Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Helen RY Sun & Laura Malatos. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Helen and Laura, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential?
LAURA: I’ve always been really into the arts, so growing up I did a lot of community theater, took writing classes, and went to filmmaking camps. Even though I didn’t know the craft of screenwriting at the time, that early foundation really helped build a love of story and taught me so much about exercising your imagination. I also had some really amazing mentors who were so dedicated to their craft and to teaching and gave me the confidence to pursue film professionally. There’s such a jump though going from prose and short film writing to pilots and features, and from making films in your backyard to making full-scale productions, so a lot of the craft I learned in and mostly after college. At USC, I didn’t take many writing courses cause I was mainly focused on production. But near the end of college was when I realized I wanted to be a screenwriter, and that was the same for Helen as well so we dove into learning everything together.
HELEN: Yeah, I think I wanted to be a producer since I was very little. I didn’t totally know what that meant but I was very organized and all about business. I first landed in the music business because that felt like the right balance of hustle and art but then at USC I got to be on film sets a lot and realized that the pacing of a film set suited my personality a lot more. I ended up going to grad school for film producing, where I got to be on sets even more and got to really shape my run-and-gun producer experience into a more formal Hollywood-friendly approach.
LAURA: Yeah, and since committing to screenwriting, podcasts have been a huge resource. We started out listening to Paper Team hosted by Alex Freedman & Nick
Watson – they’re both earlier on in their careers and it’s such a valuable perspective because they know exactly what it’s like to work your way into the business right now. We also listen to The Screenwriting Life with Meg LeFauve and Lorien McKenna. It offers a lot of insight into the craft and business of screenwriting but they also focus a lot on the emotional life of being a creative and offer really personal perspectives, so I’d highly recommend if you’re someone pursuing screenwriting or curious about that world.
HELEN: Yeah, podcasts definitely kickstarted everything for us. I would honestly go as far as to say that other than physically writing as much as we can, these podcasts have taught us almost everything we know about the craft. But we also owe a ton of our growth as writers to Script Anatomy. They’re a screenwriting school based in LA but since a lot of classes are conducted on Zoom you can take them from anywhere and it’s a really flexible program. They have all sorts of classes and workshops where established TV writers teach you how to write and polish your scripts, and a lot of students go on to place in competitions and fellowships.
LAURA: The first class we took there, was actually where we developed the outline for the script that got us into the Blacklist x WIF Episodic Lab. The class was so pivotal in understanding story mechanics and structure and once we sat down to actually write the script after taking the class it just felt like we were really set up to succeed. And we’re still friends with some of the people we’ve taken classes with and having that community of writers is so helpful to stay motivated and keep learning from each other.
Love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourselves to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations.
HELEN: We’re a writing-filmmaking duo based in LA but we were actually born 5,000 miles apart, with Laura hailing from Seattle and myself from literal Moscow, Russia. We ended up meeting at USC, and have lived together ever since. That’s also where we started working together.
LAURA: Helen was doing marketing at Vans Warped Tour and working in artist management with different artists at the time, and coming from film it was a world that was totally new to me and I was super intrigued by it and impressed.
HELEN: I think we were both generally impressed by one another, cause at the time Laura had already been featured in a ton of big film festivals and was doing commercial work and it film was this equally enthralling world from my point of view. And in talking to eachother we found we really aligned creatively so we wanted to find a way to collaborate which is how we first arrived at making music videos. Our first project was featured on Country Music Television and in Rolling Stone magazine, and I think that’s when we really saw a future together as production partners – like that’s when it started feeling like a real career pursuit for us.
LAURA: It felt like a lot of things were clicking into place but then COVID was a bit of a bump in the road production-wise and we started focusing more on writing instead. And once we started writing together we kind of started doing everything together and seeing that as the long-term joint career plan: from writing screenplays to music videos and shorts to social media marketing consulting. It’s all been a really fun and kind of unhinged ride. At one point we found ourselves transforming our living room into an
underground bunker and then two months later we were staging medieval fights in the California mountains all while becoming skincare influencers.
HELEN: Yeah, and then in March of 2023 we were accepted into the 2023 BLACKLIST X WIF Episodic Lab and the 2023 WIF Fellowship which is really what has set up our career as screenwriters to the next level.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
HELEN: As for many, COVID was a major pivot for us. Like a couple of months before the shutdown, we just started getting real heat for our music video work. It felt like all the moving pieces were coming together to truly make production our full-time career. But then the moment all production stopped we knew we still wanted to have that consistent creative outlet that we couldn’t get on film sets anymore.
LAURA: Of course, at the time we thought this new creative outlet only had to carry us over for the next “couple of weeks” of the shutdown. But we basically started working on a web-series idea that I had back in college. It was this comedy called “DOOMED” about a group of friends getting stuck in a bunker. Helen and I started talking more about what this could be like as a series and then before we knew it we were assembling a virtual writers’ room to write a full season of it. I think we were all so pressed for a creative outlet at that time in lockdown that it just came together so seamlessly.
HELEN: Yeah, and at the time we still thought we would just shoot the series at the end of the shutdown, which kept getting postponed further and further, so all we could do was hone in our writing skills with this series. I think eventually we realized just how much we liked writing together and we really dedicated ourselves to learning the craft.
LAURA: Then a mentor of ours told us to make “DOOMED” into a half-hour sitcom instead of a 10-minute web series so we could actually sell it. We followed that adivce, and then in the summer of 2023, we finally got the cast together and shot the pilot, which has since secured a broadcast spot on UK’s KMTV, Sheffield Live!, and NVTV as well as a streaming spot on Roku.
HELEN: Yeah, that project is so near and dear to our hearts mostly for being this launching pad for our writing careers and really showing us how fun the writing process can be.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
HELEN: I think it isn’t lost on us how crazy it is for other people to get invested in something that used to be just yours. Being writers and filmmakers, we often get to see our projects from the first idea to seeing it on the big screen. And it’s completely baffling to see a silly idea that we had, clever jokes that only we thought to be funny and vision that only we had in our heads capture others in the same profound way. For our cast and crew to be laughing with us and stand behind the projects that we make together and feel like they are theirs as much as it is ours.
LAURA: Yeah, we feel so grateful to be sharing our artistic endeavors with so many others – that’s by far the coolest thing about filmmaking – just how much you share the joys and responsibilities of any project with dozens of others. I think we felt that the most with “DOOMED” actually. We started writing and casting back in the summer of 2020 but we weren’t able to film it back then because of the restrictions and we only ended up starting production 3 years later. Back in 2020 though we were still doing table reads and socially distant rehearsals so we really got to bond with our future cast even then. And then our cast stuck with us through all those years until we were ready to film.
HELEN: That was really so special. I think on set you could feel the energy being so strong and people (seemingly) having so much fun. We’re trying to sell the full series right now and we’ve only filmed the pilot episode so far but the actors keep coming back to us with so much love and pride for that project, antsy to film the rest of the series. That has just been so surreal to have our original material be so important to our colleagues that they would invest months of their time, effort, and talent to make something that was so dear to us.
Contact Info:
- Website: createdbytheduo.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/helen_ry_sun/ || https://www.instagram.com/lauramalatos/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheWritingDuo
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@createdbytheduo