I’m not going to get into the minutia or contracts or any of that stuff – it’s just too much to handle here. What I am going to discuss in this post are a few Agent basics since a few people I’ve spoken to seem to be a bit confused on the subject.
So, in broad strokes, here it is.
If you’re going the traditional publishing route you may want to hook up with an agent and that isn’t as easy as it may first sound. But, there are fewer obstacles than one might imagine. One of them isn’t upfront cash.read article
One of my earliest TV writing gigs was on a very short-lived, early ’70s series called THE SIXTH SENSE, which had nothing to do with the much later – and better – film of the same name.
THE SIXTH SENSE was unusual for its time because not only was it science fiction – psychic powers and all that – but it also had two story editors running the writing. And two very distinguished story editors at that: Harlan Ellison, a science fiction legend, and Dorothy Fontana, AKA D.C. Fontana, the fabled story editor of the original STAR TREK series.
Harlan and Dorothy both left THE SIXTH SENSE while I was in the early stages of writing my script, but we remained friends for many, many years. Both of them were huge boosters of my career and my self-confidence as well, and depending on our fortunes and relative professional positions at the time, we would hire each other to write on various shows.read article
Several years ago, I worked on a show that shot a series of interviews in what we referred to in post as the “God chair,” a big red chair set against all-white background, shot with a diffusion filter. The resulting effect made it seem almost as if our cast was addressing camera from the afterlife. It was a creative decision that seemed like a great idea but ultimately didn’t pan out, and the decision was made to go back in and reshoot the interview content. Problem was, it would take more than a week to try to wrangle everyone back in for interviews.
I went back into interviews from previous seasons to look for tops and tails that could be added to the interview content to give the editors something to show while the God chair content could be buried under picture. Simple phrases, like “All I have to say about that is…” and “I can’t believe he just said that.” Those phrases would be tacked to the top or tail of the God chair interviews to form phrases like, “I can’t believe he just said that. // This was an important day for me, and now it’s ruined” or “All I have to say about that is… // If she thinks she’s getting away with that, she has another thing coming.”
We actually managed to bury almost all of the God chair content by employing those tops and tails, and didn’t have to worry about doing pickups at all. The scene-specific stuff still packed a wallop buried under picture, but the generic interview look from the past season served well enough to show who was speaking. Best of all, it saved us a few hours of cast wrangling and reshooting.read article
Tonight is the last meeting of the 148th session of TVWriter™’s Advanced TV & Film Online Workshop. (At least, I think that’s the official name. Official names have, I admit, never meant very much to me.)
148 sessions? Over a dozen years? I’d better try not to think about that because if I start seeing what I’ve been doing as any kind of rut my Normal Life Avoidance System might kick in and…well, then there’d never be a 149th session.
Right now, though, there is. And the 149th Advanced Workshop AKA the April Edition will start two weeks from tonight, on the last day of April, so maybe we should call it the May Workshop? But then people will start writing in demanding to know “What happened to the April Workshop?” so….read article
Tonight is the last meeting of the 148th session of TVWriter™’s Advanced TV & Film Online Workshop. (At least, I think that’s the official name. Official names have, I admit, never meant very much to me.)
…Cuz if you’re going to do non-CGI, hand-drawn animation, why not do it the way it was done best?