Week 2: Act 1, Playlists, and Backstory

This week, I submitted act 1 of the first draft of WASHINGTON AVE to my film seminar, and I'll be getting feedback tomorrow afternoon. I'm not sure how the screenplay will be received -- I struggled a lot with starting to tell this story, for a few reasons that I'll get into, but I'm hoping that my classmates' insight will be helpful with me moving forward and writing the rest of this first draft and revising into a more finalized one.

I think the thing that I struggled with the most is the motivation of these characters I've created, and communicating them without deliberately telling my audience the story point blank. My main character, Lex, and her brother, Rowan, have a lot going on under the surface, and I had a lot of trouble striking a balance between keeping those secret for act 2, and setting up the hints in act 1 so that the revelations don't come out of nowhere for my audience later on. 

I've actually been yelled at for taking the lord's name in vain when someone else said something actually offensive before.

I've also realized how much fun writing screenwriting is for me. Not that it wasn't already, but I love when I can find the rhythm in the dialogue and keep the momentum going. I find it really satisfying, and I think in the academic writing and the technical, more boring work of last semester I've forgotten that writing for me is really fun, and that's why I started doing it in the first place. 

All of that writing stuff aside, something I had a lot of fun with this week has been coming up with a playlist for this project. I really love making playlists for seasons, events, moods, etc., but I tend not to listen to music when I write, since I get distracted so easily, but since this piece is set in 2012, I've started combing old top 40 charts and my playlists from high school to pick songs to use to kind of set the mood. It's also been extremely helpful for getting to know the characters better.