Orville Sharkbiter, Xtranormal and Animated Storyboards
April 22, 2012 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
A while back, I came across a program called Xtranormal (www.xtranormal.com) that allows you to create animated videos by just typing in dialog. I’ve seen a lot of short videos on YouTube that used the program. This week I decided to try it out.
I converted my short story Book Review: Sharkbiter – The Secret to Success into a script. The story is a satire of some of the get-rich-quick books that people write. I wrote it in the form of a fake book review. For the movie version, I converted it into a mock TV interview. It was relatively easy to rewrite.
I came up with the idea for the character Orville Sharkbiter when I did Line of Taxis (www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/filmlist/line-of-taxis). I used him as a minor character in the movie, but changed his name to Orville Stark-Leiter. He is the proverbial greedy “boss from hell”. I’ve played around with story ideas for him ever since. It only took me 14 years to get the story done.
I did a first version of the script with the on-line version of Xtranormal and I was happy with how it turned out. The desktop version is more powerful, so I want to use that. I ran into trouble with the desktop program however. The support people have been very helpful and I hope to get it to work next week.
The program is free, but you need to pay for assets, such as sets, actors, and voices. You don’t need to pay to create the video, but you can’t save the video to show or post it anywhere until you do. I bought some assets with the money in my PayPal account that I got from my on-line sales.
My long-term goal is to use the program to animated storyboards of my film scripts. I feel that my scripts are a bit too talky and I thought that animated storyboards would help me visualize how the final film will turn out. At the start of the year, one of the goals I set was to try this with my short story The Crying Woman (www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/stories/the-crying-woman/). It would run something like 40 minutes. The Sharkbiter video will run about 10 minutes.
If the Sharkbiter video turns out OK, I’ll do The Crying Woman next.
Conversation Stories 2012 February 20
February 20, 2012 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
My story The Crying Woman is what I call a “conversation story”. I plan to do what I’ve done with my transportation planning stories and write a series of articles and blog posts to explore that concept more thoroughly.
Other than write The Crying Woman and set up the conversational stories webpage, I haven’t produced much. However, I have given it a lot of thought. I have an article partly drafted, but it may be a while before I publish it yet. With my film Contingency still not quite ready, I can put too much time into anything else. At least not for a few weeks yet.
What I Found in My Notebook
November 6, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
A couple of years ago I started to keep a notebook of the ideas I had for my films and writing. It isn’t an original idea. In several writing courses I took, they suggested I do that.
The other day I pulled it out to look up some notes I wrote last week for an idea I had for an article. As I flipped through the pages I came across some notes I wrote about a film idea I had last August. I had completely forgotten about it. That surprised me.
The story is a variation of the idea I had for The Crying Woman. Like The Crying Woman, the story is about a chance meeting between two people. Where and how they meet is different. The two characters are different. What they want is different. Overall, I think it is a darker story, but it has a happy ending. It also has a message that I feel strongly about.
When I reread my notes, I found the story compelling enough to want to work on it some more. Right now, I have a couple of projects that I want to complete, so I can’t go back to it right now. I have notes for a couple of other stories I want to do.
The big advantage of keeping a notebook is that you don’t lose any of the ideas you have. You never know when they will prove useful. On the other hand, I remember reading an interview with Paul McCartney where he said that he felt that if you couldn’t remember it later, then it wasn’t that good an idea. That may be the case with him, but I think I can use all the help I can get.
New Short Story – “The Crying Woman”
September 6, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
I invite you to read my new short story The Crying Woman. http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/The_Crying_Woman.php
A woman whose life has just been turned upside down tries to run away from her problems. When she has a chance meeting with a man on an elevator, she is drawn into a conversation by the empathy he shows toward her.
I wanted to do a story that was very different from the stories I wrote before. It was a difficult story for me to write.
I want to eventually develop this story into a movie. I would like to hear if you think this would make a movie that you would like to see.
Thoughts on No Budget Filmmaking
September 4, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
The concept of no budget filmmaking appeals to me. Largely because I can’t see that I’ll ever get the money for even a low budget movie.
The other day I followed a link someone posted on Twitter to the article The Rights and Wrongs of No-Budget Filmmaking http://www.huffingtonpost.com/abe-schwartz/the-rights-and-wrongs-of-_b_940438.html I encourage you to have a look at it.
The essence of no budget is to know your limits and work within them. One bit of advice I like is to use only the money you have immediately available. Never go into debt to make your movie.
I think the key to success is in the writing. It is there that you really need to be aware what you have to work with. In some of the stories I’ve developed I have critical scenes that are well beyond what I could do in a no budget movie. That eliminates those projects right off the top.
What I am starting to realize is that I need to identify my locations and cast my film before I write my script. In my project The Crying Woman I did talk to one actor before I started to write, but I never gave any thought to the other main character. I have no idea who I might get for the part.
The danger of approaching actors too soon is that if it takes a long time to get the project started, they may lose interest.
The more of the work you can do yourself, the better. I do prefer to use a cinematographer rather than do it myself. When I direct I want to concentrate on the actors and not worry about the camera work. I like to edit and write too. Both of these can be very expensive if you have to pay some one else.
The biggest issue for me is sound production. In many ways sound is more important than the images. Sound is also more difficult to do right. I’ve also found that it can be very expensive to hire someone. I like to work on the sound, but I don’t have much confidence that I can produce an acceptable quality sound track.
Aside from the creative aspects of sound production, I don’t know the technical specifications. I know that there are a lot of tricks that can improve sound quality, but don’t know how to achieve them. The problem I have with My Most Difficult Case is noisy live sound. I haven’t had much success with my own attempts with noise reduction. I can eliminate the noise, but it changes the quality of the voices.
Given the cost of sound production, I think it may make sense for me to take a course in sound production.
Painting the Tiger
August 28, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
Back when I was young I spent a couple weeks in the summer at “Art in the Park.” It was a program at Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg. We would go to different parts of the park and paint what we saw. We also went to Kildonan Park, where I did a picture of the Chief Peguis statute.
My memory of that time is rather vague, but one incident does stick in my mind.
One day we were at the tiger enclosure in the Zoo. I strove mightily to do a realistic picture of the tiger. The teacher (coach?) came by and looked at what I’d done. I can remember exactly what he said, but it was to effect that I was too conventional.
After he had gone I decided, OK, I’ll show you unconventional. So I did a more abstract painting. I just did the orange stripes of the tiger. It wasn’t the realistic image I wanted, but more of an impression of a tiger. When I look back, it doesn’t seem so unconventional now. At the time, for me, it was.
When the teacher came back he was very impressed with it. At the end of the program, he selected that painting for the showing they did. I remember seeing it up on the wall at the Kildonan Park pavilion. That was the old pavilion, not the one they have now. I never got the painting back.
As I’ve struggled with my rewrite of The Crying Woman, my thoughts went back to that teacher’s advice. Am I too conventional in my approach? I do recognize that I often fall into a set pattern. I reuse the same phrases, words and structures.
If I really want my movie to stand out, I must find a way to break out of my conventional thinking. Over the last eight or nine months I have looked for a writing formula to help me move to longer and more substantial stories. That taught me more about how to write, but it also constrained my creativity.
I’m not sure how to shift mental gears just yet. Maybe, like the tiger, my work needs to be abstract and impressionistic. I use a similar approach when I created Line of Taxis and I feel that worked well.
Focus Focus Focus
August 24, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
A problem I run into all the time is that I spread myself too thin over many different projects. I find myself jumping back and forth between each project. In the end, I never finish any of them.
It is only when I take a step back; consider each of my projects, and then make one my top priority that I finish. In the last couple days I’ve come to realize that I’ve fallen into the same trap again. It is time to let go of projects.
I have a bunch of ideas I want to work on.
Feature Scripts and Novellas
I wrote four feature scripts and I’d like to rewrite all of them. I’ve also thought of rewriting them as prose. They’d all end up about novella length. Maybe some day I will get back to them, but right now, there is only one, Then the Phone Rang, that I can see I would ever make as a movie.
Transportation Planning
I want to do a movie about transportation planning. I worked as a transportation planner for 30 years and thought that background would help me write. I still feel strongly about many issues in transportation planning, which would help push me through to completion. A month ago I asked some transportation planners what they thought of my ideas. The feedback I got wasn’t quite what I expected. I think I need to take some time away from the project to absorb what I learnt before I pick it up again.
Articles and Stories
A little over three years ago I started to post my stories and articles on-line at sites like Triond and Bukisa. Generally I’ve noticed that my stories don’t do as well as articles. As a result I’ve done more articles. Right now I have quite a few ideas for articles. In fact I had a new idea this morning and wrote up some notes for it.
While it has been nice to have people read what I wrote, it doesn’t bring in much money. It also distracts me from my stories and movies. I’ve decided not to write anymore articles. I’ve decided that several times, but every so often I do one.
I have started to post my stories on my own website and no longer post them on Triond. I want to use them to build up my “brand” and I think that would be more effective on my own website. Several of the articles I wrote I’ve done as blog posts instead. Again, I think it is better to draw people to my own site, rather than some other site. So far it hasn’t made me much money either.
Blog
My blog does take time away from my other projects, but I plan to keep it up. It allows me to articulate some of the ideas I have and help me focus. In the long term I think it will help promote my work.
Long ago I started to refer to this project as “My Most Difficult Film.” The first draft of the script is dated March 6, 1991 and the film still isn’t finished. I really need to put this project to bed and move on.
Years ago I read a quote from François Truffaut. He said that when he started a film, he wanted to make the best film ever made. As the project progressed, he decided that he’d settle for the best film he ever made. By the end, he just wanted it finished.
I really need to make this project my top priority.
Next year will be the 20th annual $100 Film Festival. Melanie Wilmink at the CSIF would like to see all the film makers from the first festival submit new films. I’ve got a couple of irons in the fire.
Howard Horwitz, who also had a film in the first festival, and I have talked about collaboration. I did some test shots a couple weeks ago. I need to fill out that idea more. It needs to be ready to submit by December 1.
I have another idea I’ve considered for years. I think I can get it done fairly easily. It would be a very short film. Less than a minute long.
I really do want to get this project done this year.
This was originally an idea I had for a movie. It came from a suggestion that I do a film like Before Sunrise. I realized that it was very different from anything I’d done before. As a way to build up my skill, I decided to start with a short story.
I thought that not only would I develop my skills, it would also help me pitch the film. It has been a hard slog to get the story done. I made some good progress on a rewrite yesterday, so I feel much better about the project now.
While I feel good about the story, I do worry that people may not like the ending. It is so built into the structure of the story that if I wanted to change it, I would have to start over from scratch. I want to finish the story I have now, but I also think I will start on a new story in a similar vein.
My Short List
I plan to concentrate my efforts on just three projects for now.
- My Most Difficult Case,
- My $100 Film Festival Film, and
- The Crying Woman
Ideally I should only have one top priority, but I think I can work on all three of these projects at the same time. Each of them will have periods where I have to wait for some one else to do something, which would allow me time to work on the other projects.
Project Updates: A Film, Another Film, An Article, A Story and More Stories
August 21, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
I made progress on several of my projects this week.
$100 Film Festival Film
I got the test roll for my new $100 Film Festival Film (HDFFF2012). I was happy with how good it looked. I had been worried that the film was too old and wouldn’t work. I need to plan out what to do next. What I’ve had in mind is something like Man with a Movie Camera. I’ve been in touch with Howard Horwitz to collaborate on this project. He had a film in the first $100 Film Festival back in 1992.
My Most Difficult Case
Actually I haven’t made much progress on My Most Difficult Case. I’ve run into some difficulty with the sound production.
I wrote and published a new article about taxes. I had some ideas about what is fair and thought that an article on taxes would do well. The initial response was good, but then things slowed down.
The Crying Woman
I got the first draft of my story The Crying Woman done. It came in at about the length I planned, but the last section of the story was short by 200 words, while the first three sections were a little over. Right now I think I shouldn’t get all concerned about that.
Before I start to rewrite it I want to think over what I want to do with the story. Since I took so long to write it, the style I used isn’t consistent. I had followed the Lester Dent formula, but it isn’t really appropriate for this kind of story. I want to move back closer to the style I used for A Walk in the Snow, A Woman Alone in a Cruel World and Hello, My Name is Bob.
Transportation Planning Stories
I’ve written two transportation planning stories, The Glencoe Project and The Gladstone Barrier, as part of my goal of a transportation planning movie.
I posted a request on some LinkedIn groups for transportation planners to comment on my transportation planning stories. The response wasn’t as great as I had hoped, but I still had trouble responding to the comments. I want to give thoughtful responses and that takes longer. I got most of them done this week, but I think there are still a few I need to follow up on.
I started on the outline for a new transportation planning story this week. I tried to incorporate some of the suggestions I got. I wondered if I should be doing a new story outline now with all the other projects on the go. I do enjoy doing out lines and it is a little too easy to drop what ever else I’m doing and put them together.
The Crying Woman and the Art of Listening
August 7, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
The Crying Woman
I got back to The Crying Woman this week. I got about 850 words done Thursday. The next day I couldn’t write if my life depended on it. I find this is a very hard story to write.
I’m about 80 per cent through the story now. I hope to get the first draft done next week. It will need a lot of rewriting though. Of course, since I plan to turn it into a film eventually, I’ll rewrite it many more times before I’m done.
The Art of Listening
The story started as an attempt to do a film like Before Sunrise. The story is about a conversation, but what I want to explore is how to listen. There is a skill and an art to listening and it is hard to do it well.
I like to think I am good at listening, although I am less confident than I used to be. Never the less, there have been several occasions where my ability to listen has been valuable.
I took a communications course many years ago. What struck me was it was mostly about how to listen. They taught us a technique called active listening.
Part of the active listening technique is to periodically paraphrase what the person said. This forces you to pay attention to what they say. It also lets them know you had heard what they said and understand. Of course if you got it wrong, they could correct you.
I used to talk a lot with a friend who had taken the same course. She used to kid me when she realized I was using the technique. The technique doesn’t work as well if it is too obvious. Still, I found that it did work quite often. It is a skill that you need to work at before you get good at it.
Another challenge is to not give advice. The natural inclination is to give advice when someone tells you their troubles. However, when someone wants to talk, they often don’t want advice. They just need to let out their emotions. If you try to give advice, you don’t let them express their feelings.
It can be hard when someone explicitly asks for advice. Do they really want advice? Or, is it just another way they express their need. I would get a little panicky when that happened. It wasn’t clear to me what I should say.
Men are more likely than women to feel they should give advice. In The Crying Woman it is the man who needs to listen. I need to show that he has to struggle.
Asking questions is another useful technique. Opened ended questions were better because it encouraged them to be more open about what they wanted to say. I found that a good question was better than any advice I could give.
I really felt that most of the time, people already knew what they wanted to do. They just needed to have someone else validate what they thought. Many times in the course of a conversation I never did find out what their problem was. Yet, I was able to help them make their decision.
I picked listening as a major element of the story because I had some experience to draw from and I felt confident that I was good at it. So far I find it a real struggle to imagine how a conversation like this would go. My memories of my successful listening events are vague. That may be just as well, since I don’t want to repeat anything that someone said to me in confidence.
I hope that by the time I get to the rewrite I can recover my lapsed skills.
The Gods Conspired Against Me
July 13, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
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 post Tuesday.
Tuesday I decided to print some forms I needed before I did my blog. When I did, the printer got corrupted and I had to clean up the registry and reinstall the printers. That strained my limited technical expertise. The problem kept recurring and I spent much of the day fixing it. In the end I discovered that the problem would only crop up when I tried to print some PDF files. Other PDF files worked fine. The PDF files that caused the problem were created by my scanner’s software.
At least it gave me something to blog about. I haven’t made much progress on any of my projects.
I thought I’d finished the first draft of The Crying Woman, but it turned out that I’ve got about a third of it to do yet. I plan to rewrite The Gladstone Barrier first and get it published, and then go back to The Crying Woman.
With both these stories I used a variation of the Lester Dent Master Fiction Plot. I did a couple of stories, The Abattoir Project and The Glencoe Project and they were fairly easy to write. I find these two new stories are much harder to write. In part I think it is because his plot is an adventure story, while my new stories are not.
The Glencoe Project isn’t really an adventure story either, although I call it that, but it wasn’t so hard to write. I want to put more emotion and character into the two new stories and I find that hard to do. I know it is something I need to do, but I wish it were easier.
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