SCRIPT FRENZY

I love comics. That’s not going to be a surprise for anyone who knows me. One of my first memories is watching the Superman Motion Picture with my family. That’s probably one of the more telling and shaping moments in my youth.

That and when my brother was having a doctor’s appointment for his glue ear, I stole a black and white comic which reprinted an X-Men and a Thor comic. I think that was my first ever comic. After that I went into buying Secret Wars when it was reprinted with Alpha Flight, the Iceman miniseries and whatever else the British Secret Wars comic could grab. From there I fell in love with the X-Men and started what is now an eighteen year comics habit. There are people older than my reading of comics. That’s scary.

WHAT IS SCRIPT FRENZY?

Much like National Novel Writing Month, Script Frenzy is a month-long competition. Well, competition’s a bit of a fake phrase for it. It’s a challenge for all participants. NaNoWriMo asks that all people who sign up try to write 50,000 words, Script Frenzy asks that we write 100 pages of script. Those who win get 100 pages of script which they’ve written in a month. One hundred pages of product. It can be edited, redrafted, whatever but hell, you’ve just made something.

SCRIPT FRENZY 2010

I’ve grown more pragmatic in this last year of writing. Last year I took a more ambitious approach and wrote two and a third television pilots. They were genre-based and therefore too ambitious for someone with no contacts, connections, money or even equipment to do a film.

It was a great month and I’ve worked some things out about those intellectual properties which can be used in the future.

I also decided that I want to write scripts for something visual, so possibly a web film which will be possible without any kind of a budget. But that script may have to wait until I can iron out the idea.

SCRIPT FRENZY 2011

So what am I doing this year?

I’m working on comic scripts. I have four that I want to write first issues to. After that I’ll either hit up the web film or try and carry on with the runs of these comics.

My main goal for these comic scripts is to find an artist, create a pitch and then try to get them sent off to comic companies.

This year I actually thought to look into sending pitches to Marvel and DC. I knew DC didn’t really allow anything unsolicited, but hadn’t known that Marvel’s policy shifted in this way, too.

That means I had to shelve my proposals for an Elektra series, a Stilt Man series (yes, there is a Stilt Man in mainstream comics) and, probably shockingly, a use for the 1990’s Marvel character X-Treme.

I’ll probably post little pitches here once each issue one is finished, but not the spoiler-filled proposals I’ll send to the companies I want to send these scripts to. What I will say is that the scripts are:

• A crime story in a world where retired superheroes work undercover in four opposing crime families. Think a world like that of Powers or Invincible but with a story closer to Heat and Infernal Affairs.
• A superhero comedy about characters who are better friends than they are heroes. A brightly-coloured world with character-based issues and moral ambiguity. Like if the JLA were played by the characters from Misfits.
• A city where one million people wake up with no memory, patrolled at night by things beyond our comprehension. A group of characters try to find out where they are, who they are and what’s going on behind the scenes of the city. The influences are The Prisoner, Silent Hill and Dark City.
• A modern village-based chocolate box murder mystery crossed with 1920’s Lovecraftian horror. A fractured family are brought together when an unfortunate niece inherits an old mansion and starts finding parts of her dead aunt.

So far I’m five and a half pages through the required hundred. I’m certain I’ll be annoying everyone around me with the page count I’m on until the last week of April, which I have off work to hermit away and grow insane as the deadline looms. Or chill on my balcony with the netbook and a coffee, if last year’s Script Frenzy was anything to go by.