"The Hysteria of the Uppity Guru" and Future Plans

I posted the recording of a writing exercise based on the title: "The Hysteria of the Uppity Guru". Two young people seek an audience with a great guru. What they learn is not what they expected.

·         https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-hysteria-of-the-uppity-guru

Before I sat down to write, I had misremembered hysteria as anxiety, so the result is a bit of a mix. The story has four characters and a lot of dialogue, so I pushed my vocal skills to the limit to create the voices. In the end, I used an artificial voice for the female character.

Future Plans

One of the goals I had was to redo "The Barrier". There were some changes I wanted to make, but it is a big project to take on. I want to try some smaller projects first so I can try out some of the techniques I want to use.

I was thinking about making some short videos based on my writing exercises using NAWMAL. Someone in my writer’s group suggested that I compile a list of the various sets and characters available in NAWMAL, so I would have some idea what I had available. I started to do this.

I had this idea in the back of my mind when I wrote this week’s exercise. That did affect how I wrote the story, and why I put a little extra effort into the voices. Some time this week I’ll take a swing at creating a video based on this story in NAWMAL. At least I hope I get that far with it

Other Programs

At my writer’s group we had a chat about other animation programs that were like NAWMAL. We talked specifically about UnReal Engine and Blender. They can both do photo realistic images. That is the program can do photo realistic images. That doesn't mean I can.

I've used Blender in the past and watch some videos about UnReal Engine. I've used Blender enough to know it is not as easy to use as NAWMAL. I suspect that UnReal Engine will also be more difficult to use. Although both programs are available for free, while NAWMAL isn't. I don’t have the creative skills necessary to produce good quality sets and characters. So I would need to buy them separately. That can expensive quickly.

Links:

·         https://www.nawmal.com/

·         https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/

·         https://www.blender.org/

 

NAWMAL, UnReal Engine, Blender, writing exercise

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

Two Writing Exercises Posted

I got two exercises to report this week, because I didn’t do my blog post last week.

 “The Maze of the Rich Emperor”

A rich emperor gives a humble gardener a great opportunity.

It is sort of set in China, but I made no attempt to sound Chinese. I’ve forgotten most of the Chinese I learned. I’ll need to brush up before I go there again.

https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-maze-of-the-rich-emperor

“The Sadness of the Cautious Goon”

Albert hires a bodyguard. He begins to wonder about the man.

As usual I followed the rule that I can only write for 30 minutes. It wasn’t until I went to record the story that I realized I didn’t make the goon cautious in any way.

https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-sadness-of-the-cautious-goon

 

  Random Title Generator

I made some more changes to my random title generator. I added a few more articles and quite a few adjectives. I added a lot of person descriptions the week before. It can generate over 233,000,000 titles now. That was up from 153,000,000 in the previous version.

As I noted last week, I want to promote its use, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. Any help or advice is gladly accepted.

https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/random-title-generator/

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

The Sorcery of the Powerful Videographer

I recorded and posted my latest writing exercise, "The Sorcery of the Powerful Videographer", on SoundCloud.

https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-sorcery-of-the-powerful-videographer

A movie director fights with a videographer and with his own ego.

I found the title was something of a constraint on the possible story lines. That isn’t a terrible thing, although I think it would be better to have a title that could go in multiple different directions.

I wrote it from the point of view of a director who has a conflict with a videographer. When I went to record it, I realized a couple of things about the story that I hadn’t thought about it when I wrote it. I confine myself to a 30-minute period to write. Although I often think about the story before I write.

One aspect was that the director character is likely a bit naïve about how you shoot a movie. A large part of the crew report directly to the cinematographer and not the director. If I were to rewrite the story, I think I would try to build up that aspect.

The other aspect is that the director is fighting with his own ego as much as the videographer. He is more interested in “winning” the fight with the videographer than making the film better. I think at the end he has grown a bit and learns to accept that the videographer was right.

Filmmaking is very much a collaborative art. As a director, you need to allow everyone to contribute. I watched a YouTube video about “Full Metal Jacket” where Stanley Kubrick got together with his cast and said he didn’t know how to end the film and asked for ideas. You really need a lot of self confidence to do that kind of thing. Few beginning directors, such as myself, have that self confidence.

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