Synopsis: Presentation Zen (Emptiness, Grids and CRAP)

A slide is composed of positive elements (such as text or logos) and empty (a.k.a. 'negative') space. The idea seems to be that you can use negative space to draw attention to the positive elements.

Having empty space in your slide seems like a simple concept, but it's hard to implement; it's very tempting to fill that empty space with lots of other stuff. From what I can tell, the principle to apply is this:

• Start with nothing, and then add.

To begin with, look for the empty space in your slides. Once you can see it, use it. Reynolds demonstrates the difference between asymmetrical and symmetrical designs here. Asymmetrical designs activate the empty space and make your design more interesting. Symmetrical designs tend to crush the empty space out to the sides.(*)

* That's because symmetrical designs are centred along a strong vertical axis and are mirrored on both sides.
Guiding the Eye

"A well-designed slide has a clear starting point and guides the viewer through the design."

Presentation Zen provides a couple of tips here:

• Make sure images (especially of people's eyes) guide the viewer's eyes towards the elements you want them to look at
• Have a clear hierarchy that shows which elements on your slide are the most important, which are less important, and which are least important.

Reynolds also talks about using grids on your slides, and composing the information on them according to the rule of thirds.



The red dots at the intersections of these lines are called 'power points'. These are areas where you might consider placing the main subject of the slide.

Using grids to divide your page or slide into thirds will also help you align the various elements on them.

CRAP

Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity.

This was another moment where I was reading Presentation Zen and realised that it was referring to a book I already own. In this case The Non Designers Design Book, the first book on layout and typography I ever bought. It's a great read, and it made reading about the principles in this section more like revision for me. To quote directly from PZ:

"Use the principle of contrast to create strong dynamic differences among elements that are different. If it is different, make it very different." Contrasts can create a focal point for your slide, clearly pointing out the one element that is dominant. This gives the viewer a starting point to process information.

"Use the principle of repetition to repeat selected elements throughout your slides. This can help give your slides unity and organisation."

"Use of the principle of alignment to connect elements visually (through invisible lines) on a slide. Grids are very useful for achieving good alignment. This will give your slide a clean and well organised look."

"Use the principle of proximity to ensure that related items are grouped together. People will tend to interpret items together or near each other as belonging to the same group." This reminds me of a basic rule of writing: help a reader understand a sentence by grouping related words and concepts together. As an example, compare the previous sentence to this one:

• Related words and concepts can be used to help a reader if you group them together as this will make them understand a sentence more easily.

Grouping stuff together means an audience doesn't have to think about what you're trying to say. Instead, they can think about what you're saying.

That's it for Section 2 of PZ. Time to take another break -- but over the next week I'll link to a few of the presentations mentioned in chapter 7.

Synopsis: Presentation Zen (Remove clutter, use pictures)

Now we're getting into the principles that Garr Reynolds identifies as being useful for the good graphic design of slides.

First up is Signal to Noise ratio -- the ratio of relevant information on a slide compared to its irrelevant information. The goal is to get rid of clutter. If you remove as much irrelevant information as possible, people can understand what the slide is saying as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Some sources of irrelevant information that make it harder to understand a slide include:

• inappropriate charts
• 3-D charts (which often make it more difficult to interpret data)
• ambiguous labels
• distracting grids
• footers
• logos (remove these from all but the first and last slides)

Reynolds recommends using as few elements as possible on a slide. However, you should consider retaining or including elements that support the message at a more emotional level. That's the subject of his next principle.


Picture Superiority Effect

Pictures are remembered better than words, if you or exposed to the picture for longer than 30 seconds.(*) The picture and your words must reinforce (not repeat) each other for this to happen.

* This Picture Superiority Effect is strongest when the picture represents common, concrete things.

Historically, words have dominated presentations because we lack the technology to easily take or acquire pictures. Now we have readily available digital cameras, editing software and Internet resources. Some sources of rights-free images on the Internet include:

Morgue File
Flickr Creative Commons Pool
Image After
Stock.xchng
The everystockphoto search engine

As Reynolds established earlier, bullet-pointed lists of words usually aren't effective in a live talk. They should be used rarely and as a last resort. The three main techniques that come out of this section are:

1. Ask yourself what information are you representing with written words that you could replace with a photo or other graphic?
   
   
2. Find images with plenty of empty space around them (images that are scaled to at least 800x600) and place text inside those images
   
   
3. Quotes or phrases can illustrate your points. Use them sparingly; keep them short and legible. You don't want to bore the audience by reciting what they can (or have) already read.

One thing that I have really appreciated about Presentation Zen is that it constantly draws on documentary and comics as examples of effective presentations to study. In fact, it actually spends quite a bit of time quoting from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. I think I have some further reading and watching to do in this area (coming soon: looks at Zenith and An Inconvenient Truth).

Synopsis: Presentation Zen (Designing for simplicity)

I'm going back to my summary of Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. Presentation Zen (PZ) is about designing presentations that effectively communicate with the audience. Previously I have summarised Reynolds' ideas on creating the story of your presentation; now it's time to look at his ideas on visually designing the presentation.

He begins with the idea of simplicity - which he defines as a clarity that gets to the heart of the matter.

Achieving simplicity takes time, but it also makes the time that the audience spends paying attention to you far more worthwhile, as they will learn more from your presentation. Comparing the idea of 'simplicity' with ' giving the audience every bit of information', Reynolds makes the point that if you overload people with information, what (if anything) will they remember? He advises focusing only on information that illustrates your core point.

Similarly, if you overload a slide with information, pictures, charts, sidebars and borders, you force the audience to search for relevant information.

Simplicity makes it easy for the audience to understand the heart of what you're saying.

How do you achieve simplicity?

Each presentation's design will have its own logic, layout and rules (*). PZ recommends you: (a) design from the start, and (b) use design to organise information in a way that makes things clearer.

* I believe this - based on my experiences with writing scripts, songs and short stories, everything I've created has had its own internal logic. Once I've figured out what that logic is, it's made writing and redrafting far more effective. In fact, I do consider something to be finished until I figured out its logic and helped it live up to that as much as I can.

Clarity in design is achieved by elimination and omission. In other words, good designs have plenty of empty space.

• Aim to get the maximum effect with a minimum of graphic elements
• Use negative space
• Suggest rather than state
• Subtract rather than add

Reynolds then lays out his essential principles of design:

• Signal vs Noise Ratio
• Picture Superiority Effect
• Empty Space
• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

I'll go into more detail about each of these in the next couple of posts.

Why I'm Not Writing today - Atmospheric B&W Afterlife edition

Closure (flash game) has kept me interested far longer than platformers usually do. It is slow where most platformers are fast; stark rather than gaudy; and creepy, not funny.

It also has a great central conceit: you can only see the sections of the level that are illuminated by the lamp you're holding. If you can't see it in your light anymore, then that section of the level literally disappears, and you can fall through it to your doom (or in this, to your level restart).

The Fountain

scr. by Darren Aronofsky

A beautiful and (I felt) moving film, this is the first Aronofsky film that I can imagine myself rewatching.

Brief summary: It's a love story told in three time frames (15th century, modern day, and far future) about the search for immortality.

Something strange happened to me while watching this film.


*** SPOILERS ***






The movie begins with a sequence of a Spanish conquistador fighting and struggling to the top of a ziggurat, where he is attacked and apparently killed by a Mayan angel wielding a flaming sword.

Later, after establishing the other two time frames (far future and modern day), it's revealed that this 15th century South American sub-plot is actually a novel written by one of the modern day characters. At which point, we cut back to that sub-plot. And immediately I started wondering "Well, given that I know these people are just fictional characters, do I actually care about them less now?"

... which, after a few seconds, made me go "What the hell am I saying?" Every character in the film is fictional. Every character in every film I've ever watched is fictional. Should I care less about 15th century Hugh Jackman (15cHJ) just because I've had my face rubbed in his ... ah ... 'intra-fictional' nature?

And the answer I had to come to was 'Of course not'. As long as the script is making me care about them, then it doesn't matter what particular degree of unreality a character exhibits. In the case of The Fountain, not only did I enjoy the parallels between all three stories but I forgot that 15cHJ was a character in a story written by a character in a story to such a degree that I was shocked when he met his eventual fate.

It all reminded me of an argument (friendly but intense) that I got into with Sean and Andrew during the post-production stage of hopeless. I'd watched so much of the film's raw footage - actors pissing around on set before the 1st AD yelled action - that sometimes, when I looked at the film just so, the illusion of that it was a story would disappear. All I'd see was the moments we'd specifically selected, the moments where we liked the actor saying this particular line in this particular way.

What this meant, I argued, was that we were actually watching a documentary about things that had happened on set. And our brains were choosing (quite reasonably) to interpret that as a story filled with characters and plot, rather than the inter-spliced moments of reality that they actually were.

In the case of my 'films are actually documentaries' opinion, our brains don't really need to exercise much choice at all to create a story. In the case of The Fountain, I found I needed to make a real initial effort to buy into 15cHJ as a character I could care about (after all, if he's just a story, who cares if he lives or dies, right?).

There's something connecting those two points, but I can't quite see it at the moment.

The Garden of Last Days

by Andre Dubus III

I'm about 40% of the way through this novel at the moment. Do you remember that sequence in Boogie Nights where everybody's lives have turned toxic and now things are going horribly wrong for them? It's a sequence that goes on for about 15 minutes, intercutting (if I remember correctly) between Mark Wahlberg, Heather Graham, and Don Cheadle - all of it scored with this slowly tolling bell, ringing over and over again.

The sense of doom is near unbearable. (*)

* In a film filled with great cinematic moments, this sequence is the one I find the strongest due to its ability to create and sustain that single emotion.

The Garden of Last Days has created and now sustained that sense of doom for 191 pages. I've had to stop reading halfway through a chapter because a character I at first thought was despicable (and have now come to feel sympathy for) is just about to accidentally do something that will get him into so much trouble with so many characters ...

In fact, that's the reason I've stopped reading. I feel that the book is just about to change up: from a sense of doom, to the situation exploding. Not only am I nervous about finding out what happens, I'm also nervous about the dynamics of the book (which I've been enjoying immensely) changing so dramatically.

Brief summary: The Garden of Last Days, so far, has taken place entirely over one night at a strip club in Miami. It rhythmically switches between characters at the club - including an elderly widow prone to panic attacks, and a three year old girl - slowly building up a sense of character identification and momentum. The overall impression is of a book about people whose lives are in the process of not turning out well, and the story seems to be in the process of turning from a drama into a thriller. (**)

** Ian McEwan meets Carl Hiassen, I guess.

Terminator Salvation: more constructive

OK, so I found the film deeply annoying. Annoying enough that before I went to sleep last night, I had to figure out what I would do with it. Rather than exercise any original thought, I took the premise of the film as my starting point and here's what I came up with.

*** SPOILERS ***

It's a trilogy.

Rather than focusing on the plot of each film, what I'm most interested in is setting up interesting arenas for each film to explore. The first film is about friendship, the second film is about loyalty, and the third film is about achieving victory when you're not protected by destiny anymore.

Movie 1: Is all about establishing the relationship between Marcus Wright and Kyle Reese. Maybe the movie starts the same way, or maybe it starts with Marcus walking out of the desert. Either way, Movie 1's mission statement is make Marcus/Kyle the coolest post-apocalyptic duo ever. Make their friendship legendary. Kyle is the boy with the plans; Marcus is the guy who can pull them off.

John Connor is an off-screen figure, a legendary inspiration who is essential to the Resistance.

During Movie 1, much of the same stuff happens to Kyle, giving Marcus an against-impossible-odds rescue mission. During it, he discovers pivotal information about himself (and what he's supposed to do to Connor). Movie 1 ends with Kyle rescued, Marcus reeling, and both of them forced by circumstance to team up with Connor on a mission of pivotal importance to the war.

Movie 2: Is all about playing with tensions and loyalties. Kyle grows to know John Connor, but still thinks of Marcus as his best friend. Connor grows to know Kyle and Marcus, trusting the two of them. The question of what happens when the switch in Marcus' head flips on is present throughout the film - which is mostly a kick-arse action setpiece that incorporates many of the moments we saw in 'The Terminator '. A central question that's often asked in this film would be "We don't understand the enemy, so how can we destroy them?"

This second movie ends with Marcus turning on them, and Kyle and John teaming up to try and execute him. The film finishes with the cliffhanger of Connor's team beginning the assault of Skynet's time base.

Movie 3: Starts with the assault on Skynet and getting Kyle into the time machine. After that, everything is in play - Connor can die, the war can still be won or lost. Let the action ensue; hell, bring back Marcus from the dead if you can think of something interesting to do with him.

... or you could send giant robots back to London 2011 to beat the sh!t out of everything.

Terminator Salvation: if you haven't seen it yet

The answer is no.

But before I start talking about Terminator Salvation (no colon), let's review John Rogers' three principles of writing a good scene:

1.) Who wants what?
2.) Why can't they have it?
3.) Why do I give a shit?

OK, no spoilers.

This isn't John Connor's movie. Connor is a sidekick in this film. That's right: a sidekick. Actually, he's less than that. The film not only doesn't establish why John Connor is special, it doesn't even provide a compelling reason to keep him alive. This is a Terminator film in which John Connor lacks a destiny. ... And actually, it's even less than that: Connor is a LIABILITY to the Resistance - he gives away their position and their plans, and doesn't seem to have learned anything about Terminators, ever (*).

(*) There may be a little bit of hyperbole in that last sub-clause.

OK, Connor is a sidekick. Fine. Now I've got that out of my system, I think my rage is spent. This was going to be a long rant but I think I can summarise it now.

The movie's not all bad. While the first act rushes through a whole bunch of stuff and doesn't give us any reason to care about anyone, it does do a great job of establishing that terminators are badasses. Well done.

There's some nice future robot shooting action, and a 30 or 40 minute sequence in the middle (from the gas station through to the swimming lesson) where the film has: (a) momentum, (b) characters with understandable motivations, and (c) an interesting central dilemma. Well done.

From that point on, I was sniggering at the film until it ended. That's about 30 minutes of mocking something I once loved.

Not. Cool.

And the film has two other big problems:

First, John Connor wasn't even supposed to be in this movie! This link has much spoilerage in it, but is pretty essential to figuring out why the Connor scenes don't work, don't advance the plot, and don't make you care about anyone.

Second, the whole way the Resistance works is completely implausible (and I say this acknowledging that they are fighting a war against AIs and cyborgs). They have jets, and airbases, and helicopters, and a base that's two days walk from Skynet that's surrounded by ... well, you'll find out if you see the movie, but the fact that these characters survived more than two or three minutes ASTOUNDS me.

Here are two other spoiler-filled reviews to read before I ask the question: Poland. Quint.

So the question you need to ask yourself after reading all this is, "Should I see Terminator Salvation"?

Synopsis: Presentation Zen (How to Build a Story)

The act of preparing your presentation and finding your core message is the first step in finding your story.

Step 1: Brainstorming

· Write down everything - be messy, explore every possibility that occurs to you, examine every aspect of your core point

· Mind map, word associate

· Don't settle for the just the obvious or starting ideas you come up with; push

· Approach the presentation with a beginner's mind; don't worry about making mistakes or failing. Instead, adopt an attitude of experimentation and exploration. Try to rid yourself of preconceived ideas.

Step 2: Group and identify.

· Transfer ideas to post-it notes and chunk the post-its into themes.

· Look for the one key idea that is central and memorable to the audience.

Sections of your presentation can start to emerge here (3 can be a good number). Remember: each section needs to serve the core point.

Now begin to create a storyboard that will give your presentation a 'shape'.

Don't go to PC; stay analog - use post-its or a whiteboard.

Step 3: storyboard your presentation (away from the computer)

· One idea per post-it note

· Lay out the post-it notes - rearrange and then rearrange the post-its again, until the flow feels right

· Sketch pictures from the ideas

Step 4: Storyboard on the computer

· Create distinctively formatted slides to demarcate each new section.

· Add visuals to each of these section slides to support your narrative.

Step 5: After creating your presentation, edit

· Eliminate elements that aren't crucial to demonstrating the core point of the talk.

Huh. I've become aware that despite PZ saying that it's not offering a methodology to rigidly follow, what I'm synopsising here is starting to look like just that.

However, I'm not sure that this has really gotten to grips with how to create a story; the book hasn't lived up to its promise in that regard. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'll be taking a closer look at Elements of Persuasion, writing by a experience scriptwriter / pitcher of movies to Hollywood studio execs.

That's it for the story side of things, though. Time for a break from Presentation Zen. I'll come back to it in a week and break down the Design section of the book.

Presentation: Brought to you by Debbie

As Debbie suggested in the comments, this clip will show you the true power of Powerpoint:

Synopsis: Presentation Zen (Stories and Stickiness)

Bad Powerpoint presentations consist of bullet-pointed recitations of facts. But audiences don't just want answers, they want meaning. So Presentation Zen (PZ) encourages you to tell the audience the story of your facts. (*)

* This reminds me, I need to re-read Elements of Persuasion, a book co-written by a Hollywood screenwriter about how to pitch movies.

The advantages of stories include:

• they're more attention-grabbing and memorable than lists
• they explain complicated ideas through examples and metaphors
• they connect with audiences, especially when they are personal and authentic.

Make your presentation unforgettable

PZ uses ideas from 'Made to Stick' - a book which describes qualities that can make an idea or speech more memorable(**) - and applies them to presentations.

** One thing I've noticed is that PZ draws off many recently published books. It makes me wonder if this methodology has really been tested.

These principles are:

• Simplicity: be ruthless in your efforts to reduce your message to its core
• Unexpectedness: Suprise people. Ask questions. Open up gaps in their knowledge (and then fill those gaps)
• Concreteness: use natural speech and real examples, instead of vague abstractions
• Credibility: put statistics into terms people can visualise
• Emotions: you need to make an audience feel. Images help.

As a presenter, you need to fight the "Curse of Knowledge", which is your inability to imagine what it's like to NOT have any background knowledge about your topic. The above principles are weapons that can be used to fight the curse of knowledge and create a story.

So next up I'm going to summarise PZ's process for giving your facts a logical structure and then finding their story.

Why I'm Not Writing today - Bad Voodoo edition

I've been playing Pandemic and Pandemic 2, two flash games where you take the part of a disease, and your objective is to kill as much of humanity as possible. I've tried to tell myself it's educational, that I'm learning about vectors of transmission and the components that make a virus more lethal ... but increasingly a superstitious part of my lizard brain is getting activated, telling me not to mess around with this sort of stuff lest I bring on the germ-pocalypse.

I link in the belief that you're more enlightened than I am.

Synopsis: Presentation Zen (Finding the core)

If designing a presentation is a creative act, what will help you be more creative? That's the thrust of the next section of Presentation Zen (PZ). The book spends quite a few pages convincing the reader about the value of creativity, and then provides some strategies to enhance it. The ones I particularly liked were:

1. Approach the presentation with a beginner's mind; don't worry about making mistakes or failing. Instead, adopt an attitude of experimentation and exploration. Try to rid yourself of preconceived ideas.

2. Take things slowly. Spend some time alone, stilling your mind, contemplating the problem. Hopefully you'll then start to see the big picture of your presentation, and figure out what its core message(s) are.

I don't think PZ argues its case quite as strongly when it comes to the value of having restrictions. The author believes that if you're not given restrictions, you should impose them on yourself. While I'm not totally convinced, I am a fan of pecha kucha, so I'm prepared to buy into it for the rest of the book.

However, there is one restraint that feels right to me: reducing your presentation down to its absolute essentials.

What's the point?

... of your presentation? If you were to condense your talk down to 5 minutes, to 2 minutes, ... if you were to shorten it to 30 seconds, what would be left? What is the core message(s) you're trying to get across? (*)

* Apparently, you'll be lucky if you can get your audience to remember even one point from your presentation.

That's one question that PZ hammers on again and again. The other is "Why does it matter?" To make people care about your presentation and the point(s) you're trying to make will require persuasion, emotion and empathy, as well as a logically constructed argument.

Synopsis: Presentation Zen (Introduction)

Here's a weird bit of research: people find it more difficult to process information if it's delivered to them verbally and in writing at the same time. That means that most Powerpoint presentations (*) actively interfere with how people actually learn and communicate.

* The stereotypical 'speaker reciting from the bullet-pointed list on the slide right in front of them'.

This is one of the starting points for the book I'm reading; Presentation Zen is about making better presentations - ones that help you communicate more effectively (or at least not bore your audience). This is something I've been interested in for a while; it ties into one of the potential new things I'm going to do.

Designing a presentation is a creative act

A presentation involves transforming facts or opinions into a story. I haven't read very much of Presentation Zen yet, but I suspect this is going to be one of the fundamental principles of its approach.

And now I think about it, that transformation can be applied to a lot of things: advertising, editorialising, propaganda. Reflecting on it, I realise that makes me a little uneasy: communicating in order to share your insights is something I'm fine with; communicating in order to persuade the audience brings up memories of feeling manipulated. I guess presentations can have an ethical dimension to them.

The author, Garr Reynolds, suggests that the first thing to do when given the opportunity to create a presentation is to slow down. Take the opportunity to think about what is important and what isn't. This leads into ideas of:

• Restraint (in preparation)
• Simplicity (of design)
• Naturalness (of presentation)

Reynolds suggests that applying these three principles will lead to greater clarity in your presentation. I'm about to reach the point in the book where he explores the first of these: restraint.

True Blood: Season 1, the last three episodes

The last three episodes were filled with great stuff. Strong character developments, changes to dramatic situations on all fronts, the introduction of interesting and despicable new characters. Funny (and moving) in parts, too.

And yet I'm having trouble getting enthused about it. As a TV series, I like True Blood, but I'm not sure I'm that interested in it. It's actually kind of a weird feeling - I think I'm starting to realise I like to get a little obsessed with TV shows. And the qualities that get me obsessed fascinated are intriguing questions and a sense that a series has a bigger picture (a mythology) that each episode is a part of.

True Blood is a really entertaining horror melodrama, that's well-written and performed, with a story that occasionally takes funny and surprising turns.

And I'm not sure that's enough for me. Guess I'll find out for sure when the next season rolls around (preview, here).

On a slight tangent, I do think I've consistently made the mistake of viewing this as a TV series and judging it on an episode by episode basis. While watching the finale, I realised it works better for me to think it as an TV adapation of a novel. I'm not sure I can articulate the difference between than that, yet. I'll think on it.

Why I'm Not Writing today - Existential Dread edition

I've been watching the History Channel doco, "Life After People", which follows the planet Earth forward about 10,000 years to see what would happen if every single human were to disappear* right now.

* The doco continuously uses the metaphor of 'disappearance', as if we're all taken up in some raptural-like experience. Implicitly, though, it's asking "What happens if we all die?" ... and to its credit, it delicately steers away from explaining that this would give dogs that have been trapped inside a house an extra week or two of unrefridgerated food supply.

Things I've learned from it:

• Dogs with short legs are screwed; pity them more than you normally would
• Nuclear power plants won't melt down
• Radiation can have long-term benefits for the environment
• Flying squirrels are cool
• Radio and TV broadcasts from Earth probably turn to gibberish after travelling about 2 light years.

A bit lame and OTT in places, extremely moving in others. It's broken down into 10 minute segments on this site. I recommend it.

Graphic Design Practice #7

More Photoshop challenges (where you get a random picture, title and quote, and make a book cover):



That's my second draft. My first draft (where I wanted to play with the title a little) looked like this:

Capturing the inner life of an adaptation

In the comments thread for the previous post, Sean said this:

I find an adaptation only tends to work for me if I get
swept away in the inner life of it, given that a big usual
question ('what will happen next') is already answered.

I'm interested in how an adaptation does achieve an inner
life. Breathing the life into an adaptation is kind of
magical as well as a technical accomplishment.

Hix, do you have any further thoughts on that aspect?

I am fascinated by this, too. I lament that many Stephen King books
that I find riveting to read fall completely flat on screen as not only
do they fail to capture the inner thoughts and completely reasonable
motivations of their characters, but also fail to create an identity
outside of schlock-horror scares. Randall Flagg in the TV adaptation
of The Stand, I am looking at you.

Last year, one of Bex's students was doing a speech on adapting
books into films. While it's written for an 11-year old and contains
pretty basic stuff, it'll give us a starting point:

Why do people turn books into films?

1. They love the story.
2. People have already bought the book, so studios reckon
  they'll pay to see the movie. That's why best-sellers get made
   into films.
3. Books have already worked out what the story is, so people
   can see how it turns out.

That means, in general, you turn a book into a film because
books are safe - they'll probably make money and you know
what you're getting.

What's the problem?

The way most books are written, you get inside the
character's head and hear their thoughts and see the world
from their point of view. Movies are pretty terrible at
showing this - they film what's right in front of you, not what's
happening in your head.

Also, books are filled with lots of tiny details, and things that
aren't obvious. You have to be a pretty great scriptwriter or
director to put those tiny details up on screen, so most film
adaptations of books don't show the stuff that's really
interesting in the book.

What are good books to turn into films?

Action-adventure stories, crime novels, some horror and
science-fiction and comedy stories - if they're about people
doing and saying things to each other. That's important -
the book should show you what's happening, rather than
what people are feeling.

What are bad books to turn into films?

Books with lots of complicated thoughts about life, or history,
or that are set entirely in a character's head. Maybe
The DaVinci Code is an example. The movie version of The Lord
of the Rings removes a whole bunch of stuff that's about the
history of Middle Earth and mostly shows you the action
sequences and the moments where people are in lots of trouble.

--- --- ---

So, I open the floor to you all. What gives an adaptation an inner
life? How do you make an adaptation fascinating in its own right?

Opinions, examples, links to relevant blog posts - all welcome.

I've been able to start reading Garden of Last Days again, and
last night there was a chapter from the point of view of the wife
of AJ, a major character. Previously, we've only seen her from AJ's
point of view  - and she's seemed cold, sexually disinterested,
and difficult.

During this chapter, which is 11 pages long, I got a real sense
of her childhood, failed relationships in college, why she fell in love
with AJ, and the difficulties they've experienced since.

11 pages. An entire life.

So, that's difficult to do in films. But it makes me think this:

ADAPTATIONS CAN'T PRIORITISE THE PLOT

Hypothesis: If you just dramatise the plot, you will fail. While you
capture the events of the book, you won't capture what makes the
characters tick.

However, you can't really just transfer the characters' inner
monologues onto screen via voice-over either. Doing that will not
make us care about them or understand why they are what they
are.

So, I propose this: successful adaptations always create entirely
new scenes to illustrate essential points about characters from
the source material. This is WAY more than just transforming
prose into dialogue. It requires showing us character decisions
and conflicts between characters demonstrate these essential
points.

(Despite the phrasing, this is just a proposal. Challenge it!
With examples, preferably. I'd be particularly interested in
people's thoughts on Atonement, Fight Club and The
Shawshank Redemption)

True Blood 1.9

And just like that, the show's awesome again.

This time, not because it changed up the situation; instead, the episode took its time exploring the subplots, and had some great character development.

• Tara tries to confront her demon
• Amy and Jason's relationship deepens and grows more touching, while gaining a whole crapload more karmic debt to pay back
  
• Vampire Bill gets a subplot.

If I'm being entirely honest, this episode completely won me back inside of 10 seconds. A streaming jet of blood completely covering Anna Paquin has that effect on me.

I even like the cliffhanger - which was a situational cliff, rather than a jeopardy one.

Nice work all around. Probably my second favourite episode of the season, and a timely lesson in not being too judgmental.

Adaptations

Chris asked me what I thought of Watchmen. That reminded me that I judge films where I'm familiar with the source material VERY differently to other films. My ranking system for adaptations goes kinda like this:

1. Incompetent: The film completely misses the point of the source material; quite possibly it's narratively incoherence or lacks an inner life.
... Examples: The Punisher (Dolph Lundren version)*

* Yes, I think there's probably a good version of The Punisher waiting to be made.

2. Mishmash: Cobbling together moments from the source material, this film creates a narrative that makes sense but doesn't really capture the spirit of the original
... Examples: Aeon Flux (in places), Constantine, The Return of the King (pre-Shelob), Fantastic Four 2, From Hell

3. Photography: This is simply and literally translating the book on screen. While it looks and moves like the source material, there is no excitement or engagement. It's a dead but accurate adaptation.
... Examples: the first half of Harry Potter 1, all of Harry Potter 2, Smilla's Feeling for Snow*

* Which is the film that started me on the path of developing this system.

4. Competence: A translation that basically hits the mark, recreating some of the moments of the original or standing on its own as a movie.
... Examples: The Two Towers, Hellboy, Aeon Flux (sometimes), the second half of Harry Potter 1, Harry Potter 3, most of Harry Potter 4*

* I'm confused about exactly why I'm using Harry Potter as my go-to reference, but let's roll with it.

5. Dead On: An adaptation that nails exactly what I love about the original material. In some cases, it even improves on the original.
... Examples: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Return of the King (post-Shelob), Hellboy 2, The Dark Knight, Harry Potter 4 (the school dance sequence)

6. Masterpiece: The adaptation to film has given the story new meaning or resonance; it transcends the original
... Examples: The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather

Given that, I can say that I felt Watchmen veered between competence and being a dead-on adaptation* (with sporadic moments of being a mishmash) ... which shakes out to a film that's slightly above average.

* Places where I felt it was dead-on: Rorschach / Nite Owl II scenes. Dr Manhattan revisiting his life, on Mars. Quite a bit of the Antarctic finale.

True Blood 1.8

OK, I think I've got a problem with the cliffhangers now. It took me about 4 days to work up the enthusiasm to watch this episode - which I attribute solely to the false jeopardy of how the previous ep ended. I tend to feel betrayed when a cliffhanger promises to kill the lead character or threaten the series-defining central relationship.* On rare occasions, I'll keep watching if the cliffhanger makes me ask 'HOW the hell could she possibly get out of this?", but that is a difficult skill to regularly master.

* It's why I stopped watching Alias after 6 episodes and never went back.

Far more successful are the cliffhangers that change the situation utterly.* True Blood has only done this twice so far (1.6 and 1.7), and they were far and away the most intriguing, engaging ends of episodes for me.

* See most episodes of 24.

So, I wasn't predisposed to like this ep, and sure enough I found it a little choppy in its characterisations. Tara and Sookie seemed all over the place emotionally - for good reasons, as both their lives seem to have fundamentally changed, but not in ways that convinced me dramatically. Vampire Bill's characterisation seemed much more settled and relaxed, which I totally didn't buy after what he'd just been through. And there was what seemed like a 10 minute sequence at Merlotte's that just felt like a series of scenes in a dull soap opera.

Maybe it'll all play better if I rewatch the series. I'm prepared to admit that I might be judging it too harshly.

And it did do something neat with the central Bill-Sookie question that kicked off the episode: for a while I felt that were going to drag out the mystery for the entire episode, focusing on Sookie alone, seeing what she did and how she started to live her life. The way they actually revealed what had happened was shocking, dirty, and kinda sexy in a WTF sort-of way.

It also contained a number of nice developments in everyone else's subplots. I'm a particular fan of Jason's new girlfriend, who's drug addict hippie ways make me laugh at nearly everything she says. In a way that feels much cleverer than the equivalent in this movie.

But then the ep ended with another false jeopardy cliffhanger. So, yes: officially starting to get grumpy and worried about this show now.

Lost - Season 5 - The Dharma Years (Part I)

This run of episodes has been the strongest Lost has been for me since the end of Season 2.


*** SPOILERS, JENNI. ***


*** YEAH, I KNOW YOU'RE NOT WATCHING IT, BUT YOU TOTALLY SHOULD BE. ***


*** WHY BOTHER, YOU ASK? BECAUSE SAWYER IS AWESOME AGAIN ***


*** TRUST ME. I WAS RIGHT ABOUT VERONICA MARS AND SUPERNATURAL, WASN'T I? ***

Introducing time travel is proven to be an extremely elegant way of getting a lot of backstory about people whose lives have been touched by the island. More importantly, by taking the pressure off people like Sawyer we've seen them blossom. From Sawyer's character arc lows in Season 2 (the long con with the guns) and Season 3 (he freakin' shot Tom in cold blood), he's now become a hero, a leader, a person to admire.

And all the people who stayed on the island now have a lot to lose. I'm totally invested in them.

Meanwhile, they've given Kate something interesting to do - seriously, giving her a mission that doesn't have anything to do with the boys and that goddamn love quadrangle will (I assume) make her way more fascinating to watch, and lead to further exploration of the island. I'm also in awe of the character transformation they're making Jack go through - his acceptance of the island is planned for him undercuts all the potential Jack-Locke conflict we've been expecting, and opens up many new areas of their personalities to explore.

Plus it's so nearly came close to unbelievable, top-moment-of-TV-everness with that cliffhanger between Sayid and Ben. I would probably have tried to have this show's babies if it had followed through on opening up an alternate timeline in which one of the lead characters never existed.

The show is totally recapturing the magic of Season 1 for me. It's ambitious, inventive, and driving towards the finish line. And I have to wait two more weeks for the next episode.

Learning how to play - Process

I've played an enormous amount of cellphone poker over the last 2 days. It's made me think about some broad phases of skill acquisition when I play games. For me, it breaks into:

• Process (what do I do and when do I do it?)
• Tactics (what are the best options for me?)
• Understanding (the point at which the game becomes fun)

Process is simply getting comfortable with what happens when. When is it your turn? What are your options on your turn? What further decisions do taking those options open up for you?

There are a lot of games that I think I'd enjoy where I'm simply not comfortable with the process: poker, D&D4E, Capes, The Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries.

The thing that makes me comfortable with process is repetition. And that's where having poker on my cellphone comes in handy. Normally I might play three games of Texas Hold 'em a year. In between times, all of those skills simply get lost. Any insights I've made, fade away. In the last 48 hours, I've played at least 3 games a day (probably more), and in the course of doing that I've become way more comfortable with checking, calculating outs and pot odds, and bluffing.

Games where the human element isn't so important (and I think I include D&D4E in that - despite loving the way it plays and its apparent tactical depth), are really amenable to these rapid cycles of practice and learning.

... huh. I just taught myself something. Taking that idea of process (which has also been talked about here, with the idea of how do you introduce someone to a game), I think I'm going to add an 'introductory' round to Bad Family - an opportunity for players to get used to narration and introducing complications, without introducing the rules.

Star Trek (2009)

It's an amusing diversion filled with performances that range from satisfactory to excellent.

Most Satisfying: the rowdy, pulp action. Swordfights! Gun battles! Perilous Footchases!

Most Suprising: that the space battles didn't really engage me.

Biggest Regret: reading ANYTHING about the film before I saw it.

Biggest Failing (*) : that quite a bit of the storytelling felt functional rather than gripping; that the outcomes of conflicts seemed inevitable.

* I'm going to have to see it again (probably on DVD) before making final judgments about this, but there were moments and conflicts between core characters that just felt bland to me. I mean, there's basically a scene where a character says "This is what you need to do," followed by a scene of it happening. I haven't seen writing like that since the end of Bonfire of the Vanities.

Kirk: Is hilarious. For the first half of the movie, Ed and I were sniggering in our seats every couple of minutes at how outrageous he was being. Top marks.

All in all, a reasonably fun way to reintroduce the franchise to a new generation of fans so that Paramount can suck money out of them for the next 20 years. It's a sexy, rowdy, funny Trek that's gotten better in my memory.

And here's the thing: the original actors played these roles into their 60s and 70s. Given that, and given a movie every two or three years, that means we could expect another 12 to 15 films from this iteration of Trek (**).

** Given that sort of timeframe, I'd prefer it if the Kirk-Spock relationship had been developed a little slower - across multiple movies.

I have no idea what that means for the future of the Trek franchise. No more stories in the original TV universe? A reboot of The Next Generation? Star Trek movies shot back to back, Pirates of the Caribbean styles?

Lost ads

More, here.

Movies to Look Forward to

Star Trek - Seen. Short review later today.

The Hurt Locker - a bomb disposal thriller by Katherine Bigelow

Solomon Kane - it sounds badass

Moon - indie SF film set on the moon, starring Sam Rockwell, and the voice of Keyser Soze as the possibly-crazy computer.

What about you?

Why I'm Not Writing today - Portable Edition

I'm jazzed by my new cheap cellphone - I can shoot two hours of footage on it, store the names of all the books I want to read from the library, record voice messages to myself, listen to mp3s and play games.

Currently, I'm getting the hang of Texas Hold 'em Poker. (Di: if you're reading this, I'm gunning for you now.)

True Blood 1.7

Less convinced by this episode. Ep 1.6 gripped me because it dealt with the ramifications of a single situation; this one started out looking like it was going to focus heavily on exploring the pros and cons of a vampire-human relationship but it kind of drifted away from that, into a reconnection with (and amping up of) everyone else's subplots.

It also looks like True Blood is moving into that dangerous territory: where it could be less about normal people in a setting with supernatural elements, and more about supernatural people in a supernatural setting.

I don't mind that - in fact there are parts of that (like the possible explanation for Tara's behaviour) that I think could be fun. It just means that the show is starting to remind me of a mature version of the soap opera elements of Buffy, minus the 'Monster of the Week' structure to give episodes a payoff and Joss Whedon's authorial voice.*

* I haven't really detected a distinctive 'voice' to this series yet.

The show's moving faster than I expected though - partly cos' it's meaner to its characters than I expected, and partly because Sookie's telepathy has allowed us to develop a lot of subtext about minor characters within very few episodes.** However, there's also a lack of a compelling over-riding question that's drawing me in to watching the show - the cliffhangers aren't enough for me yet.

** It's a great technique, and one that I'll consider to be extremely lazy if any other show picks up on it.

Great to finally recognise two of the actors though. The guy who plays Detective Andy Belfleur was Frank Sbotka in Season 2 of the Wire, and is almost unrecognisably due to his lighter, goofier body language. And the Iraqi War veteran is played by the same guy who was Zach in Gilmore Girls - again, a very different performance, and one that could assure him a solid career of supporting roles.

Changing my posting schedule

Writing is tough, but it should be also be fun. And if it's not fun, I tend to try and figure out why not and then make adjustments.

I've been running an experiment with the blog over the last month or so: writing posts whenever I've been inspired to, and then auto-scheduling their publication.

It's a system that fits with my writing style a lot better; I tend to write in bursts, which usually means multi-dimensional goes through periods of posting 5 or 6 times a day, followed by several months of silence.

So, I'm enjoying blogging again for the first time in ages ... but to take the pressure off myself even further, I'm going to slow down the rate at which I'm auto-publishing my posts. Expect something every couple of days for the next month or two.

We'll see how that goes.

Review: 279 Days to Overnight Success

JP and I have been having a little bit of a conversation about 279 Days to Overnight Success in the comments.

At a simplistic level, 279 Days describes a strategy for building your blog in such a way that you can make a living (or at least a side-income) from it.

Is it the sort of thing you'll be interested in? Well, that depends on what you want:

• Do you want lots of people to read your blog?
• Do you want to sell stuff that you've created?
• Do you want to build a community of people interested in the same topic(s) as you?

I've recommended it to two people so far: Jenni (because she's interested in creating stuff people want to buy) and Morgue (whose ideas about small group action deserve a wider audience).

There's quite a lot I like about this manifesto. First off, it encourages you to think about why you're blogging - I've had to do a bit of that over the last year (and came to the conclusion that I just want to enjoy it - more fun, less profundity).

Second, I absolutely agree with the philosophy that if you're going to try and make money off your blog, do it with your own creations, not Google ads. As part of that, 279 Days describes the process of listening to your audience and discovering what they want. I find the process of finetuning the balance between my writing needs and what people who comment here say they want to be really fun.*

* Actually, JP, based on an earlier comment of yours, look for quite a bit more TV reviewing to show up here in the near future.

279 Days also mentions some other principles I agree with:

• Figure out your writing style
• Commit to a publishing schedule
• Know why people should read what you write
• Ignore vampires (critics who try to vapourise your will to write)*

* I've had a couple of these over the years, and I've had to figure out a couple of ways to deal with them.

This is not for every writer. The desire to expand your community - whether or not you intend to make money from blogging - isn't for everyone. But there's enough good stuff here that I have to recommend it.

Questions, JP?

(BTW, JP's blog is one of my top five reads on the internet: literate, thoughtful, funny meditations on growing up and parenting. This is a perfect example.)

True Blood 1.6

This is the first episode of True Blood I've been eager to watch. Following on from the first riveting cliffhanger I feel the show's done, Episode 1.6 dealt with a whole mess of nasty emotions coming to the surface: grief, suspicion, resentment ... while still laying out the possibility for hope.

We've also seen enough of the characters in action so that subtext is starting to come effortlessly to the scenes. And Anna Paquin's scene with her grandmother's pie is the first classic moment of the series for me.

Andrei Tarkovsky wrote about how cinema was the art of 'sculpting in time', and I could see that here. This episode felt cohesive, in comparison to the way that previous episodes have been entertaining but a bit all-over-the-place. It probably has a lot to do with the single event that this episode is based around, and its ramifications for all the characters. (Yes, I'm being vague here. If you haven't seen it, I totally don't want to spoil it.)

And one hell of a cliffhanger to finish off with. This series is totally hitting its stride.

Dracula - updated in realtime

You may have seen this already: someone's blogging Dracula, publishing each diary entry on the day that it was written.

Dracula.

Jonathon Harker still hasn't reached Castle Dracula yet, so there's plenty of time to jump on board the experience.

(JP: My thoughts on 279 Days are coming I'm posting my thoughts on 279 Days tomorrow ...)

True Blood - The first half of Season One

I'm really enjoying this. The word on the street is true: it does take a little while to warm up. I'd say it doesn't really become a TV series until about 40 minutes into the pilot, when Sookie and Bill the vampire spend a long, long scene together, firmly establishing them as the relationship that's going to be our hook into the show.

Prior to that, all we have is a setting. A small town in the American South, in a world very much like our own except that vampires exist and have recently outed themselves to the world. The show plays that part fairly matter-of-factly; the existence of vampires is pretty much as novel and filled with unknown dangers as the internet was about 10 years ago. What show-runner Alan Ball (and presumably novelist Charlaine Harris) is interested in at a setting level is using vampires to explore ideas of bigotry and integration. Setting the show in the south allows them to create parallels between vampires and African-Americans; the fact that vampires have recently revealed themselves but looking just like everyone else gives the show an opportunity to play around with ideas of being gay.

The show feels very different to Ball's previous series: Six Feet Under. I imagine it's a relief to be able to write episodes that explore a different emotional pallette (which I'd describe as sultry pulp, with a bit of comedy of human weakness thrown in there).

Over the last four episodes, True Blood has gradually deepened the supporting cast - several of them now seem like interesting characters embedded in pretty fascinating situations - and that's helped it go from a fairly functional show to an entertaining one. Very much looking forward to the next episode.

Parker, now in comic form

As a long-time fan of Richard Stark's Parker novels, I'm glad to see this comic. Particularly like the sense of time and place that Darwyn Cooke's creating.

Click here for the preview, if you're interested in reading about a bad-ass heist planner looking for revenge.

The Room is a great bad movie

The Room is the Plan 9 from Outer Space of '90s indie movies. I suspect that within 2 to 10 years, The Room will be as well known as Plan 9.

It is damn funny.
It is terrible.
These things are related.

And it is having an obsessive effect of many of my friends.

Sharp Teeth

A novel about werewolves, written in verse.
Spends the first two-thirds getting up to speed
And the last third delivering
On its promise.

Flashforward

Robert Sawyer's novel takes a starting situation I found pretty interesting (due to an experiment gone wrong, everyone in the world gets a two minute glimpse of their lives 21 years in the future), and uses that as a springboard to examine the conflict between free will and determinism.

And it's soon to be a TV series. The book provides an excellent tapestry for a show, and so far it seems to be making changes that make it (a) less cerebral, and (b) more likely to sustain a 3+ season TV series.

Flashforward's inspired me to seek out other sci-fi novels with strong 'What if' premises and good characterisations. Anybody got any suggestions?

Bad Family - still hammering away

The outline is nearly finished, and I'm about to send off the final requests for artwork. Not sure I'm going to make my self-imposed May 16 deadline, though.

The common wisdom around goal-setting is that you should always include a realistic but challenging deadline to achieve your goal by. I generally don't find deadlines that useful - I find them frustrating and de-motivating if I miss them. My preference is to set an objective and then stubbornly keep at it until it's done.

The one enormous exception to that is when I decided to film hopeless within a year. That got things done.

I'm still trying to reconcile these two things.

Supernatural - the Season 2 finale

Hmm. It was good, but it makes me wonder what the season would have looked like if it had focused on telling the over-aching story as opposed to filling a 22-episode order. I suspect it would have been considerably shorter.

Definitely interested in checking out Season 3, though. No spoilers: A main character made a decision very early on in the final episode that has set up a 'ticking clock' situation that I'm fascinated to see play out.

Why I'm Not Writing today

I'm busy pretending to be a hacker - playing Exploit, by Gregory Weir. Try it: it's got a fun, War Games, 1990s cyberpunk vibe to it.

You tube time travel

And to continue with the time travel theme, a choose-your-own adventure delivered via youtube. Any ideas how make one of these things?

The Second Best Thing ever

Click to embiggen.

The first best thing ever, of course, is this. [h/t and link to Billy]

Go Zack Kim!

If you are into guitars, music, the Simpsons or things that are awesome, then this is worth 1 minute and 38 seconds of your time.

Bad Family - Progress Report

Bad Family is the Old Thing #3 that I've been working on. I've nearly finished restructuring the outline. I'm trying to far easier for readers to visualise how to play the game. I've sort of been using Jason Morningstar's process:

the rules have to be crystal clear about procedures, and call out what to do when, and flag points where what you do is a little off kilter. So how to do that?

I’ve been steadily revising a cheat sheet, a “what to do when” document, so I atomized that into a very detailed outline. Like this detailed:

3.2.4.3 Keep any die that resolves a spotlight scene for your character in front of you throughout the game.

It’s four pages long and was a pain in the ass to put together. Then I cut and paste my current text into the outline by paragraph, wherever it referenced the outline. And here’s what I learned - there are big chunks of assumption, places where I don’t talk about what to do, when. There’s redundancy. There’s stuff that is presented subtly out of order. It was a really instructive and eye-opening exercise. It’s going to make the game text much, much clearer. I recommend it!

Jason's comment about stuff that's presented subtly out of order is very true of my project.

No idea if I'll make my May 16 deadline for producing an ashcan of this, but I'm making lots of progress towards getting the thing done and out of my life.

[RPG] Why I'm enjoying PTA - The Other Side

I mentioned how much I'm enjoying our Tuesday night game of Primetime Adventures. Here are a few reasons why:

1.
We've created a setting that we all love, and want to expand on. Our sessions are filled with improvising new details and quirks, and creating incidental characters. I'm keeping a chart of all the characters we've met, which we refer to regularly to reincorporate them. I, for one, want to see a return of the married animated doors that guard the King's treasury.

2.
This is our second season with the show. We're familiar with what works, and we've fine-tuned what didn't.

3.
Not only that, but the characters are all in really interesting and totally unstable positions that have emerged naturally from the events of Season One.

4.
More focused. Previously Svend and I were co-producing, and playing a character each. Now Svend is the solo producer, he's dropped his character. It's more screen-time for each of us.

5.
Celeste is playing a KICK-ARSE character, and her performance is riveting to watch. She has taken a secondary character who we all loved from last year, and turned her into something magnificent.

6.
There's a lot of trust between all of the players that at any point we'll be able to come up with something fun/cool/inventive/appropriate.

7.
We playing by the rules, which funnily enough is making the game easier to run. In particular, we're doing two things. First, we're focusing the conflicts on what the characters want, rather than trying to invent possible outcomes for the conflicts. Second, we're trying to keep the game 'in the moment', roleplaying stuff out rather than just saying "Then [this] happens, and then [this] would happen." Both those things are making the game flow more smoothly and more vividly.

8.
We're using fanmail to reward the things we want to see more of - like Wayne being emotional, and Celeste being bold and evil. It's not just about input that we think is funny. I think the game is deepening as a result.

Dollhouse 1.9

Spectacular. If this is the show, then it's the most interesting thing Joss Whedon has ever created.

Supernatural - the rest of Season 2

Supernatural continues to be a entertaining horror-for-TV show. It's been interesting seeing it mix:

• brotherly banter and matter-of-fact attitude towards dealing with monsters
• an episode of the week structure that uses several genre tropes (the Rashomon episode, the episode where they live a completely different life)
• serious emotional character developments and philosophical arguments, and
• a solid mythology for the show.

Favourite subplots so far include 'The FBI are after us', and 'Sam may go dark side'.

All the episodes have been fun, but the standouts for me are: No Exit (their take on 'Saw'), Nightshifter (weirdly, I feel it's inspired by 'Inside Man' and it's a great sequel to a Season 1 ep), Heart (werewolves, and a pretty amazing conclusion), and Hollywood Babylon (an satire of trashy Hollywood movies - Pearce, if there's one episode you should watch it's this one).

This second season has basically put all the pieces into place for a third season dealing with a war of demons vs hunters. I'm about to watch the two part season finale, and my expectations are high. The end of Season 1 had the highest proportion of cliffhangers-and-twists to running time of any episode of TV I've seen since the Season 1 finale of Twin Peaks.

Dollhouse - The original pilot screenplay

Just finished reading the screenplay for the original pilot of Dollhouse. Interesting stuff: overall, I'd say was a good idea for Team Whedon to do a rewrite/reshoot - not because the original version of the pilot is weaker than the broadcast version; in some ways the original pilot is stronger, particularly in its Act One introduction of what Actives are and what they do.

The problem is that it condenses a lot of beats that appear in later episodes into a single 54 page burst. That means that moments and plot developments don't have time to breathe or gain significance.

I feel there's a balance to found between this hyper-compressed version of Dollhouse and the first six episodes that were broadcast, but Team Whedon were right to unpack it they way they did.

[RPG] PTA - The Other Side

The Primetime Adventures games that I'm playing on Tuesday nights is fantastic. Season One was set mostly in a fantasy kingdom (orcs, elves and wizards) that's been colonised by American multi-national corporations. We're on to the second season now, which is flipping between that fantasy world and contemporary Earth.

The fantasy world has just suffered through a regime changes and is now struggling with the crappy leadership of a dangerously naive king (played by me). Back on Earth, Sam (an extremely emo teenager) is battling for the soul of his 9-year old sister with a fairy godmother from hell (literally).

It's great fun, and I'll go into more detail about why, later.

Supernatural - Season 2, the first 5 episodes

Supernatural: a show about two brothers who drive around the States in a Ford Impala killing monsters.

It should be the sort of show I hate with its 'kill a new monster every week' episode structure, but I really like it for two reasons: (i) attitude - the brothers are sarcastic, listen to metal, and kick monster ass with a variety of shotguns and crowbars, and (ii) sub-plots.

Right now, the show is juggling the grieving process, a hunters-bar sub-plot complete with an (I'm guessing) unwitting incestuous romance for Dean, the mystery of what Dad said to Dean, Dean is a psychic, (possibly) a crazy hunter who wants to get revenge on the brothers, (possibly) a peace-nik vampire, and a demon who wants to bring about the apocalypse. And it's doing it all fairly effortlessly while telling satisfying, self-contained stories every week.

I'm also a fan of the characterisation: what started out as a fairly simplistic 'Dean is a bad boy, Sam is a good boy' dynamic got nicely complicated about halfway through Season 1 when we realised that Dean has always tried to live up to his father's dreams, and plays the peace-maker between his Dad and Sam, who rebelled by quitting the family business of monster-hunting and going to university. I admire this because it was simply a matter of viewing facts we already knew in exactly the opposite way - and as a result it elegantly demonstrates that both brothers have elements of each other in them.

Nice, solid, 'horror movie but for TV' entertainment.

Zombies - Bad Plans and Romero films

Hat-tip to Simon for showing me this thread: a simple-minded teenager high on sugar products describes what he would do in the event of a zombie outbreak, and has his plan ripped to shreds by various asshats, gun fanatics, and people who take George Romero films EXTREMELY seriously.

BTW, I just watched 'Diary of the Dead', Romero's latest flick. Good cheap fun, not ground-breaking, but nice to see Romero doing a road-trip version of the zombie film. While the idea that the survivors travel around in an RV felt a little like 'The Walking Dead' to me, it was a great way of cheaply conveying a sense of scope to the outbreak (and that scope was nicely helped along by lots of internet footage).

Biggest problem: it doesn't quite figure out the right tone of how to mock its student film-maker protagonists.

Biggest asset: Samuel the Amish zombie fighter.

Biggest innovation: unlike 'Cloverfield', 'Blair Witch', 'Rec', or 'Doom', this film occasionally managed to really capture the thrills and terror of a first person shooter. Nice work.

Why I'm not writing - The Geography edition

Here's Globetrotter XL, a Flash game that tests your geography knowledge. I am fighting the urge to play it for the next couple of hours.

What I'm watching

With the end of Battlestar Galactica, my viewing habits are going to change. I'll be dabbling in TV shows, rather than following simply watching one till it finishes and then starting on another one. Currently, the shows I'm interested in seeing more of are:

• Dollhouse
• Lost
• Supernatural
• True Blood
• The Wire
• The Shield
• Rome

More on these, later.

Progress Report

Old Thing #2: I've sent off an enquiry email about The Limit. The second round of producer submissions has finally begun. Sean, you are now under strict instructions to stage an intervention on me if I attempt another unpaid rewrite.

Old Thing #3: I've figured out a way to structure the game's presentation; hopefully it'll be way easier to follow now. But there is much writing to be done.

Old Thing #1 is done

I've sent off the outline for this feature to the director. Probably a few more emails and meetings before it's all closed off, but as far as I'm concerned it's finally done.

Now to send the enquiry email and close off Old Thing #2.

What's stopping me writing today

Transmover: a Flash puzzle-solving game.

Dollhouse - The First 8 Episodes

Here's what I think: Dollhouse has the most untapped potential of any TV show I've seen in years.* The premise is that there are people ("dolls") who have 'volunteered' to have their minds first wiped and then replaced by programmable personalities. The show explores what happens to these dolls, and to the people who look after and control them.

Here are four reasons I want to keep watching this show:

1.
It's using its premise to create inventive soap opera storylines and weird-ass relationships that are extremely uncomfortable and dysfunctional.

2.
Caroline's backstory (as hinted at in the first scene of the pilot, and the most recent episodes) has been enough to hook me into watching the show to completion.

3.
The sense of paranoia that pervades everything. This show has a mood, and it's not typical Joss Whedon wise-cracking territory.

4.
From episode 6, I'm watching a show that's growing more interesting and layered with every passing scene. This is a show that's not afraid to take its time establishing its characters.

***

If you watch Dollhouse, I recommend you skip the third episode (which is weak). I'd recommend you skip the fifth episode (which I felt had a weak payoff) but it contains a small plot development which has an influence on future episodes.

Episodes 6 and 8 are strong and (coupled with the amount of exposition that dolled out in Ep 7) have me believing that Whedon is either aiming to:

• complete his overall story for the series in a single season (in case Dollhouse doesn't get renewed), or
• setting the groundwork for an amazing second season where the stories come primarily from the characters and situation, rather than an arbitrary 'Genre Movie Premise of the Week but with Dolls' episode structure.
  
  
  * Heroes felt like it had this sort of potential in its first 12 episodes, but it gradually slid into a web of relationships and conspiracies that was too tightly woven for my tastes (every character either being related to each other, or plotting against them).

Lost - Season 5 so far

Very quickly (and yes, spoilers if you haven't been watching. Massive spoilers.):

• Flaming arrows?
• Sayid kills people with his feet? And a dishwasher?
• Benjamin mother-fraking Linus?
• Penny and Charlie?
• Daniel Faraday's unsettling past?
• Jughead is still out there.
• Time travel? Exploring the island not only in space but in history? And putting an end to time travel?
• Sure - they spent a little too long off the island, but the stuff that happened there at the very end was fascinating.
• Sawyer and his band of sarcastic geniuses joining the Dharma Initiative? In 1974? For three years? Let me rephrase: Sawyer has been a happy and productive part of the Dharma Initiative for three years. W.T.F?
• Killing off nearly all the remaining survivors of Oceanic Flight 815? And then crashing another fraking plane on the island?

I honestly have no idea where this show is going to go next. It's like Dollhouse in that respect. Hatches? Numbers? Frak that. We have just watched a team of writers dismantle their own premise, bury the parts, and simultaneously all drop acid. What happens from this point on is going to be fascinating.

Oh yeah, and ... THE STATUE IS BACK!

Graphic Design Practice #6

A revision of yesterday's cover - I wanted to create more white space, and use some contrast in the font for the quote.

Graphic Design Practice #5

I learned about 'gradient fill' with this one - the nice shading from dark blue to white in the background.

I tried mucking around with a lot of differents appearances and placements for the quote, but in the end I decided that keeping it simple was going to be the best thing for the cover. I did do two versions though - adjusting the colour of the quote so that it sort-of matched the picture.

Slightly Less Ambiguous Progress Report 2

Here's how things stand:

Old Thing 1: I am currently re-editing, and writing a little bit of new material one scene away from locking down this treatment (it's a scene I didn't expect to be problematic, but I think I can get through it if I just focus on the characters rather than the plot) and will probably get away within the next week or two two or three days.

Old Thing 2: I need to compose have composed an enquiry email to a producer about my feature - now to send the damn thing.

Old Thing 3: need to completely rewrite (with examples), integrate artwork, and try to release as an ashcan in time for Day of Games on May 16.

Graphic Design Practice #4

My most recent design.

Graphic Design Practice #3

This third mock-cover is even simpler, but I tried to turn the quote into a tattoo (mucking around with the question mark to make it a bit more primal):

Graphic Design Practice #2

For my second cover, I went for something a bit simpler, and I wanted to take advantage of the black border on the left hand side:

Graphic Design Practice #1

I've been finding this graphic design challenge thread really inspirational - use a random wikipedia article as a title and randomly select a picture, and then turn them into a cover for a game.

I've never used Photoshop seriously before, and this challenge has been just the excuse I needed to start teaching myself.

Here's my first cover:

Ambiguous Progress Report

Here's where I stand:

Old Thing 1: am currently re-editing, writing a little bit of new material, and will probably get away within the next week or two.

Old Thing 2: need to compose an enquiry email to a producer, and send the damn thing.

Old Thing 3: need to completely rewrite (with examples), integrate artwork, and try to release as an ashcan in time for Day of Games on May 16.

Anti-bang

I have reached deep into the innards of my computer and given it life again.

Work on two old things and one new thing is proceeding.

Bang @#$@ !!!!!!!

Computer has exploded. Again.

Seems like it does this every time I finish a draft of The Limit. Perhaps the power supply unit blowing up is a result of unleashing my raw creative energy and focusing it into Microsoft Word.

Or, it could be that I take so long between drafts that the fan wears out.

... Anyway, repairs will soon get underway.

Another brother video

Again for Samuel Flynn Scott and the B.O.P. Made for absolutely no money.

I think this one's even catchier:

Keeping it in the family

My brother directed and edited this music video:

[RPG] Linkage to my game plan

Here's what I played last year, and the games I'm planning for 2009.