The structure of success

So, it occurred to me that I want to sit down with one of the two new screenplay ideas, and try and hack into them. I'm not in a place where I can work on the Darwin Trilogy or Willful Tragedy, as I've said I need a more solid mythic grounding for that, and I don't have the time to develop it right now. I'm also in a delicate place with regards to the memoir, so I'm a little stalled out on that for the moment. I'll work through that, it's just a thing. Clearly, I don't want to get into it.
Anyway, I was napping a little bit this afternoon, and I was thinking that instead of the process by which I've written the various screenplays and pieces in the past, that is to take a loose outline of the story as broken down into the trad. three acts, it would make more sense this time to try to really work the structure to a finer honed web than I have in the past. Usually I'll just sit down at the typer with that loose structure and see where we get to. This time I want to be more prepared before I sit down with the idea. I want to really work out all the characters, the specific scenes, get the whole thing sorted a little better than I have traditionally beforehand. It also occurred to me that I've been much to welded to the page as a way of writing. Character creation should be a much more live process than just dialogue and some slight action descriptions. In that vein I really need to get a tape recorder or a video camera to work through characters in a more live way. Cassavettes worked completely with a tape recorder. Just a reminder.