Writing is where I feel I'm weakest in my filmmaking skills. I think it's probably where my obsessive film watching hinders rather than helps. I become too aware of what's come before, of the tropes and stories I'm working with, and lack the confidence to subvert or freshen them up. I can come up with a decent story idea, but fleshing it out, plotting a middle and end, creating characters who actually have arcs as opposed to just being concepts or plot devices? I'm not there yet
That said, I have been involved in writing a number of screenplays in my first year at LIPA. I wrote a draft of Clean Barry as well as a draft of Narcissus, and I completed a final draft of an action/sci-fi/horror short entitled Entity for the Story Script And Authorship module. The first pages of these are below, and the full scripts are available to download.
Prior to my time at LIPA, I ran a pop culture blog entitled Hitsville U.K. Initially just working and writing by myself, I eventually opened the site up to other contributors to enable wider coverage (and to lighten the load on myself), with the pool of writers eventually reaching around thirty at its height. The blog provided invaluable experience in many fields; I taught myself rudimentary HTML in order to get the site looking and running exactly how I wanted, developed my graphic design skills to help craft the visual identity for use across social media, and designed merchandise to sell in order to pay the writers for their work. In my role as editor of the site, I quickly learned the challenges of organising a large group of disparate people, delegating and editing work, without losing their unique voices in the process. I also helped to create and edit the video content on the site's Youtube page, including interviews, performances by bands, and a monthly football vlog. The site was featured on the "spotlight" page of Tumblr (the blogging site used to host Hitsville) and reached 130,000 followers at one point. Unfortunately a downturn in financial fortunes meant I had to close the site, as I didn’t want people putting in time, work and effort for money or just for “the exposure and experience”.