A post from Gábor Krigler
Ever since I learned in 2014 in Berlin from a few Swedish colleagues how to set up and run what we might call the “European writers room”, I’ve been a convert. I much prefer being in a room with the writers and working together on figuring out the story together in real time, to simply giving notes and wait for them to come back with a new draft and repeat that process until we get to the same page.
You don’t need more than 3 people in the room. If they are truly professional, properly motivated and thus thoroughly engaged, the result is always going to be a lot more than the sum of their contribution. Whether it’s early development, proper scripting or revision, I believe in the team work when it comes to drama series.
Earlier this week we did a two-and-a-half-day intense session on our project FRUST. The creator, acclaimed Bosnian filmmaker Srdan Vuletic, came to Budapest to our office. We’ve been pitching the project internationally and have garnered quite a lot of interest and received some great notes from high-level people who’d read the first script and the bible. Joining us was our friend and colleague Eszter Angyalosy, former HBO dev exec and current Torino Series Lab mentor. At one point we had two trusted story editors came to the office and listened to their comments regarding the first episode.
Based on all the feedback and our own shifting perspective of the story, plot and characters, we began by exploring the core themes of FRUST in relation to all the other elements of the series proposal.
We then spent a day or so re-breaking the pilot episode, and finally whiteboarded the entire season. Six episodes, four individual storylines. At this stage it is enough to grasp the main thematic heart of each episode, and articulate the content of the story strands in the form of loglines. Based on these, Srdan will be able to rewrite the pilot and come up with a new episodic bible.
There are a lot of changes, most of them subtle, but all made with a view to make this twisted superhero origin story paraphrase into a truly unique, gently humorous take on some familiar tropes.
We’ll continue pitching FRUST after the rewriting of the pilot and the bible in a month or so, in Lille at Series Mania.
There is strong interest in the project by a powerful company in the region. Our intent is to fasttrack the scripting process in the second half of the year and hopefully set up production in the not too distant future. Watch this space for future updates on FRUST and the other Joyrider projects.