Desk of Amy Suto

TV writer who eats danger for breakfast

A Week in the Life: Showrunning, Writing, and Sleeping (Sometimes?)

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Since January, I’ve been inhaling coffee and painting my calendar red, as this semester has been the most insane yet: by May, I will have written 210 screenplay pages, produced over 120 minutes of the dramatic scripted TV miniseries CON, and will have met several career milestones, such as getting my first feature assignment, being nominated for a college television Emmy, and graduating from USC’s Writing for Screen and Television program (also known as the Writing on Zero Hours of Sleep program) and to top it all off still maintain some semblance of a social life.

On top of this I work two jobs — one at Verve (the Literary and Talent Agency that reps Meg Lefauvre, Colin Treverrow, and other amazing writers and directors) and the other as a Resident Assistant in Webb.

So if you see me on campus and I’m running to one thing or the next or typing furiously it’s because I’ve got to hit deadlines so maybe, just maybe, I can get some sleep — but it’s all worth it as I get to work with some of the greatest filmmakers at USC and do what I love.

amy suto con trenchcoat

which is wearing trenchcoats in 80 degree weather

A Snapshot of My Week

Saturdays and Sundays. On a typical weekend when I’m not on duty as an RA, I spend 20+ hours on set, helping keep things moving on schedule and make sure all the logistics I put into place with the help of our amazing producers and AD’s throughout the week (location contacts, crafty orders, shooting schedule, etc.) happens smoothly. On our show, we have a 1st AD who is in charge of the crew, a line producer help take care of the nitty gritty details, and us executive producers take care of all the paperwork on and off-set and deal directly with the Trojan Vision and film school administrators (and drive the golf cart!) [Read more…]

Trailers and Time Management

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The past 8 months have been filled with the creation of this television miniseries, which is airing September 10th on Trojan Vision 8.1. The series will also be available online at ConTVShow.com. If you want to know more about the series, you can read interviews on that website so I don’t sound like a broken record every time I blog about this series. Anyways, I’m incredibly proud of how the trailer came out, and can’t wait to share the series! It was a challenge to get the show made and on the air, and every hurdle was worth it.

Secrets to Time Management

Screen Shot 2015-08-28 at 7.33.36 PM

My schedule on any given week is a pretty good visual representation of a high-pitched scream: filled with meetings and mandatory events and classes and work. My to-do list isn’t a list, more of a set of grids organized by category and day of the week and urgency.

So on the occasion where I’m asked how I find the time to do X or Y, the answer is that I know how to prioritize. This entanglement of commitments can be brushed aside for the right task or person.

Prioritizing can be challenging because no one wants to sacrifice on one aspect of their life. But if you can’t figure out what you’re willing to set aside for something else, everything on your plate will suffer.Screen Shot 2015-08-28 at 7.38.38 PM

Here’s how I divide my priorities: [Read more…]

Writing 100 Pages and Second Seasons, #Scriptchat, & Passing the FBI Fitness Test

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It’s been a landmark summer filled with unexpected writing opportunities, a rollercoaster post-production process for CON, and lots of having to explain why my walls are covered in newspaper clippings, red string, and far too many color-coded notecards.

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I have 99 problems and all of them are trying to keep these notecards from falling off my wall

Jen (my writing partner) and I are also training to pass the FBI fitness test– and not because we want to join the FBI, but because we want the bragging rights for our Twitter bios. Yeah, we’re cool.

Writing Projects

This summer I wrote a play, two thirty minute episodes of a miniseries (season two of CON!), a short film for a production company, a short web series to go along with our CON marketing campaign, and some short portfolio items. The page count total is somewhere around 100, which was my goal for the summer. [Read more…]

Playing Pretend: On Set of CON and the Television Experience

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wrapcastandcrewCON TV Miniseries: Check us out on Facebook!

back row, left to right: Ashley (actress), Allison Kelly (equipment manager), Jon Pham (cinematographer), Joey Livingston (actor: Jonah), Sandy Valles (actress: Faye), Amy Suto (me, the co-creator), Eric Casalini (actor: Jonathan), Irina (supervising producer). Front Row, left: Avi Kaye (director) and Noah Suarez-Sikes (producer)

ON SET OF CON

Every week we have a quote of the day on our call sheet. My favorite was written by Irina, our Russian supervising producer: “We wrap by 5pm or else I’m sending you all to Siberia.”

On set today, we’re shooting in the TV station on campus — Trojan Vision — and we’re pretending it’s a radio station. Our Assistant Director/Associate Producer Noah walks with me through the double doors and into master control, talking about the poster he made for set design with the name of the fictional radio show “THE MILES HOUR” and how he designed it like a Russian propaganda poster as a joke, and how he can’t wait for Irina to see it. I anticipate her sending him to Siberia. [Read more…]

CON: Writing Con Artists

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conpartySo ever since the TV miniseries my writing partner Jen Enfield-Kane and I created went into production, I’ve been living that executive producer life again.

Which sounds glamorous, but in reality it’s more paperwork, scheduling, emailing, and budgeting then I ever thought I’d do in a lifetime.

tumblr_inline_nkd1pzHG9Z1r58neqexcept instead of bread being thrown at my face, it’s endless call sheets and budget invoices

The show itself is a thriller following two con artists, Iris, a lone wolf, and Jonah, the architect with a god complex, who team up to get what they need from their marks.

Jen and I split up the episodes and each wrote our own before rewriting the season as a whole, and I remember when I wrote the first episode, I was anticipating a much darker show (especially since poison and murder is my jam.) But when we were casting our Iris and Jonah, Jen and I realized that what we wrote skewed more to a buddy-cop with con artists instead of a dark drama.

We’ve still got dark elements to our show and in the classic Shakespearean genres CON is considered a tragedy, but we’ve also embraced the lighter side of our story. Like sandwich making as a contact sport and the unruly laws of grammar, or taking mysterious phone calls in dark alleyways:

11043256_10152749153331958_8046654306574661084_oI don’t know about you but I’m writing this from a dark alleyway right now [Read more…]

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