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 […]

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…” […]

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 […]

Emotional Distancing

When to hold back ☛ One of the basic tenets of the industry that has grown up to help screenwriters with their scripts is: make your story as emotional engaging as possible. It’s not bad advice: well-written, emotionally impactful scenes cost the same to shoot as averagely written ones; but they can make the difference […]

Directorial Style

Why directors make their mark ☛ One thing that distinguishes many successful directors is their tendency to leave their own personal stamp on a film. From Woody Allen to Ken Loach, Spike Lee to Tarantino, directors whose names we know often give their films such a distinctive feel that, were we to be dropped into […]

Don’t Forget to Pack Your Editor

Cutting on Location ☛ I’ve written before about the advantages of cutting during the shoot, but on my last job – a lovely British feature called Me, Myself & Di – I went a step further and was cutting on location with the crew. I learnt some interesting things to share with you. To clarify, […]

PRODUCT REVIEW G-Drive mobile SSD Rugged

As camera resolutions improve and file sizes increase, filmmakers need more and bigger hard drives. But we have a variety of requirements of a device to store our media, for example: It needs to have the capacity to hold a lot of very large files. It needs to have a fast read speed, so […]

How to Travel in Time

The Art of the Flashback ☛ Flashbacks are on my mind at the moment. I’m currently working on two feature projects – one as writer, the other as editor – which are structured around multiple time periods, so my brain has got well-used to jumping around in time. Flashbacks are pretty common these days, but […]

“One for Lloyds”?

How many takes to shoot ☛ “One for Lloyds…” is a phrase often heard on movie sets in the UK. It means shooting a second take, even if take one was perfect; y’know, just in case. Lloyds is the centre of the British insurance market – I believe their policies once demanded that a minimum of […]