London Screenwriter's Festival

This weekend just gone I attended the London Screenwriter's Festival. In fact, it started a week today - how time flies! Here's a pic of me right at the end of the festival looking surprisingly fresh-faced despite feeling very tired indeed!

Pic taken by the multi-talented Leilani Holmes

Writing, script reading and editing work can sometimes be very solitary, especially if you're a freelancer working from home. Social networks such as Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and the blogosphere become your main source of networking and self-promotion. That's why it's so important to get out there and meet like-minded people.
The London Screenwriter's Festival may sound expensive, but the sheer amount of knowledge being shared, the networking opportunities and the pitching/development opportunities are priceless. Time and time again I heard delegates say that they felt they had recouped the price of the ticket in the very first day alone.

Sadly, I couldn't make it on the Friday due to being at work. I missed the legendary Edgar Wright and some other fab sessions, but you know what? It's cool. Because the delegate's private social network will contain videos of most of the sessions. That's right; with your ticket you get access to a private social network with the opportunity to message and chat with other delegates and speakers AND watch videos of sessions from the 2011 festival on top of those from the 2010 festival! Edgar Wright is already up on there, so I'll be kicking back on the sofa tonight with it and a nice cuppa tea...

My weekend at the festival was filled with learning, new acquaintances, chatting, confidence-building, eye-opening, camaraderie and above all INSPIRATION. I felt inspired by the speakers, the volunteers, the delegates; their passion, their positivity, their confidence when pitching. I'd opted not to pitch this year but felt that I learnt a lot from the exciting Pitch-Factor session in which delegates had 1 minute to pitch their ideas to producers and be in with a chance of winning a cash prize. I can honestly say that they were all fantastic!

My favourite sessions were Keeping your writer's voice: creative compromise in the real world with John Griffin, Emma Frost and Georgia Lester and Adapting a novel into a screenplay with Olivia Hetreed and Kate Leys.

As a writer and an aspiring script editor/story consultant, I found it fascinating to consider both sides of the equation and to hear about how script editors and writers work together efficiently; or not as the case may be. Robin Sheppard's session on Strategies for powerful collaborations with directors also touched upon the importance of good relationships.


Here's a selection of "golden nuggets" I took from the sessions I attended:


Keeping your creative voice

• Accepting all of a script editor's notes abdicates your responsibility as a writer. Do so and you will lose the creative spark that drove you to write it the way you did in the first place
• However, resist all the notes you may risk being fired
• Compromise is key

Adaptation

• You need to have something to say about the story that no-one else does/can
• Find the spine of the story; what's driving it and what are you responding to?
• The central character in the story may not be the one driving the story!
• Don't try and please the author because your responsibility is to create a film
• It is perfectly within your rights to create a new character or merge two characters if necessary
• Using "inspired by" as opposed to "based on" can relieve you of a lot of hassle!

Don't wait to be discovered

• It's important to know how the industry operates
• It's all about marketing; need to know how to sell yourself and your project
• Europe are crying out for screenwriters. If you have another language, even better!
• Look for a USP (unique selling point) in a script/project
• Think outside the box; work on the trailer for the movie!

Distributors & sales; what the numbers mean

• Reviews can be essential for smaller films; bad ones can cause films to be taken off large cinemas
• Audience is key; simple fact is that certain target audiences won't make you money (older generation)
• Piracy websites can ruin distribution companies/success of a film. Films need to sell to cover print runs! 
•  Lovefilm also affects distributors and as a result it won't sustain the film industry. iStore is the only one that doesn't take too much of a percentage of the rights
• Comedy budgets mostly go on the big names who star in them

Common Pitfalls

• Scripts that are too long (120 pages+) put peole off! Some agents will not even read them if they are that long
• Etiquette is key; write polite yet concise emails. No one-worders and certainly no rambling/life stories!
• Online presence is becoming ever more important. maintain your websites, don't slag people off and, most difficult of all, don't let it distract you too much from actually doing some work ;)

Copywriting

• Not too dissimilar from screenwriting; skills cross over
• It's all about summarising things in as few words as possible yet conveying it in the most effective way for its market (not unlike loglines and synopsis', then!)

To conclude, I'll direct you over to a blog entry I wrote for the London Screenwriter's Festival blog on Positive and Negative Deadlines. Now that we're all raring to get on with writing and advance our careers, it's important to take time to evaluate the goals we are setting ourselves and to make sure that we don't fall into the trap of making negative deadlines.