"Melodrama and sweet champagne, and a garbled plot from a scrambled brain."

I finished the screenplay a couple of weeks ago. Boy-Morgan seems happy with it. He'll have a few changes based upon the logistics of our location, but, seeing as the only one he's mentioned thus far involves changing the word "floorboard" to "baseboard" due to a carpeted foyer, I'm not too worried about jeopardizing my artistic integrity to satiate a power-crazed demagogue.

Both Boy-Morgan and I are pretty easygoing and non-buttheady, which has made this collaborative process run like a dream. The script is, I would say, about 75% Boy-Morgan's ideas--before I got involved, he already had a firm idea of the setting, the tone, and the rough plot--combined with 100% my screenwriting knowhow. I'm making that BFA in Filmic Writing work for me, one way or another.

(Off-topic: I could be wrong, but I don't believe USC's film school uses the word "filmic" in that particular degree program anymore. I think the department heads sat down and said, "Hey, you know, 'screenwriting' is a perfectly good word" and changed it. And wisely so.)

By mutual agreement between myself and Boy-Morgan, the script is under standard feature length. Once filmed, it'll probably about an hour long. This helps greatly in sticking to the "no budget" part. Too, our focus is on being clever and entertaining, and a witty script with short scenes that move at a breakneck clip is a good step in that direction.

(Also, we've both been influenced heavily by Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which clocked in at a zippy forty-five minutes. We, too, are aiming for zippy, though our film will have fewer infectious musical numbers. A shame, really.)

Here are the key things I kept in mind while penning a no-budget film:

1. Boy-Morgan is probably not going to find professional actors willing to work for free. In fact, he's probably going to bribe his friends, neighbors, and coworkers into joining the cast with promises of free doughnuts and coffee. Thankfully, we're in good shape with our prospective lead. Boy-Morgan has worked with her before on his short film, and she's exactly right for the role: energetic, smart, and adorable. Boy-Morgan also assures me she has great enthusiasm for the more goretastic parts of the film (a dip in a bathtub filled with blood and body parts will be involved), which is good news indeed.

However, the rest of the cast is a blank spot. So I planned the script accordingly. Most of the humor, for instance, comes out in the dialogue and doesn't hinge upon elaborate visual gags or crackerjack comic timing. My goal was to make the dialogue strong enough to carry the film, if necessary.

2. The bulk of the film is set in one location--an apartment building--with a couple of additional small scenes that aren't terribly location-dependent. Boy-Morgan could, if desperate, shoot them in his own living room or on the sidewalk in front of his house.

3. Since budget is always a priority, I avoided writing scenes requiring hard-to-find props or tricky special effects (though I did include a disappearing-into-thin-air scene which already has Boy-Morgan tearing out his hair. Here is the fundamental difference between Boy-Morgan and myself: he actually cares about making stuff like that look, y'know, convincing. Whereas, as anyone who has seen the student films I made at USC knows, I myself do not.)

It's been a cool experience, writing a horror film, though I've discovered this genre might not be my strong suit. As you might expect, the vast majority of our characters meet brutal ends, and damn it, I like these characters. I spent some time instilling life and personality into each one; I felt guilty about turning them into pulp. If I could have somehow written that rare horror film in which everybody lives, I would have. But I suppose that would have completely defeated the point.