Using Uni to write scripts

[hix]

Hi gang,

In the Solo Uni thread, Chris asked what I'd have to teach people in order to use Universalis as a script-writing tool. Well, we're about to have the 48 Hour Film contest in Wellington and I'm strongly pushing to use Uni to write the script. So, here's an attempt to answer Chris' question (cross-posted to our group's forum):

The Process

1.  First thing is to agree that everything we introduce into the story (locations, characters, props) we have to be able to obtain in real life.

2.  We go around the table and each choose one element that we want to see in the story.

3.  Once that's finished, let's take a step back and examine if we're happy with the overall elements we have introduced.

If we are, let's start on telling the story.  If we're not, let's cherry pick any elements we like and begin again.

4.  We tell the story and challenge any elements we think have the potential to get too ridiculous (like the 'mechanical teddybears' from last Tuesday ! ) .

5.  After we've finished, we do a highly focused brainstorm about the story asking: "How do we feel about it?", "What are the problems?" and "What ideas do we have?"

6.  Sort out the biggest problems and brainstorm solutions.

Here's the biggest change. Normally Universalis would finish at (4). However, let's treat what we've just created as an OUTLINE. Now that we've got an ending and characters and an idea of the main problems, let's go back and re-tell it, fine-tuning the thing ...

7.  A second draft of the story, making any changes we figured out at (6).

Leaving the actually "Putting the script together" for another post, any comments or suggestions about the above?

[Valamir]

I've always viewed the mental process of Uni as being a more structured approach to what I envision happening for any TV sitcom whose scripts often involve a team of writers.

I'm real excited to hear how well it actually works when used for the process...if the structure actually helps achieve a direction.

[hix]

We're going to have a test-run tomorrow. Some challenges I'll think we'll face, in no particular order:

1. Maintaining genre.
2. Avoiding silliness.
3. Getting everyone to buy into the process.
4. Managing the transition from first to second draft.
5. Keeping the story simple.

I've always viewed the mental process of Uni as being a more structured approach to what I envision happening for any TV sitcom whose scripts often involve a team of writers.

Ralph, I'm with you. Hopefully this'll be a good opportunity to test the differences between: a) going into a writer's meeting with a pitch for the situation (and a rough idea of the act breaks); and b) Uni, which is more about discovering the story through the process of sitting your asses down and creating it (and then retro-fitting act breaks or whatever else is necessary).

I'll let you know how it goes.

[Valamir]

Cool, I look forward to adding a new section to This Page on the Web Site.

[hix]

I guess I have three reservations about Universalis. The first actually seems common to many New Style games - I've certainly seen it in InSpectres, for example - and it may be inherent in the improv storytelling form: Escalation. To introduce conflict (or heighten it), it's always tempting to throw in something that ups the stakes - one character is the another's mother, or secret lover, or father's murderer.... okay, if the genre is "Greek melodrama", then I guess that all those together would be fine, but in that case, starting to throw the gods in would be the kind of escalation I'm thinking about. The danger here is two-fold - first, it means any emotion we've invested in the now-marginalized plot points is potentially wasted; and second, it can get "Fonzie jumps over ten buses while on fire"-type silly. Having said that, I think that the Universalis challenge system, the fact that we don't have enough time for much escalation to develop, and the social constraint we'll have of producing something filmable, should all act to minimize this.

My second concern is the kind of dramatic structure that Universalis tends to produce. Thinking back about the way the games I've seen have moved, the structure of conflicts has tended to be a series of peaks and troughs, rather than any sort of steadily mounting tension. This is a consequence of gameplay, I think - you introduce a complication, the challenge is built up with various people and their attributes coming into play... and then the conflict is resolved, and the winner starts spending the dice they've won to push the story in a certain way. I don't think I've ever seen anyone start spending the stuff they've just won in a conflict to start up another conflict - it could be a sensitivity to hogging the spotlight, or a "I've won, now I get to do stuff" thing. Anyway, my point was that it works fine as a game, but may not translate into compelling viewing. However, since we're just using the game as a jumping-off point, rather than trying to translate it directly, this shouldn't be too much of an issue.

My third, and final concern is that this might not be the best method for all genres. For example, I'd argue that it might be easier with a science-fiction film to work backwards - come up with a nifty idea (like "If you could download experiences into your brain, how would you know when you were interacting with the real world?" and draping a story around it. Or there might be an idea that's one simple, long scene - like a heist movie where it appears to be an old con-man yarning to a bored "customer representative", but the patter is actually cover for a heist that happens in the course of the tale. Or the locked room murder mystery - it's often easier to come up with how the murder was untraceably done, and work backwards to find out the kind of red herrings you need, and thus what players you should introduce. However, the cases where it's inappropriate are probably not that common, and the solution may well be simply to introduce the kinds of elements I've mentioned as additional constraints - "The girl who appears to have been accidentally killed instead of the actress was the actual victim; the actress killed them, because they discovered that they had caught the German measles from the girl (which affected the actress' unborn child) many years ago while on tour."

Whew! Long. Anyway, my response was that this was all good stuff. Some ideas I've had (and this is verbatim, due to lack of time to re-edit):

1. Escalation: yeah, both you (Svend)and I have seen this happen. I'm hoping that everyone (but you and I especially) will be keeping a look out for this. Tips – keep the cast smaller and keep focusing the issues on the people we've already introduced.

2. 'Peaks & Troughs' structure[/u] – I know what you mean. What I'm hoping will compensate is that we'll all be throwing ideas in and surprising each other. Which hopefully translates to surprising the audience.

3. Is this the best method?[/u] Maybe, maybe not. Some of what you've suggested here I think will be taken care of by the Tenet phase where we all brainstorm ideas we want to see in the story. But, let's re-examine it tomorrow ...

4. Genre.[/u] After you announce the genre, I want to just go round the table and brainstorm out a list of our understanding of the conventions of ... say, the heist movie or the silent film. Tips – whoever's most familiar with the genre we're working in gets designated as the 'genre' cop. It's their responsibility to make sure we keep leaning the scene towards those conventions. Ideally I'd like at least one 'genre moment' in each scene.

The plus of this strategy is we don't need to itemise every element of every genre before hand. We're all children of the visual century; together we'll know how any given genre works.

I have another idea: each of us brings a situation or setting or idea for each genre we're inspired by to the Friday night script session ... but we can talk about that later, too.

[hix]

This could actually work.

We did a run-through tonight and played through a second draft of the story using Universalis. Things of note:

It was non-silly.
The use of coins and complications diminished in the 2nd draft.
Lots of challenges and debate.
The ending was difficult to resolve – but this is only a trial run.
The 2nd draft radically simplified our original outline. In fact, that was our biggest debate between runs – how to do that. Figuring out what the issue in the setting was and what relationship would best illustrate it.[/list:u]
This 48 hour competition randomly assigns each team a genre. We winnowed the list down to the ones we were weak on and randomly selected "Superhero".

Our story (Version 1) was a fascist state where the Capes are treated like Jews. In a Casablanca setting, two brothers try to escape. They're hunted by the brainwashed ex-lover of one of the brothers. There is a gunfight. There's also much Big Brother-like news coverage of the Mayor speaking about the superhero menace.

Version 2 kept the Big Brother stuff. Made the central relationship a husband and wife – the guy has just discovered he's a hero. The wife is the head of the secret police. Neither of them know the other's secret. This irony is played to the max. They meet at a raid on the base of the Underground Railroad. There is much superhero fighting. The ending is unresolved (due to time pressure) but we were debating quite a few ideas.

Simple story with a cool setting – 2nd draft of an outline with lots of dialogue within 3 hours ... this could work.

[Christopher Weeks]

I think that some of the problems Svend predicts for certain kinds of genre are able to be handled through tenet.  If you need to work backwards, for example, then just write the damn thing from conclusion backwards.  

"Tenet: every scene will take place immediately preceding the one just played."

Am I 'getting' it?

[hix]

Starting to recover from making the film. We got 'Disney Family Movie' as our genre.

Working round the table, we easily established our feel. Then the Tenet round gave us a clear idea of our story: An evil property developer is trying to destroy the library. He falls into a magic book and in that fantasy world he learns the value of imagination. When he gets out, he saves the library.

The first round of Uni gave us the story but it stumbled and was slow. I'll go into detail about why in my next post.

Uni gave us awesome details and characters, who turned out to be extraneous when we had to edit. Our first draft of the script came in at 22 minutes. The maximum duration of films in this competition was 6.5 minutes. But culling was reasonably easy because we'd decided in our between-rounds-of-Uni discussion that the basic conflict of the story was between Imagination and Max's Evil Business Unimaginative Nature.

I'm also turning into a strong advocate of the style of playing that emerged that I call Relaxed Uni. I'll start a thread about that later.

All in all, using Uni gave us a really strong base to work from. I'll be using this process again next year. Haven't thought about its broader applications to film and TV writing yet.

Am I 'getting' it?

Dude, after I get some sleep we'll talk. But my first impression is that that would make for a wicked game of Uni.

[Mike Holmes]

Well, not too much to say yet, I think, other than that I'm eager to read the follow-up posts.

Also, what happens to these scripts?

Mike

[hix]

The first round of Uni gave us the story but it stumbled and was slow. I'll go into detail in my next post.

First, I learned an important lesson about the Tenet round. For the game to get super-charged, it looks like I (and maybe each player) needs more than one tenet they're excited by. For instance, the Supers film we plotted out on Tuesday had: Play it from the perspective of the Normals, there's an origin story and Supers are treated like the Jews in Nazi Germany. Those three things really sparked my imagination and I made a full contribution to the game. There were rarely any pauses.

This time round, the only one Tenet that excited me was Max finds his imagination. That meant whenever the story wasn't centring on that, I found it hard to make a contribution. I'm going to assume that most of the other players suffered from the same thing. Rather than a smoothly flowing game of Exquiste Corpse where the turn passes to the person who's most excited, this was more cautious, with lots and lots of moments when none of us knew what to do.

Of course, the massive time pressure might have had something to do with it.

Second, we need to set a time limit or scene limit to focus the story. An hour, hour and a half is more than enough to produce 4-7 minutes of screen story if you play the Uni scenes at a very personal scale.

**

Mike, did you mean "how did we use the script in production?" or "you want to see a copy" or something else?

[Mike Holmes]

First, I learned an important lesson about the Tenet round. For the game to get super-charged, it looks like I (and maybe each player) needs more than one tenet they're excited by.

I think that if each player doesn't put in at least one tenet of their own, the story will not have any energy. That is, if a player puts in a tenet, and others do not challenge that, this is not the same as a player making his own contribution of something that excites him. Sans such a contribution a player can have a feeling that the story being created is not his in any way. It's actually better to skip the tenet phase entirely than to have one player dominate it.

Mike, did you mean "how did we use the script in production?" or "you want to see a copy" or something else?

Both, actually.

Mike

[hix]

What happens to the script? It gets broken down into Characters, Locations, Props, Costumes and Shots & Scenes. All of which Universalis provides as an intrinsic part of the game.

From there it's pretty standard: break the scene down into beats / film the beats with appropriate camera angles / arrange the scenes and shots in order of importance and prepare to drop scenes and shots from the schedule as necessary.

Using Uni still requires a Head Writer / Foot position – and it still requires making sure that stakes and plot points are adequately set-up.

I'll arrange to post the script on-line this week – and also post a re-edited version of the writing process once I've done it.

**

Mike, your comments about the Tenet phase seem worthy of their own thread.

[hix]

Thinking about some previous questions and comments:

Did the structure help achieve a direction?

Yes. The basic idea became focused by our Genre round. After that I believe someone always challenged when the story threatened to go off the beam. And there were way more challenges in these games of Uni than in any I've been involved with before. Probably that's to do with my exposure to the Wiki games and thoroughly briefing the writers that it was okay to challenge.

... about Escalation and Peaks and troughs

Nonsensical escalation wasn't' a problem. The story escalated – but in a pleasing,  internally consistent way. Again I believe that was principally the result of challenges and discussion.

Peaks and troughs – I can't remember if they existed. If they did, they were eliminated in the second run-through and following rewrites.

I think it's worth noting that this time round we didn't have many complications ... I believe it was just one and that was when we were fully stuck on a plot point and I thought I'd throw the complication in just to see what happened.

**

Here's a revised version of my writing process using Uni:

Establish Genre: its conventions, whether we want to subvert or support it. Assign a Genre Cop (to make sure we're staying true to the feel of the Genre).

Then do the Tenet Round. Is everyone excited by at least 2 (or 3) tenets? If not, cherrypick and start again.

Outline Draft 1. For a short film, set limitations like: 3 scenes or a specific number of locations or complete Draft 1 in an hour. Outside of the writers, only the Director should have input here.

Go around the table and establish how we feel about the story, its major problems, the order we should tackle the problems in and possible solutions. It's a reduced version of De Bono's 6 Hat process. Ask "What are the Stakes (the main question the script is trying to answer)?" What is the basic conflict? Has the problem been set up clearly?

Then dismiss as many people as possible.

After doing Draft 2, analyse: do the scenes have Turning Points? Conflict? Do they tell a coherent story? Do a page budget for the scenes. 5-6 pages max.

Assign scenes to writers. Probably 2 writers per scene – one to type, one to assist. Across all the teams I interviewed post The 48, this consistently seemed to produce good results. Meanwhile ... cast the script. Do up a Locations and Props document. Write the scenes, compile them, print them out.

Read-through and timing. Afterwards, go through the script again and identify problems. For each problem, the Head Writer determines if they are an A, B or C. As are solved immediately, brainstorming solutions. Cs are left for the Head Writer to tidy up. Bs can be gone through again if there's time.

Edit.
Print.
Read-through and time the script.

Now it's time for the Head Writer to rewrite. Break it into Beats, Camera Setups, Number the scenes. Email to everyone as a .doc and a .rtf. And then go to sleep.

In the morning, there's a read-through. The Head Writer makes any necessary adjustments due to casting and actor feedback.[/list:u]

[Mike Holmes]

Just to be clear, this is the process for applying Uni to this particular problem, right? Not a general outline for using it to write? Or am I confused?

Looking forward to seeing the posted result.

Another question about the process - is there a "winner" for this? Or is it just like the 24 hour writing and game creation processes? Just intended to produce as good a product as possible in that time?

Mike

[hix]

Yes, that process is just to this particular problem with this particular group with me as the Head Writer.  And the points where it seems to get weirdly specific, ... that's just me trying to figure out where we can save time next year. We should have finished writing at about 1 in the morning; we ended up going through till about 6.30am.

[Edited to add: ... But I think I'm getting to the point where I could generalise some suggestions for scriptwriting with Uni.]

Now, about a winner: at a group level it is very much like the 24 hour writing and game creation processes. "Produce as good a product as possible in that time" is the goal. We determined that by having very frank discussions between outlining rounds to figure out how we felt about the script.

However, it's part of a competition - so all finished films are screened and judged by a general audience. We unfortunately aren't eligible for that; the film got handed in 2 minutes and 41 seconds late. Still, could be worse. My friends' group got there 17 seconds after the deadline, were refused entry and the ensuing temper tantrum was covered by the national media (TV and newspaper).