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

Direct Publishing for Kindle

Apparently Kindle sales make up over half of Amazon’s sales now. I read a blog about the benefits of Amazon’s Direct Publishing for Kindle, so I had a look at it. Apparently some already successful authors are going that route rather than through traditional publishing.

It costs essentially nothing to get published. They take part of the sales price. You get either 35 per cent or 70 per cent of the list price. If you go for the 70 per cent option, you have to pay a distribution charge before you get your royalty. It is only a few cents though.

One problem is that they deduct withholding for U.S. taxes. I looked into that once before when I was on Associated Content. It would cost me to get that back and it was more than what I’d get back. However, that was for a very small payment. If I got some decent sales, then it would be worthwhile.

Their website explains how to create your own e-book.

I tried out two of the programs they recommend: The Mobipocket Creator and the Kindle Previewer.

The Mobipocket Creator wasn’t too hard to use, although I can’t get it to create a table of contents. I’m not very happy with the quality of the result though. I played around a little and got it to look better, but I’m still not satisfied. I think that with a little more practice I can get an e-book that looks good. I need to study some other Kindle books and see what they look like.

I’d like to publish my book Walk in the Snow on Kindle. I have it for sale on Lulu as a hard copy and a PDF file now, but I think I may get better sales if it is on Amazon. I’ll wait until I get the hang of the e-book creation first.

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

The Perils of On-line Publishing

The Canadian election led some people to my articles How Would Proportional Representation Change Canadian Politics? and Should Canadian Taxpayer’s Finance Political Parties? I chose those topics because I thought that would happen.

When you search for “How Would Proportional Representation Change Canadian Politics?” on Google the first item is my article. The big disappointment for me is that it is the copy on the site that pays the least. My higher paying sites are further down the list.

I hadn’t thought of that as a problem before. I felt that the various sites would draw different groups of people, so the more sites I had, the more readers, and money, I would get. Now I see that they can compete.

I wanted to remove the article from the low paying site, so it wouldn’t steal readers from my other sites. It turns out that they don’t allow you to delete your articles. All the other sites where I published my articles allow you to delete your articles, so I never thought to ask.

I ran into video sites that don’t allow you to delete your videos after you’ve uploaded them. The terms of service do say they get a perpetual right to show the videos on their site, so there is no way to get out of it.

I have thought for sometime that it makes a lot of sense to have your own website to publish on. You do have more control over your work, although you do give up a lot of exposure that you would get on larger sites. On the other hand, I notice that it is the smaller sites that are more likely to want perpetual rights. I expect that isn’t just a co-incidence. That would drive away the more savvy video makers, who also draw the most viewers.

I experimented with publishing my stories on my site (see: http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/writing.php) and more recently I tried a video (see: http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/extra_special_care.php). So far I haven’t got a huge number of visits, and they’ve dropped off in the last few weeks, but my site does better than some of the other sites I post on.

Last year when I thought of ways to promote my website, I came up with an idea for A Co-operative Video Website. If I can find other people who also want to set up their own sites, then we could come up with a way to link the sites, which would expand our audience.

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

A New Approach for my Blog

Monday last week, Stacy Parks of Film Specific put a post on her blog about blogging for filmmakers.

I made a comment about some of the challenges of writing a blog and she suggested that if your film has a particular target audience, that posts about their interests would be a good idea. As I commented back, I should have thought of that myself.

However, when I started to look at the projects I have underway, I realized that it isn’t always easy to follow that advice. In part, I find it difficult to articulate who my audience is, and what kind of posts would attract them.

I started to think over how I could approach this with some of my projects.

The Doorman’s Sacrifice

A man’s fascination in a series of books leads him to the dangerous cult like following that has grown up around them.

There many books, TV programs and movies that develop a cult following. Many of these people could be interested in a story like this. I haven’t been involved with this sort of thing myself, so I would need to learn more about it.

My Detective Story

A troubled police detective is targeted by a nasty villain.

This would be a problematic story to target. Not so much that there are not a lot of people who are interested in detective stories, but because there are so many other detective stories around for them to watch. I think I do have a unique perspective, but it is only revealed at the end. The initial premise isn’t distinguishable from a lot of other detective stories.

Bright Freedom

A young lawyer seeks justice for abused women, but then has to face a past she thought she left behind.

I see potential to explore aspects of the story in a series of blogs. Certainly I know that I need to know more about these issues if I want to create a good story. It would be too easy to go badly astray.

Then the Phone Rang

A politician threatened with blackmail struggles to save his relationship with his wife.

I don’t see anything that sets this story apart from many others of the same ilk. The story needs something more. I could develop the project to be more about how the private lives of politician affect their political careers.

The Crying Woman

A chance meeting between two people leads one of them to confide in the other.

I want this story to be about building trust and learning to listen. I am fascinated by the idea of putting one’s own interests aside and devote time to listen, and there by help, someone else. I’m sure that there are others who would find it interesting too.

I only have a preliminary outline for this story. I don’t think I am quite ready to write it. I did cannibalize parts of it for Then the Phone Rang, so I need to either scrap one of the two stories or come up with new elements of the story to replace the ones I used.

Transportation Planning Story

I spent a long career as a transportation planner, so if I “write what I know” that would be the subject. I wrote one short story, The Glencoe Project, about transportation planners. So far as I know, this is the only story about transportation planners ever written.

Most people I met over the years had strong opinions on transportation plans and planners. So I think that discussions of these issues and how I incorporate them into a story could attract a lot of interest.

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.

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

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.

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

Ramblings on How to Make a Movie #1

I believe strongly in the need to experiment. You learn something new from every project you do. 

With the end of My Most Difficult Case in sight, I need to consider the approach I’ll use with my next project.

One approach I want to go back to is what I did on Line of Taxis. While I had a script for that film, my intention from the start was to focus on the editing. The film shoot was to collect material to work with in the edit. The script was there to help me plan the material collection.

In my shooting script I had two different last scenes. I used the one my assistant director suggested, and then added another final scene later.

I also identified a bunch of “interesting” shots that I had no plan to use. I used some of those shots to create a new scene in editing. Several bits were improvised by the actors. Some of the best parts of the film were the improvisations. I did a number of neutral close ups, which I found very useful when it came time to edit.

I want my next film to be much longer, so I think I have to have a much more organized shoot. But I want to keep the same sense of collecting material. There is no such thing as a bad take. You can’t say what is “good” or “bad” until the editor decides he can’t use it.

Someone suggested that I make a film like Before Sunrise. I like the film, but it is a much harder film to make than it might seem. If I were to do a film like that, I would want to cast the main characters before I wrote the script and have them participate in creating it.

To be continued . . .

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

Productivity in the Arts

Just the other day, I came across a reference to the Baumol effect . In short it says that the productivity of some activities cannot be improved. It has been used to explain the growth of government, but that isn’t what caught my interest.

The prime example used to illustrate the concept is a string quartet. It takes just as many people and takes just as long to perform a piece of string quartet music now as it took in the 18^th century.

If the productivity of a symphony orchestra increased as much as computer speed has over the last 30 years, it would take 4 milliseconds to play Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony. Even if this were possible, why would you want to?

I wondered if this were true of filmmaking. Certainly the introduction of new technology has had and will continue to have a profound impact on how films are made. I know that the technological changes have made it much cheaper and easier to make films. Where once you needed a film crew to shoot a film, one person now can shoot on their own.

That isn’t the whole story though. There are parts of the creative process that new technology cannot improve. Writers need just as long to conceive and write. Actors need just as long to rehearse and perform.

What is productivity mean in an artistic work?

Today, you can get software that provides more power to create music than the Beatles could have dreamed of in 1967. Millions of people around the world can and have acquired these technologies.

If it were just a matter of technological improvement, then we would expect the world to produce a thousand musical works with the same impact as Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I don’t pay as much attention to music as I used to, but I have had the feeling that this has happened.

I do believe that technology has opened doors to many more people to express their creativity. While I think this is a good thing for the world, creativity can still not be mass produced. Who knows if it ever can?

Watson, the Jeopardy playing computer has shown that many mental abilities we thought only humans could achieve can be done by computers. Maybe one day computers will be creative.

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

Why I Held My Breath Before I Screamed Copyright Infringement

I use Google Analytics to track how many people visit my web pages. Yesterday, when I checked, I saw there had been a big jump in views of my Bukisa pages.

When I dug deeper, I found that the increase was all from one article I posted back at the beginning of February: A Review of “Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail - And Why We Believe Them Anyway”. Almost all of the referrals came from one blog post: http://judithcurry.com/2011/03/15/foxes-hedgehogs-and-prediction/

While she did provide a link to my article, she also quoted almost two-thirds of it. That left me with mixed feelings. On one hand her post had generated more views of my post than I would have had otherwise. On the other hand, she deterred many people from clicking through to my article when she posted such a large chunk of what I wrote.

My initial gut reaction was to complain to her about copyright infringement and ask her to remove what I wrote from her post. I do make money when people read my articles; not much money but in principle I lost money. Her blog had more comments than I had visits, so the difference in my revenue might have been substantial.

Before I acted, I thought over how I should react. It was true that she had copied my material with out permission. However, how did it really affect me? By posting my material, she did send some people to my way. In the long run, success comes from the slow build up of followers and supporters. If I lashed out at her, or anyone else that quoted my work, it might just cut off the opportunity for potential supporters to find me.

I read several articles on the web that suggested that people help you when they quote your work. As long as they link to you, you will benefit from the post.

I decided not to complain. I did post a comment on her blog though, where I noted my authorship, added some thoughts related to earlier comments and promoted my short story The Parasol.

When I reference other people’s posts, I give a brief description of the article and its relevance, along with the link. Less often, I include a direct quote. It would be nice if everyone did it that way.

Anyway, I think I did the right thing.

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

Rethinking Participatory Cinema

A short while ago I did a post on participatory cinema . At the time, I felt fairly optimistic about the prospects of this approach. After some thought, I’m not so sure it is likely to be all that successful.

I thought back many years, to when I tried to make my first film through the CSIF. In retrospect, I wasn’t ready to take on a project of the scope I had in mind. But, there is another lesson I can learn from the experience that is relevant to participatory cinema.

I had an outline of the story with a list of scenes, but didn’t have a script. That didn’t stop me and I recruited about 8 or 10 people to work on the film. Everyone seemed enthusiastic and we had a couple of sessions to plan the movie. In my mind it would be a collaborative effort, with everyone making a contribution. That didn’t really work.

I realize now that everyone waited for me to take the lead, which I didn’t. After a short time, people started to drift away and the whole enterprise faded away. While I was disappointed, I did learn from the experience and move on to make several films.

How you recruit people to participate is critical to success. I think you need to start with a small core group who are committed to the project. As you develop the project it should start to take on a life of its own and will gain momentum. Once that happens, and the project starts to look like it will succeed, more people will be drawn to the project.

When I first developed the idea for the $100 Film Festival, the core goal was for people to see a clear benefit to themselves if they supported it. When I saw people’s eyes light up when I first explained the concept, I knew it would work. That is an approach that I think you need to take with participatory cinema. People will be less interested in “your” project, than in “our” project.

There is a delicate balance that we would need to strike if we want participatory cinema to work. If we provide no direction at all, nothing will happen. If we provide too much direction, then others will not contribute. Exactly how we would achieve that isn’t clear to me.

While I don’t plan to make a participatory cinema project any time soon, some of the same methods would be valuable in a more traditional approach to filmmaking. I’ll continue to look for examples of successful participatory cinema projects to emulate.

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

A Move Forward on My Transportation Planning Story

Some of the people I used to work with have encouraged me to do a story about transportation planning, so I have tried several times to do that. Nothing has come together yet.

I started to write a movie set in a transportation planning office, but got bogged down in the details. That experience made me realize that I need to focus on plot before I get into any transportation specific details. After 30 years focussed on those details, it is easy to get caught up in them.

More recently, I decided that I should write a series of short stories as a way to develop my ideas, which I would later incorporate into a film. I need more practice telling stories too. Back in January I developed an outline for a story set in a transportation planning office. This week I started to write it. I set a goal of a 6,000 word story. I got just under 3,500 done and I’m less than half way through. At that rate it will end up at 9,000 words. I’ll need to do some severe edits to get it down to size. That can be a good thing for the quality of the story.

I started with the Lester Dent master fiction plot that I used for The Abattoir Project: A Ken Walker Adventure. In the master fiction plot, the hero gets in to actual physical fights. I was tempted to do the same thing in my transportation planning story, but decided that would be silly. Instead I had verbal arguments rather than fist fights. Maybe if/when I do another story I can have some real knock down melees. Another approach would be to make it a comedy.

In the master plot, the heroes and villains are black and white (or rather white and black), but I’m much more inclined to make them more of a dark grey/ light grey. The story is about a fight over a development proposal. My heroes are the City’s transportation planners, while the villain is a developer. A consultant is caught in the middle. That isn’t the only situation where transportation planners run into conflict, but it was an obvious place to start.

I’ll need to avoid the temptation to preach about how transportation planning should be done. That can be a bore, and I’m bad enough at that as it is.

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

Participatory Cinema

I have been on the look out for new ways to get my projects done. It isn’t easy to make a movie and I feel I can use all the help I can find.

I stumbled upon this Wikipedia article on Participatory Cinema http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_cinema and it thought it might be worth digging deeper.

The idea encompasses a couple of different ideas: crowd funding and community production.

Crowd Funding

In crowd funding, money to make a film is raised from many small investors who each contribute a small amount toward production of the film. There are several websites that have been created to help with this, and of course you can always set up your own site.

This post has a list of crowd funding websites: http://blog.webdistortion.com/2010/07/18/9-crowdfunding-websites-to-help-you-change-the-world/

 

Community Production

In community production, a community of people contribute to the production. This can include suggestions about the script and material help on the film. I found one website that co-ordinates community production: http://www.wreckamovie.com/, although several individual films have their own websites.

Amazon Studios, http://studios.amazon.com/ , looks similar in intent, although many people have expressed doubts about it. My own script hasn’t generated much interest there.

 

Some Examples

Sauna is a horror film set in 1595 on the border between Russia and Finland. Sauna is finished and can be purchased on Amazon. http://www.wreckamovie.com/sauna

Iron Sky is a story about the threat of an attack from a Nazi base on the Moon. Iron Sky has completed shooting. http://www.wreckamovie.com/productions/show/ironsky

The Cosmonaut is the story of a Russian cosmonaut who is lost on a trip to the Moon in the 1960s. The Cosmonaut is still in preproduction. http://www.wreckamovie.com/thecosmonaut

 

Is This the Way To Go?

This is a fairly new approach and while there have been some films made, many more haven’t. I like the idea in general, although it would take a leap of faith to plunge into a project. I have a lot of fears about legal problems and interference.

I have some elements of collaborative cinema on my website now. I have a donation option that could be used for my own crowd funding. I need a project that will excite people’s interest if that is to work.

Through my blog I hope to get some feedback on my ideas and projects, although I have very few comments so far. If a project is to be successful, it needs to take on a life of its own. I saw that happen with The $100 Film Festival and Line of Taxis. That only happens when others step forward to support the project.

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

Sore Teeth and Other Thoughts

The last couple of weeks one of my teeth has become very painful. This week it got so sore that I found it hard to concentrate on much else. I will get it pulled Monday.

Recently, when I develop new stories, I try to give the main character some kind of handicap or limitation that they need to work around. After this last week, I think that a painful tooth would be a good handicap to give a hero. You really need to be nasty to your heroes.

I did manage to finish and publish a short article this week: Some Advice to People at The Start of Their Careers . It is a follow up to an article I did earlier: Six Lessons for Planning a Career . When I finished the earlier article I cut out a lot of material to keep the article short. I went back to that material and used it to build up a new article.

I came across another blog post to recommend: http://filmutopia.posterous.com/movie-blog-hey-film-makers-its-about-the-scri . His first point is one that I can attest is a good idea. When I first started to make films, before I started a project I would tell people about my ideas. I could tell from people’s reactions, which ideas caught their fancy and which ones didn’t. It wasn’t a conscious plan on my part, but it made a big difference in my work. I don’t really do that any more. I want to find a way to get that kind of feedback again.

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

Ideas for a How to Write A Feature Movie Script Article

Over two years ago I wrote a series of three articles on how to write a script.

How to Write a Feature Movie Script Part One - What is a movie script anyway?

How to Write a Feature Movie Script Two - Writing a script isn’t just writing a script

How to Write a Feature Movie Script Three - Finding your way into the story

I started the series as a way to organize my thoughts about how to write a script. Since then I have thought about other articles in the series, but I haven’t done any, yet.

One idea was to talk about getting feedback. I did write one article about the feedback I got on my film Who Shot the President (Why Do People Hate my Film?). I still may do an article that looks more generally at the issue.

Another idea I had more recently was on structure. Over the last year I wrote three feature scripts and several short stories. That experience gave me a lot to think about on structure.

I get confused by the terminology people use to describe structure. Scripts can be broken down into acts, sequences, plot points, story events, scenes and beats. What some people call story events, other people call scenes. I define a scene as something that happens in one location at one time, which is useful when you shoot a film. In a film, a story event could be played out in several scenes.

One of the things that I want to write about is the concept of the “beat”. Some people seem to use it as a synonym for story event or scene, while others use it to refer to a brief interaction within a scene. In my view I think the brief beat is a more useful concept. I see a beat as something lasting about 10 seconds. It could be an exchange of dialogue, or a bit of action. For a 90 minute film there would need to be about 540 beats.

Beats are built up to create a scene. Story events are built up to create sequences and sequences are built up to create acts. Acts are combined to make the whole movie. When you write, you would normally work backwards from act to sequence to scene to beat.

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

Are Wish Fulfilment Fantasies What Stories Are All About?

I find myself in an internal conflict between projects that reflect my personal beliefs and projects that strive for wide spread popularity. In the past I felt that these two goals were not incompatible, but lately I’ve been focussed on how to attract readers. While I still feel I need to write for a wide audience, I also need to integrate my personal views.

The last few weeks I have considered why some of the viral e-mails that fly around are popular. Although the e-mails were typically presented as factual, I found them unrealistic. Usually when I looked them up on the urban legend websites, there are indeed fictional.

In one typical e-mail story a man turns the tables on street mugger. His actions, as he describes them, would have likely ended with him dead on the ground, rather than the mugger run off in defeat. The impression I was left with was that the author was angry after he was mugged and dreamt up the story to express what he wished he had done.

My conclusion was that many viral e-mails are wish fulfilment fantasies. The stories were of people who faced negative situations, such as a street robbery, but who had the skill and drive to turn them around. Most people in similar situation would freeze up and give in, but would afterwards wish they had acted with more self confidence and effectiveness. These viral e-mail stories allow them to vicariously see their wish come true.

This ties in well with what I have read about how to create sympathetic characters. People like characters that are what they wish they were.

In my past work I have tended to focus on characters who are not anymore capable than a normal person and who would not have the skill and drive needed to succeed where normal people would fail. This reflects the way that I see most people and what I want to say about them. It is to survive and find happiness that is success.

I need to be careful not to draw too broad a conclusion about these observations. However, I do see a conflict between the likeable character and the kind of character I want to work with. I am confident that it is possible to achieve both goals, but I will need to develop my writing skills to bring them together.

Rethinking Self Promotion

I don’t like to blow my horn, but they say you need to self promote to develop a following for your creative work.

Over the last couple months I used Twitter to promote my stories and films on Twitter. Every day I would post a couple of tweets with a link to a story or film. I also post stuff on my blog, MySpace and FaceBook. My FaceBook page is the most successful of these from what I can tell.

It is difficult for me to tell if this promotion is working as well as it could.

Over the last couple of weeks I read a few articles on the internet on self promotion: Social Minefield: How To Self-Promote Without Being A Jerk for example.

One of the bits I read was that if you want to be effective at self promotion, don’t self promote all the time. Keep your self promotion to about 20% of what you post. I’ve modified my promotion plans to do that. I still need to come up with other stuff to post. I do post links to interesting sites. I have a huge collection quotes I could share. I’m not that keen about saying much about myself personally. It feels to egotistical.

Ideally anything you post should get people to think “I want to share this” and send it off to a few friends. If what you are promoting is not interesting, then no amount of promotion is going to work. My more successful posts usually do well without promotion. I suspect that I should put more effort into improving my material than promoting.

The articles I read suggest that you ask people to pass your stuff along to their friends. I don’t really want to do that, but I will.

Please Please Please, share this post with your friends. ;-)

Transportation Planning Expose

Writers are always told to “write what you know.” I worked for 30 years as a transportation planner, so I thought I should write a story set in that milieu. So far I have found that very hard to do.

About six years ago I started on a script idea set in a transportation planning office. Initially I called it The Thompson Proposal, but changed it to Traffic Collision. I got bogged down because I tried to come up with a good McGuffin before I came up with a good story.

I started a satirical story that I called Tom Swift and his Incredible Traffic Model. I have a draft done, but it just doesn’t work. I need to massively rewrite it. I can’t use the name Tom Swift in the title either.

This week I started to write a review of the book Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail - And Why We Believe Them Anyway. Most of my career was spent in forecasting and I found the book resonated with how I felt about the topic. It has been very hard to write. Maybe it is just that it is that I have to go back and think about the work I used to do before I retired. I want to check and double check everything I say, which takes time. Once I get on the Internet it is so easy to get distracted. Besides that, I can’t seem to find a way to say what I want to say. I’ve tried several different approaches, but none has worked so far. I think I’ll leave it for a time.

After I did The Abattoir Project: A Ken Walker Adventure, I decided I could use that as a template to write a transportation planning story. I made good progress on the outline this week. I need to fill in more details about the plot and the characters before I can start to write. This time I focussed on the story before I developed the background. I think I have enough plot ideas for several more stories. We’ll see how it goes.

I want the story to be a realistic portrayal of transportation planning, but part of me would like to throw in a murder mystery and gun fights. It is easier to catch reader’s attention if your protagonist is likely to be shot, than if he might get a stern talking to from his boss.

I want to get back to work on My Most Difficult Case now, so I’m not sure when I’ll get this story done.