is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Saturday
Feb 18, 2006

Re:[2] Round Six: Rise to Vote, sir posted by Martin

It cannot be said that Reminiscence did not get its fair trial. I also vote for Time to Die.

In the end, I’m suckered in by the clarity of the action lines, and even though I didn’t totally connect with your version of Reminiscence, to tell the truth I didn’t totally connect with mine either.

This might be scary, but I’m thinking the treatments in the final heat should be at least twice as long, if not longer

I’m open, but I don’t see length as a necessarily great measurement of the expression of the idea. Sometimes, good treatments are dense and hit the high notes in short form. Also, I don’t want to totally box us in with a treatment that is the final heat winner. What I suspect, is that things will become a mixture of both of our ideas. That is, after we pick the winner, I see us re-writing the treatment more than once.

But, we’ve talked a lot about what our process is to get our idea, but maybe now we need to begin the dialog about what happens after we have it? How are we going to approach writing it? What should our process be? I would like to hear if you have any of your so-called needless, but actually fun, rules to impose on us, and let’s see if we can map the process out a bit. That might give me some more specific ideas of how I personally would like to approach the final heat and the treatments we write for it.

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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.