People always ask me: “Anthony, are those blue glasses real?” This often leads to a discussion as to whether they are referring to the glasses being prescription or if they feel they are hallucinating blue glasses onto my face. After we discuss that the glasses are a pair of Bondi Blue Roosevelts from WarbyParker.com, the NEXT thing people always ask me is: “How do YOU write scripts?”
This is a better question. The glasses thing always seems rather silly.
My creative process begins with evacuate everything in my mind on a particular topic. The beginning of every script assignment begins with the creation of something I call a “BRAIN document.” I capitalize the word BRAIN to denote how important this document is. It is not an acronym. Just super important. My BRAIN document holds all the raw material that will go into creating the actual script. Free writing, input gathered from co-workers or other sources, links to videos or sources to serve as inspirado. It all first exists in the BRAIN document. A BRAIN document can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to put together, depending on the size of the project and how the inspirado is striking on any given day.
From the BRAIN, I’ll then dash out a few starters. These are essentially the earliest first drafts of a script. Some starters are just a few lines. Some are full takes on the script. Some are much longer than the time allowed for the script. The point is to take the raw material generated in the BRAIN and attempt to start putting some of these ideas together.
The next part is one of my favorite parts. See, up until this step, a lot of the creation has been done in a vacuum. There is some early collaboration and discussion, but the starters come from one voice and one point of view: mine. But now these starters get released into the world. Well, Byron’s world. I think one of the best aspects of our creative process at Windsong Productions is our ability to have meaningful and productive conflict. Byron gets the starters and access to my BRAIN document.
He will then:
- pick things he likes
- pick things he doesn’t hate
- pick things he hates
- re-order lines in the starter
- swap lines from starter to starter
- sometimes, he’ll even pick my most hated line from the BRAIN and find a new way to use that makes me fall in love with it.
We have a sometimes passionate but always productive discussion about the tone, message and style of the script. Then I go back to the BRAIN with those notes and hone in one or two specific styles. The goal is to create two very different takes on the same script. My personal goal here is create two scripts that prohibit you from using any of the lines from Draft One in Draft Two and vice versa. The tone and style should be too dissimilar. That’s the hope anyway.
After I have a draft that I’m happy with, I normally read it aloud to Sara for a pat on the back or a smack in the face. If she hates it, she smacks. If she’s indifferent or loves it, she pats and it goes back to Byron.
At this point, we’re normally pretty much in simpatico, but we will still take the time to beat the script up a bit and discuss if we’ve found the most effective, elegant and/or efficient way to say what we’re trying to say. That includes language, amount of words and how the script works with the visuals.
Another round of tightening revisions and reads around the office normally gets us to a final draft that is ready to be sent to the client.
And THAT is how a script gets made at Windsong Productions.
Any questions?
Interesting thought process on script writing. It seems like Byron plays a pivotal role, and having two different takes on the same script seems like a smart idea. Thanks for sharing.