I am full of expensive spaghetti, iced tea

Went into towne to meet someone for dinner tonight and I had my camera with me so...

Here are a couple of pictures from Sloane Square, which is in Kensington - AKA the wealthiest borough in London. Want to spend twenty million pounds on a home? Then come on down!Dinner was nabbed at an Italian cafe in Covent Garden Market - a great place to see at any time of day, it has proper stalls and shops during the morning and afternoon, then transforms into a dense nest of great eateries in the evening. Prices are generally average and up - but certainly better than most places I saw in Kensington (where you were looking at thirteen pounds and up for the main course).
And later still, I had a bit of a ramble before hopping on the tube. True story!

It is, by definition, propaganda...

...but this Barack Obama clip was interesting nonetheless. I'm particularly intrigued by his common theme of a United States of America - if only because of the amount of speculative fiction I've read where as soon as ten years from now the U.S. has balkanized into all sorts of fiefdoms.

It's inked and it don't stink

Toooo much? I'd like to think that I'm managed to cross the line from stanky to a more palatable manky with this rendition of Clive. When I get back from work today I'll experiment with slapping this hot mama in front of the background types I've been twiddling with - perhaps even try using the brush tool to further tweak this and that (the right shoulder seems a bit large still).

If my opinion of the Syd Field guide were a person...

...then it would be manic-depressive. Up and down. Positive and negative. I cannot make up my mind about a book that so far (three chapters left, from eighteen) has made me want to apply it's wisdom and at other times throw it out of a window, perhaps after writing "YOU'RE WORLD VIEW IS SO VERY NARROW" all over the cover in angry black crayon. With so little left to go, I think I'll wait until I've finished it to do a more in-depth analysis.

Sometimes I can't help but wonder how I'd read the book if I was coming to it with no story writing experience - all doe eyed and full of wonder. Not that I'm a hard-bitten, cynical, chain smoking writer, whose shirt collar is permenantly bent out of shape and speech pattern is locked in"Sardonic" mode*...but I do know that the way I read stories has certainly been affected in some negative ways by my study of them.

A quick and easy example is the most common filmic use of allusion**, wherein the writer cannot be arsed to properly devlop a charactor or concept so that the audience is shown what s/he wants them to see...thus they name a character after something they came across elsewhere, hypertext linking you - in a fashion - to something which they hope you read as well.
A pretty straightforward example, used by Fields in his flabbergasting book, is how the main villain of Chinatown - a man behind a major conspiracy to do with manipulating Los Angeles water supply - is named Noah Cross.

Now, I liked the movie as a whole...but the thing is that having spent so much time analysing stories both in school and of my own volition, this slapped me across the face with as much laziness and absurdity as if you were to call him "Watery McBiblical". Particularly since I know full well that someone doesn't have to have even read the entirety of a Wikipedia article on most subjects in order to be able to allude to them (as they can rely on the viewer's knowledge to fill in the gaps).

Feh!

You have been reading...

SCRIPTIN' FANCY-LIKE: OLIVER DOES NOT CARE FOR ALLUSION IN FILM, PARTICULARLY ALLUSION TO PRIOR WORKS VIA THE NAME OF A CHARACTER OR PLACE. OKAY?

*Yet!
**Oh dear, it all comes full circle...

A tiny tidbit...

...as job hunting (my contract with Network Rail ends on the 11th of May!) has consumed most of tonight. After some careful consideration, I've chosen this tree I came across in Uffington, near Oxford, for my next stab at watercolour painting. All day I've been having powerful reactions to that Syd Field book, you can safely expect some scriptwriting discussion tomorrow.Addendum: Posterchild found a site which lists the hobo graffiti code from the earlier part of the 20th century. You may need it?

Some drawer-ings

Well, I may not have the chops of Simon - but I think I'm getting closer to what I want for the webcomic. Getting the USB cord in the mail and using my new scanner/printer reminded me of something I should have remembered after only six months of being scanner-less. Pencil drawings do not scan at all well, inking is a must.

I've made some forays into inking but they aren't quite anything to show yet - one or two full page drawings have even been ruined by an errant, spastic motion which lead to the atmosphere of my apartment being rendered audibly blue. When I get one I like, I'll post it - true story!

But for now I'll slap up the 15/30/45 takes of Clive, the main character, and his girlfriend Charlotte (with whom I plan to have him live, thus far).
Fifteen minute Clive showed promise, I even tried to work in a little design for his t-shirt. Arms were too thick, but oh well on to 30 minute Clive.
Thirty minute Clive is my favorite and damn near what I'd like to use as the basic reference model for the strip. The loose lines in the hair will come or go if I colour or don't colour the strip - I'm tempted to start black & white then migrate to colour as skill allows. The biceps are still a little thick, I guess I was just trying to avoid boring cylinders for upper arm sections. The only other thing I'd change is the collar, which I think I nailed better on...
,,,45 minute Clive. Though I felt I made some improvements from 30 minute Clive, I definitely had trouble replicating what I wanted to keep. Consistency is something I'm going to try and work on more, I've filled a couple of sheets with repetitions of faces etc for the characters as a means of practice. I'd post them, but they're boring?

Meanwhile 15 minute Charlotte was, frankly, horrid. I think I tried to overcomplicate things, which would explain why I spent time detailing her belt but didn't finish her right hand in the time I gave myself! So I'll skip to thirty minute Charlotte.
As with thirty-minute Clive, I felt like I'd just about nailed it. I was aiming for a much shorter, curvier figure than Devon (a new design for which, I'll try to post later this week). For whatever reason, I've known a lot of women with this kind of build so I just tried to work from a mental composite image - as opposed to Clive, who is shamelessly modelled after myself and other tall, slender lads. Anyways, aside from my running difficulties with feet, I think I really got everything the way I wanted but perhaps for a slightly too large chest. I tried to correct this without making it look weird...however I don't mind admitting that I was reluctant to spend too much time on that section of the anatomy due to a self-conscious moment wherein I realized I was a guy sitting alone in his apartment drawing and re-drawing boobs. I got over it quick enough, but still! One of the draw backs of writing for film and thinking so often in filmic terms is that it is very easy to quickly compose an unflattering image of ones self!
Fourty-five minute Charlotte had a more satisfying torso, so to speak, but I think I shouldn't have experimented with the wider hips. Plus, as with Clive, I had a lot of trouble faithfully copying the head, which pissed me off because the thirty minute Charlotte was exactly what I wanted, from the neck up. Ah well, more sheets filled with multple Charlottes should help me improve my consistency. I think part of what helped with thirty minute Chartlotte's face was that I'd done a larger drawing of it just before I attempted the full figure.
Ah well, I feel progress is being made and the Drawing: Basic Anatomy guide I picked up along with the Syd Fields book shouldn't hurt. Meanwhile, I've written the first ten strips and have been adding to a list of general ideas whenever I have one. I know that I'll want to get a few strips done and in the can before I start posting them so that I can have a buffer to protect me, should life get in the way. I've noticed that, as with most websites, webcomics tend to live or die by the regularity of their updates. They don't necessarily have to update five times a week, but they do need to update when they say they're going to. I've also just about settled on a title as well, which shouldn't be tooooo hard to guess!

Lil' environmental update

A rather positive development, if I do say so myself.

A follow-up on Syd Field

The man has decided to do a series of interviews with only screenwriters so as to help make them heard more, amongst the clamor of square chins and round tits that generally get attention in Hollywood. The following is a clip from his interview with Michael Arndt - who wrote Little Miss Sunshine.

Meanwhile, "Hello!" to the recent explosion of people who've come by here in the past 48 hours! I hope you all stay around and feel free to use the categories list in my sidebar to focus on my photos of London or my discussions of scriptwriting , to pick two examples.

[Edit: If you have trouble with the video on my site, you can go to the original posting here]

Scriptin' Fancy-Like: Books, courses and other things to lead you astray.

Yesterday, during a short ramble in south Islington, I did something I rarely do and am very skeptical about.

I bought a guide to screenwriting.

This particular guide is Syd Field's "Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (Newly Revised and Updated)". Three factors helped draw me up and over the mental barrier I've erected.

1) I recognized the name and, more importantly, the films of the author (amongst others, Syd Field is responsible for Chinatown).
2) The title is straightforward and to the point. When someone tries to be clever in the title of an instructional work, I get to wondering what shoddy business they are trying to distract me from with humour.
3) This is an updated version of a guidebook which has been reprinted many times over almost thirty years. The book itself, let alone the man, struck me as a bit of an institution.

What sealed the deal was the following short quote which I read on page eight of the introduction.
"This is not a 'how-to' book; I can't teach anybody how to write a screenplay. People teach themselves the craft of screenwriting. All I can do is show them what they have to do to write a successful screenplay. So, I call this a what-to book, meaning if you have an idea for a screenplay, and you don't know what to do or how to do it, I can show you."

I love it. What a great attitude, humble yet instructive. I'm about two chapters in and so far so good, there's a good chance I'll do a tiny review when I finish.

When I was a young'un, I basically decided that I didn't like the idea of Script-Writing books - or anything else that told me how to write. Not so much because I had inflated my ego to the point that I thought I'd perfected writing, but I really hated the idea of their being one way to write anything. In the enhanced mental state that can only come from being a teenager, I decided to more or less reinvent the wheel when it came to writing.

So I wrote.

Then I realized that it might be more expedient if I could learn from the mistakes of others? I found myself utterly repulsed by what I saw on shelves, so I signed up for the beginners scriptwriting course at the CSTC. It was a week long, very intensive course and what I really liked about it was how you were taught more than just the obvious. There were writing exercises, sure, but my teacher focused on teaching about the lifestyle and the business of scriptwriting. This is something I really appreciated because, frankly, I was already studying stories and forms in University. But my picture of how to go about getting a script actually made was woefully inadequate - I more or less imagined that you went to a studio with your script and handed it in, like an essay. Maybe, at some point, a mysterious character called "an Agent" got involved?

Riiiiight.

But the second course I took with the CSTC, one year later, contained a great deal of what I cannot stand in instruction. My teacher fell prey to something which I have always known is a danger when one sets out to teach others how to do something as personally subjective as writing, painting etc. Whether or not he realized it, it was obvious that at some point in his life he had followed this path of deduction.

1. "I want to teach people how to write well"
2. "I think I write well"
3. Conclusion: "I will teach people how to write just like me"
   

Thus style and form get all messed up in the dudes head and this came out in everything he said. Teachers should help people devlop their own style and to take what they find useful from structure(s) - not just try to carbon copy themselves into the presumably tabula rasa student.

What began to tip me off was something which came up at the beginning of the first day. We were each to give a synopsis of the twenty-five page script seed we brought in with us. Eventually it was my turn and I described my story about a detective who has made questionable deals and has to murder his own partner in the first ten minutes of the film (an extension of the first short script of mine that was made for the 2003 Carleton Student Film Festival - Trenchcoats & Corsets. It had some warts, let me tell you, but it was a fun first effort).

For a moment he looked at me, like I'd forgotten to flush the toilet for the thousandth time and he'd just found the evidence. Then he asked me "Oliver, why on Earth would I want to see a movie with an unlikable character?". I took this as a bit of a challenge, alright - fairplay, and started to try and justify why people would want to watch this character. Hey, if somebody wants to bust my balls a bit in trying to get me to further explain an idea of mine...that's cool, I do the same thing to others all the time.

But then he did The Bad Thing. He interrupted me before I'd barely begun speaking and said that he was asking a rhetorical question, that nobody wants to watch a movie with an unlikable main character - that the protagonist has to be someone they'd want to spend time with.

"Uhmmmm....." I said, as I mentally tallied about a dozen different films right off the top of my head which contradicted what he said. Keeping topical, I can honestly say that 300's take on
King Leonidas certainly seemed more intense than someone I'd want to go have a pint with. I can't say as I'd be fussed about hanging out with Hannibal Lector, either. Ah well...

So all I can say for courses is they are a real crapshoot that depends largely on the teacher. When I get my next job sorted I'm going to look into doing a second course with Panico, but this time I'm going to email them and ask for details about the professor so I can at least feel slightly less like I'm taking a gamble with the money I invest.

As for books....I can't say as I'm quite settled on these, having found the odd exception. But I would recommend looking for books written by older writers that have a good, long body of work and who straddle the fine line between speaking in overly esoteric terminology with no practical grounding and the other end of the spectrum, those who seem to think that stories can be explained using a slide ruler and protractor.

After going on about all this, I feel compelled to say "Why yes, I did get a big laugh out of Adaptation".