What a week this has been. A mere twelve hours since I made my last post I fell ill and I am still feeling quite sick as I write this. You know how it is, your eyes start to hurt when you’re watching a movie and for the rest of the night there is a running joke that the film physically made my eyes hurt. And then the jokes on me when I wake up the next day with pink eye in both eyes, a sore throat, nasal infection, migraine, fever and eventually an ear infection.
So needless to say, it’s been a wonderful week of lying around and not being productive.
The Oscars are on the horizon. I have seen 5 of the 9 Best Picture Nominees and I will make an attempt to see a 6th. So I am where I am usually at, just over 50%, which isn’t bad. I think I have seen enough of them to make some informed picks. At least I hope, I am hosting a party and I have bragging rights to win.
Since it seems a fair assessment that The Artist will win most of the awards it is nominated for, and since every other site has talked about who will win the acting Oscars the so called, big awards, aren’t even hard to predict. It’s the technical awards that really take talent because no one talks about them. Here are a couple of my insights if you are picking the winners.
The Artist will win Best Original Score for a couple of reasons. Since it’s a silent film it is very dependent on music. So if it doesn’t have the best music, than the film itself is in trouble.
I am predicting The Tree of Life is going to win Best Cinematography. I don’t think it will win any other awards, but it deserves this one.
Also for the last few years I have had luck picking Best Sound Mixing and Sound Editing by picking the film with the most cars crashing or exploding. The exception to this is Sound Mixing will often go to a musical or music themed movie instead of the one with a car blowing up. Don’t believe me? Look at the winners in the last few years. So when a musical featuring cars exploding is made, you can bet it will win these Oscars.
Under this theory, Transformers is as far as I know (since I haven’t seen all of the films) is the one with the most cars blowing up. But I think the Academy will be edgy this year, Hugo has a train crash, and that’s much better than a car.
Though Best Costume Design tends to go to an English monarchy film, I think that the momentum of The Artist will continue and it will take this.
So now on Sunday we can see if I am right or if I have lead you astray.
So as well as being sick this week I am working on a treatment or an outline or synopsis or whatever other synonym you want to use. There is an upcoming script competition here and I want to put my hat in the ring. The problem I face, and the problem I knew I would face is that I am terrible at writing treatments. The style is different than scripts and it trips me up. I have the story all planned out and I am working on the finer details, but when I know that everything I write would sound better as a script, I get discouraged.
A treatment is like writing your script as a short story. It is still in the present tense, but it is in paragraphs and not in proper script writing form. And for the most part you don’t include dialogue. When writing in paragraphs I have trouble depicting visuals. I can write scripts through a bit of a fluke, scripts for whatever reason blends well with my writing style, paragraphs however do not.
I am often told that before writing a script you should always write a treatment, and it seems like this would be good practice. It forces you to know your whole story before you sit down and write. There are always small holes in your plot (and sometimes big holes) that might be overlooked until you get specific and write the whole story down. A treatment puts it all down on the page and from there you just need to write the script. It gives you a template to work on and a guide to follow as you write. More importantly, if you write 5 pages and discover major plot problems that require rewrites, then you only have 5 pages to rewrite instead of 40, 50, 90 or however many pages of a script you have written before you discover your problem then you will have a lot more to rewrite.
So this will be good practice and maybe I’ll even get good at it. Or at least I can hope. It’s going to take a lot of drafts to get through it. But it’s something I am going to have to push past and ignore.
Until next week, I will be working tirelessly on my treatment and I will give you a full report next week.
Well, it has been a bit of a whirlwind of a few weeks here with the CSSC. The 2011/12 submissions have been closed with the passing of the I-Missed-The-Deadline deadline and Principal Photography has come and gone on 2008′s 2nd place winner’s (David Carey), “NO MAN’S LAND”. Which, by the way, we have also decided to change the title to “WILL”. 
