Taxpayer Subsidies for Political Parties

I just published a short article about the taxpayer subsidy for political parties in Canada.

http://newsflavor.com/politics/world-politics/should-canadian-taxpayers-finance-political-parties/

I had thought that there was only the per-vote subsidy, which Stephen Harper wants to cancel. I was surprised to learn that the per-vote subsidy accounts for only about a quarter of the subsidies the government provides to parties.

When I first posted the article on Triond, they put it on a site they have for articles on travel. That doesn’t make much sense to me, so I’ve asked to have it moved. It is annoying, because I had to wait until it is moved before I could promote it. With the election underway, this could be a popular article, if I can publicise it.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

The Challenge of Creating Compelling Characters

I know I need to make the characters in my stories more compelling. I have read lot of advice on how to do that, but I haven’t found much of it very helpful.

It seems to me that most of what I read assumes that you already have an intuitive understanding of what makes people tick. I certainly don’t feel my intuitive sense of people is as strong as they assume. Someone suggested I might be mildly autistic. In engineering that can be an asset, but in writing it is a big handicap.

In my lazier moments I wish for a magic formula to create characters. Something that would say if they want “A” they will do “B”. This is quite unrealistic and in any event would be very limiting.

A common suggestion is to fill in a questionnaire about each character. The Script Lab has an example of a character questionnaire. The idea is that the more you know about them the easier it is to visualize the character and how they would behave. That hasn’t worked very well for me.

One approach that I used when I prepared The Doorman’s Sacrifice outline was to describe each characters’ thoughts as the scene unfolded. I think this would work, provided I put a lot more effort. Not only would I need to describe what they think, but also the thought process they would go through to make their decisions.

I expect that many writers must go through a similar process. While some can do it intuitively, other would need to work it through rationally. I believe I need to follow the rational path, although I fear that this runs the risk of superficiality. It is also a lot of work.

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Active and Passive Heroes

All that I’ve read about the heroes you create for your stories say they have to be proactive. That is, they need to push the story forward. The problem I’ve had with my heroes is that I want to focus on people who are unsure of themselves. While they may not be overtly in conflict, my preferred heroes are in internal conflict. I feel that this is a more realistic portrayal of people.

How can I deal with the kind of characters I want to work with, and still make them the kind of characters that people will want to read about. I do think it is possible.

I think the main problem I have is I find it difficult to portray internal conflict. Often people comment that my characters are just lumps that do nothing. In my mind there is a lot that happens with these characters, but no one else can see that. This is obviously a skill I need to develop. In writing I can always fall back to he/she thought descriptions, but since my ultimate goal is to make a film that is not an option.

In some of my recent stories I experimented with heroes whose conflicts are external. On one hand this has made me more comfortable with a different kind of character. On the other hand, I feel that they are too superficial.

Another approach I’ve thought about is to create external metaphors for the internal conflict. It is a very common approach, but one I have not really pursued. I guess part of the problem is that my inclination is to make everything literal. That is good for technical writing, where most of my experience is, but for the creative writing I do now, it just doesn’t work.

In the future I will try to create metaphors in my stories to express the character’s inner conflicts.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Mash-up Movies: Should I Let Other People Recut My Movies?

Recently I chatted briefly with a much younger person about mash ups. I’d heard the term, but never gave it much thought. While there is a range of mash-ups, they all involve the recombination of pre-existing material into something new.

I’m a bit slow sometimes, so I only just realized I had a similar idea many years ago. I think it would have been the late 1980s at a film class I took.

We talked about the future of film and I suggested that someday movies would be released to the public with all of the film shot for the movie available to the viewer. The director would provide a “program” so you could run the film the way he/she intended. But, in addition, viewers would be able to do their own cuts of the film.

I haven’t seen anyone do this with their movie yet, although I did “recut” Memento into chronological order. I suspect I wasn’t the only one to do that.

What intrigues me now is that I could do this with my own films. I have all the footage for Line of Taxis and My Most Difficult Case in digital files that I could make available. The transfers I had done for My Most Difficult Case were broadcast quality, while those for Line of Taxis were not. I only planned to use the Line of Taxi video for my offline edit. I don’t think the transfer quality would prevent it from use in mash-ups.

I am almost done the new version of My Most Difficult Case, so I’m not about to release any of that material. I would need to do a format conversion for Line of Taxis, but that wouldn’t be a big issue. How and where would I make the video available, and would I charge for it? I think that could be worked out with out much difficulty.

The big question for me, though, is: do I feel comfortable letting other people recut my film?

The advantage from my point of view is that it would draw attention to my work. Of course that would only work if people acknowledged they used my material. The main disadvantage is that people could use the material to express opinions that I disagree with. That could be a real embarrassment to me.

Give me a little more time and I think I just might do it.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

“At the Mountains of Madness”

I read recently of a plan to make a movie from H. P. Lovecraft’s story At the Mountains of Madness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness#Film

Some years ago I mulled over the story as a possible film. It was a quite unrealistic goal for me, but it was a useful and enjoyable exercise.

Several of his stories are structured as a collection of documents, such as diaries, newspaper clippings and letters. Each of the items would provide a slightly different part of the puzzle. The Call of Cthulhu is a good example of this approach.

At the Mountains of Madness does not use this structure, but I thought it might be a good way to approach the film. It would be structured like Citizen Kane or Rashomon. It would be nice if it were as good as those movies.

My idea was to start with a series of short newsreel reports of the expedition, which give the basic facts of the story, but cover up important details. Next would be a 1950s style movie which would fictionalize the story. This would be followed by a “cheap” TV style documentary, which would present a sensationalized version of the story, but still fall short of the true horror.

Finally, the film would conclude with a “real life” interview with the last surviving member of the expedition as he lies on his deathbed. In a series of flashbacks, he would reveal the actual events of the story.

I still think this could be a good way to make the movie. One of the issues stalling the proposed movie is cost. I wonder if this approach could be cheaper to make. I still like the structure. Maybe I can find another story where I can use it.

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My Most Difficult Case Project Update 2011 April 7

I was a little shocked to realize that I hadn’t done a progress update on My Most Difficult Case since last October. I’ve made some good progress since then.

I’ve “locked” the video for the film. I don’t plan to make changes to it now, so I can move on with the sound. The film now runs about eight and a half minutes. That is down from 11 minutes with the original version. The cuts make it a tighter film.

The composite shot I created of the two lawyers seemed too short for me, so I made it two-thirds of a second longer. I’d still like to remove a couple pictures on a wall in a couple shots. I tried several different ways, but none of them worked. I’m sure I could do it if I spent a lot of time on detail work, but I don’t think it is worth it.

Vildo Sturam did an animated DynamicLethargyFILMS logo for me when he did his cut. After all the file conversions I did with it, the quality was not very good, so I created a new one.

Walter Sheppard http://www.youtube.com/user/TangibleImages did a new music track for the film. He’d done a number of videos with his own music that I thought would work well with the film.

I’ve arranged for Chris James to handle the sound production. He arranged a recording session at Christopher James Connelly’s studio www.music.connellystudios.com and we rerecorded Louis Koutis’ voice over.

My current task is to review the voice over recording and decide which takes to use. Once I’ve made those decisions, I can turn everything over to Chris James to finish the sound.

I am optimistic that the final film will be ready soon.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Thoughts on Crime, Villains, and Realism

I’ve been promoting my new story The Glencoe Project this week. I have gotten some good feedback on it. It wasn’t all good in the sense of positive, but useful. 

Some people suggested that more people would find my story interesting if I added some kind of crime to the story. I suppose that would work, but then that would undermine the message I am trying to convey. I feel that a story about transportation planning can interest people outside the field. I believe there is enough human interest and conflict in transportation planning for people to appreciate the stories. I haven’t found the right approach yet, but I’m confident that it can be done.

One person thought my villain was stupid, which made it harder to see him as a real threat to the hero. I do realize that my villain is something of a cartoon. A while back I wrote the article Don't Let Your Heroes be Stupid. Maybe I need to write Don’t Let Your Villains be Stupid.  On the other hand, everything he does is based on something I saw or someone else told me about.

It is important that the villain be realistic, but what is realistic? I’ve found that just because something happens in reality, doesn’t make it seem realistic in a story. In The Doorman’s Sacrifice I have a scene where the hero meets a woman at an LRT station. I got a lot of feedback to the effect that it was unrealistic. Since I based the scene on my personal experience I didn’t agree that it couldn’t happen.  All the same, for the most recent version of the script I removed the scene.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

What Would a World with 90 per cent Unemployment be like?

I just posted What Would a World with 90 Per Cent Unemployment be Like?

 

It is some speculation about what the world might be like if some current trends continue. I wanted to explore the idea to see if there were some ideas I could use in my stories. I came up with a couple of ideas, but they haven’t inspired me to write yet.

I’ve mulled over this idea for some time, but had thought I’d just do a short blog about it. Not that the article is particularly long.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog