Speaker 1: Hey, this is Steve from myothercareer.wordpress.com, and today I wanted to do a different kind of video and talk a little bit about adapting real-life events into a screenplay, but first I'm shooting this video a little different. I have a new computer and a new iMac, and it's got a built-in eyesight camera. I've never really used the eyesight camera before. I have one on my MacBook, but I think I fired around with it the first week I got it and haven't used it since. So I'm trying something a little different instead of using my digital camera or one of my digital cameras because it's a bit of a pain to transfer the video over, and this way it's encoded natively in a format that's relatively small and uploads to YouTube easily. So back to the task at hand, I wanted to talk about some of the challenges I've run into trying to adapt real-life information into a screenplay. I've never done this before, and I haven't been able to find a whole lot of information about it, but one of the challenges I've run into, and I wrote a little bit about this in one of my posts when I was trying to discuss with my uncle how I would structure some of his journey from starting the steeplechase to making the Olympic team, is setting events so that they hit the markers in the screenplay structure to keep the story flowing and to keep it entertaining to read. Real-life doesn't map one-to-one to screenplay. 30 pages in or so, you need some sort of event. Another 15 pages after that, you need some sort of event. Another 15 pages after that, you need some sort of event. There is certain timing that needs to occur in a screenplay to keep the story moving forward and to allow for events to provide insight into character development and just create drama and conflict in general. So part of that is dramatization, and what that is is either changing events around or fabricating events to fit those needs. In the storyline that I'm brainstorming out still, there is a relationship that my uncle will have with a priest that used to be his track coach in high school. Now in real life, that priest, his old coach, actually, my uncle went to a private Catholic school in Detroit. That's where he ran track in high school. That's where I'm from originally. So it's just giving you a mindset of why a priest. So the priests were the coaches at the high school, and this priest in particular was very important in giving him his scholarship to the University of Tennessee, and in one of the meets after my uncle had started writing Steeplechase, the group of priests had been in town for some, I don't know, priest conference or whatever, and they came to see him run. Well, that kind of gave me an idea of a way to create some conflict. What if that priest, you know, I expand the mentor role a little bit and use him, maybe failing health or some sort of event with that priest to kind of drive the story and provide some sort of drama and tension to affect how my uncle performs, you know. Perhaps there's a race he should have won or should have placed in that he doesn't after getting bad news or whatever. You know, you can think of a bunch of movies where there is some sort of dramatic element that prevents the main character from performing up to what they should, and I thought this might be, you know, one story mechanism. Now, it would be completely fabricated. Nothing like that happened in my uncle's life. The track coach, the priest that he had in high school passed away, but because he was like 85, natural causes, far after my uncle had already transitioned into his coaching career as an NCAA track coach at Tennessee and then later Florida. So I would dramatize some of that, and my uncle didn't really grasp why I would need to do that. He thought, you know, why don't I just tell the story in a linear fashion of the real world events, and I had a hard time getting, you know, across to him that real world events and the way they play out in a linear fashion are not always interesting. There's a lot of downtime. You've got to spend time explaining stuff, and you have to structure events so that they, you know, are exciting to watch on the screen. So while I'm trying to develop some dramatic tension using some fictional events, I'm also running into challenges of how to adapt real world events so that they're dramatic. So, you know, a track meet is a lot less exciting to watch than a race car or a race event with, you know, Indy 500 or NASCAR. I mean, think back to Days of Thunder. Days of Thunder is exciting to watch the race sequences because there's cars crashing into it, you know, engines, cars flying around, spinning out, you know, there's a lot of excitement in a race car race. Track race, not so much. You're not going to have guys, you know, throwing each other into walls and dropping elbows and, you know, they're running in a circle. And even more boring, they're not running at a fast pace. You know, at least if it was a sprint event, it's 10 seconds long and I'm over with, you know, and in a track event, you've got what's in effect a 10-minute race. Now, I'm not, you know, you can't obviously write a 10-minute race and be boring as heck. So I've had to try to figure out a way in how I would approach these events so that I can cut, you know, I'd get in really late. Maybe I show the start of the race and I cut right to the tension in the middle of the race or, you know, I've got to try and figure out a way to move through the race. Even in, and I'll go back to Days of Thunder, you'd see the start of the race sometimes and only key elements during that race. Even Talladega Nights, you know, I mean, that's a comedy, but the same thing. They will take a specific race and break it up into chunks and do, you know, cuts forward and elapse time and condense it. So that's been really kind of a challenge to figure out how I'm going to approach that. I've never really been faced with that challenge before and like I've said, I've never had to adapt, you know, something in real life. All the stories I've written were just completely fabricated, so they would do whatever I needed them to perfectly. But when I'm adapting real life events, it's a little challenging. Now, the cool thing is just talking to my uncle, there's a lot of drama that occurs in many of these events, specifically the first race he runs, which he wins and he wasn't supposed to against the Big Ten champion. And then the qualifying at the Olympic qualifiers, he falls on the last lap, cuts his leg open badly, and gets up and still qualifies and had there been another 100 meters, he probably would have won. He wasn't supposed to even place, you know. So because at that point, he's not just running against collegiate athletes, he's running against the best athletes in the United States, post-collegiate and, you know, and all sorts of stuff. So there's a lot of drama that occurs in that last lap, and that provides some interesting things. And just talking to my uncle in general, finding a lot of excitement that occurs in a specific lap or the end of a race or the start of a race, hopefully will provide a window on how to make some of those events a little more exciting. In addition, having to come up with a way to connect all the events has been relatively challenging because I have to flesh out my uncle's life over a period of about four months, you know, condense it into 90 to 100 pages, and then when I take out the 15 to 20 pages of stuff that occurs in the track, that's, you know, 80 pages of just life I have to make exciting. So that's going to be interesting. I'm going to have to make some decisions on how I want to approach that. So you know, I just wanted to kind of give you an idea of what I've been working on, and some of the challenges I've been running into. So if anybody else tries to take on something like this, you know, maybe this will help them out a little bit. You know, I don't know. But you can at least see how I'm coming from. I posted earlier that I'm going to write this kind of as an homage to my two-year anniversary of the blog. I'm going to do it along the exercises of the screenwriter's workbook. I think that'll be really fun. It'll be neat to see how I progressed as a writer or how I kind of had it when I started writing two years ago, using that book kind of as some sort of technique, and then see how that technique still works for me. I've written a lot since using that, and I've kind of developed into my own, but I'll go back to my roots a little bit, and I thought that would be a pretty interesting content mechanism. I'll be able to show specific progress as I move through the exercises, and it's a good refresher for some of the newer viewers and newer readers and just people who come across the blog now. The postings will have a lot more narrative to them in general, so people can follow along and maybe even do them themselves. I would encourage you to pick up the book. It's only like $15. Sid Field's A Screenwriter's Workbook. I'm not going to post a lot of stuff verbatim about what the exercise instructions are because I think you should buy the book, and it's not fair to Sid and all the work he's put into it and the editors and publishers to just provide the content for you. So I'll give a summary and provide my results, but I'm not going to give any of the instruction that's in the book. I think that's fair. Let's see if there's anything else I wanted to talk about. Oh, cool thing about my new iMac is it's got a gigantic hard drive. I have an Apple TV that I kind of use as a media streamer, so I've been using my MacBook to, in my own movie collection, I would digitize and just put it on my Apple TV, while with my iMac I can store a lot more. I have a terabyte hard drive. So I've been backing up all the movies, and now I don't have to use any of my DVDs. So it's kind of cool that I've just got everything in storage. Until next time, this is Steve from myothercareer.wordpress.com. Keep writing.