Free Lightsaber Day!

Wow, haven't blogged in awhile. Well, if you didn't here I'm working at The Annoying Orange and having a blast! I was recently in a hilarious Vine we shot this week, so check it out right here.

Speaking of Vines, I'm on a couple new social medias.  I'll post them up here later so you can follow me all around the Internet!

Thanks Writer's Bootcamp!

So for the past 6 or 8 weeks, depending on how you count it, I've been working on a feature script as part of the course curriculum.  I'd taken screenwriting classes in college and high school, but I'm always looking to improve my writing, since that's where a project first takes shape as something potentially good or bad.  I was pondering whether or not to take the class, but a couple of reccomendations sealed the deal.

Turns out, it was well worth the investment!  I heard a lot of stuff I'd heard before, such as 3 act structure, protagonist, and so on.  But they also gave me an arsenal of new tools to write with.  While I wasn't able to write for the 10 hours a week they prescribed us, I did learn to schedule my writing time much better and write quicker then I ever have.  Normally I think writing quicker means sacrificing quality, but since I spent 80% of the process with the new tools before I even began writing pages, once I actually opened Final Draft the screenplay flowed out like water.  And I was incorporating the minute story and scene details I had already spent so much time on with those tools.

I know this sounds a lot like an ad for them, and they're not paying me anything to write this up, but I have to honestly look back and say, "Wow, that was a good class."  With these new tools I enjoy writing even more, and now I can use them on short form content, like in Hyperdrive Pictures!  Hopefully I'll be able to take the more 'advanced' (and unfortunately more expensive) classes soon to work on how to best rewrite drafts of a script.  Anyways, fun times writing and it's cool to say I've got another feature under my belt!

Takin' it to the Big Screen!

You've heard that phrase a ton of times by now.  Your favorite tv show or book is being adapted for a theatrical format.  We've seen it happen in books like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games.  TV Shows like Firefly and Star Trek have jumped to the big screen too.  Or in my case, this show:

I had to throw that one in there.  That'll probably be my favorite tv to movie adaptation, mainly because I remember how excited I was when I saw that trailer as a kid.  I distinctly remember jumping off the neighbor's fireplace.

But back to action!  Or, back to the point I was making here.  You're probably very aware of how Hollywood loves adapting pre-exisitng franchises and properties to the big screen.  I had the pleasure of meeting with the president of a production company here in Hollywood and he told me just that.  The pitches that get the most attention come from a pre-existing property.  So we can keep expecting books and tv shows to get on the big screen.

Now I'm going to take a planned tangent here.  TV shows are old school now, and web content is the newest form of entertainment.  There's one off videos that are meant to be consumed on their own, like the fun video I made with Hyperdrive Pictures, JJ Abrams' Star Wars.

Or you can watch content with longer, recurring narrative arcs, ie web series.  Instead of sticking to the strict time restraints of tv shows, they have more freedom with how long or short each episode is.  They range in production costs too, but are largely cheaper to make then a tv show.  But when it comes down to it, you can get some friends together, write something up, and produce a web series.  On the higher end of a web series costs, you could come up with something like my favorite series so far:

Now lets think about entertainment.  Books and plays have been around for thousands of years.  Those have become movies.  You could even say radio has been adapted to the big screen, but the only example I can think of is War of the Worlds.  Then tv came around, and that's been adapted to feature films.  Now, in the 21st century, we have web series, and some of these look really good!  DTLA, a web series produced by a former Longhorn, recently got picked up and is now a tv show.  I personally think VGHS should be picked up as a tv show.  I used to say it should go on G4, but that ship sailed long ago.  But do you think the day is coming when web series will make it to the big screen now?  Seems like it.  I think that would be cool to see.  And with the extra freedom that comes with writing a web series, it's interesting to think about what stories might look like when they become feature films.  Cool, huh?