Writing Process

I guess we’re still in the writing phase, so I should talk about the writing for Hoodoo Voodoo.

I always sort of said that I wanted to be a writer, but it wasn’t until starting to work on Hoodoo Voodoo that I think I, myself, knew that I wanted to be a writer. I had made movies as far back as I can remember even before I knew anything about plot lines or continuity. When Aaron and I started making movies we didn’t have scripts. We would just ‘wing it’ and turn the camera on whenever someone had a funny idea. At that time, we were really proud of our movies but, after watching them recently, we can barely follow the storyline ourselves.

Even when working on ‘Making It’ the writing process was way different. We had just failed at writing ‘Subconscious’ which was going to be our first serious drama and blamed our lack of ability at writing convincing dialogue. So for ‘Making It’ we would basically just write the first draft in point form and hope the actors were funny enough to ‘improv’ their way through each scene.

Now that we’re working on Hoodoo Voodoo we realized our mistakes with ‘Subconscious’. When there was the two of us sitting in Tim Hortons trying to get through the dialogue, we were just too embarrassed to suggest a serious line (we were fine at doing comedy) and we would settle for generic and cliché phrases that you hear in every second-rate movie out there.

So for Hoodoo Voodoo we ‘manned-up’ and just started saying lines that sound natural; things that we would say in that situation. At first it was a bit slow until we eventually got into a rhythm where one person will ask “What happens next?” or “What would this guy say?” and everyone else will keep throwing out lines until we pick something we like. It’s not very often anymore that we will be stuck. That’s the nice thing about having this many writers working on the same project, we each have our own idea of where the next scene will go so we always have ideas that we can work on.

Aaron and I were talking and he says that we should try for the end of December to finish the script. I think we can do it we just have to meet more often –right now we’re meeting twice a week – and try to minimize our distractions. It’s time to buckle down.
As for the shorts, I don’t think they’re going to be as difficult to write (we already have most of the storylines down in our heads) and it will be easy to prioritize since all four of us aren’t necessarily writing all the shorts. So on a day when one of us can’t make it, we can work on one of the shorts that the three of us are doing.

Anyway, I don’t want to go on for too long, so I’m gonna go now, but I’ll try and post often to keep you up to date.