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terraling

Listed below are comments made by terraling between Friday, 28th November 2008 and Wednesday, 4th February 2009.

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Being Human 9:09pm on 04 Feb 2009 Good stuff. I've surprised myself by how much I've enjoyed watching it - vampires and fantasy seem to be very big these days even though more than ten years after Buffy first aired it all seems a bit tired - and I look forward to reading it to see how it compares on the page. Especially the policeman vampire who I thought was very good - see whether it's there in the writing or was thanks to the actor.

On the subject of scripts, Paul Ashton in one of his perfect ten posts praised the opening of Five Days. Any chance of getting episode one up?

Thanks
The Perfect 10 5:19pm on 15 Dec 2008 Excellent post, really getting to the rudiments now of what elevates good work to better. Now there's just the tricky matter of going from knowing what's required to how to achieve it.

A little off topic, but any chance of getting Wallander up in the script archive? Really excellent, and it would be interesting to look at the script to study how much is down to the writing and how much to the very high production values. It's hard to isolate one from the other when watching (and enjoying) it. I'm guessing the budget was much higher than for a typical drama.
The Perfect 10 8:13pm on 28 Nov 2008 These are fairly fundamental and should be known to most aspiring writers already, but it is good to be reminded of them from time to time. This kind of thing is particularly useful when you want to take stock of where you are with a project and are trying to identify what works and what needs more attention.

Quite timely this second installment, because I think the opening episode of Survivors doesn't stand up too well against it. I personally found it quite watchable but at the same time kept thinking it fell a long way short of what one might have expected about a drama about the end of humanity. It was oddly undramatic. Mystery Man's excellent blog talks about a crisis in screenwriting because the art of suspense appears to have been lost, and that seems a reasonable assessment of Survivors.

I don't think people would be fretting about the age and race mix of the cast if it was a ripping good story. The fact that they are suggests that it is failing to really engage the audience, and I'd say the fault begins with the first thing in your list - knowing when to begin the story.

In Battlestar Galactica humankind (ok, a fictional, different humankind) was virtually wiped out, and it was thrilling. In Survivors we got a fairly cursory run-through of the stages of the disaster, but it seemed to be purely a mechanism to introduce character (half of whom were going to die anyway, of none of which we'd spent long enough to care one way or the other). Such a half-hearted treatment might as well have been done away with, and it would have been dramatically more compelling and intriguing to have started with the inciting incident to have already taken place before the start of episode one. Start with Abby Grant waking up recovered, wondering what the heck has gone on, finding her dead husband who'd been keeping a vigil etc.

As you say, "Don't wait."

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terraling