Twenty-Five year television veteran Frank Spotnitz is a big believer in luck. He was lucky that his parents never supervised their son’s voracious and indiscriminate consumption of 60s and 70s television, allowing him to build up a vast catalogue of narrative strategies in his mind. He was lucky that Chris Carter hired him for his […]
Actors are extraordinary and courageous. I just spent a day casting a film we are making in a few weeks time and saw scores of for several parts. I will be posting more on this next week but I wanted to share two insights that struck me, one about writing and directing, the second about […]
Given context and the development of character and story, a great actor will usually suggest removing dialogue in key moments. They know they can do just as much, often more, using silence and connection with other performers. While this clip (that has been doing the rounds on social media for some time) is not of […]
Attaching top talent to your screenplay doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get your film made, but it certainly increases your chances. The questions asked in 99% of meetings with distributors, film financiers, and sales agents after you’ve pitched your screenplay or they have read your screenplay is: “Who is the director?” followed by “Who is in […]
Why You Should Consider Virtual Filmmaking For Your Next Project Guest blog post by Hugh Hancock, filmmaker and author of Machinima for Dummies Everyone knows that it’s impossible for micro-budget filmmakers to make a CGI animated movie, right? It’s horrendously expensive. It’s brutally slow – hours of rendering for every frame. It’s so technical that […]
This year at the London Screenwriters Festival we ran a new initiative called The Actors Table Read. The idea was to take a sequence of three to five pages and workshop it with actors, a director and the writer. We ran nearly 100 sessions and the feedback was actually better than five out of five […]
I am super excited that Olivia Williams has agreed to come and talk at the London Screenwriters’ Festival this year. I thought I would share this interview I did with her, from the Guerilla Filmmakers Handbook ahead of our chat at the festival (below). I just got off the phone with her and she told […]
Your dialogue may be awesome, but an experienced director and actors will take it to another lever. This short video is a fantastic example of what actors and a director can do with your work. The scene is a direct re-enactment of a conversation between a two year old girl and her father, only the […]
