First Film Shot on My $100 Film Festival Film

After substantial procrastination, I’ve taken a break from my transportation planning stories to work on my short film for the 20^th annual $100 Film Festival.

Wednesday I picked up a camera (a Canon Scoopic) from the CSIF’s new production coordinator Yvonne. It’s been a while since I used a 16mm camera, so I had to practice loading the film. I had a heck of a time with the practice film, but when I loaded the actual film, it worked just fine.

Character Names

Over the years I tried several different approaches to character names. I’m still not sure which the best way is.

When I started I just picked names “out of the air.” It turned out that wasn’t always easy to do, and some of the names were uninspired. Later I developed names that were similar to mine, like Jack Gilmore in Line of Taxis. I thought this was a little too cute, so I dropped that.

New Short Story “The Gladstone Barrier” Posted

I just posted a new short story.

The Gladstone Barrier

http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/The_Gladstone_Barrier.php

This story is set a traffic operations office, but has some of the same characters as The Glencoe Project. Although I wrote it later, The Gladstone Barrier happens before The Glencoe Project.

I found this story much harder to write. It could be because I drew more of the story from personal experience. That means I have to relive some events that still affect me.

The story is part of an ongoing project that I hope will lead to a film about transportation planners. I've created a page to bring together all the stories, posts and articles I've been doing on transportation. http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/transportation.php

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

Issues in Transportation Planning #3: Political Interference

In my next transportation planning story, The Gladstone Barrier, I have a couple of scenes that involve what some people would call political interference. They are relatively minor parts of the story.

One case in my story isn’t what I would call political interference. In that situation a person at a public meeting gets upset at a traffic engineer and complains to the mayor about him. The mayor then pushes upper management to pressure the traffic engineer to apologize to the citizen.

This is an example of one person’s political interference is another person’s democracy in action. To me it is clear that the situation in the story is democracy in action. The traffic engineer doesn’t like it and the person who complained really didn’t have a valid complaint. But, the politician made the decision about the merits and while you can disagree with the decision, you can see it as legitimate.

This situation can become much more complicated depending on who the person who complains. I’ve many stories of land developers who complain to politicians to get their way. In one sense this isn’t too different from anyone else, but because of the money involved it is usually seen as inappropriate.

The other case in my story involves a politician who tells a traffic engineer to include a project his constituents want built in a priority list. I would see this as political interference, but I don’t see this as a big issue. Like my other case, if the scale of the project is big enough, then it becomes a big issue.

How do transportation planners react to these situations? How should they react? I believe that often it is the politicians who are responsible, and a transportation planner can not know with certainty if the situation crosses the line. I do believe that there is a point where a professional has to draw the line and protest. It is very hard to know where that line is.

Some transportation planners do need to struggle with ethical dilemmas like this. It can be a period of extreme stress and conflict. I’m not ready to make political interference a central part of a story. I do see that it could be the basis for a strong story.

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

Gladstone: Struggles with Dialogue

I got a second draft of my short story The Gladstone Barrier done this week. I think it is much better, but I still think I’ll need two or more drafts before I think it is ready to post. I wish I could do it faster.

I have trouble with some of the dialogue. While I took a break from this story I read a book on dialogue and they suggested that the dialogue should be in short sentences. When I rewrote the story I tried to do that.

The book suggested that longer passages could be split up with short descriptions of action between parts of the dialogue. In the story I gave a lot of my characters long bits of dialogue and I wanted to break them up with bits of action. I wasn’t happy with the result. Partly it was because I used the same bits of action description over and over.

When I rewrite it next time I want to fix that, but I am not sure just how to do that. I don’t have the dialogue book anymore, so I can’t easily check it again. I feel that in some cases a long “speech” works OK. At least better than if I put artificial breaks in.

Another change I would like to make is to put more emphasis on how the protagonist feels. From my experience with Line of Taxis, this is the way to connect with the audience. I haven’t put enough of that into the story. I think the story does have a strong emotional core, but I’m not sure that it will be clear to readers.

I want to plan out what to look for in my next rewrite before I start.

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

Issues in Transportation Planning #2: The Limitations of Models

I am almost finished with The Gladstone Barrier, my second “transportation planning adventure story.” I continue to explore the field of transportation planning for story ideas. This post draws on my experience with transportation models.

Most of my career in transportation planning was spent on models and forecast. Much of the rest of my efforts went to surveys and other data collection. Over the years I developed a view of their proper use, which a lot of people don’t agree with.

There is a conflict between what transportation planners want from models and what they can actually deliver. In the movie Coal Miner’s Daughter, or maybe it was the movie Sweet Dreams, a character said “People in Hell want ice water, that don't mean they get it.” This is the way it is with transportation models.

It became clear to me over the years that models could not predict the future like we hoped they could. Henry Minzberg’s book The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning helped me understand the complexity of this problem. In the book he focuses on business planning, but many of his suggestions can apply to transportation planning. The article From Strategic Planning to Strategic Thinking by James L. Morrison (no relation) has a good short description of Minzberg’s ideas.

We don’t have the luxury of waiting and seeing. We must make decisions now. But we must recognize that often we will be wrong. The goal then is to be aware that we can be wrong. We need to recognize when we are wrong and act in a timely manner to correct.

The approach I strongly favour is to link forecasts to a robust monitoring program. Periodic “reality checks” of forecasts will catch forecast errors sooner and allow plans to be modified. This is not a new idea. When I looked at technical manuals from the 1950s and 1960s they all talk about the importance of monitoring. They explicitly assume that models and their forecasts are fallible.

I think the main barrier to successful monitoring is that people don’t like to be exposed as wrong. They fear the personal consequences of the perception of failure. This fear is not unfounded. Many people use examples of failure as excuses to discount other people’s opinions.

Admitting that a forecast is wrong can become a political issue. Politicians work out compromises between different interest groups to reach their decisions. When transportation forecasts turn out to be wrong some interest groups won’t get what they bargained for. This undermines the compromise and may impact the resolution of other issues. Often it is easier to deny the problem rather than correct it.

I don’t like the idea that interpersonal and political issues can conflict with technical issues, but this is the reality we face.

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

The Gods Conspired Against Me

Well, not really the gods and it wasn’t really all that bad.

My website got migrated last week. For some unknown reason the version they migrated was from two weeks earlier. I didn’t want to post a blog until that had been fixed. It wasn’t done until late Monday, so I decided to wait and post Tuesday.

Tuesday I decided to print some forms I needed before I did my blog. When I did, the printer got corrupted and I had to clean up the registry and reinstall the printers. That strained my limited technical expertise. The problem kept recurring and I spent much of the day fixing it. In the end I discovered that the problem would only crop up when I tried to print some PDF files. Other PDF files worked fine. The PDF files that caused the problem were created by my scanner’s software.

At least it gave me something to blog about. I haven’t made much progress on any of my projects.

I thought I’d finished the first draft of The Crying Woman, but it turned out that I’ve got about a third of it to do yet. I plan to rewrite The Gladstone Barrier first and get it published, and then go back to The Crying Woman.

With both these stories I used a variation of the Lester Dent Master Fiction Plot. I did a couple of stories, The Abattoir Project and The Glencoe Project and they were fairly easy to write. I find these two new stories are much harder to write. In part I think it is because his plot is an adventure story, while my new stories are not.

The Glencoe Project isn’t really an adventure story either, although I call it that, but it wasn’t so hard to write. I want to put more emotion and character into the two new stories and I find that hard to do. I know it is something I need to do, but I wish it were easier.

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

“The Crying Woman” and My $100 Film Festival Film Updates - 2011 July 3

The Crying Woman

I had one very productive day on The Crying Woman this week. The whole story should run about 6,000 words and I wrote 2,600 in one session. I have another 2,000 to do.

I was optimistic that I could finish it off the next day but I got stuck. Before I started to write I read over the last bit I wrote the day before. I was disappointed because the woman sounded like a whiner. The story requires her to share how she feels, so I have to let her open up about how she feels. I do need to find a way for her to do that and not sound whiny.

I didn’t feel like writing after that. I gave it a shot, but just couldn’t get started. It is kind of foolish of me. I know that I can fix the problem in the rewrite and I should get on with the first draft.

This story is a substantial departure from what I’ve done in the past, so I will run into snags as I feel my way forward. I see this project as an opportunity to learn and grow. Some years ago I decided that with every project I would push the limits of what I feel comfortable with. It looks like this project will do this.

$100 Film Festival Film

I took another little step forward on my film for next year’s $100 Film Festival. Last week I checked on film processing.

This week I met with Murry Smith, the acting production coordinator at the CSIF. We talked over what equipment I would use on the project. I was quite happy to learn that they still have the camera I like to use.

While I’ve used the ARRI M and the Bolex, I much prefer the Canon Scoopic. I’m sure that more experienced cinematographers would say it is not as good a camera as the ARRI or Bolex, but I found it easier to use. Ease of use is important to me when I’m the camera operator. It has been a while since I have used it. For some reason I thought it was a Panasonic camera.

When I looked up more information on the camera just now, I was surprised to learn that the camera was introduced in 1965! The camera at the CSIF must be a later model, but it could still be 30 to 35 years old.

I talked to Steve Hanon, who shot Line of Taxis and My Most Difficult Case for me. He thought he could help me with this project. Howard Horwitz has already agreed to help. I hope that over the next couple of weeks I’ll get a test roll shot, and then I can move on to the project proper.

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