I got a recent request to update everyone on the Collaborative Writing Project. There aren't too many details, but I'll oblige.
Right now I have three teams going, with each person advancing the story ten pages from where it is when they get it. My original goal was only to put eight people on each team, as once you add in my original ten pages, that would put the script's length at 90 pages. However, I had so many people interested, I decided on 9-person teams, which would give us some leeway in the event anyone dropped out.
As it turned out, that was smart. One of the teams had a person drop out due to unforeseen circumstances. Unfortunately this didn't happen until their deadline, so they fell a week behind the other two teams. This same team experienced another delay when one participant's server problems resulted in a several-day delay in delivering the pages.
At the moment, one team has 50 pages completed, one team has 60 pages done and the third team has 30 pages done. I also have four alternates standing by in the event that any of the teams drop below eight members.
At this point it's been very interesting to see how my early threads have been taken in completely different directions by the subsequent writers. When the project is done, I'll write up a post going page-by-page through my contribution and explain my thinking for the plot strands I was setting up. My goal was to open a lot of doors for people as well as imply connections between seemingly unrelated threads. That ambiguity has given the writers a lot of room to play.
As we're more or less at the midpoint, it's time to start thinking about what to do with these three scripts once they're done. I need a way to make them available for download, so that any interested parties can read and contrast them.
Also, what would make the best use of these as they relate to screenwriting lessons? I thought about trying to stimulate discussion here, but it also occurs to me that it might be a good idea to see if anyone over at the GITS Club was interested in any discussion on the three VERY different scripts that are resulting from the same initial ten pages.
There's also a very wicked side of me that is considering putting one or more of these up on Triggerstreet just to see what sort of reviews we'd get.
So sound off - what do you think we should do with these scripts once they're done?
