Hi everyone, as I told you before, I have been working on a Pirate by Blood TV pilot for the BBC 19th April deadline. Good News, I have managed to submit the script to their portal, so hopefully I will hear from them in the coming months.
Pirates by Blood is a screenplay that I wanted to start for quite a while, so now that I have the first episode, I feel hopeful for the second. Many people helped me race to the deadline as I asked for script readers to give feedback, and to those, I say thanks.
One of my struggles was to display the different power levels of Sarah, Grace, and Richard. I wanted to show Grace as obedient to Richard, although she has a habit of speaking out of turn, meanwhile, Sarah is able to control Richard, much to his dismay. I think with the readers support, I managed to fix this issue.
Parts of my dialogue was also expositional and confusing, so I worked on trying to make this clear.
Adapting Pirates by Blood
For me, developing my prose is nothing new. I started out as a prose writer as a teenager. Back then, I didn’t know screenwriting existed. I showed my first story to my dad, he liked it but he said it read more like a screenplay. So he taught me screenwriting.
Since then, I have always loved screenwriting. It just feels natural to me. Prose is much more thinking, much more technical for me. Nevertheless, I will write my stories in prose because I feel like it is a good way to get an idea of what is happening in the story—a long treatment of sorts. It gives me guidance.
So, that’s what I did with Pirate by Blood. It is a project with many chapters and no wear near finishing. But the parts I am happy with, the beginning, were ready to be adapted.
Many readers complain that the films and TV shows miss out lots of things in books, and there is a reason for that. It is not always the time, because a TV series wants as many episodes as it can, it is about the actual ability to show that on screen.
As I wrote my pilot, I looked at my beginning chapters—Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. In prose form, I have been debating which chapter is which, and I still do, but in script form, it didn’t matter, it was episode 1.
Things I changed
The most obvious change I made when adapting my story to screenplay was the narrative. In the prose version, it is third person limited—so every scene had to have Sarah in it. But on TV, this does not work—each main character is as important as the marked hero archetype.
Pirate by Blood pilot episode opens with Jasper losing control of his ship because of some mystical force. Aware what this means, he follows the helm and we as the audience know that his direction has to do with someone called Sarah. It then cuts to a scene with Sarah, Grace and their family.
Another change was the slow pace in my prose. You can afford to be slow on prose so long as the descriptions are relevant and tell us something, but a TV series about pirates—people want the action, and they want it as quickly as possible. A lot of Sarah’s observations and broodiness was cut short, the dialogue was much more to the punch and the characters strongest personalities were introduced by their actions around each other.
I also change the order of scenes. My prose version displayed the non-linear narrative through separate chapters—it’s easier and clearer to do that in a non-linear prose, although for short passages, you can do that in the same chapter.
However, on screen, the cut between chapters is not as clear. Instead I needed to decide what would be relevant for the scene that had just unfolded.
What’s next?
Overall, I have had fun writing the first episode of Pirate By Blood. The adaptation from my prose—or as I like to call it—extended treatment went really well. I am confident that this is a strong script. I wrote it in just under three weeks, something I have had to do before, but I am pleased with it.
Here are my upcoming plans.
I am going to continue writing Pirate by Blood and see how many episodes I can complete. However, I also have some other projects on my mind.
Last year, I wrote a script I named Cast for my MA. I wanted to make it into a TV series as well but the teaching style and my learning style clashed. It clashed that much that I really struggled just to write the script, and the extra work for the TV series would probably have pushed me past the deadline. So I decided for my Masters, I would condense the script into a film. I would like to return to it and make it the TV series I know it can be.
I also have Death’s Hourglass. Like Pirates by Blood, Death’s Hourglass took the form of an extended treatment—but I have never managed to get past chapter three, purely because of the complexity of it. But I would like to explore more into this.