Oh for the love of...

When it comes to debating with one Oliver T.C. Brackenbury, Rob basically has magic powers. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, lest I dare to take personal responsibility for slaying the curmudgeon.

Meanwhile, today has been an artsy day, good times.

That'll learn me to be cynical

I've often exasperated people who find downtown Ottawa hard to get around by mocking them mercilessly. Why do I mock them? Because Ottawa, like most North American cities, is built on a grid system and because of that most navigational errors can be undone quite easily. If you can think in an overhead, Pacman-esque manner then you are basically set. Meanwhile, I have also been known to describe the planning of London's roads in a scenario where someone throws a heap of spaghetti at a wall just before pronouncing "There, that is what we shall go with". Maybe it's really just the end result of a much older city which has grown more organically (re: messily) over the past couple of millenia or so. Maybe.
I'm only just about managing to look the correct way when I cross the street, 100% of the time, now. But my inner sense of navigation still works on the grid system and thanks to that I got lost like all hell in the Leicester square area last night - failing to find my way to the LFA Actors Tower until fifteen minutes into the speech. Even so, I didn't get in! There was but one door, tucked away somewhat, which had a little sign labelled "Theater Door" beside it. I tried the door...but it was locked? I checked the address of the places around it and through the process of elimination, I had to be at the right place and yet...
Well shucks howdy, I took a picture or two but in the end I just explored a bit before heading home. Disappointing? You bet!

Meanwhile, I've been thinking about ways to market myself (market, not whore. Sorry ladies!) and as is the way of the world - the Internet has come to mind. But man, there sure is a lot of stupid jargon floating about these days which suggests that something as simple as a website would not be enough. It would not be Web 2.0, a term which seems destined to eventually sit in the same over-sized, dirty blue plastic bin at the back of a Wal-Mart as Cyberspace or Information Superhighway.

But things like Myspace and Facebook induce an at least partially illogical vomit reflex on my part. They really do. I've tried to look at the former in an objective manner and I do gather how it has helped raise some musical acts profiles. But there is some kind of metaphorical curmudgeon nestled deep inside me which just can't help but find them facile and obnoxious. Maybe I'll swallow a spider to bite the curmudgeon at some point, hopefully not setting off a whole ecosystem in my stomach which may or may not lead to my death, but until then...

Strangely, even though I know the sucessful are greatly outweighed by the obscure and unrewarded, I find my mind keeps wandering back to webcomics. Thanks to somebody*, I've been a regular addict of the medium for about four years now. That sound like two marbles being put down a long chute was Ryan rolling his eyes, by and by. Twice in the past few years he has suggested that I pen my own webcomic and he's not the only one. It isn't terribly hard to translate filmic thinking to comics and I already have 15 mb of webspace from BT to play with.

Back in September, I'd even considered doing a little webcomic, instead of this blog, to chronical my doings over in England. It was going to be a bit of a shamless stylistic rip-off of a pretty popular comic called Overcompensating, in that I'd draw in a fairly similar cartoony style using photos for backgrounds. To be fair, I was going to put my cards on the table and call it "Olivercompensating" while never making any effort to profit from it. Other times I've thought about translating my full script for "Tonight We Fall In Love" into a serialized story. I've even thought about how there are more than few webcomics devoted to taking the piss out of films, but none so far on the film making process (of which I'm aware, anyways).

So the moral of the story is, I've hemmed and hawed about it for a long time without ever seriously pursuing it? NO. The moral is that thanks to a muck-up** at work, I have wound up in possession of several blank sheets of paper I could use to investigate if I have it in me to to cover the artistic side. I have some old "Olivercompensating" sketches to use as a jump-off point and we'll see where it goes from there. By Monday I'd like to have a simple style for drawing people that I could use. This will be the big challenge really, compared to writing, ideas or even the web design side of things. Let's see what comes of it!

* Seriously, Ryan, are you aware of this? Perhaps you should investigate in the hopes of, potentially underage or underattractive, smooches?
**Honestly, not theft. The story is just dull, that' s all.

A little follow up from yesterday

I'll tell you, waiting around for inspiration to strike is the route of the sucker and the do-nothing. I forced myself to write out that less than satisfactory bridge and, simply by re-inserting myself into the story, I found myself charting out the rest of the film with greater depth, colour and vigour. Later still, I thought of a way to re-write that lame bridge so that it played nicely into a new scene I'd thought to have and even came up with a great epilogue. If I'd just remained in the state I've been the past little while, floating around the story and patiently waiting for good ideas to just appear....well, I think I'd get about as far as someone sitting around and waiting to get physically fit.

Meanwhile I'm checking out a Film Directors talk at the London Film Academy tonight, which will be followed by films made through both Panico and the LFA. This can't come out without sounding a bit horrid, but I'm looking forward to seeing who I might want to try contacting to work with and who I might want to be thankful I'm more talented than...

Yeah I guess I went there*, along with everybody else who does or plans to do this for a living. What's that you say? An ugly side to the world of film?

*There: A magical land where insecure creative types (that's all of them) can simultaneously appreciate and disparage the work of their peers - taking equal parts of encouragment and inspiration from either activity.

Scriptin’ Fancy Like : Dangers!

It’s a simple enough problem. I know what scene 3:1 is and I know what scene 3:2 is. But the only way I can see to get the characters from one to the other feels a tad implausible. I’ve got the broad strokes of the entire rest of the treatment for Archbrook done and I know I’d whip through them, but instead I’ve let myself get hung up on this one part at the start of the third act and as a result the script has stalled. Today I’ve resolved to just sort of say “To hell with it” and write out that less than satisfactory scene bridge so as to let myself progress with the rest. It’s the first draft for heaven’s sake; I can always come back and change things. That being said, this has put my mind onto the topic of that which can hinder and halt the writing process. I reckon now is as good a time as any for another SFL supplement.

Getting Hung Up On One Stupid Thing
Partially covered in the previous paragraph, this is essentially when you get stuck on writing the story in chronological order and you've reached a point you're having trouble with. The two solutions I've found are to either write a placeholder (if it isn't a terribly important moment) or to just write pieces you want to include later. Having to make those later parts fit into the continuity can often give you ideas for how to settle that part you got stuck on in the first place, now that you have a better idea of what it is leading to.

Fear of Cliché
This can be a big one for me sometimes and I've honestly gottan a tad neurotic once or twice in my desire to have a story (or just story element) which has never graced the minds of mortal men before. Attempting to actually create something 100% original is akin to trying to create a new primary colour or musical note. If you can get yourself to remember that you are working with a sort of "reality palette" and that it is the arrangement of elements which makes a story original, then you can usually deal with this pretty well.

Writers Block
Write something else, anything else. I always think of writers block like a cramped up muscle and if you can just limber it up then things will soon be alright again. Even if it's just nonsenical gibberish that makes you laugh, it will get the pencil moving and get you closer to where you want to be.

Just remember to come back to what you were first writing before you’re not only stuck but you’ve lost interest. If the worst happens and you lose interest, then never, ever delete or throw anything out. Ideas can lay fallow for a long time before something will happen in your life that makes them interesting and relevant again.

Unintentional Idea Theft
Trying to come up with a name for the deity which the religion/cult in Archbrook worships, I really tried hard not to be derivative. I didn’t want to just slap some consonants together or do something in the vein of Lovecraft or anything that sounded like a guttural Klingon burp. So I experimented with different sounds and their combinations on a page of one of my notebooks. I experimented with syllables and how pleasing or frightening they were – trying to aim for a name which could be either terrifying and enticing, something context-sensitive, which would also easily translate into the term for it’s followers (ex. Christ = Christians). I let myself sleep on it several times and returned to the page again and again over the course of a month until I finally arrived at something I felt satisfied all my criteria.

“Hylia” I thought “That’s pretty damn good”

Too bad it turns out my subconscious fed that one to me from when I was ten years old and playing Zelda on the SNES with Rob after school! I haven’t played a link game since and I would never have thought I’d been a big enough fan at the time to remember such things (the coincidence was pointed out to me by Tom, otherwise I don’t ever think I would have realized). Now I’m not sure what to do, I’ve held onto it for now since I don’t want to further gum up the works by spending time going back over this draft and subbing something else for Hylia, Hylian and Hylians. But will I ever replace it? Should I ever replace it? I can’t say as I’ve answered these questions yet – though I keep thinking about how there is dick all connection between my Hylians and the other kind.

Placeholders
In the spirit of just getting on with the story, it is often tempting to just name something anything or to write a part of a scene that you don’t like but will get you to the next one. These kind of placeholders, particularly when it comes to the title of the film itself, are very useful in getting past the first problem I’ve mentioned here. There are two dangers with placeholders, however. One is that if it is a one use affair, deeply embedded in the story, that you might forget about it. That is also why I've stopped leaving sarcastic notes to myself in my stories! I don't want people who are proofreading my work to come across "Oliver! Get your dick out of your ear and re-write the ending to this scene!".

The other is that if it is something which occurs many times, like a name for a character, then you will be creating a very large chore for yourself in having to go back and change every single instance of that placeholder when you figure out a higher quality replacement. But hey, better that you have to go through a script with a fine-toothed comb then to never have finished a script to...comb....in the first place, right? Right?

I am right.

Your eyes look like two slabs of fudge with a streak of caramel going across. Also, your hands have a darker skin tone than your face.

I have yet to find a way around this problem.