Ch..ch..ch…check it out.

This year is an exciting one, as the television festival has merged with the nextMEDIA market — Canada’s premier digital media event. As the worlds of television and digital media grow closer together each day, the overlapping of these two events is a natural fit.

This year we are pitching a new Comedy series, Below the Bar — a project with a ton of cross-platform potential. We will be posting details of the project very soon, so look out for that!

Check out the others!

For now we have finished work on our feature-length script Lost Case.We have entered it into the BlueCat Screenplay competition, received some good feedback on it and have decided to put it on the back-burner for now.

We are now working on a project we have been tinkering with for years. It is a TV Comedy series that we may possibly produce ourselves for the web.

We will be attending the 2010 Banff World Television Festival in June, but we aren’t going to be pushing the project so hard on people. We will take a more laid-back approach and just network, learn, relax and possibly try and find some production partners. This year Banff is combined with the annual NextMedia festival, which is somewhat exciting. The world of “pictures” is moving to the Internet, it seems. A lot of the big players are moving into the web world right now. We’ll hopefully also get to meet some celebrities who will be there such as Ricky Gervais and none other than William Shatner himself! We’re very excited.

So there may be a lot of mystery surrounding our new project, but we will make an announcement shortly about the details of the project.

Sorry again for the lack of posts. Things should be picking-up again in the Broken Forty world.

I stumbled across this video years ago on Medicine Films. It was created by a man who found the raw footage on a blank VHS at a thrift store.

There is something strangely haunting about this glimpse into the lives of bored, confused, sexually frustrated teenagers in Fairmont, West Virginia, circa 1993.

Late last night, it finally happened. Nathan and I finished Lost Case. Or, at least we are finished writing it… For now.

This is the part where a whole new set of challenges present themselves – namely, how to properly market the script without representation.

We are caught in the “Catch-22″ that afflicts most every unrepresented screenwriter: producers (for the most part) don’t want scripts from unrepresented writers, and agents/managers (for the most part) don’t want writers without a few credits. So what’s a struggling writer to do?

Keep working. That’s what we’re gonna do, at least.

We’ve been lucky enough to make a few industry contacts, and we will be courting them all as best as we can in the coming months.

We are also going to enter a few contests. Having a ‘contest winning screenplay’ surely couldn’t hurt…

And, of course, we are also going to start up the next project!

It’s the start of a new year. And it’s going to be a good one.

I found a really cool video today. It is a song and music video constructed entirely by splicing together sounds from the movie Terminator 2. For those who don’t know, T2 is probably my favourite movie of all time.

Or maybe it was, and I was just too young to know it.

Hollywood University is a blog run by TV writer Jessica Butler. As she puts it on her site, “Hollywood University was launched to provide aspiring scriptwriters with the practical information and resources needed to successfully pursue a career in television. Posts include interviews with and recommendations from industry professionals and address the FAQs of novice scriptwriters.”

I spent a couple of hours last night pouring over the site, and wow. There are some great bits of information and resources to be found on there! She covers a ton of stuff — from sharing some of her own experiences in the industry, basics like formatting scripts and writing query letters, to ideas on breaking into the industry and networking. She even has resources for writers thinking about relocating to LA or New York.

I definitely recommend spending some time perusing the site.