Joe Avella's Page

From the LA Times Business section: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-neil8-2009sep08,0,3168538.column

For reasons known only to the pop-culture gods, IKEA -- the Swedish retailer of cheap, lingonberry-flavored furniture and other shinola -- has suddenly become a ubiquitous presence in the ether. Example: in August, when the 2010 IKEA catalog came out, people went utterly bonkers because the designers had changed the print font from the familiar Futura to Verdana -- an esoteric difference,… Continue

Sorry for the lack of updates, I’m moving this week. Got to put all my props, wigs, lights and other useful film making junk in boxes. Haven’t had a lot of time to work on the script, but I’m a little ahead of schedule anyway. Here’s a few thing about casting and locations I’ve been keeping in mind while writing:

Casting: While writing the script, I’ve had specific people in mind for various parts. Some I had in mind at the begin… Continue

There are a million books about film making. Yes, one million. Exactly 1,000,000.

What all those million books about film making, writing, directing or whatever have in common is they are all useless. Sorry to be a dick about it. Reading several books about any artistic craft, I feel, is “paralysis by analysis”. Put that shit down and go do it!

(...and now I enter hypocrite town)

I have, however, come across a few that I think are pretty good. These books have inspired me to make films. Speci… Continue

Writing a full length script is incredibly daunting. A rule of thumb: 1 script page roughly equals 1 minute of the film. A 110 page script? I’ve never written anything that long. Sounds gigantic.

I need to make this easier, less scary, and manageable. To start, I wrote out a list of all the beats to the film. Start to finish. Then I narrowed it down, combining and deleting most of them, to about 17 parts, and divided them into 3 acts.

… Continue