The video below marks our return to the regular updates format, as well as my montage of cell phone videos from the past year.

The only really good community-oriented YouTube idea I ever came up with is the Camera Phone Clean Up. Every spring--'cause that's the time for spring-cleaning--it's time to purge the camera-on-our-hip of video clips and find out what we thought was worth documenting within the last 12 months. The advent of high quality camera phones has obviously lead to more people shooting video then ever before, but it also serves as a very personal statement of what draws your interest. According to my camera phone contents as seen in the update's montage, for me that consists mostly of my wife, quirky things we come across, dramatic landscapes, fun with friends, and, I guess, squirrels--which I think just indicates how much time I spend looking out windows.

Then I ask everybody in the community to do the same. Either edit it together or choose their favorite clip they find in their phone and post it as a video response. I get a bunch of great stuff and post a few of my favorites here. Side note: I'm biased toward the first clip in particular. It's my wife's first YouTube upload and features our cat, my sister, and her husband. Onto the camera phone clips:

Thanks for reading and participating this year.

TRAILERS...FOR YOUR SCREENPLAY?

Our mission is to provide tools that can help you become a successful artist. In this series we hope to illuminate different aspects of the business you are in and make it a bit easier to climb up the career ladder.

And remember, the FINAL DEADLINE for the WRITING & PITCH COMPETITION is May 24...4 DAYS.

The video below is the last of the Cinematic Study Guides for now. Next week it's back to the PoPS updates until Episode 7 comes out.

One of the standard tools of YouTube audience building are collabs. Collabs, I'm sure you'll be hyper-shocked to find out, are the abbreviated form of saying collaboration videos. You find someone else on YouTube with similar interests or a similar style of content and you collab…orate. Usually without being in the same place. You each shoot your individual parts and the person who suggested the collab has to edit everything together, it goes up on their channel, and both channels promote it in the hopes of fostering audience crossover and growth for both channels. BOOM.

These can be hard to organize. People are super busy. The more subscribers they get the busier they get. I recently tried to get a collab going for a Cinematic Study Guide and though the folks I reached out to said they were up for it, our schedules never aligned.

I've used the spirit of the collab in PoPS newscasts. In episodes 4 and 5, whenever a newscast comes on, those are other YouTubers appearing as newscasters and witnesses. I think they all did a great job, but I also think it's hilarious the way the microphones keep changing. I don't know why that's so funny to me. I've been able to arrange some fairly prominent cameos thanks to the help of my buddy Craig using his clout to reach out to them. I also had contact with an author I'm a big fan of, J.A. Konrath, he's at the forefront of the e-books movement and has made a lot of money through self publishing and speaking out against the parts of traditional publishing he has a problem with. I sent him an email asking him to be a lynchpin character in episode 7. He said he'd do it if I would agree to a rewrite he did on his character. He did a hilarious rewrite that enabled it to be more of a crossover with his social media persona and I loved it, it was just too much of a departure from the series so that was another collab that didn't work out.

Several times I've agreed to be part of collabs where I wasn't entirely pleased with the end results. Interactions like that leads to many people distrustful of sending footage in to any collab. But here are a couple of examples of collabs that I think are great.

Thanks for reading!

THE SPEC MARKET

Our mission is to provide tools that can help you become a successful artist. In this series we search for articles that can illuminate different aspects of the business you are in.  This week we are bringing you Scott Myers' take on the Spec Market from his great blog GO INTO THE STORY more at: http://gointothestory.blcklst.com/

And remember, the EXTENDED DEADLINE for the WRITING & PITCH COMPETITION is May 24. If you rushed to beat the Late Deadline, we'll accept revisions up until May 24...more time to refine and submit your great work.

The Business of Screenwriting: Everything you wanted to know about specs. (part 6)

March 21st, 2013 by Scott Myers

Spec scripts, that is. I’m guessing that perhaps 90% of the people who follow this blog at some point in their lives will write a spec script. And the other 10% are involved in buying and selling them. In light of that fact, last year I interviewed a top manager and some Hollywood screenwriters about the ins and outs of what is involved in bringing a spec script to market. I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to do something with that inside information, so when Vanity Fair recently came out with this article — 'When the Spec Script was King' — a decent piece, but pretty surface level, I figured this is as good a time as any to dig into the subject in a comprehensive fashion.

In Part 1, we looked at the genesis of the spec script in Hollywood from 1900-1942.

In Part 2, we covered the emergence of the spec script market from 1942-1990.

In Part 3, we analyzed the boom, bust, and back again of 1990-2012.

In Part 4, we surveyed the buyers, both major studios and financiers.

In Part 5, we examined the screenwriter-rep relationship in terms of developing a spec script.

Part 6: Rolling out a new writer's spec script

There are multiple ways in which managers and agents take out a spec script, but when it involves a new writer, there can be an additional value in going wide. Check out these observations from Chris Fenton, literary manager and producer of H2F Entertainment from an interview I did with him:

It depends on the script. We’d like to have something that works for both the studios and the financiers, a script that could be a big blown-out studio movie as well as something a little more constrained that can work for financiers with smaller budgets. If we have something like that, I want to introduce that writer and their script to everybody in town. I want to create excitement around a piece of material, make sure the tracking boards are covering the project, and try to get it out to 120 producers, get everybody reading it. Because you never know what can happen with a good piece of material and the right producer. Maybe it doesn’t sell, but it gets that producer thinking about another assignment, creates an opportunity for the writer that way, too. Bottom line the spec market is a fantastic way for getting a new writer to be read.

A lot here. Let’s  unpack it:

* First and foremost, everything depends on the script. As Chris said elsewhere in our conversation, “It’s super important for us to be very critical and have a high quality control when it comes to representing writers because every time we sell something, that makes it that much easier to get everybody to read our next writer client and their script, and read them fast to try to make another sale.” This underscores what we discussed in Part 5: No script goes out until it’s ready.

* The desire for writers to craft material that can be sent to both sets of buyers — the major studios and independent financiers — is understandable. As discussed in Part 4, the odds of a deal are much better when dealing with 50-75 buyers than no more than 9 major players. The subtext here is that writers would be wise to don their producer’s hat when conceiving, developing and writing a spec script, one that is cognizant of budgetary issues. If you write a script that can only be produced for $100M or more, you seriously reduce the pool of buyers. If, on the other hand, you create a script that could be made for $30M, but if a major studio wants to step in and lay in all sorts of special effects and set pieces, then you have two sets of buyers.

* 120 producers or whatever the number, the goal here is to get a writer and their material maximum exposure. All it takes is one set of eyeballs to get the script, to become its champion. Moreover, as Chris noted, producers are involved in multiple projects. Perhaps they like what you’ve written and have another script in development they can plug you into. And yes, Hollywood players are in a constant state of motion, moving from this gig to that, that gig to this. Exposing a writer to as many producers and studio execs as possible may not translate into anything specific in the present. On the other hand, if a writer can make connections with multiple players, that increases the odds that at some point in the future, the writer’s name will arise in relation to another project.

* “The spec market is a fantastic way for getting a new writer to be read.” The meaning of that is simple and plain, and should encourage each of us — aspiring screenwriters to professional screenwriters. There is nothing quite like a spec script in terms of its potential to introduce a new writer, redefine an established writer, reawaken the career of a floundering writer, and generate enough heat to translate into a writing assignment or an actual sale.

Next week: Another installment in this series.

The Business of Screenwriting is a weekly series of GITS posts based upon my experiences as a complete Hollywood outsider who sold a spec script for a lot of money, parlayed that into a screenwriting career during which time I’ve made some good choices, some okay decisions, and some really stupid ones. Hopefully you’ll be the wiser for what you learn here.