My career began in London as a theatre director staging an impenetrable existentialist play in the backroom of a pub to an audience of an old man and a whippet on a string. Not the most auspicious start. To be honest, I suspect he got lost looking for the Gents loo, but I was too overcome with gratitude to ask, and by Act 2 I couldn’t bear to wake him - or his dog, for that matter.
Undaunted by these less than promising beginnings, I remained fascinated by telling stories using stage pictures and words and connecting with an audience of humans and occasional canines.
I graduated to larger pub backrooms and then theatres with screwed-down seats and audiences larger than the cast. I remember being exhilarated by the audience's response on those occasions when images and words came together with the perfect ‘ting’ of a flicked champagne glass.
The fascination with stories told in words and images led me to focus on screenwriting, and I became a TV scriptwriter after writing some short film scripts, which a BBC editor fortunately fished out of a bin when hunting for scrap paper. Then another unexpected turn in life gave me the chance to move to the US, which led me by a circuitous path to becoming a Producer/Writer in unscripted TV where I discovered that stories about real people were just as powerful.
Seeing a connection between telling TV stories that focused on real world problems and solutions, and still chastened by the underwhelming marketing of my first foray into the world of communication arts, I felt that copywriting was an avenue of storytelling I urgently needed to explore.
So this is what I do now: I use my storytelling skills in scriptwriting, producing and copywriting to tell meaningful stories in bold and singular ways, and I have an old man and a whippet to thank for it.
SOME WAYS I COULD LEND A HAND ON YOUR PROJECT:
SCRIPTWRITER
I can write scripts in many different voices and styles, short form, long form, dramatic, humorous on a good day, dark and existentialist on a bad one. But above all, I’ll give every script meaning and emotional resonance
COPYWRITER
I drill down to the core of the problem and conceptualize striking approaches to solve it. Does the idea have legs? Can it be multi-platform? I will hack my way through a jungle of ideas to find out, but I’ll take a compass.
PRODUCER
Nothing beats collaborating with a team of fellow creators - put it down to my theatre directing background working in the trenches (and I’ve been in some sweaty, claustrohobic, smoke-filled ones.) It means I can direct and run a production and know a thing or two about editing, camera and sound beyond the on/off button.
marcusdanielgoodwin@gmail.com (206) 276 0746