#support directors

Whenever a franchise does really, fantastically well, people always praise the directors and the actors for the amazing job they did. It's all praise this, praise that, you've pulled all of this together.

But when something does bad, when it all goes wrong, people are very quick to point angry fingers at the writers. It's your fault! You fucked it all up!

Now, believe or not, this is not a comment directed towards GoT. I don't watch it, but what I am seeing, is the aftermath of the latest episode, something that I've seen before, not to the same extent, but still there towards Supernatural.

The fact of the matter is, any show, any movie, any franchise, all has a three stage step. Pre-production. Production. Post production. Let me tell you now, in each of those stages, a very different story is being told.

Some things work well on paper, they can be read out loud and people think it's awesome, but by the time production comes around, the world begins to change. Some things aren't practical to be produced, some things actors feel in the heat of the moment are out of character, some things the directors feel out of character, some things get script rewrites because things just can't work on that particular day for whatever reason. Then, after months and sometimes year of work, it hits the editing stage, creating a whole new world and often fresh eyes for this story to exist in. They see bad acting, stiff dialogue, mistakes on screen, and all this affects what the final product will be.

This means, realistically, instead of just blaming the writers, why not blame the whole process? Writers struggle to get enough credit as it is without having all the stories blame placed on our shoulders too. Can we take some of the fault? Sure, after all, without a script, the beginnings of it all doesn't exist. But is it fair for us to take a fall because a director or production company (cough, most franchises, cough) gets too heavily involved? No.

Everyone seems to be so willing to dish out negativity to the writers as soon as things go bad, but no one seems to want to remember when things go right, when you have those special moments that just absolutely fall into place at the right time. That's the whole process my dears, all starting with the writer, pen in hand, fingers ready at the keyboard.

We can take constructive criticism like most creatives, but we also need the praise like most creatives, something that people seem to forget about and leave us in the dust. We work just as hard as the rest of the cast and crew and we need that positivity too. You want more good writers? Support them just as much as you would support an actor or director. More often than not we are forgotten names in the dust of shows and movies.

This goes for editors to, who don't seem to receive any of this at all, but they deserve just as equal recognition. As someone that's spent hours in front of a screen editing only short films, I can tell you that that stuff is hard and requires absolute concentration.

I get it, I do, you're angry, hell, when S12 of Supernatural ended, I was epically pissed, and a lot of it was poor and lazy writing, it stopped me watching the show, but I also knew that there were others making poor decisions too. It was clear that the director/s didn't really give a damn which then reflects on the acting that was given, and in all fairness, the editing was fairly lazy too. The reason why is because it's a popular franchise, they think they can get away with shit like that and they don't care as long as people watch it and it makes money.

Now, I know that the above might sound a little contradictory to what I've said, but I'm a trained screenwriter, I can usually pick up lazy story telling versus the rest, I don't want you to think that I'm just pulling this out of nowhere.

Just, and I'm kind of begging here, remember there's a whole process behind these stories, you can't point blame at just one singular group, nothing in the film and tv industry works that way. There should be support and negativity on all levels because everyone is involved. It's all a big group project that, unfortunately, you sometimes have shit circumstances in, but it's still meant to be an even playing field.