Hello! Welcome to my blog. I've futsed around with a blog at Myspace , but I've decided to chronicle the making of the first Miller & Mullet live-action DVD. Since the internet is full of all sorts of weird and wacky stuff, I thought I'd contribute with my own rantings.
Who am I? I am half of Miller & Mullet, a comedy duo based in Toronto, Canada.
So far, we've shot a 74-minute "boot camp" video, shot a 5-minute short, completed issue 1 of a comic book (with the help of a great artist named Kameron Gates), and took the comic book to the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con. Now, we're turning our attention to both issue 2 of the comic book and a self-published live-action DVD, with a return to San Diego (assuming they'll have us back...).
At this point, the project is basically a dozen first-draft scripts, most of which I've abandoned and will not polish into second drafts. In 2005, when I started writing scripts, we were aiming at filling a broadcast half-hour (22 minutes in Canada, I think 20 minutes in the U.S.) with a no-budget pilot for a sketch show starring... Miller & Mullet. The plan was to shoot 3-4 sketches and edit them down into a cohesive show. But before we started shooting, we met industry people in Toronto who told us the half-hour wasn't necessary --just concentrate on 5-minute shorts. People in San Diego told us the same thing, so our 2007 plan is to do a DVD with 4-5 5-minute shorts. The 10-20 page scripts have gone back into the trunk, and now I'm working on making the magic happen on less than 6 pages.
I started brainstorming ideas last August, writing stuff into a notebook I started carrying with me all the time (or my trusty Palm if I'm going where no backpack has gone before). Stories began to appear in my head, and I dutifully put them down on paper where most of them died quick, painless deaths (the cold light of the written word tends to spike the weaker ideas quickly, I think).
Then I got writer's block. Back when I was in college, I wrote for about 2 hours a day, making great leaps forward in my writing. I lost that daily exercise, so now I've had to work hard at getting back to an hour session 2-3 days per week. The goal is to get back to an hour a day, 7 days a week. I'm not there yet....
I've found the writing process liberating and frustrating in equal amounts. You don't have a lot of time to play with, so the diversions we're so fond of doing with the characters have gone by the wayside. There's not a lot of room for other characters, either, so the end result is the stories have to be more direct than they have been in the past. But I find that it takes me 3 pages just to set up the situation, so once I've written out the script in a rough first draft, I go back and trim the beginning down.
In the next week or so, aside from brainstorming new ideas and getting them down on paper, I'm going over the stuff I've already shown Mullet and pickign them apart to make sure I can't do things better. Checking for internal logic, making sure the writing beats are set up properly, trying to find a better setup for gags, trying to find better payoffs for gags --that's how I'll be spending my weeknights, TV be damned.
Our budget for these shorts is pretty low, probably in the $100 (Canadian) range for each production day (1 short per day is our goal), so I can't include exteriors we can't use for free or include too many characters as we'd have to feed them.
For inspiration, I've been watching the shorts I have on tape and DVD at home, like Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, etc. --mostly to see how they economized on the story and character development to fit one or two reels. These were the people and shorts that inspired me to get into comedy. They had a much better budget than we can scrounge up, but when I watch them, I'm paying more attention to how they're telling the story.
I've got a collection of shorts from the late, great Second Cine, a show that Andrew Currie ran at Second City Toronto a few years back. When the show ended, Andrew brought in a big collection of submission tapes which were eagerly grabbed as potential dubbing tapes. I haven't erased any of them, and with the mix of good and bad, I've watched a few to see what I like and don't like. My favourite shorts from Second Cine were those from HotdogBoy.
And there's Channel 101 and 102, which I visit every month to see what the L.A. and NYC videoheads are doing. I've spun 101 alumnus David Hartman's DVD a few times this week, too, just to marvel at his freaky and violent little opuses (opi?) --will I ever have excellent gun flashes like he does? I have saved a lot of favourite 101 and 102 videos to my hard drive just to watch whenever the mood strikes me. Originally, I saved just my favourites, but about a year ago, I started saving all of them, even the rejected pilots. Some I can't sit through, others have that magic to them.
It's good to study the good with the bad. I paid money to see Dude Where's My Car 2 weekends in a row (at the gone but not forgotten Eaton Centre cinemas, which cost all of $5, making the study of bad comedies cheap). I think I learn more from my own mistakes than when I succeed, and other people's mistakes are a great help, too.
We're prepping for a live appearance at the 2007 Ad Astra con here in Toronto (30-minute show to fill time before the Masquerade starts), so I've put the scriptwriting aside this week.
I think I need 4-5 new stories to add to the 7 I've already done first drafts for. Of the scripts I've done so far, "Can" is my favourite and the first one I've shown to anyone other than Mullet. Another script was actually a clone of "Can," so I've discarded it after I realized what I'd done.
So, after the Ad Astra show, it's back to finding new stories to write. Mullet is slaving away on the script for issue 2 of the comic book, so he's my sounding board rather than writing partner for the next few weeks.
It's still too cold and crappy outside to do any exteriors, so I have about a month to work on the scripts before we have to start the more commitment-heavy parts of preproduction: crew, casting, scheduling.
Keep writing,
Ed
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