PRODUCT REVIEW: Chat GPT for the Screenwriter

AI is here and its mission is to help screenwriters and democratise movie making / decimate the screenwriting profession (delete as appropriate). There are a number of different writing AIs, also known as LLMs,—Large Language Models—but Chat GPT is the best known. As the head of Open AI, the parent company, is currently wooing Hollywood, […]

Shallow HAL

The Use of AI in Screenwriting Geisler: Ever act?Barton: …Huh? No, I’m—Geisler: We need Indians for a Norman Steele western.Barton: I’m a writer. Ted O—Geisler: Think about it, Fink. Writers come and go; we always need Indians. ‘Barton Fink’ screenplay Ethan & Joel Coen The film and TV industry is scared. Why?The Rise of the […]

Saving the World in the Nick of Time

Making films and TV About the Climate Emergency ☛ “Hmmm… tricky…” I’m at a UK-based Film and Television Market and a panel of mainly TV executives have just been asked how they’d respond to being pitched scripts on the subject of the climate emergency. “We don’t want to preach to people.”“We don’t want to scare […]

Establishment Rules

Whether and when to use establishing shots ☛ When I was at film school there was a lot of sniffiness about using establishing shots, an attitude which I also came across in some feature film cutting rooms. For some feature film directors and editors GV—or general view—is a dirty word. But what’s the beef? Why […]

This Time It’s Personal

Writing from experience vs. writing from imagination ☛ I recently took part in a competition where I was pitching a spec script and was asked by one of the judges why I was the right writer for the project? Part of me wanted to reply “because it was my idea, and I’ve written it, so…” […]

Blurring the Border

Where fiction lies ☛ The question of when and how fiction can tell lies has been very present in the public mind recently, especially in the UK. The new series of The Crown has ruffled establishment feathers by taking what some see as an overly free hand with historical reality, especially in its depiction of […]

Making Music pt.2

Laying Down Tracks In the last blog we looked at choosing the style of music for your film, and how it can place the sort of film it is or where it’s set. Now you’ve settled on a musical style, I’m going to talk about what strategy to use, where in the film to use […]

Making Music

Pt.1 Style counseling. Long before movies had sound, they had music. Not the 10,000 piece orchestra of Hans Zimmer*—instead, a single pianist on a cheap upright piano, or later a cinema organ, improvising to the picture as it played. Nonetheless, from near the beginning, moving images relied on music as a trusty guide, steering the […]

No More Heroes Anymore

The Hero’s Journey: mythic or myth? ☛ Toby Litt recently wrote a fascinating article in which he argued that writing screenplays about climate issues has become difficult because movie screenwriters, and indeed audiences, have all got too use to the Hero’s Journey model of storytelling. His logic goes that tackling climate change requires collective action, […]

Executive Stress

When Money People Monkey with your Cut ☛ In the Oscars this year Harrison Ford unpocketed a set of notes that had been given by the Executive Producers on his 1982 film Blade Runner. His intention was clearly to ridicule the wrong-headedness of Hollywood executives and the way they blunder into the editing process; these […]