Book Review, “Somedays . . .” and “Contingency”

I made progress on three projects this week.

I published a pseudo book review. It is an idea I’ve been toying with since I began work on Line of Taxis. The story is about a guy I call Orville Sharkbiter. When I did Line of Taxis, I changed his name to Orville Stark-Lieder. You can hear him mentioned at the end of the film on the radio. I would describe him as “the boss from hell”. I’ve had some good feedback on it so far.

http://authspot.com/short-stories/book-review-sharkbiter-the-secret-to-success/  or http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog/?page_id=761

I got the film I shot back for my $100 Film Festival film this week. I was disappointed with how some shots turned out, so I want to reshoot them. The dead line for submission is this coming Thursday, so I’ll have to live with what I have now.

I actually have two films now. Somedays . . . is a very short gag film that plays around with the SMPTE Universal Leader. I had the idea several years ago, but I didn’t want to make it because I thought it would be difficult. I came up with an easier way to do it, so it wasn’t much extra work to shoot it on the same roll I shot for Contingency.

Contingency has evolved a lot since I started to work on it. Originally it was meant to be a sort of history of the $100 Film Festival, in part modelled after Man with a Camera. Now it is more about how things didn’t have to happen the way they did. I keep getting new ideas for the film, which is a good sign. Although, with only a few days left before the deadline, I need to stop at some point.

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

Back to Writing: Scraping off the Rust

I haven’t got the film I shot for Contingency back yet, so this week I worked on some other projects. I have two articles and a short/fake article on the go. One article is about how to listen and the other is about chaos theory, complexity theory, and economics. The story is about a character I created called Orville Sharkbiter, who is the worst possible boss you could ever have.

I’ve had the ideas for a long time and had extensive notes. However, when I tried to work on them this week I found it very difficult to write. I think it is partly that I got out of the habit of writing. The other problem is that I tried to write them as if they were blog posts, which is a very different style.

I left them for a day and then tried a different approach. The listening article came together fairly well, but I ran out of steam at the end. I think I can finish it off in another session. I did better with the Orville Sharkbiter story and got a good first draft done. I’ll leave that for a day or so and then polish it.

I experimented with eBook publishing a little more. The place where I sell my book, Lulu.com, has an eBook converter you can use when you publish with them. I couldn’t get the eBook to look quite the way I wanted to, but I can work on it some more.

It also turned out that Lulu had converted an earlier version of my book into an eBook and it is for sale on iTunes. (http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/walk-in-the-snow/id470953296?mt=11) Not only that, but I actually had a sale through iTunes. I made enough to buy a Tim Horton’s donut! If I can sell 999,999 more, I’ll make a million dollars.
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$100 Film Festival Film Update – 2011 November 13

My film is closer to completion now. I’ve even given it a title: Contingency. Not really that original, but descriptive none the less.

My original plan was to include some shots of me editing some film on at Steenbeck at the CSIF. They are moving at the end of the month, so the time was tight. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get in touch with the guy I wanted to help me, so I came up with a plan B.

I will used some outcuts from my earlier films. That is one reason I picked the new title. I think this forced improvisation will make for a better film. I pulled out some of my old Line of Taxis files to see what I have that I can use. It looks promising. I documented my more recent films quite well. Some of my older films are not, so I am not sure what I have.

I shot another roll of film with a few more images I wanted and some titles. I wanted to include shots from my earlier Super 8 movies and I don’t have 16mm blowups I can use. I do have digital versions of those films, so I shot short bits of them off the computer screen.

I included two films that I did before the $100 Film Festival. The Smiling Corpse was a film I did back in 1974. In many ways, it was the original inspiration for the Festival. I copied two “cool” shots from the film. I can only include one of them though. The other film I used was Extra Special Care, which I did as a student project at SAIT in 1989. It was another example of the type of film I had in mind for the festival.

While I was at it, I short another short short film I call Somedays I just Can’t Get Started. If it turned out OK, I’ll submit it to the $100 Film Festival too.

I mailed the film to the lab Friday. I have some “Exposed Film” tape that I use to wrap the exposed film, but I couldn’t find it. Until, of course, after I’d gone and used some other tape. I still have quite a lot of tape and I don’t think I will find much use for it now.

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

What I Found in My Notebook

A couple of years ago I started to keep a notebook of the ideas I had for my films and writing. It isn’t an original idea. In several writing courses I took, they suggested I do that.

The other day I pulled it out to look up some notes I wrote last week for an idea I had for an article. As I flipped through the pages I came across some notes I wrote about a film idea I had last August. I had completely forgotten about it. That surprised me.

The story is a variation of the idea I had for The Crying Woman. Like The Crying Woman, the story is about a chance meeting between two people. Where and how they meet is different. The two characters are different. What they want is different. Overall, I think it is a darker story, but it has a happy ending. It also has a message that I feel strongly about.

When I reread my notes, I found the story compelling enough to want to work on it some more. Right now, I have a couple of projects that I want to complete, so I can’t go back to it right now. I have notes for a couple of other stories I want to do.

The big advantage of keeping a notebook is that you don’t lose any of the ideas you have. You never know when they will prove useful. On the other hand, I remember reading an interview with Paul McCartney where he said that he felt that if you couldn’t remember it later, then it wasn’t that good an idea. That may be the case with him, but I think I can use all the help I can get.

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

$100 Film Festival Film Update – 2011 October 30

I got the film I shot for my $100 Film Festival Film back this week. It looks good to me. I still have some more shots to get. Then I can move on to the edit.

I’ve started to think about what kind of sound track to do. I can’t do sync sound, but some kind of voice over or music would work OK. The first idea I had was to have a cacophony of voices and have individual phrases and lines popup into the foreground.

I’ve had a good idea about the images I want for a while now, but now I have to give more thought about the point I want to make. For a long time now, I’ve wanted to do a film about contingency: what happened didn’t necessarily have to happen. Just by chance, I got a shot that conveys that idea quite well. That makes me think this could be the film where I do it.

The original suggestion I got from Howard Horwitz was to do a film about the $100 Film Festival. My idea of contingency works well with how the festival came about. If you read the article (http://www.bukisa.com/articles/137107_the-history-of-the-100-film-festival ) I wrote about the festival you can see that there were several times where I might have dropped the idea before I proposed it.

I wanted to use a quote about contingency from Stephen Jay Gould. I was sure I had recorded it, but I can’t find it now. I’m tempted to record it with someone else, but I feel that would be cheating. Maybe I need to come up with my own line to convey the same point.

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

Website Upgrades in the Works

I want to improve my website and have started to experiment with some changes.

My first improvement was to add an e-mail notification to my blog. Google’s Feedburner allows you to sign up for notifications every time there is an update to the blog. I tried it out myself and it works just fine. Now I need to get people to sign up for it. I already have an e-mail list to send out notifications, but I promised to send out notices no more than once a month. The notices from this will be more frequent.

Up until now, I have created my website with html and php files that I coded myself. I did add WordPress when I added my blog. More recently, I looked into content management systems, which would make it easier for me to maintain the website. I could add features, like comments, which I can’t do very well now.

I hadn’t found any systems I felt comfortable with, and then someone suggested I could use WordPress. Since I use it for my blog, I have a reasonably good idea how it works. I set up a test website a couple weeks back to experiment with. (http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/testsite/ )

In order to match the look of my current website I need to create my own theme. That has been a challenge. I’ve run into and solved several problems so far. I got a WordPress for Dummies book, and while I found it useful, it doesn’t have a whole lot on how to create new themes, especially with the features I want to include.

I still need to fix a few bugs yet and I want to add in all of the pages before I take the new site live.

I sometimes wonder if I put too much time into improving my website. Maybe I should put that time into my stories or films instead. On the other hand, I think that a professional looking website does help. So far, I don’t have huge numbers of people who visit my site, so I feel I have the time to experiment with the site itself and with what I put on it.

Besides, I enjoy setting up ad improving the website.

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

Transportation Planning Humour

I wanted to put together a collection of transportation planning jokes, but I haven’t come across many. In fact, the only one I know of was one I wrote about 20 to 25 years ago.

Back then, our department faced some very difficult problems, which had resulted in the replacement of the manager. The new manager asked me to prepare a report about how new models might help to fix the problems. As I wrote my report, I came up with a way to explain what I wanted to say in a humorous manner, so after I finished the report, I wrote a short memo based on those ideas.

The memo is long gone, but this is what I remember of it:

We need to have three new models.

First, we needed a model that would help us address operational problems with our transit system. We would call this the Transit Operations Model, or TOM.

Second, we needed a model that would help us evaluate development applications faster. We would call this the Development Impact Calculation Kit, or DICK.

Third, we needed a model that would help us review the roadway plans on an annual basis. We would call this the Highway And Road Review Yearly, or HARRY.

In summary, with the help of every TOM, DICK and HARRY we can overcome our problems.

I was a little unsure if I should actually give it to the manager. The humour is a little lame, but I thought he would like it. I felt relieved that when I gave it to him, he liked it. He liked it so much that he showed it to several other people.

Unfortunately for me, some of the others were not so amused. I don’t regret that I did it though.

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