News & Blogs: Caravan Film

We’ve recently had a major burst of energy and creativity here at Caravan, which has lead to first drafts of two new feature film screenplays. They’re still only first drafts, but both posses great potential for development and fit neatly in their respective genres. The decision to focus on writing for a few weeks was much fueled by a recent visit to our friend and colleague Tahir Shah in Casablanca. The trip was partly aimed to tie up some final interviews with Tahir Shah, for our adventure documentary about Tahir’s search for the Gold of Ahmad Shah in Afghanistan. However, much of the time there was also spent discussing and brainstorming storys and ideas with several mutual writer friends and other interesting people visiting.

Back in London we were all eager to get writing againa and to apply some of the new input we had brought with us from our late night discussions but… as I’ve come to realise every time I’ve written or collaborated on a screenplay, the structure generally needed for a story told for the screen is often hampered by the creative processes of writing… and vice versa. But more often than not the structure suffers from too many pages written and too many ideas chucked in, without any plan on how to pay them all off or use them for the dramatic need of the characters in the story.

So this time I was really keen on trying to narrow down the fault margin to slimmest possible, and to not allow pages to be written, that were not absolutely necessary for the core line of the story.

just another postit on the wall

The other common “child-disease” for screenplays, which I wanted to stomp out at a very early stage, is the tendency to try to run all the way to goal on a too thin plot, or a simple plot point with a major flaw, which one hopes will magically vaporize as one reaches the end. It never does. I do completely believe in plots being hard hitting, simple and easy to understand, without unnecessary complications.

The initial process, of one of the scripts we’ve been working, was the most interesting; as we’re three people at the office involved in this part of the work, each one of us was assigned the task to think up at least 5 plots within the decided genre. This finally amounted to just over 15 plots that we presented to each other. After that each one had 3 favourite plot ideas, either only their own 3 best, or a mixture from the large pot; this amounted to a boil-down of 9 ideas from the initial 15. At this stage the ideas had already started to morph into new more refined story-lines or even begun form combination of two or more. This lead to the next step in the process, which was for each of us to choose 3 new favourites and then combine those respective 3 ideas into 1 idea and then pitch that to the group. Finally, as we sat down by the table the last time, we would do a final boiling down of the ideas left, making sure to bring as many working ingredients into the winning plot as possible, but while still keeping the simplicity of an idea which can be pitched in about 3 sentences. It seemed to have worked.

It did feel a bit contrived to structure our work flow this way at the start, and I did get some resistance, but one of the prerequisites for us all had been that we would spend the least amount of time brainstorming together from scratch, as that in the past has most of the time only lead to a lot of laughing and joking, but very little usable work. However, at the same time I wanted to avoid people going away and working to much on one or a few ideas alone, before presenting to the group, thus getting married to ideas at a too early stage. Finally I was adamant to take full advantage of everyone’s brain and their ideas and to squeeze as much usable material out as possible from everyone involved. Brainstorming is a great thing, but one has to have laid out the rules and base material first, from which one can start.

When this was done, there wasn’t much else to quibble about, than to start writing. Although, I did still have a very strict idea of how I wanted to direct the writing process with Sara, who was appointed to write the first draft; each bit of the the story was to be allocated 10 pages or less, and on top of this we’d stake out a few plot points and a clear mid point. The agreement I forced through was that by no means would we be allowed to slip on the amount of words and pages in the first write-through. I saw this as crusial, mainly because I’ve noticed with myself lately how I tend to drench stories that I write on myself, in way too many ideas and subplots, until I can’t any more decide which idea is really important to drive the story forward. I guess all these ideas on writing come from learning from, or at least acknowledging, my own mistakes and I’ve gone out on a tiny bit of a limb to prove that these mistakes can in fact possibly be avoided, if I get to crack the whip.

Let’s see how it goes…