As you might have guessed, I have been hard at work on the development of my first feature film. It has been a full-on endeavor as I have elected to do the producing, writing, and directing. I will be hiring more help as I go along, but I feel it is necessary to have complete control of the project at this stage.
The majority of my time lately has been devoted to fundraising and writing (two things that don’t go very well together by the way). To my surprise, the fundraising has been coming along steadily. I should reach my first 25% of the budget by the end of December. For my other job, scriptwriting has been less successful. I would like to address a few of my issues in the hope that writing them down with offer me some perspective to fix the problems. As always, I am open to any recommendations or advise from those reading this article.
My main issues are as follows:
-Trying to make the story be directly about promoting veganism. The subject matter always comes off as being preachy if I am too direct about the issue. Or, if any of the tenets of veganism are included subtlety, they appear un-necessary.
-Trying to please too many people by making the story universal and not offend non-vegans.
-Trying to make an incredible/innovative story from the outset of the process. This only creates writers block for me.
These were all the same problems I had when coming up with the idea and script for Vegan Love (further explanation). I am adamant about not repeating the mistakes from that shoot, so I have decided to make some slight alterations in the way that I approach the story development of my feature film.
Here are a few of my ideas for a solution to the problem:
-From now on, I would like to take a more liberal approach to the script writing.
I will not restrict myself to including vegan themes or situations in the script. That doesn’t mean I will be changing the name of this blog anytime soon! I just need to concentrate on writing about what I feel is most interesting and compelling to myself regardless of context. If I am not enthralled by the idea, I doubt anyone else will be either…vegan or not.
-From now on, I will be taking a much more personal approach to the script writing.
Every writer draws on their own life’s experiences in developing a script. As a vegan for 8+ years now, I have my own set of experiences and perspectives that I am sure people will find much more engaging than something generic. I also feel that my perspective on life is firmly entrenched in a vegan philosophy…meaning the advocacy will naturally come out in anything I write. I don’t need to force it. A personal approach doesn’t just have to do with writing about my own experiences in life, it also has to do with personal expression. An essential and obvious ingredient to filmmaking that I have neglected to address most of my artistic life.
-Hold off on writing entirely until I reach my initial goal for the budget. I think that I will be more efficient in both fund-raising and script writing if I focus on each area separately. I will concentrate fully in fund-raising until the end of December then switch to focus on the script writing for 1-3 months and then switch back to fundraising until I have a completed script and budget in place to shoot the film.
This may all seem like more generalizations and common sense, but they are things that I easy forget if I am not constantly reminded of them. I will let you know how these new approaches pan out.
