Pipestone Flyer
Vol 15, Issue 12, Leduc - Wetaskiwin Pipestone Flyer
A horse walks into a bar and orders a drink. The bartender looks at him and asks, why the long face. Okay, lets all have a collective groan. Not one of my best jokes but for the moment it serves the purpose. Let's try another one.
A duck walks into a store and says, "Give me some Chapstick. The clerk says, "How are you going to pay for that? Oh, just put it on my bill.” Okay one more and then I will get to my point.
This guy walks into the doctor's office with this big white duck on his head. The doctor looks up and says, "Yes, sir, can I help you?" And the duck says, "Yeah, can you get this guy off my butt?"
Now the most logical question would be why am I tormenting my reading audience with rather dumb cheesy jokes. Anyone who knows me well is aware I can drop a really bad joke with the best of them. While these jokes are dumb and rather tasteless, t from those jokes ideas can spring forward. Like why is a horse walking into a bar to order a drink? Does the horse have an owner that takes him to the bar and that person has died but the horse still shows up for his drink? Or maybe it is two college students wearing a horse costume and they are trying to play a joke on the bartender?
Or in the case of the duck maybe he does have an account at the store and the guy behind the counter is new and does not know this? The bigger question would be why is a duck or horse doing things they could not be doing in the first place.
For any inspired screen writer they would look at these jokes and sometimes ideas would spring forward. Or they would be driving down the road and an idea can come right out of the blue and now you have the makings of a great movie. The reason I am bringing this up is because every April there is a writing event that takes place called Script Frenzy. To quote right from their website at scriptfrenzy.org; it is an international writing event in which participants take on the challenge of writing 100 pages of scripted material in the month of April.
There are no prizes, no fee to participate but you do get all the glory if you do write 100 pages in 30 days.
I have taken part in the event twice now and can say it was probably one of the best and most challenging experiences I have had as a writer. The joy of taking part is, after you have finished writing your masterpiece is you have something that could potentially become a movie or TV show. We live in a 5000 channel universe and they need new material to feed that beast.
Also consider the CRTC requires all broadcasters in Canada to provide original Canadian programming as part of their license requirements. So there is always demand for good screen plays and TV scripts. Half the battle for me is doing the actual writing. When I was a full time reporter sitting down at night to do more writing after pounding the keyboard in the daytime was about as appealing as listening to Yoko Ono sing. The neat thing about Script Frenzy is you have a deadline, goal and all kinds of support services available on there website. They also have something for novel writing that takes place in November but I will talk about that in future columns.
The beauty of this is you are not limited to any one type of format. You can write screen plays, stage plays, TV shows, short films, comic books and graphic novel scripts, adaptation of novels or anything else you want to write. This could be a script for an existing TV show, maybe someone could actually write an episode of Doctor Who that makes sense.
So if you have ever thought you had an excellent idea for a screen play or watched the latest Hollywood block buster and thought a monkey with a typewriter could have done a better job then here is your chance to experience that. Go check out scriptfrenzy.org and lets see what words hit the page.