DIVING BOARD

                                   Screenplay by Greg Pierce

                                                                      White Draft 7/16/09

WGA Registered 2009
Ham and Armor Films


EXT. SWIMMING POOL - NIGHT

A waterless pool surrounded by a motel that looks like hurricane wreckage. On the pool's floor, a plastic, overturned deck chair. THEA and CAM stand there at the bottom, facing each other, about 10 feet between them. THEA looks like she hasn't slept in a month.

ANGLE ON: The diving board, where someone's spray-painted "cunt" and then exed it out.  

I have begun writing a sequel, which I'm calling #Saccades, because I plan on using the same three-hundred-and-sixty-degree structure and timeframe. Likewise, I also intend to make the sequel's first draft openly available, just as I am doing here, with the first book. However, I'm very interested in exploring different means of distributing the first draft of #Saccades, but that will depend upon whatever technologies are available in one year's time. Regardless, the sequel begins where Saccades ended, except for the fact that the second book begins on August 30, 2009, the night before Thea starts her junior year of high school.

Clearly, the trial and errors of the first novel and its first year online will inform the second book and second year of The Saccades Project, which could take any number of directions, designs, applications and collaborations. For example, "Diving Board", excerpted above, is a three-page screenplay that was written by Greg Pierce, based on a few images and a sketch of #Saccades's opening scene that I emailed him. I will post the screenplay in its entirety on the project blog in the near future, along with the original images and the sketch I sent, as a preview of the second book. At that time, I will also post a second image gallery, specific to the sequel, on this website

I expect #Saccades will be even more musically and visually inspired, seeing as I have begun writing the book by storyboarding, first; using Flickr and iPhoto to arrange the images I find online, anything that speaks to me; then writing in response to imagery. It wasn't a conscious decision, taking this approach; it's simply that collecting imagery for each character, the act of clicking and dragging jpegs into folders, now feels as natural to me as jotting a note on a piece of paper. Creatively speaking, I want to be ambidextrous, to move from image to text in a fluid and responsive manner.

For each book, I have already written a physical description, and I have a clear picture of Thea in my head, and yet, I see her now every day, in the images, in the faces of a thousand different girls, online. Maybe that's because I believe every girl is made up of a thousand different girls, each and every one of who are constantly questioning, changing, reinventing herself, and that's the greatest challenge of this project. After all, who in this world is more complex, more full of light and dark, than a teenage girl?