Remember how one of your favourite songs starts, before the riff or whatever really kicks in, and imagine continuing it in that vein for a few minutes.  It doesn’t work, does it?  Sure, there are genres of music I know and like where minimalism and repetition works, but where favourite songs are concerned it’s all about the build-up, the contrasts, the wait for some bits to come round again, and the extra sweet part that comes just once and makes it super-special.

Scriptwriting needs to function in the same way.  And the key to being able to write scripts that have the pace and urgency of music is mastery of the beat.  A lot of authors on screenwriting waffle about story beats without actually providing a useful definition of what they are, which is kind of critical if you want to have a technical vocabulary that’s shared among people who use its terms.  So, here’s my definition:

A BEAT IS THE SMALLEST UNIT OF STORY

Meaning, that a beat is what advances your story in some way.  Quite often this means choices by characters.  Or revelations of character.  Ideally, those chunks will be one and the same.  And that’s what a beat is.  Get it? 

The substance of the beats you’re working with will vary according to the nature of the story you’re writing.  In a soap opera, it’s fine to see people buy milk and converse with shopkeepers before sitting down for a cuppa with a neighbour.  You’re unlikely to see that in a film, any more than you are to see a gun run out of bullets in an action movie, or an inventor deciding not to use their time machine in a science fiction story. 

Beats are shaped by genre then.  Big beats make for big stories, in many cases.  But big here does not equate with physical enormity.  Sure, the monster ripping through buildings in Cloverfield is a screen-filling presence from what I hear, but what I’m getting at is what I term the DEPTH of a beat.  That is, its resonance within the story.

Magnolia is full of deep beats that move the story on.  There are numerous scenes with real emotional power: the relationship of Tom Cruise’s character with his father.  William H. Macy’s ongoing desperation.  Pretty much everyone in that film is caught up in matters of real weight.

So, beats can have depth through their emotional richness, especially where that connects with the film’s theme and isn’t just random catharting, which is what soap operas do too often.  I’d say that beats can also have depth through the way they echo or mirror the beats of other stories. 

This is where we get into the realm of incorporating myth into film.  Look at The Descent for instance.  A group of women friends go pot holing together with tragic consequences.  To begin with, they’re easily identifiable types.  As the tension ratchets in the film, they’re pushed into decisions that polarise the group – physically as well as emotionally, since they’re split up.  And things enter the realm of the mythic when one of the women, who has narrowly avoided death on numerous occasions, rises from a bloody lagoon.  The image is powerful, and carries associations of birth and rebirth, painting her as a woman who’s been reborn as a goddess of vengeance.  Even if you don’t think that consciously and literally, the image is strong enough to stay etched on your mind as evidence that the character’s nature has profoundly changed.

In planning a story then, get your beats right and the script will be a dream to write.  Tackle them ahead of time rather than as you go along, to ensure that you’ve got a story that moves smoothly and carries your audience with it.  Good advice, which I increasingly follow in developing my own projects: it really does make the whole process of writing easier and more enjoyable.

There are a myriad ways to develop a story. I check out interviews with successful creators across a whole range of fields to pick up on the beliefs and strategies they have which help them to create work that stands out. It’s one of the reasons I read biographies, assuming the biographer is bright enough to allow their subject to shine through their own assumptions and other filters. I’ve interviewed a variety of successful writers myself, too, with an eye and ear to picking up on useful distinctions and approaches.

A few years back I attended an event in Manchester with the man behind Dr Who’s hugely successful relaunch, Russell T Davies. He’s a bright and genial man, and it was fascinating to hear him relate the story of his career, which included elements of his particular style of creativity. For Russell, it seems to start with a germ of an idea; for instance, in one recent interview he refers to a forthcoming script codenamed MGM, or More Gay Men: “What got me started was a friend, a former Mr Gay UK, who split up from his boyfriend. He asked me ‘Why are so many gay men glad we split up?’ That remark’s stayed with me for six years”.

Then, his core concept identified, Russell compares it to his mental database of all the stories he’s seen, read or heard to find out how that concept has been treated before. Having done so, he can then develop something new, which carries with it lessons learned from previous iterations of the core concept. When he’s actually writing the script, he can see in his mind’s eye a rough version of what’s happening on screen. Not in detail – that comes when actors and designers and a director are on board – but a kind of mental animatic, or moving storyboard, just to see if everything flows right, and has pace. All of this was apparent in the way he spoke about his writing process, whether consciously or through observing consistent patterns of body language (which is where the stuff about the ’screen’ comes from, for instance: his eyes kept returning to it).

OK, so that gives some insight into a working and replicable model for coming up with stories. What other factors might be involved? This is an issue that proved of critical importance to comics writer Brian Michael Bendis, whose career exploded into the mainstream after his success in the independent scene shortly after I interviewed him. I asked how his writing had developed over time:

“All I can tell you is I started riding a bicyle every single day. I get up mid-afternoon, I shower, I ride my bike and I take off for 6 or 7 hours, pick up some food, do errands, ride maybe 70 miles, and by the time I’ve come home I’ve got everything all figured out. It’s like meditation. No kidding. Right in the middle of Goldfish it happened, I became a better writer once I started managing my personal time better. The other factor is meeting my wife, who is maybe the best sounding board in all of comics. A huge fan, who loves reading, and has great ideas.”

Which makes sense. I’ve found the same when I go swimming, and Charles Darwin is just one example of someone whose ideas came when he took them for a walk. Body and mind are one after all, so using exercise as part of your writing routine can pay dividends. Now all I have to do is work out how to woo Mrs Bendis.

Carla Speed McNeil, who is the writer, artist and publisher of the excellent comic series Finder was a fascinating interview subject, given her experience of all aspects of the processes of creating, marketing, and distribution. Here’s what she had to say about the response she gets from readers, the first line of which also happens to be the core of what more clued-up marketing people advise their clients:

“Getting direct feedback is necessary to build a kind of ‘virtual audience’ in your head. You get a feel for what will come through clearly after you’ve had people read and analyse what you’ve produced. You always need that reality check stuff.”

So, those are some insights I’ve gleaned from people out there making it as writers. And there are musicians and artists who are well worth reading up on to discover what helps make them and their work tick. More on that in the future…

Is there a man more aptly named than Russell Brand?  Consistent, distinctive, and seemingly omnipresent, the presenter-cum-lothario is on-message 24/7, his electric hair and woman’s trousers defining him as clearly as a logo even before he opens his mouth and does his shrill stuff.  It’s a considerable achievement, and one that those of us aiming to create memorable films and television programmes could learn a lot from.

A lot of writers get sniffy about advertising and marketing.  More fool them.  I’ve learned –and earned — at least as much through work in those worlds, with big name clients from Kodak to Virgin, as I have through screenwriting workshops and going through the script development process with script editors and directors. 

Forget the word ‘brand’ for a minute, and instead ask yourself this: would you like to create focused story concepts that register with an audience, and by doing so become a go-to writer for whatever sector it is you’d like to be making a living in?  Great: because learn to understand brands and that’s precisely what you can achieve.

I’m especially conscious of this at the moment because of an opportunity to write a low budget film that has a (verbal, currently) offer of funding from America.  Why?  In a nutshell, the director has established his own brand well enough to be seen credibly.  And I’m here to come up with a story that will work on that budget.  Which I believe I cracked yesterday.

Time for a recap.  The low budget film sector in Britain is at a fascinating time.  There are, thanks to opportunities like WarpX, Microwave, Qwerty, and the assistance available from regional screening agencies, a wide range of possibilities for the wannabe filmmaker.  Which is great…as long as the writers involved have the ability to develop novel concepts into striking scripts that will inspire actors and directors to create uniquely compelling films that audiences will seek out and see at the cinema, since the object of all this is to persuade people to part with cash for an evening out that may well involve babysitting fees, and we want them to have a memorable time.

Well, that’s the way I see it anyway.  And I wish more writers and directors felt the same way, because I continue to meet people aspiring to make films who have no concept of an audience and no sense of what it means to engage with them.  In which case, let’s look at things another way…

Look at the evidence of your own purchasing decisions, whether it’s your DVD collection, your footwear, your haircut, your holidays.  Each of those choices says something about you, individually and collectively, and – like it or not – shows the ability of someone somewhere to identify you as part of their market.  Fine, don’t use the word market if you don’t like it.  I’m exaggerating to make a point: what’s important is that you consider it.  And when you’re considering your story at the treatment stage, start to figure who your audience is, in detail, and bear them in mind when you’re writing.  It’s something we do naturally anyway: the way you tell a story to one group of friends in a pub is different to the way you’d relate it to your gran. 

Thinking with clarity about who you’re writing for is essential.  It’s a requirement of any work you’ll do within television, for a start, where the specifics of a particular show as contained with in its series bible effectively contain the worldview and detail of how that show is perceived by its audience.  Branding, in other words.  It’s a vital part of getting the title right for a film – I’m currently torn between two for the low budget project I’m developing, one ‘feels right’ and certainly sounds snappy, but is the name of a foreign dish and may misleadingly paint the story as an obscure piece of world cinema; the other is a distinctive expression in English that serves to identify the protagonist pretty well.  Branding, again.

When I’m script doctoring with a writer or director, branding is one of the key things I think about, and is why I like to have 1:1 sessions in person or on the phone.  It’s then that we can clarify exactly what they are aiming for, and only with that in the open – something a lot of film makers never consciously think about – can we move on to fine-tune the script or treatment more clearly so it communicates to an identifiable audience.

The fact that I personally don’t like Russell Brand’s ‘thing’ is neither here nor there.  He is reliably guaranteed to deliver his form of entertainment to those who want it, leaving me the option to search for alternatives that float my particular boat elsewhere…

I was 12 when I came across 2000AD, reading the fourth issue on holiday. Until then, comics had meant British humour titles when I was younger, which I enjoyed but didn’t feel compelled to buy every issue of. And war comics never quite hit the spot for me. 2000AD though…this was clearly a title custom-designed with me in mind. I’d already latched onto science fiction as a genre I relished, and here was a comic promising tales of futuristic and otherworldly adventure on a weekly basis, and I was hooked.

Initially it wasn’t any particular story that had impact: the comic really did deliver on its promise of thrill power, and I rattled through every issue jolted by the concepts and images on pretty much every page. Time travellers going back to the era of the dinosaurs to hunt them for their meat. Brilliantly realised futuristic cities with motorbike-riding Judges dispensing justice. Truck driver Bill Savage tackling the dastardly Volgs with his trusty shotgun. You didn’t get that range of ideas and action anywhere else that I ever heard of. Let alone with the occasional free gift on the cover.

Over time, 2000AD spawned rival titles, and as they wavered in the market, before dipping and disappearing, they were absorbed into 2000AD. My favourite was Starlord, which seemed to me to have a more sophisticated approach to art, probably meaning they hired European artists. If you were lucky, your favourite strip from the absorbed comic would continue running in 2000AD. In my case, that was Strontium Dog, a bounty hunter drawn by Carlos Ezquerra, who had a wonderful way with faces and footwear in particular.

Ezquerra was also the artist on another favourite, The Stainless Steel Rat, which I’d loved in the form of Harry Harrison’s novels, and worked well as a comic too. By this time I was fairly aware of who my favourite artists were (which definitely didn’t include Belardinelli, whose aliens were actually pretty good but who had never apparently seen a human), but didn’t have much sense of the writers. I knew which characters I liked, without making the association to the writers who charted their adventures.

It actually took an American comic, Steve Gerber’s mordant satire Howard the Duck, for me to appreciate the role of the writer in comics. His style was unlike anyone else’s I was reading in comics, and I became fascinated by it. By that time I was reading pretty much anything I could find in comic form, as long as it was 2000AD or American. I also had an appreciation for the more underground delights of Hunt Emerson, thanks to Large Cow Comix and other small press work that he was putting together at the place my father was then working, and which he brought home rightly suspecting I’d appreciate them.

Gerber has been namechecked by some of my favourite British comics writers as an influence on their own work, some of which started to appear in 2000AD. Alan Moore’s Future Shocks – short stories with a twist ending – were a cut above most other peoples’ attempts, and he went on to develop the fascinating and unfinished Ballad of Halo Jones, which begins as a tale of a woman shopping in a brilliantly realised future world depicted by the wonderful Ian Gibson, and unfolds into a saga of space war.

Fingers crossed, I’ll find my own space in 2000AD one day. Yesterday, I was at an event organised by Leicester City Library featuring 2000AD editor Matt Smith, former Marvel UK editor and now mobile phone content provider John Freeman, and small press publisher Jay Eales. And I got to pass on a pack containing two Future Shock proposals and two series proposals to Matt, which I very much hope he likes. If he bites, then believe me I’ll be letting youdothatvoodoo’s particular brand of thrillseekers know about it.

Fool that I am, I once participated in a message board discussion about the nature of creativity. One of the more forceful debaters was of the firm opinion that creativity essentially concerns the rearrangement of what’s there already. Shuffle things up and see how it turns out, like dipping into a Scrabble bag and morphing up new words if you can’t create something that’s already in the dictionary. And that didn’t feel right to me, since it’s such a contradiction of my experience in being creative.

Sure, there are occasions when the rearrangement of elements is an adequate description of what’s going on. One episode of some soap operas is much like another for instance. A good percentage of blues music could be constructed by taking well-worn twelve bar chunks and being miserable on a topic de jour over the top. And there’s no denying that where some copywriting work is concerned, what I’m doing owes more to craft than inspiration. So yes, some fraction of what’s called creative can be done by rote, interestingly.

That rearrangement argument can be taken quite a way. Brian Eno’s experiments in generative music, where software allows users to pick parameters for the sounds generated, are as convincing as some ambient electronica I’ve heard. That makes music an emergent property, in the same way that flocks of birds flying together generate amazing patterns by following just a few simple rules. No need for any group consciousness, just keep Charlie on your left, and aim for Portugal unless any obstacles come up, in which case wheel clockwise by 30 degrees. The ultimate example is DNA, available in just the four flavours, cycled in humungous strings of interacting spirals to produce every organism you’ve ever met or eaten.

All very well, but that random mixing theory doesn’t get across what it feels like to want to do something creative at all. It doesn’t explain the impetus to make something new. And it doesn’t explain the power of what we create to move, to inspire, to change our individual and social worlds for the better. Yet those are, sometimes at least, the reasons that people are driven to create in the first place. And that, I believe, is where we need to look in order to lift the lid on creativity, if that’s something that interests us.

Paradoxically, creativity often starts as a purposeless activity – doodling in a notebook, tinkling a keyboard, making shapes in clay – that becomes imbued during the creative process with real profundity, for the artist at least, and with some works maybe an audience too. Let’s not get too hung up on the word profundity, if only because it ignores another aspect of creativity, what it feels like to play. Again, if this stuff was just random, would we get so hooked into it? Well, that depends what you think play is.

One summer at junior school, we mock-battled for control of a mound of earth in the school grounds. It was an activity that was my entire focus for the time the fad lasted, and taught me stuff about the beginnings of teamwork, group dynamics, leadership. More than that, I felt energised and inspired by what we were doing together, more so than whatever Miss Theed was doing with us in the classroom at the time.

Sure, that was to do with learning mammalian pack hierarchies and so on, stuff every generation learns anew. The ‘new’ in there is a clue. The search for novelty is an important drive. Neophilia drives human culture forward, while the urge for homeostasis keeps things the same. And what applies to society applies to the individual. Seeking difference, whether in exploring what’s already there, or making stuff that’s new, is an evolutionary trait.

Putting it like that has a certain stick-up-its-ass quality about it though. Which is why I was fascinated to read a brilliant interview with musician Jon Brion on his creative processes. It touches on his film soundtrack work – his brilliant scores can be found on Punch-Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind among others – and his work as a producer with artists including Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann. There’s a lot of substantial and articulate thinking there about composition and improvisation, very relevant to non-musicians as well as those who are musically adept, and I found it through The Onion’s website at http://www.avclub.com/content/interview/jon_brion.

OK, today we stretch those cranial muscles a bit. You’ve had it too easy here for a while, and now it’s time to put some work in. Read this extract from the set text:

She’s hidden the money in the bushes back of that deli, the one with the Polish brothers, the tall one she flirts with, knowing it pisses off the one with the ear thing. After she’s had her pierogi or whatever, she’ll come back for it, and then it’s on to Reno, where Frank is waiting with chilled champagne and a 38, like she doesn’t know that already. She almost feels sorry for Frank. Why Reno? Her sister knows this plastic surgeon there, and then there’s Max. Everything starts and finishes with Max. Pretty big responsibility for a guy looks like he does. Those loafers.

Never mind the dubious noir stylings of the above, we’re more interested in something else: the presuppositions it contains. If you take five minutes, you could list a dozen or more things about that story nugget that are there implicitly but never stated. Like, the fact that hiding money points to some kind of shenanigans. The nature of the one Polish brother’s ear thing, and what it says about our protagonist that she’s playing them like she is. The necessity of the plastic surgeon, and the unassuming appearance of Max.

As a writer, presuppositions are your friend. They help you stack information without ever having to bother writing it out, and given the necessary economy of a screenplay, that’s in your favour. And in doing so, they immerse your reader in the world of your story before they know it. Already, your mind has built up some picture of the scenario that the above text refers to, which you could expand on for a few pages if necessary. All from a few sentences of dodgy thrillerese.

Some songwriters are masters of this stuff. Check out this extract from Steely Dan’s With A Gun:

You were the founders of the clinic on the hill

Until he caught you with your fingers in the till

He slapped your hand so you settled up the bill

With a gun

With a gun

You will be who you are just the same

Did you pay the other man with the piece in your hand

And leave him lying in the rain?

Thank you Becker & Fagen. Hmm. Almost builds on the piece I chucked in at the start. For the simple reason that, again thanks to the wonders of presupposition, it’s easy to connect the criminal world in the song to the one depicted earlier, especially with ambiguous references to ‘you’ and ‘the other man’. And who else has figured the clinic on the hill offers plastic surgery?

The more you can play with presuppositions, the richer the effect will be for the reader – and ultimately, viewer. In a treatment, they can help you sketch out a world of detail with just a few lines. In a script, presuppositions in dialogue, and the skilful depiction of action, get you quickly to the heart of a story without the need for the usual setting up yadda yadda that novice writers cling to. And thinking ahead to the world of meetings, a few well-judged presuppositions are helpful for building relationships quickly. After all, when you’ve got a sense of how presuppositions work, and look back at how you use them in daily life, it’s easy to see how they’re part of the way we do things, and that you can learn to construct them with ease on the hoof, or in the proverbial lift with that exec you’ve been wanting to meet, right?

Yesterday was an interesting day. Most of it involved writing material for a computer game. Not character dialogue or plots, which is what many games require writers for, but rich and idiosyncratic detail relevant to the genre of the game…until I’m sure of my position regarding confidentiality I can’t say any more. 

Anyway, the nature of the work is providing what amounts to capsule stories; descriptions of people and events that serve to flesh out the experience of gaming for those players interested in scratching the surface of the world to see what makes it tick. The style I chose for this – a job which I’ve been putting time into for a few days now – was information-rich nuggets, 8-10 lines for each piece, varying in tone from plausible to eccentric. Hopefully, just what players will be interested in discovering, so they can build on those easter eggs in online forums etc.

After that – or more accurately during it, since this was something that consumed several short chunks of the day as I liased with my client and the artist also working on the job – a marketing piece for a business involved in the digital sector. The issue here was problem solving: how do we get across a particular issue of relevance to the story, without upsetting anyone in the various cultures who’ll be reading it, while staying reasonably true to the concept that runs through the piece, which itself has an element that many will find inherently offensive? No wonder the main contact at the client is away.

But, over the course of several surreal phone calls and emails, a solution is brokered that seems to satisfy all parties involved. No small feat, given the way we were headed at one point, when part of the possible solution which the three of us were discussing in something almost like seriousness read “The stranger stretched his underpants out in front of him and gave them a mighty TWANG…creating a resonating frequency that knocked out XXX’s corrupt and antiquated circuitry, rendering him helpless.” But détente is achieved, and an international marketing campaign can be rolled out.

And then there’s another ongoing concern, a new one: how to develop a low-budget feature film with a director who, fingers crossed, wood touched, has the money for one and wants me to be involved. This took the form of a couple of phone calls while the director juggled babies and visitors, and the gradual development of a strategy for going about how to realise our ambition. At this point the story is scarcely an issue, though I run a concept past the director that he seems to like, and which I’ll now have to find time to write a treatment for.

The object of all the above is to give some insight into the life of the gigging writer. Yes, writing was done, and quite a useful chunk of it. But it was also a day characterised by the need for listening skills, tact, the ability to change what I’m doing in response to feedback, and a bullish attitude to self-promotion. In short form then, and I may yet run a course with this title:

Be Your Own Pimp –

someone’s going to be making money out of you,

and it might as well be you

A correspondent writes:

The twist in Messiah V is just that, a twist - actually quite unexpected - but so formulaic that I feel cheap watching it. Why would anyone bother writing anything if there are truly only about 9 plots in the world? Have all the stories been told? Perhaps it’s that I don’t believe in the characters, and so I don’t care about them; whereas if I care about characters, even in a silly chick flick, then it doesn’t matter what the plot is. (Discuss - 30 points available, spend about 25 minutes on this question).

On the surface, this is a question about plot vs character. But in answering it I shall be going in another direction, which is to suggest that in a well-crafted story, plot and character are effectively one and the same.

We are all of us, fictional and otherwise, defined by the decisions we make. We empathise with people who make choices akin to the ones we’d make ourselves, and in fiction of any kind we have the opportunity to explore the choices of those who think and act rather differently from ourselves. Faced with a hostage crisis, I don’t myself know anyone who’d sling on a string vest and tackle it personally, but it’s nice to know that Bruce Willis can be counted on to do so in the Die Hard films. Character is choice; choice is action, and hence plot; see?

Now, the thing with choices is that there are truly thousands available to us in any situation, but because of a whole range of factors – upbringing, manners, training, sunspot activity, media influence – we tend to only actually respond within a narrow band, unless provoked by decisions with life or death consequences. So, it’s interesting to us to watch the choices that other people make – in real life, or in chick flicks for that matter. And we learn from that, if research in mirror neurons is anything to go by. Mirror neurons activate not only when we perform various actions ourselves, but when we watch others enact them too; hence the utility of sports players watching better performers than themselves to help train, and the reason we are stimulated by pornography…mirror neurons seem to be the key to the process of learning and empathy.

Drama then, is a means of understanding others, and ourselves, through watching the choices that fictional characters make. And that runs right the way through learning from the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street, to figuring out serial killers on Messiah. In between those points, we get to watch a whole bunch of film and television, and in the process we become adept at spotting patterns that have become embedded in popular drama for reasons of economics or marketing. For instance, you know in turning on your favourite detective show that the lead isn’t going to die unless s/he’s done a round of Sunday paper interviews about it to promote the fact, and their new stage play in the West End. You know the killer isn’t going to be the person who is most suspicious at the time of the first ad break, because there’s another two ad breaks before the end of the show, and it needs to zig and zag between them and one or two other potential culprits before the reveal. And so on. All of which helps perpetuate the notion that there are only nine types of story. There aren’t, really. But sometimes it can make it easier for writers, producers, script editors and so on to buy into that perspective, because it makes life easier when you’re working to something along the lines of a formula.

So, it’s no wonder that you like watching well-realised characters, because they get to do and say things that you’ve not seen or heard before, and they get your mirror neurons tingling because you’re taking new stuff in. But, that doesn’t mean the proponents of ‘nine types of story’ are totally off-beam. Think in a big enough frame and some things become unavoidably noticeable. Go back to the very first post on this site, and the first comment on it, which I very much agree with and will reprint here. Thanks, MTG:

When an intention meets an obstacle; it’s called drama… or comedy… or tragedy… or something.

When a square peg tries to fit a round hole; you have the human encounter with culture. The secret is that almost everyone is (or feels like) a square peg in some domain or other.

The rest of the equation is: “Are you happy with your lot?”

And there you have it:

Square pegs wanting to fit round holes; unhappy with lot.

Square pegs not wanting to fit round holes; happy with lot.

Round pegs not wanting to be seen to be square; happy with lot but afraid.

Round pegs wanting to be square; unhappy with lot.

“What is it about these displays of honest ineptness that grabs me”

You’re human.

“and is there something that can be learned, given that all three films received critical and box office success?”

The Outsider is a perpetual character; we are all outsiders.

Anything that keeps the aspiring but weird hopeful, will sell.

How do you go about creating a film that’s going to succeed on a low budget? It’s a question of interest to a lot of writers and filmmakers in Britain, given the climate we’re operating in.

Warp Film, known first for making the Shane Meadows film Dead Man’s Shoes, are a good way into their Warp X project, turning round seven features at budgets of £400-£750,000 each. Their approach centres on a four week shooting period, use of local resources, and the economies of scale that can be introduced by getting a number of films up and running within a short period. Warp being an offshoot of Warp Records (Aphex Twin, and my current favourites Battles, etc), favourable deals are being struck on music too. Plus, through judicious relationships with regional screen agencies, those small budgets can effectively be stretched further. Most importantly, Warp have a partnership with distributors Momentum, ensuring that the films will get marketing and distribution – there’s no point in making a film otherwise, and in the UK only 60% of films get distribution, though admittedly some of the others were only ever intended for DVD release. The nuts and bolts of the Momentum arrangement takes the form of a profit participation deal; 50% of the money made goes back to the financiers, and the other half is split between the film’s creative team and a fund for future projects. It’s a credible model, and is about to bear fruit with Donkey Punch (thriller) and A Complete History of My Sexual Failures (documentary) being premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

All very well, but that still doesn’t tell us HOW to create a low budget project, though it does give some pointers. Screenwriting trainer Phil Parker says a lot of the key is in the story you want to tell…but not every writer is geared up for the world of low budget cinema: in the 1990s £30 million was spent on screenplays by Britain’s leading television writers without a single film being made, essentially because the writers didn’t understand the distinctions between television and film. Television encourages writers to think in terms of ongoing stories with returning characters: film is all about the highest of stakes, from which people may never return. And successful British films are often about people seeking validation, whether the Sheffield lads in Full Monty, or the characters in East is East, Bend It Like Beckham, or Bridget Jones. Writing a story that follows in the footsteps of those examples costs no more than writing any other story, and it’s likewise no more expensive to write and perform an emotionally powerful scene than one that merely moves the story from A to B.

Arvind David helped set up Slingshot Films having studied what Indigent were doing in New York, making films with budgets of up to $250,000. He’s a smart guy who’s done a lot of research, discovering for instance that the presence of a star name makes no difference to the performance of a film with a budget of up to $6 million. And he’s got a strong sense of what he’s looking for in the projects he wants to develop: stories that have an element of uniqueness through splicing genres together, or ones that address a particular niche. One project Arvind was potentially interested in came about through recognising the size of the Countryside Alliance lobby, and tailoring a story for them – not necessarily pro or anti, but one that addressed their concerns.

One thing’s for sure: there are 100 films being made a year in Britain now, and for yours to stand out, it needs to be a truly distinctive piece of work. And that starts with something that costs nothing in the short term: applying creativity to your concepts for the story.

So, it turns out I can’t write about what’s just been happening because I’ve been asked to sign a confidentiality agreement.  Which is a shame, but there it is.  Instead, let’s look at the issues raised by the time I spent with a filmmaker friend, and that strongly resonate with my own experience and beliefs.

L has made several short films, which helped secure her a place on one of Britain’s most prestigious film making courses.  After graduating, she started to develop a feature film, and had support from a notable backer.  It was a long process, and after a year or so, she was assigned a different script editor to work on it.  One who had no sympathy with or interest in a key aspect of the the story, and who instead sidetracked L with suggestions like ‘the story happens in Australia: why not have your protagonist encounter some aboriginal characters?’.

As time went on, L felt less enthusiasm for her story, which by now hardly had any of the spark that had drawn her to it in the first place.  And when the project finally fizzled into limbo, she felt glad that she wouldn’t have to be making a film that by now she felt no connection with.

I have had similar experiences.  Most notably, when asked to develop a film set in the world of mixed martial arts cage fighting, by a team who had significant contacts within that scene in America.  I spent a long time developing a story that I did my best to imbue with some intelligence and credibility, only for the project to end up crashing and burning in a meeting with a third division action star who didn’t like the fact that his mentor character necessarily died at the end of the second act.  Hey ho.  But after the initial frisson of my first contact with the world of American film, I too felt glad that the project had been aborted.

What L learned, and what I learned, from these and similar experiences, is that if you’re going to stick with a film or tv project from the first germ of an idea to its ultimate distribution, you need to be 100% committed to it.  Why faff around with something you’re half-hearted about when that very fact guarantees you won’t be working to the best of your abilities?  Find where your passion for a project is, and apply it so that it sees you through.  That approach has seen me through the development process of a show like Doctors, where multiple drafts of a script are expected in a month, and it ensures that I’ve got what’s needed to keep at in during the long haul of developing my own television series treatment and pilot, or writing and hustling a feature film script.

And in a roundabout way, that allows me to sum up the experience I signed a confidentiality agreement about, too.  It involved very bright and talented and committed people who have exactly that passion for what they’re working on, and look for similar zest in the writers that they work with.  Which makes sense: given a choice between someone who relishes what they’re doing, and someone going for the motions for the cheque, who would you want to hang out with?