In Which Our Heroine Tries to Take Up Less Space

Recently in a Creative Writing class, I had the opportunity to watch the darkly humorous British short film Joyride. The simple story it tells in under a half hour astounded me, not only because of how much happens but also because of the completeness of the story arc. From inciting incident to resolution, the plot is suspenseful and intriguing - and the script was probably no more than ten pages.

Less recently and also funny yet tragic: local filmmaker Sean Garrity's Zooey & Adam. This film didn't even have a full-fledged script - instead, it evolved organically out of a three-page outline written by Garrity. These two films represent minimalism at its finest and most efficient.

I am not that kind of a person.

I'm the kind of person whose outline probably resembles an entire script in length - and not for a short film, but for a James Cameron-length epic. I'm the kind of person who, when Karen Press announced a ten-page short film script assignment, promptly wrote what amounts to a novella in order to establish my characters' backgrounds, but I haven't made any headway on the script. This is mostly due to my indecision. What to keep from the novella, and what to toss? And how to convey all this background information while at the same time advancing a compelling plot from its start to its finish?

My saving grace will probably be the fact that I can work with images. I can convey, with a single shot of a character's apartment, her relationship status, work ethic, favourite colours, financial status, what books she likes to read, etc. Rather than needing five pages to describe a bar, I can have the protagonists enter the bar and the audience can take in all the sights and sounds at a single glance.

As I embark on only my second adventure into screenwriting, it is very important to keep these things in mind.

And it's important to try to be a minimalist. Wish me luck!!

Thrifty IPPs

IPPs are not cheap. A lot of time, money, thought and work goes into creating a finished professional-looking project that the creator can be proud of. After three days of IPPs, here are my observations:

Freaking out: $$$$$$$$$

Losing data: TIMETIMETIME

Not seeing friends, family, significant others: STRESSTRESS

Being finished, and looking down at a finished product that you created: priceless.

Sometimes, it's just worth it. :)

Facebook vs Twitter?

I had my Twitter account about a month before I got a Facebook account, but after getting Facebook I am rarely on Twitter. The reason? Facebook is so much more interactive. I can read status updates, which are a lot like tweets, but I can do a lot more beyond that. On Facebook I can chat with people in real time, view photos and video content, and reply to other people's posts in a way that's directly linked to the post rather than showing up disjointedly and prefaced by a "@" symbol. I know there are a whole bunch of Twitter "add-ons" out there, but most seem to be intended for an iPhone I don't have. And then there's the unfortunate incident that happened to me the day I got Twitter. A spambot linked to me in a post - about a porn site. That's exactly what I want as part of my online professional presence, Twitter! Thank you so much! (That was sarcasm.)

So I abandoned Twitter. I will post the occasional tweet, but there are mostly virtual tumbleweeds drifting across my page. I feel like its time came and went very quickly, to be perfectly honest. It just doesn't do as much as Facebook does, nor does it offer me any control over who is associated with me and why. Facebook allows me to vet anyone who tries to link to me, and to report them as troublemakers if I don't know them at all. I guess that's the most important thing for me: Facebook allows me control.

Only a few of my non-CreComm friends are on Twitter, anyway. My friend Gareth announced, "I don't like things like character limits, especially when my ideas don't fit them in handy, bite sized pieces."

My friend Darran doesn’t have a Twitter account either. "Why? Should I?" he responded, baffled. I wonder if he, like me, doesn't see anything offered by Twitter that isn't also offered, more safely, by Facebook.

I don't have any non-CreComm female friends that use Twitter, but my friend Bryan uses both Facebook and Twitter. " I use both for different purposes: Facebook is for keeping in touch with my friends and family, a way of easily sharing photos, links, and short status updates/stories," he says.

"I use Twitter to stay on top of things that other people do; most of my Twitter viewing is Twitter feeds from people like Wil Wheaton, Jon Scalzi, and software companies. Twitter is a great way of seeing short ideas brought to life, or of gaining insight into the thoughts of creative people whose work I admire."

So Twitter is for people/things that won't add you on Facebook? Or is Facebook just a longer, more time-consuming yet more informative version of Twitter, the way a video is a longer, more time-consuming yet more informative version of a photograph?

Either way, until I find ways to make 140 characters more interesting, I will still be mostly a Facebook girl.