Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Technical knockout

Oh my, it's been over a month. Sorry to have neglected you but I've been busy.

I have completed ScriptFrenzy for the 6th year but only "technically". Which is to say that the Celtx generation of PDF reached 100 pages (WIN!), however in actual comic book pages I got to about 74 (not really a win). But I learned a lot, mostly that writing a graphic novel is really quite hard. Unfortunately the story began to deviate from my plan almost from the start and I wrote myself into a very dull corner. (I had called this post "Technical win" but that doesn't sound anywhere near as interesting as "Technical knockout".)

Of course, at the same time, I've been doing the Producer thing in order to shoot scene 8 of our steampunk webseries WINTER. More than that we've been going through a crowd-funding exercise and I have been sending out emails to everyone I have contact with (and that's several hundred).

And still doing the day job, of course.

But my mind is heavily focussed on ensuring that the shoot goes according to plan. There are so many things to think about from the producer side, I have been given able assistance from people who've already done it. Without them I imagine I would have been rather lost.

Anyway I'm not lost and it's going smoothly (everything crossed, touch wood).

So, give us a hand and contribute to our project at http://igg.me/p/93585?a=405734

Self, Director, and cast all available for interview :-)

(Oh, and I got a rejection from a very well-respected agency. "Clearly a very talented screenwriter..." they said. Which was nice. "...but no clear distinction from our other writers." Ha! I'm too busy to care - I don't even remember sending them a script.)

(Also went to see John Carter which was really quite good, and Battleship - it's not a deep film, but very enjoyable and does have real characters and real plot. It's also has very well integrated links to the game. I was quite impressed. It even managed to surprise me a couple of times.)


What's on the turntable? "The Fall of the House of Usher: Arrival" by The Alan Parson's Project from "Tales of Mystery and Imagination".

1 comment:

JOHN T. SHEA said...

Please excuse a two years late comment, Steve, but I share your liking for both 'JOHN CARTER' and 'BATTLESHIP' and still cannot figure out why they failed (relative to their big budgets).

'JOHN CARTER' is a bit confusing at times, but not catastrophically so to my mind. A bigger problem was people probably could not figure out what it was about. Removing the '...OF MARS' suffix did not help though I imagine Disney were concerned people would them assume a hard SF movie set on the lifeless present-day Mars, not knowing the 19th Century Western framing story.

Ironically, this least successful of big SF movies has more than a little in common with the most successful 'AVATAR'. 'AVATAR' was originally pushed as a kind of update of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian stories!

'BATTLESHIP' was simply brilliant, not least because of Liam Neeson. Perhaps its relative failure is just a combination of a huge budget and sheer bad luck?