Uncover the Mysterious Power of the Ladybug Effect with Greg Porper – SYS Podcast Episode 535 Exclusive!
Greg Porper
So generally, I write alone, and I’m a solo writer on most of the things I write. So, to me as normal is to have a final draft document and use the alternate page, using the beat board to kind of plan things out and to write out what the different characters are doing and color coding that. I do find that helpful more so than actually a physical cork board, which I do have, and I rarely use it. I find I do it digitally. And then I use a lot of Google Docs as well to just write down notes, and then I usually go through them again and will retype certain things out and re-synthesize the notes. I have brain dumps in the Google Doc, and in the case of writing with John, that became a shared document. It was kind of easy to take this workflow and adapt it to two people. We started writing this in 2018, so this is before Zoom was a thing. John lived in Pasadena at the time, and I was in Culver City. And we were meeting at coffee shops. I know we first started talking about writing this movie at an IHOP on Wilshire Boulevard, like in mid-Wilshire. We would meet in person to kind of talk things out to the initial outline discussion, general discussion of what’s the plan going forward, bigger picture things. But then very quickly, because we both had full-time jobs and we lived on opposite sides of town, we were writing between 6 and 9 AM most days before work started, and we were doing so usually via Skype, or just we had the phone on speaker, and we were using Final Draft, using the collaborator function, which ended up being quite glitchy. And so I would be the one kind of actually making the edits, the changes, writing it, and then John would be viewing it as I was doing it, because we found that when both of us started editing, there would be a glitch, and we wanted to make sure that we always had a clean copy. So every day, or really, multiple times a day, there would be multiple drafts saved that in case there were glitches, we can go back and revert to certain versions. And in this case, we really kind of talked through scene by scene, beat by beat, line by line together. There was very rarely we went off to say, all right, I’m going to write this scene, you write that scene. A lot of times what happened was scenes that we had written together, I would go through and do a joke pass. I was very anal about making sure we need to be funny and funny, funny. Obviously, we need to tell our story, but this is a comedy, are we getting our jokes per page in? So there are times where I would then take the script and then just go through and a joke pass, and then the next time we would get on, I would say, here are the changes marked in blue, what do you think? And then he would chime in and make his edits or his thoughts, or I’d say this is great and move on. So that was kind of how that process went. Very rarely did we write in person.
