Over the weekend, I attended
Over the weekend, I attended Screenwriting Expo 2 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. It was an interesting combination of good information and useless wasted time, with that always-so-special dash of convention center food pricing thrown in.
One of the most interesting events was the Screenwriting Tournament, wherein contestants were given 90 minutes and a paragraph of specific parameters to compose a scene longhand. Scenes were scored and ten percent of them advanced to the next round, for which new scenes were written according to different parameters. The tournament was a humbling experience; I learned that I am useless without a computer and the back-and-forth writing the word processor enables. Even though my Round 1 scene was an absolute train wreck (in all seriousnessóI'm not sure I have ever written a worse scene) I advanced to Round 2. Having learned how not to write a scene, I put together something I was pretty happy with and... you guessed it... failed to advance.
Highlights included Jeffrey Gordon's Writer's Boot Camp Mini-Camp and Q&A with Aaron Sorkin. Low points included PowerPoint Gal's "Creating Your Own TV Series" presentation, which was replete with full-motion clip art and paragraphs of text she simply read from the screen.
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