I went to Watford (the college, not the place, although if you go to the former, you do end up spending time in the latter. Horrible fucking shithole). We were taught a bunch of very useful things but we never had a single lesson on how to write a script.

Which is odd because, thinking back, I’ve never had a formal, deliberate lesson on advertising scriptwriting. I’ve had the odd bit of advice here and there, but no one seems to mind that you’re just shoved in at the deep end, producing (supposedly) professional scripts that clients will see and directors will work to.

Anyway, a few years back my boss sent me (after a bit of nagging) on Robert McKee’s Story Seminar, which is like this:

But here’s a free hour of his more recent thoughts.

It was a really good course, although geared towards feature film script writing rather than ads.

For further brilliant advice, this is a website set up by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, the writing team behind Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean and other big hits (the link is sometimes a little dodgy but it’s worth persevering). They explain why the names of your characters are so important and offer little gems such as the fact that M. Night Shyamalan didn’t realise Bruce Willis was dead until the fifth draft of The Sixth Sense (lesson: draft, draft and draft again). It’s all still films rather than ads, but many of the principles hold true for both.

Other advice: if you’re thinking of writing a movie script, get Final Draft – formatting is key. Also, read Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. It’s really enjoyable as well as really informative.

What else? There’s this interesting comment that was left on the blog yesterday by an ad person who has sold a script to Hollywood:

The joy of writing a screenplay is that you can do whatever you want in it. It’s sort of helped me stay sane in advertising. I say ‘sort of’. I am not entirely sane but let’s not go there. I never thought about what would sell, just developed ideas that grabbed me. There’s a feature film in every one of these ‘high concept’ ideas so if you have anything like that I’d encourage you to keep turning it over in your brain until it gains momentum. I suppose you could compare one of these ideas to a really good advertising idea. You’ve got the print ad but what’s the ambient execution and the iphone app. etc. If it’s rich enough you’ll find it has many dimensions. If you work on all of these you’ll find you’ve got enough ideas to flesh out into a screenplay. Before I started writing I found the whole idea of attempting something so big really intimidating but the more you time you spend on it, the more you break it down, the more it starts to feel like writing one ad after another after another – I believe Ben made a similar point a few months ago – which makes it much more manageable and very suited to our skill set. It’s also much easier than writing a novel because there is definitely a right and a wrong way to do it and we’re all pretty familiar with what makes a good movie.

It’s also closer to copywriting in so far as you can spend ages tinkering with a few lines. I’m guessing you can’t really afford to do that when you write a book.

Next to getting it read in the first place, the hardest thing to deal with is development. By the time you are asked to re-write something you are likely to be bored to death of it, not to mention impatient to see it made, but actually the development process can be very positive. It has been in my case. Entire threads were ripped out of the story and although I didn’t like it at the time I can now see that it was the right thing to do. In other words there’s a lot to be said for not being precious. Easier said than done obviously and I did lose a few things that I wanted to keep.

Now that I have sold the rights to it, I no longer own it which means they can do whatever they want with it. Another writer is on board now, working off the producer’s notes and that marks the end of my involvement. Pretty unceremonious. If he likes what they do, it’ll get made. If he doesn’t, it won’t and I’ll go back to freaking out about the horrible state of my career.

Anything else? Um… Dunno really. If you’re thinking of writing a script, do give it a go. As the above person says, it’s fun. I have my own screenplay Fuck Me Backwards almost finished. It’d be nice if someone was insane enough to want to make it, but I don’t really care because I’ve really enjoyed writing it and the process has been an education.

Feel free to leave thoughts in the comments section. I know at least one other professional screenwriter drops by here occasionally. If he would like to give us some insights, I’m sure they’d be greatly appreciated.

This year Adidas will be bringing us a reactive moving graphic novel, where stories of its players and their achievements at the WC will be changed as they happen.

They are launching it with this.

(From 180 Amsterdam and Jonny Green. Interest declared: I did some work on this campaign in December, but I’m not sure how much of my contribution has survived – I didn’t do any of the above. It was really fun, though. If you get the chance to work at 180 I’d recommend it, although it helps if you wear a woolly hat indoors and grow a beard.)

Aside from anything else, I like the fact that they have gone somewhere different, both in style and content. After all, the usual thing here, post Good vs Evil, is to set up a weird football match of some sort. This, instead, gives us the players as heroes in a separate world of their own.

(Poster by Paul Belford at This Is Real Art).

Do come along. I’ll be sitting in H4. If you say hello I’ll buy you an ice cream at the interval.

I often cast envious glances in the direction of Hollywood.

Not just because movies are bloody great, but also because the people involved in them seem to be so much better at what we do than we are.

We often try to create advertising campaigns that are viral, multi-media, 360-degree experiences, yet that’s what movies have been doing since before the terms were even invented. Star Wars toys, Happy Meal tie-ins, posters, radio ads, trailers that people go out of their way to spread and download, personal appearances by the people involved, premieres, reviews in the editorial sections of media… The list goes on and on.

You could just take the poster, a medium in which movies beat advertising hands down. They too have to communicate several things in one simple image, possibly with the backup of a line, but they do it so much better than we do:

I think a great lesson to learn here is that economy of elements can be boosted enormously by tone of voice. People rarely seem to mention this in advertising, but the TOV of an ad can communicate as much as, if not more than, the words and pictures. You can tell what those three movies are going to be like just be taking a glance at their representative images. And those images (I mean the whole poster, by the way, not just the picture) are better than anything I’ve seen in advertising in the last year.

And they all have it: brilliantly crafted image making that distills even a shit two-hour experience into one great picture:

Some of you might wish to argue that their ‘products’ are better/cooler/more interesting than ours. Well, that’s just one more thing that movies get right.

A studio never makes a picture that doesn’t ‘work’. It may not be of great quality or to your taste, but they almost always take 120 pieces of paper, filter them through a crew of 200 and come out with something at the other end that is a coherent whole that will appeal to a minimum of a million, but probably more like hundreds of millions of completely different people across the world.

Whereas we sift through some dismal shite from one car company/detergent/snack that is much like another.

Sorry, I’ve just realised this post is going to go on and on and on, so I’m going to break it down and do it in separate chunks.

Publicis have just launched an app that allows users to feed and help a virtual homeless person.

It’s called…

Wait for it…

iHobo!

Yes! iHobo

You are supposed to help your own little homeless fella live, like he’s some kind of 2010 Tamagotchi.

The reason why I ask if it’s real is that someone’s already done it as a spoof (a cursory check on t’internet would have found that out pretty quickly).

And the name: iHobo.

We don’t call homeless people ‘hobos’. That’s what they did in depression-era America.

Besides, even if we did, it’s a pejorative term, making this kind of like creating an iSpazz app where you can help a mentally handicapped person dribble his soup a bit less, then donate to Mencap.

Odd.

(Thanks for the spot, A.)

UPDATE: it’s real, all right…

And it’s in the ‘entertainment’ category of the iTunes App store, not ‘education’.

(Thanks, P.)

Maybe it’s more of a visual pun.

I don’t know.

All I know is that is sucks the shit off a dead cow’s arse.

If I need to explain further, it smacks in the worst possible way of the utter desperation of the creative team/agency/account man at the 11th hour when everyone else refused to touch it.

‘Give them (like a gift) the chance to own the road (an actual chunk of road)’. And these recipients actually seem delighted at these chunks of asphalt. How odd. And they don’t seem all that heavy. How much odder.

It even won an award for being shit.

Congrats, all involved.

I like an ad that wears its bollocks on its sleeve.

This one has taken a big chance and I think it’s come off a treat.

Rewatchability, stop-you-in-the-pub-ability, talkability.

What more do you need?

I know Sell! Sell! put this up yesterday, but just in case some of you don’t venture to that corner of cyberspace (you should), here’s advertising at its very, very best; perfect in both concept and execution:

And here is the making of:

Changing the subject with no finesse whatsoever, I’m currently reading a book called How To Be Free by Tom Hodgkinson.

It’s an enjoyable potted philosophy on how to opt out of the demands of what I can only describe as The Man, and getting back to reclaiming your life for yourself.

The main principles are freedom, merriment and responsibility, ‘otherwise known as having a laugh and doing what you want’ (the responsibility bit refers to taking charge of your own life instead of numbly sleepwalking through a life that is most convenient for those in charge).

The reason I mention it is that I sense from some past comments on this blog that there is a degree of dissatisfaction from some of you. You bought your ticket but the movie turned out to be shit, and now you’re itching to leave but you can’t quite bring yourself to waste the money you’ve spent.

Well, I used to walk out of movies on a regular basis (I still do, but as I’ve got older I tend to choose more wisely). My friend would stay in the cinema and we’d meet up later whereupon he would ask me how I could bring myself to walk out of something I’d paid a fiver for. The simple answer was that I thought the idea of paying not to enjoy yourself was absurd and it was much better to stop the boredom ASAP and go and do something else.

Of course, my tortuous analogy is much easier than the reality of changing your career, but I urge any of you are who are unhappy to take a baby step in another direction and see where it leads. Perhaps reading the book will be that baby step.

I’m going to have another G&T and check out as many of The best movie endings of all time I can lay my hands on.