Mid-Year Review of My Goals for 2014

At the start of this year I laid out my goals for 2014. With the year more than half gone now, I thought it was time to review and revise my goals. This year hasn't been as productive as last year.

"Felix"

I set the rewrite of "Felix" as my top priority for the year. I thought that would take me a couple of months. While I have done some work on it, I am nowhere near a completed rewrite.

I must admit that it isn't a very original idea. It began as a rewrite of a H. P. Lovecraft story. Although, as I worked on it, it did drift away from the original story. I don't want to do a bad imitation of Lovecraft.

I have been very erratic in my work habits, which I think is the main reason I make so little progress. I need to get into a writing routine. That is a mater of will power.

Sometimes I find it easier to write in long hand rather than on the computer. I'm not sure why, but it feels more creative.

"The Barrier" / Replace Xtranormal

The primary barrier to my work on "The Barrier" was the discontinuation of Xtranormal, the program I used to create it. Xtranormal does seem about to return, but hasn't been rereleased yet (see http://xtranormal.com/). I don't want to put much effort into the project until I know for sure that I can continue to use Xtranormal, or a compatible program.

I have done some work with Blender (see: http://www.blender.org/) to animate some scenes that I can't do very well in Xtranormal. There are a couple of scenes that I can do that way with out Xtranormal that I think would improve the movie and it may be worthwhile to do that to give me more of a final version of "The Barrier".

A movie about transportation planners does have a small audience, so I can't expect to redo it as a even a low budget movie. Best to stick with Xtranormal, if I can.

I will hold off on this project for now and see what develops.

"My Most Difficult Case"

I think I have left this project too long for any serious chance of getting a sale. Even when I contacted a distributor five years ago, they thought it was almost too old to get a sale. I'm inclined to do a quick fix up and post it on-line.

I'd like to try out one of those pay-per-view sites. I want to do that with the final version of "The Barrier", so I want to get my feet wet. "My Most Difficult Case" might be the film to try. Hopefully, I can avoid some missteps later with "The Barrier".

"Bright Freedom"

I have thought about this project from time to time, but I don't see that I'll do anything on it any time soon. It is hard to write a story where the protagonist is a woman and you've never been one.

"Pete's Plan"

I submitted this story to several Science Fiction magazines in 2013. I thought it was good enough to get published, but no one was interested. One person that read said that it seemed to be more of a treatment than a story. It is short, about 1,000 words, but it says all I want to say. I planned to submit it to other magazines, but held off on that.

As I've thought about it, I think it would be better to rewrite it as a first person narrative. It would force me to focus more on the hero and how he feels as he executes his plan. What I have now may be too detached from the character.

Other Projects

Over the year a number of other ideas have popped up in my head. I usually write up the idea for later. Sometimes I forget the idea before I get that done. I think some of these ideas have a lot of potential, but I don't want to delve into them until I get a few of my current projects put to bed.

One idea I've toyed with is another "transportation planning adventure" story. I've come up with some ideas and would like to move on with it. I plan to write it as a story, and if things work out, I would develop it into another movie like "The Barrier".

My Priorities

My first priority is to get back into a writing routine. Even an hour a day will help me accomplish something, if I keep it up consistently.

My second priority will be to finish off the rewrite of "Felix" and get some feedback.

My third priority will be to finish off "My Most Difficult Case", post it and promote it.

After that, it will depend on what happens with Xtranormal. If it is available, I would like to do a new version of "The Barrier". Otherwise I would work on the rewrites of "Bright Freedom" or "Pete's Plan".

I will also allow myself to go with the flow when the spirit moves me on other projects.

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

Writing Formulas and Artistic Expression

I am interested in writing formulas, but I know others look down on them. I believe that formulas can help writers be more creative.

A while back I read an article on-line, no idea where now, about formulas. The author was very anti-formula. He talked about Michael Moorcock's " how to write a novel in three days", which also mentions Lester Dent's Master Plot Formula.

This link has a description of both of these: http://www.wetasphalt.com/?q=content/how-write-book-three-days-lessons-michael-moorcock.

The writer disparaged the whole "pulp fiction" approach to writing. He said that good writers don't do "pulp writing". What caught my eye was his examples of good writers: H. P. Lovecraft, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ray Bradbury. I wondered if he had his tongue in cheek because all these writers started writing for pulp magazines.

What this illustrates for me is that use of a writing formula is not a barrier to artistic expression. I found formulas helpful in my writing, although I wouldn't claim to be a successful writer artistically or financially.

The comparison I think of is poetry, and specifically the sonnet. Sonnets follow a very strict format. The number of lines, the lengths of the lines and the rhyming scheme are set out. This has not stopped many poets from creating many great sonnets over the years.

Formulas do place constraints on a story, but writers, like poets, can see these as opportunities for creativity. A formula can allow a writer to focus on the deeper parts of the story and not the superficial plot.

I haven't really used a formula to help my creativity to any great extent. In my transportation stories, "The Gladstone Barrier" and "The Glencoe Development", I did extend the formula by substitution verbal arguments for physical violence. When I converted these stories into my movie "The Barrier" I didn't stick to the formula.

I suspect that all stories use a formula, but that the more sophisticated writers develop a formula for the one story and never use it again. Since it never gets reused, nobody thinks of it as a formula.

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

"The Journal of Transportation Fiction"

A friend who watched my movie "The Barrier" commented that established genres, like mysteries, have well established stock characters and situations that people are familiar with. Few people have that kind of familiarity with transportation planning. That makes it harder to connect with the audience.

With "The Barrier" (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-LOUNSEKac) I have tried to create a new story genre. That does create a challenge for me when I try to communicate to the potential audience.

In any genre there are stock characters and situations that people are familiar with. For example, in a mystery story there is the detective, the victim, the client and the villain. The role of the detective is clear, they catch the bad guy. The detective follows is a set procedure to achieve that goal.

In a transportation fiction story, the audience would not know who is the hero and who is the villain. Is the transportation engineer a good guy or a bad guy? What is he or she supposed to accomplish? Writers want some ambiguity and depth to their characters to intrigue the reader. However, if there is too much, the audience will just be confused.

I have thought of a number of ways to over come the communication challenge. I believe that I need to build an audience who are attuned to the genre. Unless I reach beyond the transportation planning community, the potential audience is too small to support a project like "The Barrier".

One idea that continues to come up in my thoughts is to create an on-line "zine" to publish and promote transportation planning fiction. It doesn't look like it would be a hard thing to do technically. The difficult part is to attract people who want to read, and write, transportation planning fiction.

I have had a few people contact me in connection with "The Barrier" about their experiences that would make for good stories. At the time I didn't want to follow up on those suggestions because of potential copyright and liability problems. If I created a "zine", I would need to work those out. While my main interest is to promote my movies and stories, I need to see that other contributors get what they want out of the venture as well.

I can see problems with paying contributors, especially when there is no certainty of adequate revenue. I would likely need to do quite a bit of editing of submissions; and I'm not the greatest writer in the history of the world by any stretch of the imagination.

The one aspect I have worked out to my satisfaction is the title: "The Journal of Transportation Fiction". It is a play on the titles of typical technical journals. On the other hand, Bent Flyvbjerg might say there is already too much transportation fiction.

If you, or someone you know, would like to pursue this idea, please get in touch with me. If there is enough interest, we might just make a go of it.

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

Blender Experiments for "The Barrier"

I want to redo the opening scene of my transportation planner movie "The Barrier" because people don't seem to understand what happens in it. Although Xtranormal is supposed to be rereleased, I don't think I use it to do what I want to do in this scene. I think I can do it with Blender. I started a trial version this week. (see http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/filmlist/the-barrier/)

In the first scene of "The Barrier", my hero, Arthur, drives along a rural road and narrowly avoids a traffic collision.

My first step is to create the set. I used Blender to create another set I used in the movie, but it was a much simpler set to create. The set was basically a box with some images on the walls. The new set is more complex and I'll need to create several different types of elements.

• a road, that twists and turns,
• a ground on either side of the road with hills and valleys, and
• trees along the side of the road.

I might add a few more elements later to make the set look more realistic. I don't want a photo realistic set. It needs to look a bit cartoony to match the rest of the movie.

For the most part, I focussed on the road way this week. I thought it would be the simplest to do. It would also be easier to conform the surrounding land  to match the road, rather than the other way round.

I started with a Blender file that I used to create an image of the Glencoe development in the movie. It had a grass "ground" and some roads. I had to relearn how to manipulate the individual points of the plane meshes. I managed to stubble on how to do it fairly quickly. I don't normally check the manual before I do this kind of stuff.

In order to have a curvy road, I needed to have it split into segments, so I could manipulate individual points. I found how to subdivide, but it split both ways, so I had a 20 by 20 grid, and not the 1 by 20 grid I wanted. I'm sure there must be an easy way to do this, but I went ahead and deleted the individual faces I didn't want until I had the 1 by 20 mesh I wanted. I made several copies, just in case.

I had to figure out where I wanted to put the individual points, so most of my time was spend calculating where they should be. I studied roadway design back in University, but I really don't remember much. I tossed my class notes about 10 years ago as well. I decided that it didn't need to be technically correct, it just had to look OK.

My first attempt failed. I tried to create a layout that matched the one I used elsewhere in the movie. That turned out to have some very difficult geometry and I found it hard to match. For my second attempt, I started from scratch and made all my turns multiples of 45º. That made the calculations much simpler.

Another issue that came up was that the section of road was too short for what I wanted to do. In scale it was only about 50 metres long! I adjusted that to 1 kilometre, so I can track Arthur driving along the road for longer. I had to redo the calculations. Again.

I finally got back to Blender and built the road there. I misjudged how many segments I needed in the roadway and it came up short. I decided that since this was originally planned as an experiment, that would be good enough. The proportions of the road didn't look right and I found it difficult to image. In the end I realized that I had used the wrong scale and it was far larger than I intended. I adjusted that down. I wonder if I can cut down the length of the road from a full kilometre and have it look better.

I tried to match the grass patches I had to the roadway, but it seems that the individual points are specified as deviations from the centre of the plane. That makes it much harder to match up with the road. It seems to me that there must be some kind of setting so you can use a local or global co-ordinate system. I haven't found it yet.

While I was disappointed at how little I accomplished on the set, I still think it was worthwhile because I learned much more about how to use Blender.

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