Diary of a Would-be Filmmaker Part 1

As I sit here eating Dok-pukki from a street-side vendor and doodling away in one of my many notebooks, I thought I'd share with you the journey I have recently undertaken. Not the one where I moved countries and came to live in South Korea and teach English but the one where I hope to find that long sort after dream, to become a filmmaker.

I had an idea and as ideas go this one seemed to to have more legs than others. They come in all shapes and sizes and sometimes it is so hard to tell which ones I should latch on to. The fact that I'm still currently a would-be filmmaker and not an actualized filmmaker should tell me pretty clearly I’ve been latching on to the wrong ideas or going about developing the idea in the wrong way.

So anyway, I had this idea and jumped ahead and wrote five or so pages of dialogue. I called it dialogue back then, (several days ago) back when I thought a screenplay centered around the stuff. Now I'm of a different mind. You see, for the past few years my creative endeavors have revolved around theatre where dialogue sings and is the stuff you hang everything on. Not so in film. After learning this fact from a handy dandy little book, you'd think film school might have gotten the idea across, I took a few steps back and started to flesh out my idea.

I wrote a step outline, I got in touch with my main characters, identifying the protagonist is not as easy as it sounds, nor is formulating an antagonist. In the past I've told myself that I don't need to comply to age old structure, that is as readable as dirt, you play in dirt you get dirty, but there is something to be said for using that structure to take an idea, a faint half notion of a glimmer of an image, and turn it into something more.

Right now I have a much clearer idea of what I want to say, of how I'm going to say it and who is going to do the talking for me. The character interviews have been conducted, the step outline has been followed by a scene outline and several pages of new dialogue have been written, not in order, but because I have a clear structure I can now work my way through the scenes as I see fit. First draft, here I come!