is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Saturday
Jan 21, 2006

Choosing The Final Seed: A Proposal posted by kza

So anyway, I’m assuming that what we’re eventually going to do is choose one of these ideas to be our “seed” that will eventually blossom into a brilliant screenplay that all peoples of the Earth will love and cherish for always. Although I suspect we could easily just pick one (or a group and narrow it down) very quickly, I have an idea, spurred by my love of competitions and needlessly complex rules.

Here’s how it would work: You pick 8 of my ideas that you like the best, and I pick 8 of yours, in order of preference. Your first choice will be matched up against my eighth choice, so on up the line, with my first choice against your eighth choice. There will be a series of “battles”, so that the original 16 are narrowed down to 8, then to 4, then to 2, until we finally have a winner. (Ideally, the Seahawks.)

These battles will carried out in the following manner: We will both write, as passionately as we can, what is great about both ideas, and we will both write as passionately as we can as to why each idea isn’t as good as the other. Once we have 2 pros and 2 cons for each idea, we’ll then simply choose the one we like best. If we can’t agree, then we continue to argue the merits of our favorite until one of us concedes, or someone in the forum changes the balance of the argument.

And that’s it. It would definitely stretch this Spitball! process out a little longer than it normally would’ve lasted, but I think that’s okay — I don’t think we need to hurry here. It would also give us a chance to expand on these skeletal sketches a little further, and give them more flesh and background than they already have.

Or maybe we should just pick one. What say you? Like it? Dislike it? Proposed rule changes?

Comments (0) — Category: the screenplay

What is Spitball!?

Spitball! is two guys collaborating to write about writing and collaboration. We're writing partners who have worked together since 2000, and placed in the top 100 in the last Project Greenlight for our script YELLOW.

Currently, we are both working on multiple screenplay, short story, and novel ideas independently and together, and collaborate on this blog.

What Spitball! used to be

Spitball! started as an attempt to collaborate on a screenplay online in real time. From January 2006 to July 2007 we worked on an interactive process to decide the story we were going to make. A full postmortem is coming, but you can find the find all the posts by looking in the category Original Version.

During this period, we affected the personalities of two of the most famous spitball pitchers from the early 20th Century. Look at our brief bios for more info about this, and so as not to be confused as to who is talking when.

We rebooted the franchise in early 2009 in its current form.

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Kent M. Beeson

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Kent M. Beeson (aka Urban Shockah) is a stay-at-home dad and stay-at-home writer, living in Seattle, WA with his wife, 2 year old daughter and an insane cat. In 2007, he was a contributor to the film blog ScreenGrab, where he presciently suggested Jackie Earle Haley to play Rorschach in the Watchmen movie, and in 2008, he wrote a film column for the comic-book site ComiXology called The Watchman. (He's a big fan of the book, if you couldn't tell.) In 2009, he gave up the thrill of freelance writing to focus on screenplays and novels, although he sometimes posts to his blog This Can't End Well, which a continuation of his first blog, he loved him some movies. He's a Pisces, and his favorite movie of all time is Jaws. Coincidence? I think not.

Martin McClellan

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Martin (aka Burley Grymz) is a designer and writer. He occasionally blogs at his beloved Hellbox, and keeps a longer ostensibly more interesting bio over here at his eponymous website. You can also find him on Twitter.