The wonderful world of scripting by Kris Tearse

I had the fortune of hooking up with Rhys (ZU Director) not long after a project of my own burnt down in flames due to the great British weather and other niggling issues. I think it worked in our favour with ZU as I was able to bring a slightly pessimistic and realistic mind to the table, with knowledge on how not to make a movie! This combined with Rhys’s energy and optimism works well I think. I originally joined as Assistant Director but ended up taking up script writing duties as although the original script was quite fun, it was unrealistic in terms action sequences and props we would need. So after 6 weeks of getting home from work and sitting in front of my pc until 12ish I finally managed to get the first draft done – 5 drafts later and we had something that finally resembled a script! Originally we were looking to shoot this as a feature film but then decided podcasts would be a good way to promote the movie (I have to say I had a really fun time taking the script from 90 pages down to 65 pages and then converting the script into podcasts – it was a testing time!)

We tend to edit the script as we do each shoot. I guess when I write lines it’s easy to imagine how I’d say it, but obviously this isn’t necessarily how somebody else would say it so the script gets changed. I’m not precious with the script. As long as I can see the amendments I’m generally quite happy with cast members changing lines to suit. My advice is: do not write a script if you’re not prepared to allow people to pull it apart – it will happen! So far we’ve filmed the majority of the first 4 podcasts and should hopefully have the majority of the 4^th podcast dialogue finished by the weekend.

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