By Kathy Fedori
Chris Jones asked during the live streaming of the Festival, “Do we have you in a bunker in Israel?” and indeed Julie Gray left Hollywood behind a decade ago.
The author of Just Effing Entertain Me and the new audio book, The True Adventures of Gidon Lev, now finds herself creating, writing and recording in a bomb shelter in her building in Tel Aviv.
Her message was to bunker down and create a new reality for your work. Her approach: to widen the net for story assets with alternative media platforms like she has done with the rascal Gidon’s story.
Here are three gems from the evocative look at what is now easily available for stories that may have been forgotten.
Are you sitting on gold?
Julie asserts that widening the net so old stories can land in new places is what’s hot right now. Those heartfelt screenplays tucked away in your bunker, the ones tabled on the brink of production, are today’s new media hidden treasures in our multi-platform universe. Shake off the dust… they are worth their weight in gold.
Screenplays are often seen as having a binary lifespan. They’re either made or they’re not. If they’re not, no one reads your story. But we need a shift in thinking now. “It makes me crazy, the value that screenwriters are sitting on,” Julie says. “The world needs your stories more than ever.”
Reformat what you got.
Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev is a very important person who came into Julie’s life, touching her heart with his story of resilience and joy, so much so that she spent four years researching and writing his story. She was about to publish when COVID-19 stopped the presses.
With a gem that was too rich to leave on the shelf, her idea of re-purposing content began. Earbuds and audio recording equipment in hand, she headed down to her building’s bomb shelter to record his story and the audio book of The True Adventures of Gidon Lev was born.
In production, she mimicked development for a manuscript, slotting stories into categories and chapters. She tweaked the scenes as needed to make them more entertaining, then started recording.
If you have an asset you want to get to an audience, let go of the pages and summarise your concept into a professional two-page treatment, not a script. Then figure out what platform you could shift it to.
“Think about your own habits to find a platform. You might enjoy folding laundry while listening to an audio book,” she added. Doing this will see you sharing what you want others to relate to and ensuring that your content is relevant today.
There is nothing you can’t do right now with a little Chutzpah!
Resourcefulness is something we all need right now. In Julie’s case, she put out a call for assistance in recording in a bomb shelter and with that the miracles with top talent began. Gidon’s voice was a bit too frail so she needed an actor to play his role… a seasoned LA actor jumped in.
Through a contact at Women in Film she connected with Hollywood’s Vickie Sampson (Pirates of the Caribbean) who went on to design her sound. For music, she used low cost solutions from ACX Audio Creation Exchange, The Podcast Host, Envato, Audio Jungle, and Creative Commons.
Now she has a spin off property, just as impactful as the original story as we experienced ourselves when treated to a few minutes of the production.
I left this session totally inspired by Julie’s gutsy risk taking and her ability to put her wholehearted passion into taking the story apart and rebuilding it into something new. I was blown away by the thought of new possibilities, reaching unexpected audiences, and by the simple realisation that we can share what was lost and now found with the world.
My commitment to the World is that everyone has a spectacular life … with every breath, in every scene … to the very last breath. Tenacious and occasionally charming, I create authentic glimpses into bright stories for the screens and pages from the wild west of Canada.
