Chasing The George

Hello, my fellow artists! Welcome to another exciting edition of my weekly blog. As you all know, I have two goals that I am focusing on this year. And each week, I am alternating between the two goals to provide updates that are hopefully inspiring and engaging. This week, we are back to my writing goal for 2024: Finish the 1st draft of the “Third Act” feature film script with Kelly Tighe. Once that’s done, do a table read, get feedback, and complete additional drafts.

This goal is moving along! As you all know, Kelly Tighe and I finished the first draft of the script on May 9th, 2024. This past Wednesday, May 29th, we had our first reading of the script with our Professional Development Program 3.0 group! It was a beautiful, exciting, full-circle moment because the story originated and developed in this class. Then, the journey progressed when the group assigned Kelly and me to write the first draft of the script. She and I could feel and see the excitement in the room. Keep reading below 🙂

It was wonderful to be back on Zoom with the group. The last time we saw each other was mid-2022! Everyone was excited to hear the script and celebrate this monumental moment together. I decided the best way to present the first draft was to have each person read a scene(s) out loud. I kicked it off, then Kelly read the next scene, then Lindsay, then Beth, and then Sayaka. Richard didn’t read but was actively listening and engaged. It was thrilling to hear other people read these words out loud. As we read through the script, Kelly and I made real-time edits to the Final Draft document. She and I also wrote notes to discuss and tackle in the next rewrite. She and I were also making edits in our minds during the reading. We saw which scenes we could trim down and how. Keep reading below 🙂

Another aspect of the reading was seeing how the story and characters landed on the group. Until then, Kelly and I were the only ones reading these scenes out loud for the longest time. People laughed and gasped. People had visceral reactions at certain moments in the script. A couple of people got emotional reading certain scenes. Everyone cheered when the script ended. Richard was so proud of Kelly and I. He praised the script, the story, the characters, the structure, and the tension that we maintained throughout the story. Richard congratulated Kelly and me as a writing duo, stating that this script is a calling card for us as writers. He believes that this is a viable script that can be produced. Everyone is excited to move forward with this script. Keep reading below 🙂

Kelly and I felt such an incredible sense of accomplishment and pride afterwards, a joy and understanding that keeps settling in that we wrote a feature film together. We enjoyed every moment of writing together. A new writing duo is born? Keep reading below 🙂

See you all next week!

Hello, my fellow artists! Welcome to another exciting edition of my weekly blog. As you all know, I have two goals that I am focusing on this year. And each week, I am alternating between the two goals to provide updates that are hopefully inspiring and engaging. This week, we are back to my writing goal for 2024: Finish the 1st draft of the “Third Act” feature film script with Kelly Tighe. Once that’s done, do a table read, get feedback, and complete additional drafts.

On May 9th, 2024, at 12:51pm, Kelly Tighe and I finished the first draft of our feature film script!!!!!!!!!! THE SCRIPT IS COMPLETED! 166 pages! As soon as we finished reading the last scenes we wrote, we asked each other, “Are we done? Did we finish the script?” And once we answered “yes”, we cheered, cried, danced, threw our hands in the air, and looked at each other with pride, joy, and a deep sense of accomplishment. A feature film script! This journey started in September 2019 when Richard pitched a story idea to the PDP 3.0 class. In the middle of 2022, the journey evolved when the group appointed Kelly and me to take over, make sense of everything, find the story to tell, and write a first draft. We devoted the rest of 2022 to making sense of the notes and research, various story ideas, characters, scenes already written by the PDP 3.0 company, etc. We revised the logline to reveal the story we ultimately decided to tell. We revised the central question to support the logline. We revised and cleaned up the entire outline. We removed a few characters and older scenes while keeping and strengthening a few other scenes. In January 2023, we took the bold step to start writing the script. A year and a half later, here we are! Keep reading below 🙂

Kelly texted the group to let them know about the great news. In the meantime, Kelly and I will meet this week to clean up any spelling and grammatical errors, check for any tracking/logic issues, etc. Then, we will meet with the PDP 3.0 group on May 22nd to catch up, celebrate, and plan the next steps, such as registering the script with the WGA, copyrighting the script, and having the group read the script together to generate questions and feedback before we do a table read. Thank you, Richard and PDP 3.0, for entrusting Kelly and me to write this script. We look forward to continuing this journey with you all to the next level of development and, ultimately, the bigger picture of production and distribution. Keep reading below 🙂

I’ll end with this. This past Thursday night, Richard invited acclaimed casting director John Frank Levey to speak to our scene study class. At one point, Richard and John talked about the importance of celebrating our wins (by the way, John loves that we share our wins at the top of the class.) John said, “We have to look for our wins, and we have to celebrate them cause that will give us confidence…” Richard added, “I kind of look at wins like gassing up. Where you put a little gas in your tank because ‘I had this wonderful experience’ or ‘I finished writing this script after five years’…it puts fuel in your tank to keep going.” John then shared a story about a recent talk he had with students from Carnegie Mellon University, and he connected it to our script. He said, “I was trying to encourage them to get the long view (about having a career). Don’t think of it like, ‘I gotta get this done by Wednesday.’ If it took five years to finish your script, you finished it. God bless you!” He and Richard then talked about projects that took a while to get off the ground. The lesson was that it’s about a sustained effort with intention. Keep showing up. The sustained effort now continues into the next chapter of this feature film script journey. Keep reading below 🙂

The End (for now!)

Hello, my fellow artists! Welcome to another exciting edition of my weekly blog. As you all know, I have two goals that I am focusing on this year. And each week, I am alternating between the two goals to provide updates that are hopefully inspiring and engaging. This week, we are back to my writing goal for 2024: Finish the 1st draft of the “Third Act” feature film script with Kelly Tighe. Once that’s done, do a table read, get feedback, and complete additional drafts.

Act 3 is coming along, and Kelly and I had a great writing session this past Wednesday. After our writing session, Kelly decided to tackle the second to last scene in Act 3, and I realized that I needed to write a “transition” scene between two other scenes I wrote in Act 3. There was a harsh, quick timeline/story transition between those two scenes. I knew we needed a scene in between that would allow the characters and the audience to breathe for a second and to fill in the blanks a little bit more in terms of making sure the logical and emotional progression of the story continued so that when the next scene occurs, the audience doesn’t say, “Wait. Woah. What just happened? This next scene came out of nowhere. It felt jarring.” I am excited to share the scene with Kelly this week and hear her thoughts. Keep reading below 🙂

In other writing news, I had the pleasure of providing advice to a high school student this past Tuesday who wrote a short film script that they eventually want to develop into a feature film. A colleague and friend initially reached out to see if I would be available and willing to provide assistance and feedback on this student’s short film script. I said yes, and they connected me with the student’s teacher. I coordinated with the student’s teacher to set up a Zoom meeting so we could meet. I read the student’s script a few times before our meeting, generated notes and questions, and looked forward to meeting the two of them. The meeting went GREAT! The student had a positive attitude from start to finish. They received my notes and asked me questions. The teacher was so appreciative and thanked me for meeting with the two of them over Zoom. The next day, the teacher emailed me and said that the meeting was impactful and her student was eager to share their experience with their classmates. Keep reading below 🙂

Two days later, I receive a text message from another colleague and friend asking if I would like to read a feature film script they wrote for a specific TV network. I said yes, and look forward to reading it as well. Hmmm, I may have to look into writing consulting 🙂 🙂 🙂 It’s been a productive past week of writing that also included writing letters to people on my relationship map and paying attention to the writing structure in a feature film I watched. Keep reading below 🙂

See you all next week!