High Def writing

N

notthere

Member
This site is great. Seriously.

HVX is a popular thread. I've learned loads on lighting. Audio has alot of hits regarding boom mics. The Red camera is a curiosity to me. And down the list we go. Kicking up the settled muck of a familiar thread, I pose the question, "Why is it easier to focus on the good visual, lighting, and audio, and wax expertise with jargon that would make the fat comic book store owner in the Simpsons jealous, than to focus on good writing...if everyone feels that STORY is the centre of a good movie?"

How do we up-res writing? How do we make our writing HD (in the parlance of this site)?

I'm interested in your response.
 
i welcome the advent of HD in the writer/director's hands because it gives many more people the chance to make *better looking* movies that have a chance of real competition in the industry

but, IMO, story should always come first. whether it's a 3 minute short or a 90 minute feature or a 300 minute epic, it should always begin and end with a quality story. I hope that HD gives the writer, who has the soul of a writer and an interest in the story for the essence of story, the chance to express something even more beautiful, both literally and figuratively.

But writing has been around before HD, before DV, before film and before paper. Stories have been around before the written word and possibly before we even had a concept of "language," and I think that this is what needs to be revisited, regardless of the quality of the camera you're working with.
 
The storyteller has always been more important than the story. A story is absolutely nothing without a good storyteller.
 
Write more...
That's the best advice.
Simple and true and really hard to do for some reason. Or maybe really easy not to do.

It is common for me, as I am walking somewhere, to be constructing dialogues in my head. Scenes that might be interesting or capture some element of an experience I just had. And they are good. In my head I have even directed the movie. In my head I have even had dialogues of acceptance speeches at pretty much every major film festival for a variety of awards. In fact, in my head, while I am walking, I am quite prolific.

But when I stop walking and sit to write, the interesting scenes and dialogues go somewhere else, and I end up posting a response about not writing on a message board.
 
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notthere said:
Or maybe really easy not to do.
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Yep.

Writing takes discipline as much as anything else. You really have to view it as a job where you show up to work, put in your 8 hours (or 4 hours, or 2 hours, etc.), and clock out.

I am not at that point, but I am trying very hard to be. It is what separates the wannabe writers from the professional writers.

I was reading an interview of Michael Arndt the other day, who wrote Little Miss Sunshine, and is writing Toy Story 3, and he said that it takes 10,000 hours of writing before you truly reach the level of professional. That is over 1 year of constant writing.
 
agcohn said:
Yep.

Writing takes discipline as much as anything else. You really have to view it as a job where you show up to work, put in your 8 hours (or 4 hours, or 2 hours, etc.), and clock out.

I am not at that point, but I am trying very hard to be. It is what separates the wannabe writers from the professional writers.

I was reading an interview of Michael Arndt the other day, who wrote Little Miss Sunshine, and is writing Toy Story 3, and he said that it takes 10,000 hours of writing before you truly reach the level of professional. That is over 1 year of constant writing.
Click to expand...

What's the expression? "I hate writing, but love having written."
 
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