Issues in Transportation Planning #1: What I Want to Say

My goal is to make a film about transportation planning. There are many things I want to accomplish with the film. This is the first of a series of blog posts about what I want to say about transportation planning in the film.

I worked for many years in transportation planning, mostly in modelling and forecasting. It shouldn’t be any surprise that this is the area where I have the strongest opinions. It is also, I hope, the area where I most know what I am talking about.

In an earlier on-line article I talked about the problems between transportation modellers and transportation planners. See Transportation: Planners Versus Modellers. A good story has some conflict and I see a lot of conflict in this relationship.

Another on-line article I wrote, A Review of "Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail - and Why We Believe Them Anyway", is not so directly related to transportation planning, but does talk about some of the limitations of models and forecasts. I want to explore this issue in more detail, in large part because I have a strong belief that even flawed models can be valuable if used correctly.

I looked at the political side of transportation in my blog post Transportation Infrastructure as Status Symbol. Many times I’ve heard people complain about political interference. My thought is that one person’s “political interference” is another person’s “democracy in action.” The relationship between the technical sphere of transportation planning and the political sphere can be very complicated.

In preparation for writing my film, I started to write a series of short stories. So far I have only finished and posted one, The Glencoe Project: A Transportation Planning Adventure Story. I thought it was a good start, although I do realize that the villain was a bit over the top.

I’ve done outlines for other stories, but have only started on one other, The Gladstone Barrier, which has some of the same characters as The Glencoe Project, but they work in a traffic engineering office. This story is a prequel to The Glencoe Project. I have a first draft of the story and hope it will be ready to post in the next couple of weeks. I’ll post updates on this project on my blog. A list of related posts can be found at http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog/?cat=17

I would like to get feedback from people. I want to ensure that people who work in transportation planning will feel that my work is a realistic portrayal of the field. I also want to find out what aspects of transportation planning are of interest to people who are not transportation planners.

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

Faltering Steps Forward on Two Stories and a Film - 2011 June 26

The Crying Woman

I did a little writing on The Crying Woman this week. I’m about a quarter of the way through the first draft. I haven’t really filled in the outline yet. I have done most of the easy stuff. My original plan was for a film similar to Before Sunrise. I’ve decided to do it as a short story first.

The idea is for a long conversation. It is a challenge for me to do that. I want to maintain interest for the audience so I need characters they can have empathy for. I think I’ve got two good characters that change in the course of the story. They also both have secrets that they may or may not reveal.

I am stuck on what they will talk about. I know the general thrust of what they want to say, but for most of the story they talk around what they really want to say. I need to come up with topics that allow them to say what they want to with out actually saying it. I did that in the part I’ve written and I think it worked well.

The Gladstone Barrier

I got the first draft of the story done this week. I’ll need to revise it quite a lot though. Overall it is longer than I want it to be, but the last part of the story is shorter than I want it to be.

It has been a hard for me to write it. Partly it is because I draw on some personal experiences. I’ve done that before in other projects, like Line of Taxis, but I usually find a way to distance myself. This is much closer to me.

While I wrote it I started to apply some of the techniques I’d read about writing dialogue. As a result, some of the early parts of the story are really in a different style. I think I’ll need to toss some of the early parts out and rewrite from scratch.

$100 Film Festival Film

In 2012 the $100 Film Festival celebrates its 20^th year. Melanie Wilmink at the CSIF contacted me about making another film for the festival. I hadn’t planned to do that again, but since I have 800 feet (244 meters) of 16mm film in my fridge I decided I’d give it a shot.

I got in touch with Howard Horwitz, who was one of the other filmmakers in the first festival. We agreed to collaborate on a project. We’ve come up with some ideas and I expect that as we progress the project will evolve. I used a similar approach when I made The Fence.

This week I started to get ready to shoot some film. I contacted the Niagara Custom Lab in Toronto about to make sure I could get the film I have developed and printed. I got a bit of a scare, until I realized that I’d sent them the wrong information about the film I have. Next week I’ll be in to the CSIF to talk about equipment. I plan to shoot a test roll first. It has been a long time since I last shot film.

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

Thinking Creatively

I posted a new article this week about creative thinking. How to Think Creatively

The idea came to me because I was frustrated with the difficulty I had with a couple of my stories. I know I can be creative, but there are times when I can’t come up with anything if my life depended on it.

I thought about the times when I was successful and looked for patterns. I identified several techniques that I can use. The most important is to make the effort. The idea may come to you in a flash, but if you haven’t prepared yourself it never will.

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

Transportation Infrastructure as Status Symbol

I won’t name names since every city will have its own examples.

When I first began to work as a transportation planner I wondered why some projects were ever even considered. I thought that they could not be justified on strictly economic grounds. Even so, these projects had broad public support.

The explanation I came up with was that the projects were status symbols. It was like a person who bought an expensive car when a typical econo-box would have served their needs quite well.

It got a little more complicated later when some of these projects turned out to perform much better than I thought they would. In retrospect they could be seen as visionary. They couldn’t be dismissed as just status symbols.

More recently there was a lot of controversy over a particular bridge. The debate focussed on the relative merits of the bridge as a transportation facility. I never thought of it as a transportation project. I saw it as a monumental work of art. They could have just as easily built some else. The transportation aspect of the structure was secondary.

Are these kinds of projects justified? I feel that in these cases the question is beyond the purview of transportation planning.

I do think that you can justify projects like these, but as a transportation planner I’d like the aesthetic component of the project to be addressed separately. They can stand on their own and there is no need to confuse the issues.

Most people would agree that attractive and even beautiful infrastructure contributes to a better life in the city. Of course, it is hard to get many people to agree what is beautiful.

I’m not sure right now how I can incorporate this idea in the transportation stories I plan to write. I’m not sure it would be a good choice for the main plot. It might work well as a subplot or as some ambience.

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

Progress Report on “The Crying Woman”: I Want Some Advice

I started to write The Crying Woman this week and I got about 900 words done. I first got the idea more than a year and a half ago and I spent quite a while in thought about the first part of the story, so it went quite easily.

The next part proved harder. The woman wants to tell the man about a problem she has, but she isn’t quite ready. I want to have her talk about the problem indirectly, as if it isn’t really her problem. I felt the best way to do that was to have her talk about a book. I thought it would be a good idea if the man had not read the book, but had seen the movie.

The problem is: I couldn’t think of a book/movie that would be appropriate. The woman wants to express the sense of betrayal she feels. The first movies I thought of, Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, don’t really fit. Especially since the stories have a woman who betrays a man. I need one where the man betrays a woman. I’m sure there must be some thing out there that would work.

If anyone has any suggestions please pass them along to me.

One possibility is to create a fictional book. I did that for The Doorman’s Sacrifice. An advantage of this approach is that the book can fit the needs the story exactly. It would also avoid any copyright issues. I’d need to come up with at least an outline for the book and note differences between the movie and the book.

Another problem I have is with the woman crying. As the Four Seasons said, Big Girls Don’t Cry.

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

Don’t Be Afraid of Changes

Years ago, when I worked as a transportation planner, I would create backup copies of my computer files frequently as I did my work. I was always afraid that if a made a mistake, that I would have to redo all the work. That happened to me before I developed the habit.

When I began to write and make films, I kept this same habit. For example, I have over a hundred different versions of The Doorman’s Sacrifice. My reasons were slightly different though.

I always worry that the changes I make will make my project worse. This fear often paralyzed me when I looked at changes to my work. I started to make frequent backups to give me the freedom to step back to my old version if the new one didn’t work out.

Just recently I realized that I don’t remember that I ever did go back to an older version of a project. Now my memory is not always perfect, but I’m confident that the vast majority of the time, the “improvements” I made did make my projects better.

I’ll never quit my habit of frequent backups, just out of habit. However, now that I know that I’m unlikely to ever want to go back to an earlier version, I feel I can let myself take more chances with my projects.

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

New Stories in the Works: “The Gladstone Barrier” and “The Crying Woman”

The Gladstone Barrier

I was stalled on my second “transportation engineer” story for a while now. This week I managed to get started again. I am about half way through the first draft now. It seems to be harder to write than the one I did before. In part it is because I’m trying to put more depth into the story. It also draws more from my personal experience and it does affect my emotions when I work on it.

I’ve come up with a new title for it. It was called The Priority Project, but now I want to call it The Gladstone Barrier. I didn’t like the first title so I picked the name of the project at the center of the controversy. After I picked it, I noticed that it has a double meaning that hints at some other aspects of the story.

I started to use some ideas that I got from Writing Dialogue. I think the dialogue does flow better. The Emotion Thesaurus was a big help to me on how to suggest what characters felt.

The Crying Woman

This is the idea for film that I’ve dabbled with for about 18 months now. Someone suggested that I make a film like Before Sunrise, which follows two strangers as they walk and talk through a night in Vienna. I like the film, but I wasn’t sure I could write a script in that style. After all, Richard Linklater felt he needed a collaborator to help him write it.

The story begins with a woman on the elevator. She is alone and cries as the elevator goes down. The door opens and a man gets on. While the woman tries to hide her tears, the man notices and asks her if she is OK. The encounter leads to a long conversation between them. The woman is afraid to reveal the reason for her tears, but desires a sympathetic ear. The man wants to support her, but he too has some secrets that he wants to keep. His motives are complicated.

I think the best approach is to have the film be at least partially improvised by the actors. Since I have never tried that, I am unsure how to proceed. I’ve decided to turn the idea into a short story. Later, I could use it as a basis for the film.

This week I started on an outline. It needs to be filled in some more. I want to go over the notes I prepared earlier for the film and incorporate them into the outline.

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