it's very easy to make sure the emotional experience runs parallel to the plot, and you can see instantly when you should test that character more, and add what you need. When you've got six different people bumbling from place to place, it's much more difficult to work out what character trait or mini-arc is important enough, where it should go in the story. It might simply be the fact that there are so many possible outcomes with all these characters rubbing off against each other, that it's more difficult to find the ones that are perfect for the characters, story and plotting.

But I'm going to have to get better at it, unless I want to write nothing but existentialist road movies and noirish detective stories.

Actually, that doesn't sound so bad.

Might go to bed now, will probably stay up and work on my short bastard film a little longer.

word count: 1,606
hours writing: 4