is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Wednesday
Jun 20, 2007

Time for Time To Die: Update Edition posted by Martin

For those of you who may be new here, and are too busy or lazy to read our archives (as I myself sometimes am), let’s get caught up.

Shockah and I came up with 50 story synopsis, and then whittled it down to a single idea that we are going to write. That idea was inspired by the kick-ass Charlotte Hatherley (who has just released a great new album, by the way) song called Kim Wilde. The original concept was this:

In a World where death itself is beaten by genetic regeneration, a guard is killed during a riot on the prison planet. One woman—his wife—faces sure death to retrieve his body in time to bring him back to life. It’s a race against time, with one nearly resourceless woman willfully fighting like a juggernaut against the prisoners who are holding his body hostage, and the powers that be that think she should just give up. All to simply save the man she loves from eternal death.

We talked about this idea a lot during intervening posts before it was picked the winner. A lot of that is meta-discussion, but here I’ll link to posts where we actually expand on the story ideas:

During the second heat, I expanded on the story, and named the protagonist: September Rose St. Germain.

Shockah introduced us to the antagonist James Crowley Okkervil in his second-heat expansion on the story.

Which brings us to Shockah’s rough first treatment of the story.

If you read those three posts, you will literally know everything we do about the world of the movie. Where to now? I owe Shockah, and you, gentle reader, a treatment of the script. One I had written got flushed away accidentally, so I’m starting it again, and hopefully it will be up soon. I’ve also started a new category called ‘Time to Die’ where you can track the progress from here on out, now that we have a story picked. If we’re good, we’ll also put it in the ‘the screenplay’ category, so if you’re looking at this by category, you can follow along nicely.

Free to You

Just a reminder that we’re releasing this entire thing, as well as the story ideas we’ve already written and the script we’re about to, into the public domain. This script is your script, this script is my script. Although we’re going to write the version we want, take it and remix and rewrite and do what you will. Just leave comments in the forum and let us know, would’ya?

Comments (0) — Category: the screenplay

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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

Urban Shockah pic

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

Burleigh Grimes pic

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.