Last Minute Planning

by syaffolee

Script Frenzy is tomorrow and I just installed Celtx on my other computer today.  As for actual planning, um, I haven’t done any.  I may just end up writing most of the script by the seat of my pants.  The only research I’ve been doing for the story is saving articles from Wikipedia and not reading them and watching a bunch of documentaries.  The most recent documentary series I’ve been watching is Journeys from the Centre of the Earth which is hosted by the Scottish geologist Iain Stewart.  I first saw Stewart on Earth: The Power of the Planet which was pretty interesting, but in Journeys, he’s just plain wacky.  Sort of like Dan Cruickshank on energy drinks.  And the really awful food metaphors reminded me of this Simon Schama spoof.

Why am I watching these documentaries?  The format of the story is going to be a pseudo-documentary and I sort of want to get a general idea of how my main character is going to behave.  Monty (the main character) is more of a television presenter/journalist who likes being the observer.  He’s not a hero or a villain although minor characters who are heroes and villains might pop up.  (And while we’re on the subject, I recently came across an interesting Scientific American article on the psychology of heroes and villains.)  My initial idea says that it’s going to be serious, but I have the suspicion that I’m going to fail miserably in that goal when it comes to execution.

For the curious, here is a short summary:

Monty Salo, a journalist for a major news corporation, is sent to a small mountain country to investigate something called “ghost light”.  At first, it appears to be a natural phenomenon associated with some local folklore.  But as Monty digs deeper into his research, he makes the uncomfortable discovery that the grain of truth in these particular myths grows bigger with each question that gets answered.