Doings and Goings On

I could be working on a script. I could be doing some rotoscoping. I don't like doing either so I'm writing on this blog.
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Via Chance Shirley, Ron Brinkmann on FCP X. Ron points out that Apple trashed Shake, which was a pretty important compositing program 'till they bought it and decided they didn't want it anymore. I bet the makers of Nuke and AfterEffects are pretty happy about that decision.
So Apple may be bringing the "pro" part of Final Cut Pro to an "end of life" in the product development cycle. Which is very good news to Avid and Adobe.
Hey, I actually edited a feature on a... Cube? Sphere? D-Vision? I don't even remember what it was. It was on a PC and it was a real bear to operate, that's for sure.
So, where am I going with this? I have no idea. It's a good thing I didn't get that dual six-core Mac I was talking about.

The Philadelphia Desert in Earthkiller. Matte painting by Joe Chapman.

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Boy, on the movie Earthkiller we're having quite a hard time with our bluescreens. For some reason they're really hard to key. They look like they're correctly exposed. The GH1 is hacked so it's operating at 30Mb/s, so theoretically it should work better. But we're just having a bear of a time with these keys.
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Today I eliminated one or maybe two characters from the screenplay of Earthwar. Just think of the money that will save on lunches.

EarthWar notion

I do not know what these are other than "Fireball S. G." Presumably that means something to someone. Is that a Japanese anime? A TV show?

Apparently their kits are all sold out.

But for the "dumb" unmanned mech at the beginning of Earthkiller, they look like they might be "easy" to build and operate from inside. Just remember -- guy in black tights makes up for a LOT of potential issues in the joints. Also, the arms wouldn't have to actually work, they could be mounted so high on the body that the operator couldn't work them anyway. A few barrels on a gun and off you go!

Neue Script

So I avoided a disastrous fate and managed to get a new script finished before any autobots could zap me. But the script needs a lot of work. Indeed, it's a big ol' mess. Some of the mess is just that we have too many good ideas. Good ideas which belong in their own stories. So we're reducing those good ideas to the ones which are important to this story.
Luckily, I have a good set of notes from my collaborators. And man, if we didn't have Joe Chapman and Libby Csulik on our team we'd be lost.
This will be my third feature-length script in a year. Did I mention how much I hate writing screenplays? But the worst of it is over -- the brain vomit of that first draft. And that first draft is easier nowadays because of Save the Cat, and going over the screenplay to the Road Warrior (which is a brilliant freakin' screenplay.)

Joe sent me this inspirational artwork for the main evil dude.

If we make a two-legged mech, can Ian model a 3D version of it to flow seamlessly?

Must go fight mutant sorcerers now...

So Basically

In the meantime, a puffin.

I have two hours to write the last twenty pages of the Earthwar screenplay. There are two Titan-class autobots with Mark XVI plastisteel railguns aimed at my head and they've told me if I don't deliver some sort of screenplay by 9pm they'll be "very angry". They've gone and explained that "very angry" for a Titan-class autobot is... well... very angry.
So here's a nice summation of Blake Snyder's 5-point finale. I have a couple problems with the screenplay so far. One is that we know now what the antagonist looks like, but we don't yet have a clear picture of the protagonist. Is he a dude in a Halo suit? Is he just a regular soldier who gets a 2-legged walker at some point? What's better? What's more important, his coolness or his relation to the combat witch character?
I suspect that right now I just have way too much stuff in the movie.
One thing to do is just put in some placeholders for the action at the end of the movie. That way the autobots will shut down (and possibly give me the cure to the nanobot virus they injected me with before they do!)

Art Meetups

Jeff Hipolito runs a New York City-based Blender 3D Meetup group.

Joe Chapman is making art for a movie which I have to finish the screenplay to: Earthwar. This would clearly be the main bad guy. Flamethrower and all. We'll have to make the movie around this dude 'cause he's just so dang cool.

Earthwar Screenplay Reblabulanation

So I ran into one of those things where you're at page 71 and the story comes to a dead halt. And that's because you're going into act 3 and you realize you have a big problem. And inevitably that problem is an act 1 problem.

So one thing is clear: Earthwar is about a normal dude who has cool servo-powered armor, and his relationship with a future-techno-witch.
I'm just going to eliminate the android altogether (I know, what am I saying, right?)
And then the nemesis can be the cyborg on tank-treads dude. Because who doesn't want to see that? (And because Joe wants to build it.)
And now there's a bigger battle, which includes the cyborg nemesis, before our hero gets to Philadelphia and finds out the truth.
So that's all worked out. I'm kind of thinking at this point that Morgan has a shuttle which they fly around in until it gets destroyed by Raut, but then they pick up a bi-ped mech which they use to do the Final Battle with.
Aren't you glad you're here for this conversation in my head?

Better Earthkiller Morgan

You know who's better than I am about publicity? Project London, that's who. Look at how many followers they have! I can't wait to see the movie.

I have an Earthwar question:
When his wife turns to him and tells him "I'm so hungry" should we jump-cut to her attacking him, jump-cut to her tied in a chair, jump-cut to outside the building and we see a flash of light and the report of a blaster set to Full?
Or does Morgan show up and restrain her?
It'll determine how we go merrily into act III. And yes, another movie with a dead wife in it. She isn't holographic this time.
I suspect there's too much stuff in this movie. We might get rid of the Android. Heck, we might get rid of the witch and just make her a soldier. Or the other way around. Or both. Simplify simplify. We're keeping the digital cat though...

Streamers

The guys at Figure 53, the brilliant company which brought us Qlab for playing back sound effects in theater, made a program called Streamers which exports... well... streamers for ADR and composers.

A still from Clonehunter.

Using streamers is kind of old-fashioned but there's a lot of merit to the method, especially if you're already used to working with them. That's so not the way I tend to work though. We tend to not even do ADR -- we will just match up other dialog takes or dialog takes we do in the field as "radio versions" of scenes instead of having actors come in and doing the dialog in the studio.
If we did do ADR, streamers might be nice.
And if you're recording with an orchestra and no click track, streamers are also the way to go.
But I don't even do audio on a Mac so I'm out of the loop anyway.

[Am on page 62 of Earthwar.]

Answers about Writing

A writer asked about my "pool" of writers. Here was my semi-lucid response:

The best writer in my "writer's pool", I'm afraid to say, is me. And I'm not the best because I'm the best at writing or have even the most experience writing screenplays -- I've just done a number of them, very quickly, and produced them, so I tend to know what works. And I'm able to do it quickly.

Did I mention the "quickly" part?

Our last movie, Day 2, I wrote entirely. The movie we're doing now was re-written from page one (although ironically contains more of the older versions of the script the same writer who had handed in). The movie before that had an extensive rewrite done by me. I'm a very good re-writer. I'm the rewriter you want on your script.

I'm also an almost religious follower of Blake Snyder's "Save the Cat" books and especially the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet. The one place in writing where I fall down is in story structure. That's most writer's problem too. Blake Snyder fixes that problem. Almost any other problem can be fixed on-set (although it's better to fix beforehand).

We need creature features and big monsters. That's what everyone has been clamoring for.

What I specialize in is science fiction -- usually with a big political subtext.

The sign outside the writer's room.

What I don't like about what we do now is the relative slowness of writing. We really need to find ourselves in a position where we can have a finished, polished, screenplay in 30 days. I can do maybe 60 days now, but it's gotta get down to 30.

And just to publicly shame myself I'm on page 52 of the Earthwar script.

What's In, What's Out

Now I'm not 100% convinced that genre really dictates sales -- not sub-genres certainly. Not to the final customers. But buyers aren't so convinced. And we sell to them.

They have no crystal ball which tells them what will sell well and so they go with what rules they can figure out from the market. And if the buyers aren't even selling to consumers -- but rather to other distributors or to retailers then "conventional wisdom" is even more important because the retailers/sub-distributors can only go by "well, this sold well last year". So just keep in mind who our buyers are: not regular people but rather people who have to market to people who in turn have to market to regular people.

So I'm talking here about the bottom of the well of the indy-feature market:

What's in?

• Vampires. Of the non-sparkly variety. Right now they want horrible vampires, not sexy ones.
• Creatures. Everyone loves creatures. The more creature-y the better. Mythical creatures. Creatures from the deep.
• World Destruction. If you can put the numbers "2012" in your title, you're ahead of the game. Don't ask me why. World monuments must be destroyed. Empire State Building, Eiffel Tower. St. Louis Arch. That sort of thing. Blow 'em up. 
• SyFy likes movies which are out-of-doors. Big. Out in the open. Not in confined spaces.

What's out?

• Zombie pictures. Right, they do very well in North American theatrical but for whatever reason they don't do well overseas. And SyFy can't make a zombie picture work. Maybe AMC can -- we'll have to see. Maybe there's just been a glut of zombie pictures. Who knows? I have this whole theory about how a "zombie picture" isn't even a genre but that's a whole 'nuther story.
• Pretty vampires. Apparently that market is already being well served thank you very much.
• Non-descript aliens from the sky. Apparently we want creatures we have some sort of familiarity with. I dunno, like "octoshark" is better than some sort of new Alien. Apparently.  

So I have a script with zombies and alien creatures, a dude in a Mobile Infantry suit, a digital holographic cat, and a witch. They're just gonna hate that aren't they? I'm on page 42. All I have to do is that amount of work again and we'll have a feature. Well, maybe it should be 90 pages. I gotta get our main crew back out into the Wasteland again to fight dinobots...

Earth War Character list.

1. Crypto -- lean tech dude who's in charge of keeping the generator working.

2. Bakunin -- the head of the operation. Quiet, level-headed.

3. Rune -- F. Herc pilot.

4. Killday -- an out-and-out crazy chick. Insufferable. Unfortunately her night vision is better than any else's so she's their sniper.

5. Grappo -- big dude. 

Hadalay is the android.

Right now the witch's name is Morgan. Thinking about changing it to Sowana.

The bad guy's name is Raut. 

I'm on page 30. In the middle of the fun 'n games. 

Memento the Cat

Apparently there's a book out there called Save the Cat. It's a book on screenwriting. You may have seen me in a Mardi Gras mask, wearing no pants, talking about it at length. If not, I won't point you to the link.

One of the things Blake Snyder says in the book is essentially "This doesn't apply to the movie Memento and so shut up about Memento."

I'm banned from Picasa but I can access my albums with the new Blogger interface.

Well, I never really thought that was true. I always felt that Memento really could fit in the beat sheet if you worked on it. It's just that Memento is harder to "beat out" than other screenplays because it runs backwards from scene-to-scene. But this dude, Tillery Johnson, did in fact create a Blake Snyder Beat Sheet for Memento. And it works.

So now it's proved scientifically (with science!) that the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet works for everything, including the most art-house-y of art-house films.

Right now I'm using the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet in my structural re-telling of The Road Warrior. The picture is called "Earthwar" and it's about a Mobile Infantry soldier who's mind has been wiped, a combat witch, and a Corvette-class android. In other words, a typical Pandora Machine film.
I haven't worked out the 5-point ending yet though...

Road Warrior

Now that I'm doing a scene-to-scene structural ripoff of The Road Warrior (which is, incidentally, impossible to do and I have no idea how I'm going to deal with the compound or how the "feral kid" is now an android and the dude in the helicopter is now a witch, but you get the idea) I've been watching the movie again. And that picture is spectacularly well filmed. I mean the cinematography and the camera work are simply excellent. Unbelievable.

But instead of the post-apocalyptic desert it's about this dude who's a super-enhanced human soldier. And he's been dumped off on the Earth after the alien apocalypse where there's just old war-machines running around the place. And he runs into a combat witch and eventually an android who, among some other people, are holding out in an industrial park in Jersey against the alien "bogies" which roam around trying to wipe out the last of humanity.

But this dude, in a cool suit of servo-powered armor, is looking for himself. When they built his new body they wiped his mind clean. At least that's the way things are so far. Or maybe he does already know who he was and he wants to get back...

How am I going to make these mechs work? And will the lead's servo-powered armor also be a rocket powered suit? Will he fly? How does that equate to Max's supercharged V8 interceptor? Will it be destroyed? Or should he have a bigger suit, one he steps into? What a pain in the tuchus that sounds like. And will you be able to see his face in the armor or will he be taking his helmet off all the damn time?

Will the feral kid and the blonde woman be the same character in "Earthwar"? And will it all take place in Brooklyn?

The feral kid is the cat Mel saves. Hmm... it's too bad Mel turned out to be such a douche.

The problem with modeling a screenplay on The Road Warrior is that the picture is almost too perfect. Sure, you can see some tropes of Star Wars in it, and there's the general craziness of Australian mondo cinema, and of course the chase scene in Bullit.

But our hero "John Keynes" (let's see how long that name will stick in the script) must certainly end up facing down a combat witch's crossbow, doesn't he?

And the way Max loses the Interceptor always seemed to easy to me.  I understand why he has to lose it but it's a bit like Han Solo losing the Millennium Falcon if it had just self-destructed. And I have zero idea of what the Starship Troopers equivalent of that would be.