Further Along

So last night (well, actually a good part of yesterday) I buckled down on my screenplay Age of Reason, and managed to push out another fifteen pages or so of writing. I’m rather pleased with myself right now, thank you very much.

The only problem I see with the story at the moment is that the movie will be too short. I’m told you can expect about one minute of film per page of screenplay. I will have about 60 pages as the outline stands currently. An hour is respectable, but not enough. I was hoping for a decent hour and a half.

I don’t want to pad the movie unnecessarily, but this has caused me to wonder what else in the story line needs further development. I don’t want the story to go off track from the main thrust, and yet I think I can probably accomplish both ends by showing how the crisis of faith has affected more people than just two families.

In fact, I just realized I have two additional characters (one of whom serves as an antagonist) for whom I’ve shown practically no developing scenes whatsoever. Now I just have to figure out what to write and how to weave it into the outline.

I’ve been using a USScriptSmart Gold template for Microsoft Word for the screenplay. It’s useful in that it helps with the formatting while being completely free of charge (hey, I’m still essentially unemployed. Free is very important to me). The downside is that it makes inserting anything new into the script very difficult, as it doesn’t automatically adjust for page breaks. I’ll have to spend a significant amount of time reformatting this document once it’s done to satisfaction. Oh well. Someday (when I have money to spend) I’ll invest in a decent screenwriting software program.

In the meantime, I’m just about better than half done. Cool. Soon, I’ll just have to worry about selling the script. Woohoo.