Here I sit, bloggin' hearted...

The titles of these posts are something I intend to have a lot of fun with, regardless of the fun other people might have with them.

The second day of the Blake Snyder workshop was incredible. He hands out this sheet of templates for leading characters, 'heroes' that Hollywood is using and buying by the truckload and that the consumer is, in turn, also buying. There are two women in the workshop who pullthe emergency stop on the seminar and hold it for half an hour just complaining that there aren't many women on the sheet. Now, I have no problem with strong women, truth is I prefer them, and I'd love to see more, but the reality is there aren't many in movies these days. They take their displeasure of this out on Blake, all the while saying "No, I'm not attacking you..." but at the same time telling him "it's your duty to include these characters". I swear, direct quote, I nearly died.

He also went through the scripts and pitches of people from the workshop and ran them through his pattern, and they seemed like genuinely good ideas. One's a movie about a man that tries to commit suicide only to find himself a daffodil picker, another about a delinquent young man that find a better life through Morris dancing. I swear about this last one, in five years you'll be hearing about a movie called either "Clogging In" or "With Bells On", and you'll hear yourself saying "I want to see that". It'll be a surreal experience when it happens to you, I still don't think I've recovered. I brought mine in, but thanks to the PC-Pronoun Council we couldn't fit it into the class.

A few things you should probably know: Blake Snyder IS a three-year-old child in terms of energy; he never stops going, he never stops smiling, he is a dynamo. Up until this moment, I was wondering in the back of my mind if this was nervous energy, and the guy was so jittery getting up in front of us that he might crumble at the first instance of pressure. Dude's response to the criticism? "Name one." They couldn't. The dude's a rock.

We watched some clips of a few blockbusters to see in action what he'd been talking about the past two days, and it's all there. There are plenty of big movies made that don't follow this structure, but they're movies that also just don't work.

Afterwards, those of us from Falmouth held him back half an hour for a mini-interview, and then he went through the story I'd brought in but couldn't do in the workshop! One-on-one meeting with an established film writer? Yeah, that was worth getting hosed in the workshop. I learned about a lot of problems with my story just in presenting the beats to him, and he brought up a few other points I need to work on. I may not use them all, keep in mind that he wrote "Blank Check", so there are differences in our tastes, but he told me I had a really good idea and hoped I would keep in touch.

Can you f&*&ing believe that?!?!?!?!

Also in this workshop, apparently Cornwall has some kind of magic aura to it. When you live here for any significant length of time, it does something to you. That's kind of what I left home for, but hearing that the location is some kind of mystical nexus of "Bam! you've changed" is kinda intimidating. I'll be sure to let everyone know if it's true or not.

I'm here in the student bar on campus, typing away in my "quiet" little corner waiting for my tutorial session to come up. I'm just about dead last. I'm penultimate. I have an hour to wait, and I've been waiting for nearly two. Thank god for laptops. This may become my A-#1 day to post. I should be working, but screw that. I'm in grad school, I should get me a beer.