My main task this week is to write a script for the film. It can be a rough draft, or a basic functional script so I can work it as I progress, but the goal is to have something by this Sunday. However, little known tidbit about screenwriting.... This stuff is hard. After an hour of sitting at my computer, blank page on screen with a constantly blinking cursor, I had managed to write about a minute of the 5 minute total runtime for the film. So I needed a break. Therefore, I called up my buddy Wade, who is a fellow student of this course, to decompress together and generally talk about how our projects are going, while playing some videogames together. Typical guy stuff.
Wade isn't really a gamer type, though, so he had literally no games installed on his laptop. So we decided to boot up Minecraft (a game that needs no introduction) and play some minigames while we talked over a call (This minigame being Bedwars). While we were joined by some other friends of ours in the call as they gave us feedback and asked questions, this surprisingly turned out to be a pretty productive session we had.
For example, in this clip below, my buddy Nick poses a fair question about how I'm going to hook the audience with this concept of a computer funeral. He shows some apprehension about the hook, and kindly suggests a sort of twist reveal to capture the audience's attention. Funnily enough though, this was already my plan! So I simply assured him that this twist was part of my plan for the film and would happen fairly early on.
Wade also gave some nice advice on writing scripts, since he's much more experienced when it comes to writing for the screen. When I expressed some uncertainty in the structure of how my first draft of the script was being formatted (I was writing it as more of a short story rather than the traditional screenplay format), Wade was really nice and validated my concerns, stating that "That's fully a way of doing a script. Don't let anyone tell you that's not a way to do a script". However, this nice moment was ruined by Nick trying to be clever.... but the validation and screenwriting advice still stands!
My final gameplay clip is of my explanation to Wade and my friend Sebi on how the film is starting in my first draft so far. After establishing the basic premise of the characters involved, I decide to try out one of the few jokes I've written for the film on this unsuspecting audience, and to my surprise, they liked it! Finally, the validation of knowing I have the capacity to be funny.... Jokes aside though, it was really important for me to test at least one joke out, because I have no way of telling if the jokes I'm writing will land or not until I tell the joke to someone. So that bit of feedback was really valuable.
Wade also gave some nice advice on writing scripts, since he's much more experienced when it comes to writing for the screen. When I expressed some uncertainty in the structure of how my first draft of the script was being formatted (I was writing it as more of a short story rather than the traditional screenplay format), Wade was really nice and validated my concerns, stating that "That's fully a way of doing a script. Don't let anyone tell you that's not a way to do a script". However, this nice moment was ruined by Nick trying to be clever.... but the validation and screenwriting advice still stands!
I'm not really sure how effective this blog was... I wanted to try something quirky and different to break up the recent monotony of my blog posts with some new, never-before-seen gameplay footage media integration to spice things up a bit. Maybe this works out, maybe it doesn't. Regardless, I had fun and a healthy amount of constructive criticism and feedback from my friends. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to keep working on that first draft of the script (and definitely not play more Minecraft....)
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