Friday, May 18, 2007

Back to college (I hardly knew ye)

Back to Screen Academy Scotland today for some classtime. Hardly seem to have been there this trimester, what with one thing and another. I went along to the first three weeks of Friday sessions, but things came apart thereafter. Week 4 I stayed home to finish rewriting Fiends of the Rising Sun. Week 5 I was in Norway helping run a comic course for local creators. Week 6 I did make it in, but Week 7 was scrubbed so we could go to Scottish Students on Screen in Glasgow. Week 8 may well have been the last class session I attended, when we had writer-director Annie Griffin as a guest speaker.

Week 9 was lost to the Easter holidays, and then we had two weeks without classes. Week 10 I was in London for the Script Factory's TV Forum. I had a meeting on Week 11 that I hope to talk about publicly soon - but not yet - so that day in class went MIA. Week 12? Bristol for the Comics Expo. Which brings us to this week, Week 13. It's the middle of May and I haven't been in class since March 30. [I'm going to miss Week 14 too, back down to London for the Script Factory's Storyling for Soaps workshop.]

The consequence of all these missed sessions is I'm well behind on my research module and writing the treatment for my final project screenplay. I haven't made the class time to workshop my screenplay idea, though screenwriting James Mavor did give me an hour-long one-on-one session about my initial synopsis that helped a lot. My treatment's due in next Friday, but I've yet to start writing it - instead I spent this week playing catchup on the academically challenging research module.

Elsewhere, the mentoring project I was lucky enough to be chosen for is winding down. I've got my final official session with mentor Adrian Mead this morning, as we chart a course for further development of my TV pilot script and my fledgling career. I'm proud to have gotten my script to its third draft, especially considering the fact I spent the first three months of the nine-month mentorship on a project I decided wasn't working and had to be set aside.

It'll be interesting to hear what Adrian's made of my progress. The pilot script still needs at least two more drafts, but that'll have to wait until the second half of June. Right now, I need to put some work into my MA, otherwise I'm flushing nearly two years of work away. Speaking of which, time to see how far I can get with my step outline before I have to race off to Edinburgh...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi, are you the same Dave Bishop who writes for DEATHRAY? Seems like a pretty interesting publication. A bit of everything.