PLAY TO YOUR STRENGTHS

The number one misstep a lot of people make when trying to make their own work is bad dialogue mixed with bad audio!

Keep it short and to the point!

My background is classical theatre. I am very good at speaking epic text that goes on forever while staying on my argument and making sense of it all. However, that is theatre! Not to mention people like, oh I don’t know… SHAKESPEARE kinda knew what they were doing.

TV and Film (or webseries) are a visual media so play to that. When writing YEAR ONES first season I made sure I didn’t omit anything from the dialogue. Passages of text were long and everything was just blatantly put out there. I did this with the thought in mind that most of this dialogue (particularly from the main character Mayne) would get removed and done with looks and body language.

It goes without saying that several drafts of each episode must be done. You want to constantly refine the story. What we are working on with YEAR ONE is an action drama. We need a good balance of both to keep the viewer engaged. So in the writing of your early drafts you should have just as much if not more description as you do dialogue. Now a sitcom on the other hand is all about people in situations discussing how they got into them and how they are going to get out of them. This is heavy on dialogue as is a straight up drama such as Law and Order.

For us an action drama is the best way to go. I categorize shows such as The Walking Dead as an action drama, high stakes and lots of action! This is what we feel people want to see if they are going to spend time on a serious YouTube channel. If we wanted to we could sit down and write a great drama but less people are inclined to view that and it will take longer to write that drama then something more action based.  Which brings me to the next point, bad audio!

This is a production killer. I am sure many of you have watched something on YouTube or a similar site and said “the CGI was great, picture looked awesome but dear lord these people can’t act!” The main culprit of this is bad audio capturing! I’m not letting actors off the leash here because there are a LOT of bad actors out there who have no idea what they are doing but you can take a great actor and if they are captured on a bad mic, the production will sound amateur.

So if you don’t have good audio, then keep it visual. This is much harder for the actor (if theatre based) but overall your production will seem more solid. This is another lesson Adrian and I learned off of the medieval film. Granted he learned this in film school but in discussing what the King in our piece should say, we wanted to keep it short, to the point and what would resonate the most with the audience. We have a fantastic actor to play the king but we don’t want to be undone by audio as his voice over plays throughout the whole piece. 

Another area of strengths involves who you have available. Luckily for us we have more fantastic actors then I can cast and know a lot of production people who know there stuff and have got the gear. So that is a big relief for us. If you are an aspiring director and don't really know the people just a few actors, ask them! A smart actor keeps a catalog of people they have worked with, people they would like to work with again in case they come up with their own project. If you can create the prefect storm of good story, good equipment and good people you're on road to success and you will be surprised how fast all of this can be found, just ask people.