It Happened Again

My kid is watching "Up".

There's a moment towards the end where, after fighting tooth and nail for, like, twenty minutes, Carl finds himself  on the floor with the bad guy holding a sword over him... and he does nothing. He sits there, waiting to die, until he is fortuitously saved by the dog accidentally turning the steering wheel.

I know it's probably not annoying to anyone else. But it's becoming annoying to me.

Have You Ever Noticed...

I've noticed a cliche in action movies that's starting to bug me.

In nearly every action movie you have by necessity a hero who never gives up. No matter what gets thrown at him, he fights back against it and refuses to lie down. When everybody else is ducking for cover, he's charging into battle. Which is great. This is what we want from our action heroes.

But almost inevitably, there's a moment where the guy freaking gives up and waits to die. It's usually a minor moment at the end of a big fight or chase, and it is almost always followed by a last-minute rescue by a piece of luck or supporting character.

For example, take Avatar. Jake spends the whole movie being Mr. Heroic, taking no crap from nobody. He's just been engaged a mano-a-mano battle with Quarritch in his big robot suit, fighting like a mad dog, and what happens? Quarritch picks him up by the hair, and Jake does nothing. He just dangles there like a dead fish, giving his girlfriend the perfect opportunity to swoop in to his rescue. At any other point in the movie had he been in this situation, he would have found a way to get in a good kick or squirm free. But here, he just apparently says "Oh well, he's got my pony tail so I'm screwed."

Same thing in Back to the Future. Marty's confronted by Libyan terrorists, they aim their machine guns at him, and he just stands there and closes his eyes, waiting to die. Any other time in the movie, he'd have... I dunno... moved, or something.

Another Fun Way I Get Unstuck

Got stuck on a scene recently and tried something else new (along the lines of my previous Sketchup Experiment).

My problem was visualizing how the scene would play out logistically. I don't really fancy myself a director, but nevertheless I thought... well heck, it would help if I had some actors here and we could block the scene and work it out. But I didn't. Actors like to get paid for that kind of thing. So I went the virtual route.

My software of choice was Iclone. It's real-time movie making software (aka "machinima"). And as with most packages of this kind, the results look like an in-engine cutscene from a video game. They're damn near unwatchable, despite what machinima proponents would have you believe. But as a tool for pre-viz or for brainstorming the logistics of a scene, they work great. With just a few minutes work (and some spectacularly awful voice acting by yours truly) I had some virtual humans blocking out my scene in a pretty decent approximation of how I pictured it in my head. Not something I'd ever show to anyone, but enough to work out the spatial kinks and even come up with a few new ideas.

Lest you think I'm sneakily promoting this one software package, there are other options available. Moviestorm is decent and relatively flexible. Muvizu is very cartoony and less versatile, but is easy to use and has the notable advantage of being free. I like Iclone because it gives you the most control over every aspect of the scene and posing, and because it imports Sketchup models so there's pretty much no location you can't simulate.

Again, I'd never make an actual film this way. Even the best machinima does not look good. But for testing out ideas, it can be a really fantastic tool.

Screenwriting in Plain Text? What Is This, The Middle Ages?

A little time off after nine drafts (!) of one script and a first draft of another. Finally.

I'm a big fan of Stu Maschwitz and his Prolost blog. Lately he's been on a kick to develop a syntax similar to Markdown for writing screenplays in plain text. Which is to say, no Final Draft, no Movie Magic, no Celtx. You'd write in Notepad, or whatever text editor is handy.

The problem he's trying to solve is that the screenwriting apps for iphone and ipad mostly suck, and the ones that don't suck (particularly Celtx Script, which is great) don't play nice with Final Draft FDX format, the supposed industry standard. So he wants to write in plain text because there are lots of great text editor apps, and the resulting file would be readable on any system.

Now here's my take:  In the eleven or twelve years I've been writing, not once has anybody ever asked me for an FDX file. It's always PDF. Consequently, I don't care if my software can read or write FDX files. So I have no problem at all using Celtx Script. It's stable, it gives reasonable screen real estate for typing even in landscape mode on an iphone, and it syncs very nicely with the desktop app (which is free).

Because of my respect for Stu I tried writing in plain text for a while. It went okay, but I found myself missing having a list of my scenes I could scroll through to quickly hunt for things, although I suppose that could be solved by having a separate plain text file for each scene. And I desperately missed predictive text (character names and locations popping up automatically, so you don't have to type them out every time). When one of your characters has a name like, say, "Fleet Admiral Von Hoogenmeyer", or even maybe "Xtactycyl", predictive text is an absolute must-have. Not everybody is named "Ed".

I guess it's nice to know that I could write in a plain text editor if I needed to. Final Draft, Movie Magic, and Celtx all have import functions that can pull in plain text quite nicely if you're conscious of formatting it properly while you write. And I'd imagine it would be pretty easy for the creators of these various apps to include functionality to pull in Stu's "Markdown" standard. So if he succeeds and it takes off, everybody wins.

Dramatica Drives Me Nuts (In A Good Way)

Another Dramatica post because, frankly, I like it. It has transformed the way I write. It also drives me nuts, but for all the right reasons.

Case in point: I've been working on a story for, like, a year now. I'm convinced it's good. I can see the movie in my head. For whatever reason, though, I just can't write it.

So I lean on Dramatica to help me. I run it through the software's alchemical algorithms over and over. I ask the guys on the Convore discussion group for help, and they are patient with my ignorance. And then I run it through again and again. And it never works. I can get one throughline right, but the others never fit.

This is what's maddening about Dramatica sometimes. You get your main storyline worked out exactly the way you want, and Dramatica tells you "okay, so your main character's problem should have something to do with Perception vs. Actuality". And you thought your main character's problem was about flesh eating bacteria, so you want to kick Dramatica hard in the stupid face it doesn't have.

But here's the thing... somehow, magically, insanely... Dramatica is never wrong. I'm wrong. It just occurred to me this morning... the movie I've been seeing in my head has no middle. It's a bunch of characters discovering something, doing something vague for about an hour, and then wrapping things up. The Underpants Gnomes of stories.

It occurred to me that I don't even really have a clear sense of the what the story's central problem is. I was getting ready to throw Dramatica aside and start writing this thing, and I don't even know what the story's about. It would have been a horrendous waste of effort.

And that is the reason why my Dramatica experiments were not working. If I'm getting the very first question wrong--the Story Problem--how can I possibly expect it to help me with the answers that follow? I need to really stop and think about these answers, not just throw something in that sort of feels like it fits.

I'm sure a lot of people try out Dramatica briefly, get frustrated just as I have, and then discard it forever. I can almost guarantee you, it wasn't Dramatica's fault. It is not madlibs; it demands a lot of a writer to use it properly. And if it's not giving you the answers you want, you really need to stop and examine why that is. It will be worth it.

I'll stop with these posts. Jim Hull is much better at them than I am.

Random Toy Story Musings

A couple of random thoughts of no value at all to anyone, brought on by repeated viewings (thanks to my kids):

At the end of Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear proves that he can fly.  There are tons of situations in the subsequent two movies where that would prove useful, so why does he never do it again?  A couple of times in the other movies, in fact, he specifically fails to fly.

In Toy Story 2, Woody finds himself in an apartment filled with merchandise from the TV show he was a part of.  How come none of those toys are alive?  He's merchandise from the show just like they are.

Third Draft Heaven

I know some writers get frustrated by the third draft, going over and over the same story. But I love my thirds.

Third draft is when I already know every character intimately. It's when all the logic holes are filled and all the motivations are clear and all the useless scenes are long behind me. It's when I suddenly can't believe I ever thought that first draft was any good. And it's when, holy smokes, this thing starts to feel like a movie.

I just finished a third. It feels good. I might do a first draft of something new to celebrate.