First blog post: Why am I starting this blog?

There are two aspects to the starting of this blog. When asked to decide on a final project for my Master’s degree, I decided to find a project that would allow me to investigate the facets of scriptwriting. A topic that has always intrigued me. Being from a Media Production background and having worked on various production projects, it has been fascinating to see the practical directorial interpretation of scripts to film. Moreover, during my many film and TV watching years, I have at times come across stories that just didn’t work, and for a while now, I have been keen to investigate what makes a great script. I do indeed also have the ambition to write my very first film-script one day.

I, therefore, decided to find out what makes scripts work. What are the fundamentals one would need to know to write a great script? I have watched many films (as I’m sure you have) which I consider terrible. I think the first time, I actually got angry about a movie, was Elizabethtown (2005). I had my reservations about Orlando Bloom’s acting charisma post-Lord of the Rings (2001) but after watching Elizabethtown (2005), it became quite clear that a bad script will exasperate a lack of screen presence and interesting characters. As a viewer, I just didn’t care about the character of Drew Baylor and could not see why we should care.

And, since the early 2000s, my impression is that more ‘bad’ scripts have been picked up by the studios than ever before. With access to more channels than ever, it now appears that the conveyor belt of film production seems to have produced just about anything to quench the need for something to see on TV. They are not B-movies, with their own unique low-budget quirkiness…no, these new ones are just not up-to-scratch.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), was the final straw for me. As a fan of superhero films, I really hoped the DC Comic stories would regain their stature of greatness, as established by Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2008). However, in my opinion, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) just didn’t work as a story. My disappointment continued with the viewing of Suicide Squad (2016).

Now, comparing these to the amazing Arrival (2016), I decided to investigate what makes some stories work and others not.

The other part of my project is to create a blog where I can write about screenwriting and share my musings on other matters of story-telling. As I have never created a blog before, I thought it would be an excellent and practical opportunity to make use of the so-called “Web 2.0 which encapsulates the idea of making it easy for anyone to publish information…[and give] users with the means for producing and distributing” (Hinton and Hjorth, 2013, p. 18) their own ideas and messages. This would also introduce me to HTML and CSS customization; as well as, the use multimedia production tools to create content such as podcasts, images, diagrams and videos for the post uploads.

I always wanted a blog on WordPress 😉 so here’s my chance.

Let’s start…