Update: The 10 Quest Initiative Finalists!
If you are interested in learning the identities of the finalists for The Quest Initiative, hit MORE.
I made the choices based on the quality of each logline, my sense of the commercial viability of a script based on the story concept, as well as some other considerations including trying to get a balance of genres for the group, avoiding similarities in general subject areas, and so on. Here are the finalists:
Jordan Austin
Matzenbach, Germany
Waka Brown
West Linn, Oregon
Christian Fontenot
Seattle, Washington
Earl Hardy
Southfield, Michigan
Summer Johnson
Simpsonville, South Carolina
Troy Warren Klith
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Sandra Leviton
Santa Monica, California
Miranda Sajdak
Los Angeles, California
Barbara Thomas
Garland, Texas
Paul Wie
Fullerton, California
K. Nicole Williams
Winchester, Virginia
You will notice there are 11 writers. Sandra and Miranda are a writing duo.
Here is the schedule related to The Quest Initiative:
June 22: Information due from first round writers.
June 24: Emails to writers to set up phone call interviews.
June 25-June 28: Interviews.
July 3: Contact the Questers.
July 8: Announce the Questers.
July 15: The Quest begins! Core [Theory]: 8 weeks.
September 9: Prep: 6 weeks.
October 21: Pages: 10 weeks.
December 29: The Quest ends!
Because I know people will ask, I will not release the winning loglines to the public. If you stop and think about it, you will see that it makes zero sense to publicize them now. This blog gets a lot of traffic. There are many people in Hollywood who follow it. And there are tons of writers who visit the site. Who’s to say if I made public those loglines, someone wouldn’t grab one of the ideas, knock out a script and get it to market before the writer who originated it?
Is it likely someone would do that? No. Is it possible. Yes. What if that idea turned out to be worth millions of dollars and the original writer who came up with it got stiffed? As Max Millimeter might say, “That would suck balls.”
Now as I have indicated elsewhere, I do think I can provide some thoughts and analysis in a general way about the loglines in aggregate, as there were some intriguing trends in terms of genres and subject areas, and some aspects of logline-writing we can explore to improve everyone’s skills there. I will do that at some point in the next several weeks.
But I am not going to make public any of the loglines that were submitted for “The Quest” for the reasons I noted above.
In the meantime, start getting geared up for Go On Your Own Quest, your chance to go through the same time-frame as the Questers. While you won’t be privy to those lectures, discussions and mentoring, I will be uploading daily posts tied to where we are in the process, first Core, then Prep, then Pages.
There were dozens of writers who knocked out spec scripts last year using GOYOQ as a way to motivate them. In fact, The Black Board arose from GITS readers who were looking for a community within which to share that experience.
This year promises to be even better because The Black Board has a much larger and more active membership than 12 months ago. So if you haven’t yet joined this terrific free resource, the Official Online Community of the Black List and Go Into The Story, why not do that now?
Go here for more information about The Black Board.
Onward and upward!
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