By Pinaki Ghosh

TheScreenplayWriters.com opens yet another chapter. From today we start yet another new service. We have set up our state-of-the-art storyboard artist studio. You can hire storyboard artists from us at the best rates anywhere in the industry.  $50 per frame for B/W storyboard, and $100 per frame for color.

Using storyboard artists for your screenplay is one of the best ways you can visualize your movie much before the movie is actually made. It can be best described as hand drawn art (nowadays digital art is also seen) that look like comic strips or graphic novels. Frame by frame, they depict the screenplay. At a glance a screenplay storyboard may book like a comicbook.

The filmmaker wants to take a look at the screenplay as it will look from the lens of the camera. As such the role of storyboard artists is enormous. Sometimes, due to budget constraints, only some select scenes are made into storyboards.  Especially the more expensive, outdoor and ‘visual’ scenes.

Not only visualizing; storyboards have helped filmmakers locate potential problems with scenes before they are actually shot, and correct them.

That should not give you the impression that storyboard artists are used only for big budget movies.  In fact at $50 or $100 a frame it is really dirt cheap, considering the benefit.

It is also a fun way of making a film.

Writing a movie script – 10 things you should do to get your screenplay rejected

By Pinaki Ghosh

Writing a movie script? Want to know the 13 secrets to get your screenplay rejected for sure? Read on.

1. Offer camera directions in your screenplay

Don’t trust the intelligence of the director or cinematographer and offer camera directions in your script like, ‘pan’, ‘zoom’, ‘dolly’, ‘trolley shot’ or ‘low angle shot’. That will make your script look like one from history and is a definite way of getting it rejected.

2. Offer editing directions in your screenplay

Similarly, go ahead… show a complete disregard to the editor’s intelligence and write editing instructions like ‘cut to’, ‘dissolve’, etc. and your screenplay will look like a thing of the past. In modern day screenplays editing directions are no longer in vogue. Only ‘fade in’ and ‘fade out’ are used twice or thrice in an entire screenplay.

3. Do not capitalize character names

Do not capitalize the character names while writing a movie script. Leave them in lowercase text and your screenplay will be rejected for sure. Similarly, leave words that denote sound, like WHOOSH, or CLANG in lowercase, to show how little you know.

4. Make your screenplay shorter than 90 pages or longer than 130 pages

While writing a movie script, you should definitely make it longer than 130 pages, or shorter than 90 pages to make sure your screenplay goes straight into the trash bin, because normal screenplays are 90 pages to 130 pages in length.

5. Write very lengthy dialogs

Writing a movie script? Love writing interesting dialogs? Then go ahead and make them lengthy. Make each dialog lengthier than 5 lines and that will ensure your screenplay is ripped and made into paper airplanes.

6. Write very lengthy scenes

While writing a movie script, make sure your scenes are lengthy enough to get the screenplay rejected. While normally scenes are less than a page in length to maximum three pages, with 5 page scenes being an exception; you should concentrate in making your scenes more than 5 pages in length… to join the rejected screenplay writers’ club.

7. Write lengthy descriptions

While the normal length of writing a scene description is 1 to 4 lines, you should break the rule and write at least 10 line scene descriptions to be a part of the frustrated screenwriters’ league.

8. Use character names that sound and spell similar

Make your character names sound confusingly similar. Or make them start with the same letter, so that the viewers are thoroughly confused.

9. Use character names for very minor characters

Give character names to even minor characters that appear just once and have one line dialogs, to prove you want to get your screenplay rejected. While the rule is, you should use the professions to identify minor characters, rather than names, a violation of the rule is recommended if you want to do the opposite of normal.

Eg. POLICE OFFICER

Show me your driving license. God save you if you don’t have one.

The above is normal, if this POLICE OFFICER appears only once in the entire movie. In a good screenplay, a name like ‘HARRY’ or ‘TOM’ or ‘DICK’ would have been inappropriate for this role.

10. Use wired slug lines.

Scenes start with slug lines like:

INT. COFFEE HOUSE – NIGHT

Or

EXT. BEACH – DAY

While normal screenplay writers use only ‘day’ or ‘night’, you can be a rebel and use wired slug lines like DUSK, DAWN, SUNSET TIME, SUNRISE TIME, to stay ahead in the race of getting your screenplay rejected.

11. Make a mess of the alignment

And finally, make a mess of the alignment. While the rule is, scene slug lines and action descriptions should be extreme left aligned, character names should be center aligned and dialogs should be left aligned, but an inch towards the right.

Eg. Correct format:

EXT. ROAD – DAY

POLICE OFFICER

Show me your driving license. God save you if you don’t have one.

Sees the license

POLICE OFFICER (CONT’D)

This license has expired three months ago. Please come out of the car mister.

He opens the door and COLLIN walks out of the car.

Wrong format:

EXT. ROAD – DAY

POLICE OFFICER

Show me your driving license. God save you if you don’t have one.

Sees the license

POLICE OFFICER (CONT’D)

This license has expired three months ago. Please come out of the car mister.

He opens the door and COLLIN walks out of the car.

12. Use plenty of mood descriptions throughout the screenplay

Use of phrases in brackets like (smiles), (looks worried), (laughs out loud) with every possible dialog to prove yourself to be a complete novice. Experienced screenwriters avoid using such phrases as far as possible because these are for the director to decide. Three such uses in a complete good screenplay are allowed.

13. Do not visualize

While writing a movie script, write it just for the sake of writing it. Do not visualize anything in your mind’s eye. Do not bother if your scenes will be picturesque or boring.

We had an expression when I was working in marketing: feast or starve. On any given day we didn’t know if our plates would be full (feast) or empty (starve). Pretty self-explanatory.

I was reminded of this expression yesterday. I woke up in a foul mood. I had a few client meetings scheduled but otherwise life was in a holding pattern.

That’s when the floodgates opened. An old client got in touch with a good opportunity that required a lot of coordination on my end. When I got to my client meetings my phone was buzzing off the hook. Another gig had come in through TheScreenplayWriters.com, this time with a same-day turnaround. Pinaki and I hustled to get the the pieces in order and meet the deadline.

I went to bed happy sometime after midnight. It had been a good feast day. On top of copious client work I had written two short story rough drafts. When the creative juices flow they tend to swell and flood the surrounding area.

This morning I’m catching up on emails and waiting for a client call. I’m still happy from yesterday’s buzz, but doubt is beginning to creep in. Will I feast or starve today?

By  Nick Blake

My wife Laura has an expression for my various creative concepts.

“I don’t know about you,” she’ll say whenever I run an idea by her. “When you try something out you either miss badly or you hit it out of the park.” As a result she’s a reliable sounding-board. She doesn’t get overly excited by abstractions (as I tend to do), nor does she balk. Instead she waits until she sees results.

Laura has largely withheld judgment on TheScreenplayWriters.com despite the project’s initial success. After only a month Pinaki and I have assembled some top screenwriter talents, and our client base is steadily growing. Our instincts were correct: there is a growing market for global media, and we are positioning ourselves correctly to meet demand.

After a trip to the movies last night, however, my wife finally voiced her support. We went out with my mother to see “Julie and Julia,” a movie that was honest and fun and, best of all, featured incredible food. Several previews ran before the movie, most of them off-target thrillers (they could have used a top screenwriter or two to straighten them out!).

A non-thriller stood out from the shocking tedium. It was an epic drama about Amelia Earhart. The preview felt correct: the story was rich, the characters were understandable, the drama was heartfelt (not just heart-racing). You had the feeling that it was a movie full of life.

And then the name of the director splashed across the screen: Mira Nair. Maker of “Salaam Bombay,” “Monsoon Wedding,” “Vanity Fair,” and “The Namesake,” Ms. Nair has risen through the ranks of Indian cinema with an incredible zest for storytelling. With “The Namesake” and “Amelia” it seems that her passion for stories is leading her to the shores of America. Where “The Namesake” introduces America to the Indian diaspora living within her borders (and vice-versa), “Amelia” is full-blown Americana heartland.

Both Laura’s and my eyes widened in the darkness of the theater. It was like we could see the world growing closer before us, and the possibilities of TheScreenplayWriters.com stretched with Amelia’s wings beyond a limitless horizon. Laura leaned into my ear and whispered, “Wow. You are absolutely correct.”

I smiled, knowing I had just hit it out of the park.

By Nick Blake

I knew I wanted to get involved with the Indian film industry while honeymooning in Kerala’s backwaters. After a quiet day traveling on a luxurious houseboat, my wife and I settled into the main cabin to enjoy the movie “Hallo” with the bottle of toddy we had picked up along the canals. “Hallo” showed off the best screenplay writers Malayalam (or Mollywood) cinema had to offer and our boat guide stayed up to enjoy the movie with us.

The story is about the wayward son of an otherwise respectable family, a toddy-drinking lawyer who cannot forgive his parents for betraying his former love-interest. Padmashri Lt. Colonel Mohanlal Vishwanathan Nair (known in Mollywood as Mohanlal) plays the lead role, and our boatman noted that he was a famous regional actor that made the ladies swoon. To us he looked more like Super Mario, sporting his signature mustache and happy Buddha pot belly.

For nearly two and a half hours the plot swerved through a variety of escapades (often as though the best screenplay writers in Mollywood were suffering under the haze of toddy as well). In the end love rules the day, corruption is brought to justice and the family is reunited. And the movie takes unflinching swings at Tamil Nadu (to translate for an American audience: combine the worst Southern and Mormon stereotypes).

What really caught my attention, though, was that the movie was more or less a rewrite of a famous Song Dynasty story from China, written roughly 800 years earlier! I’ll have to dig through my old college notebooks to find the story I’m thinking of, but it has to do with a drunken detective who solves crimes of local corruption, etc, etc. India, I realized, was a place where stories were remembered and repeated.

As a writer I’m always looking for smart adaptations of stories. If I wanted to find the best screenplay writers, my road led to India. After the movie Laura and I took a quick stroll along the water to capture the full moon over the cloudless canal. I turned to her in the dark night and said, “I want to be where the stories are.”

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether you’re writing for Hollywood, Bollywood, Mollywood, or your local community theater. The important thing is finding a good story, something worth sharing, and telling it well so that people listen. Hollywood has a lot to learn from India’s writers.

Nick is back from Maine.

By Pinaki Ghosh

Nick is back from Maine.

From the recent inquiries we discovered that a lot of student filmmakers looking for screenwriters are coming to our TheScreenplayWriters.com.  So we decided to set up a team of writers exclusively for the student filmmakers, who are tight on budget.

We may soon have another couple of really big names joining our team of screenplay writers. But I’d prefer to remain tight lipped till that is confirmed.

I believe there are two fantasy film screenwriting projects in the pipeline, which I expect to come to me this September. They come from two of my old clients. The demand for fantasy screenplays are also increasing stunningly. Harry Potter effect? Maybe. One thing is sure, till this Harry Potter bubble is intact, we will remain busy.

Since we are catering both the Hollywood and Bollywood industries and as such have a team of writers who hail from both these massive industries, I discovered some interesting differences in the ways scripts are written in Hollywood and Bollywood.

One. Hollywood filmmakers do not expect, neither allow the script writer to use camera and editing directions in their screenplay. That is left for the director and editor. I agree. If the screenplay writer decides how the camera should be placed or how it should move, or how the editing should be done, why the hell are the director and the editor employed? Just to follow the instructions of the screenwriter? In the Bollywood industry however I noticed some of the directors encourage the screenplay author to use camera directions like pan, trolley, or directions about the angle, as well as editing instructions. Interesting, isn’t it?

Two. Now this is an even more interesting difference, and Hollywood may wonder why at all it is like that in Bollywood. Bollywood, in addition to script writers employ separate dialog writers, and dialog writers are separately given credit and payment. The screenplay writer and the dialog writer are often different persons. Of course it is not that way in Hollywood. If I try to trace the roots of this practice, it comes from the days when  melodramatic movies were made in Bollywood (arguably, this practice has not entirely been discontinued). There were separate writers, besides the screenplay writers, who could empower the dialogs, add spice to the dialogs and make them powerful. I have myself seen in my childhood, people in theatres used to burst into applause and throw coins in the direction of the screen when powerful dialogs were delivered. I don’t know if such coin shower happens or happened  for similar reasons anywhere else in the world. The practice of a dialog writer still exists in Bollywood, though nowadays in a lot of movies the screenplay writer and the dialog writer are the same person. But they get paid twice for the two roles. Nice… to get paid twice for one work.

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By Pinaki Ghosh

TheScreenplayWriters.com, which was my US writer friend Nick Blake’s and my brainchild, completed little more than 20 days since launch on 31 August and has bagged a number of new projects already.  Of course the people associated with the new service are not new; I feel glad to say, each of our team members have backgrounds of huge experience.

TheScreenplayWriters.com is unique and one of its type because it is the only screenplay writers’ agency to employ both Hollywood and Bollywood screenwriters.

The first project that was confirmed was director Raj Rahi’s  (Jo Bole So Nihal) new English movie Angel Jay. The name of the movie may change though. The second project to roll in was from Dubai, and was about the Iraq war. The subject was challenging, and I was already wreaking my brains with Raj Rahi’s project, so my US writer friend Nick Blake volunteered to take up the Iraq movie project. When the Iraq movie project came up, Nick was on a vacation in Maine with his wife Laura and we had massive communication problems, with the mobile phone signal fading out more often than not, from Nick’s side. Nick had to come to the town library in Maine to check my mails and reply them. I hope I did not ruin Nick’s perfectly planned holiday.

The next to come our way was a Bengali movie project, which has not been finalized yet. It was piece of cake for me, because I am a Bengali by birth. Did I forget to mention that there was a Kannada movie screenplay enquiry on the second week? Though I was not too keen to take up the project simply because I don’t know the language (but would love to), Nick however was very eager to take up the project and spent one day searching for a reliable Kannada film writer.

There were a couple of very positive enquiries from Gurgaon and Bangalore. Both from first time filmmakers, whose passion is genuine. Hopefully the Bangalore project will materialize this month and the Gurgaon screenplay project will take longer.

Good news is that a lot of good film writers are approaching us and we have found some really talented writers in the process. One writer I would like to mention is Shivani T, who wrote the story ‘Sex on the Beach’, one of the ten short stories of the critically acclaimed film ‘Dus Kahaniya.’