I have embarked on a project to make a movie about transportation planning. This idea has been percolating through my mind for a long time and has a long way to go yet. Early Efforts I worked for over 30 years as a transportation planner. When I started to make films in the early 1990s,… Read Article →
Posts By: James Beattie Morison
“I never gave them hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.” – Harry S Truman I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier. After all, all through my career I was frustrated by how people reacted to bad news. Time and again I ran into a lot of… Read Article →
After substantial procrastination, I’ve taken a break from my transportation planning stories to work on my short film for the 20th annual $100 Film Festival. Wednesday I picked up a camera (a Canon Scoopic) from the CSIF’s new production coordinator Yvonne. It’s been a while since I used a 16mm camera, so I had to… Read Article →
Over the years I tried several different approaches to character names. I’m still not sure which the best way is. When I started I just picked names “out of the air.” It turned out that wasn’t always easy to do, and some of the names were uninspired. Later I developed names that were similar to… Read Article →
I just posted a new short story. The Gladstone Barrier https://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/stories/the-gladstone-barrier/ This story is set a traffic operations office, but has some of the same characters as The Glencoe Project. Although I wrote it later, The Gladstone Barrier happens before The Glencoe Project. I found this story much harder to write. It could be because… Read Article →
In my next transportation planning story, The Gladstone Barrier, I have a couple of scenes that involve what some people would call political interference. They are relatively minor parts of the story. One case in my story isn’t what I would call political interference. In that situation a person at a public meeting gets upset… Read Article →
I got a second draft of my short story The Gladstone Barrier done this week. I think it is much better, but I still think I’ll need two or more drafts before I think it is ready to post. I wish I could do it faster. I have trouble with some of the dialogue. While… Read Article →
I am almost finished with The Gladstone Barrier, my second “transportation planning adventure story.” I continue to explore the field of transportation planning for story ideas. This post draws on my experience with transportation models. Most of my career in transportation planning was spent on models and forecast. Much of the rest of my efforts… Read Article →
Well, not really the gods and it wasn’t really all that bad. My website got migrated last week. For some unknown reason the version they migrated was from two weeks earlier. I didn’t want to post a blog until that had been fixed. It wasn’t done until late Monday, so I decided to wait and… Read Article →
The Crying Woman I had one very productive day on The Crying Woman this week. The whole story should run about 6,000 words and I wrote 2,600 in one session. I have another 2,000 to do. I was optimistic that I could finish it off the next day but I got stuck. Before I started… Read Article →