County Line Screenplay - Pt. 1 - How a binge viewing of "The Conjuring" series led me to write a TV series.

Standing in for the bride and groom at a wedding this past season

For the past year and some change, I've been shooting weddings. Ask any photographer or videographer if they've ever shot a wedding and they'll say "I hate doing those, but they pay the bills". They can be long, 10-15 hour days and are often times repetitive. I find myself "phoning it in" with the same catalog of shots that I've created across the span of tens of weddings.

On October 21st I shot a wedding and expressed my desire to create something narrative to the second shooter. I had made a feature-length film in 2012 called "Milk Mustache" but hadn't done anything of that scope since.

Still from Milk Mustache

The day before I was on the tail end of a cold so I found myself burning through the films of "The Conjuring" series. I'm as big a horror film as the next IMDB lovin' guy, but horror isn't my number one preferred genre (I grew up a huge Lord of the Rings fan, so I love getting transported to other, well-thought-out worlds). One thing that struck me was how they each ended on a relatively positive note. The heroes save the day, the color palette warms and the family is happy.

I pitched an idea to the second shooter where the protagonist is a Priest with little faith, and the opening scene is him fleeing what is now essentially a crime scene after an exorcism gone wrong. He liked the idea, thought that was an interesting character to explore and by the end of the wedding we had come up with an outline for the pilot in between drunken best man speeches and catching shots of kids dabbing.

Milk Mustache took me and my old roommate the better part of a year to write. For this project, I challenged myself to write the pilot (45-55 pages) in 2 weeks.

To Be Continued.