Ok… so… ya. We haven’t made a blog post in MONTHS. That is ridiculous and inexcusable. We have been VERY VERY busy.

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.

Happy New Year everybody!

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.

…is not a problem!

Thanks to technology, the screenwriter no longer has to worry about writing scenes that would be prohibitively expensive to film. Well, they do still have to worry about the cost, but locations themselves can be created out of thin air thanks to amazing advances in computer composite-imaging technology. Here is an example of such scenes that were built almost entirely digitally. The video is from Stargate Studios (LA, Vancouver).

This technique is called a “Virtual Backlot.”

I found a new website today called movieclips.com. This could be good.

As I read in this quotd article, a website was able to acquire the licenses for 12,000 movie clips to be streamed and shared in high-quality over the internet. These are all sorts of movies from all sorts of studios in one spot.

Now… I know this isn’t the newest idea around. Plenty of sites like YouTube, Vimeo and others have these movie clips on them. Movieclips.com offers them legally.

There are lots of other good clips on the site too. Check it out! Even though there are “only” 12,000 right now, they are all free to watch and share. This is only a ‘beta’ site. So expect more clips soon if this project takes off.

Hello. It’s been long since I posted.

I’ve been involved recently in an awesome screenwriting community at the Screenwriting Goldmine Forums that I wanted to share. It is totally devoted to the art/craft and business of screenwriting. There are some very knowledgeable people active in the community.

In particular, I wanted to mention this post made by a guru member Scrivener. It talks about the types of coverage and analysis you can get from the different outfits which offer such services, and gives a few nods to some of the trusted ones.

Here is an excerpt:

“A professional story analyst (“reader”) will read your feature-length script 80-120 pages (no books for this special) and will analyze it in a coverage report of 3 pages single-spaced. Comments section will be two pages min. No synopsis is included.

This report will contain the following:
Logline (1-3 sentences) summary of your story.
Comments (includes strengths and weaknesses regarding, structure, dialogue and character. A few suggestions on how to improve script).
Grid Rating of: Premise, Storyline, Structure, Characterization and Dialogue
Overall Rating of script: Pass, Consider or Recommend (with your permission, we will alert the industry about your material should it get a consider or recommend). We are not agents or producers and will not take a percentage of any deal. We make the introduction and step aside. No follow-up calls to the industry regarding your script will be made.
Turnaround time is 2-3 weeks. We will notify you by e-mail when material and payment are received.

Scripts over 120 pages will be charged an additional $1 per page over the 120 page count.
Their coverage is of a very high standard.”

If you are interested in screenwriting, this is the place you should go to seek advice.

Once you become a contributing member (more than 20 posts) you may gain access to the password protected section which lets you share your scripts and loglines with the other members for critique.