Moviemaking Updates and Other Miscellany

I claim to be an amateur movie-maker at the top of the blog, but hardly ever seem to post anything about that very subject. Well the truth is that for the last while, I haven't been entirely focused on the movie making part of it.  My last big effort in that direction was completion of the fine tuning for The Stone Unturned edit, the entire project of which has been rumbling on for a couple of years now.  The edit is now, as they say, locked.  All that remains is for the sound mix to be completed, at which point I should theoretically be able to drop it straight into Premiere, render it out and we have a complete movie! Theory is all very well in theory. Dropping the sound mix straight in should perhaps be more of a hypothesis than a theory, until tested against the evidence of having something that works.

Rendering for this half-hour production used to take my machine twenty minutes, until I figured that it could use some fancy colour-grading to give it more of the cinematic feel which all amateurs working in video seem to crave.  Movie-looks were provided by a plugin called - unsurprisingly - Movielooks, a freebie obtained when I bought Premiere in the first place.  Rendering it out no longer takes twenty minutes: it takes thirty hours.  Looks great though.  I'm especially pleased, since the free version is no longer available as a promotional item.  And the reason I'm pleased is because I was able to find it cowering in a corner of one of my old hard drives.  And that reason that pleased me is from having to partially rebuild the computer a few months back, when everything started to fail spectacularly. (An obscure interaction between the ATI graphics card and the rest of the system caused drive cacheing to fail. Not sure I believed the explanation, but only became convinced when the card’s fan physically spun itself right off the board.)  I thought I'd lost the plugin entirely and the full - and only version - now available is a tad outside the range of my budget.

The Stone Unturned is tentatively scheduled for free release sometime before mumble mumble mumble. Potentially before the end of the year, but as we’ve learned these things never go to plan. In any case, I reckon it is the best-looking episode of Intrepid we’ve made so far. (Up to speed section: The Stone Unturned is a Star Trek fan film, the latest in the series.  We're approaching it all quite allegedly professionally you know.)

Mainly, however, I’ve been preoccupied with writing or at least attempting to be preoccupied with it. To this end I've now got a complete short script, around 23 pages, which I've passed both to Nick and T'Other'Alf.  Nick likes it well enough to film as-is and Lesley has assured me that "it's not complete pants".  Which is encouraging!  Executable, as it's now titled, has had an odd history.  When I was writing Bit Patterns as a full-length Intrepid script, I was halfway through when Brian Matthews' script for The Stone Unturned made an appearance.  At the time I didn't think I could complete mine quickly enough to start filming in the following months, and so it got bumped to next in line.  Nick was working on a feature length Intrepid script called Conviction of Demons, of which some scenes have since been shot.  I was concerned about what would amount to trying to make two feature films simultaneously, both of which would require extensive outdoor shooting.  In typical Intrepid fashion, both were written in the large.  A huge effort, then.  Multiplied by two.

This was the point at which I started thinking about a full length original film which would be simpler to make.  Something in a single location and with as few characters as possible.  So I started jotting down notes and thinking about a project which had the working title Bottleneck, potentially our first original film.  Then something odd happened.  As I've written in another post, myself and Nick had a conversation, the outcome of which was to rejig Bit Patterns as an original film.  Nice idea, but it involved way more than merely changing names.  As it happened, it needed almost as much effort as writing it in the first place.  Now that it's in the only-tweaking-required stage of scripting, it's obvious that it would need a serious budget and huge effort.  We reckon we could start on a sizzle reel this year - well, next year - but so far it's just in the speculation stage.
(Of course this means that I still owe Nick an Intepid script...)

So now I wanted to think once again about something which could be achieved with less effort, and with the bonus of being less likely to drive me crazy.  So I turned to the idea for Bottleneck and wondered how it would work not as a full-length script, but as a short one.  And that was the genesis of what is now Executable, the final words of which I wrote just recently.  Since it effectively takes place in a single location, is indoors and requires only three actors, we think it could be filmed in a weekend!  Even better, from my perspective, it gives me a chance to make use of the DSLR for shooting, which I bought for the very good business reason that I really, really wanted one.  DSLRs aren't known for their audio quality, however, but since Nick has just ordered a digital audio recorder...

And that’s where I am at the moment. No doubt everything which happens from now on is subject to change.

Computer Active Quotes Me on Lemmings

Computer Active has a very nice blog post about the 20th Anniversary of Lemmings; very nice because they've quoted me and asked nicely about using one of my photos! This is probably as good a moment as any to show off my belated joining of Flickr, to which I've added a selection of pics from the celebration. Here's the selection I've uploaded.

The (temporary) plaque at DMA's "old old office". I'm told that there are plans afoot for something a little more permanent. I've also taken the opportunity to add this location - and DMA's other office - to Ben Goldacre's Nerd Map in case anyone wishes to make a retro computer game pilgrimage.

Lemmings is 20

This Valentines day, I’ll do doing something a little different from the usual. Twenty whole years ago today was the release day for Lemmings, developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis. At the time I was in college, doing little freelance jobs for Dave Jones. Converting graphics for our ports of Ballistix and Shadow of the Beast occupied my spare time in the days before I was employed by DMA full-time. My job was to take shiny 32-colour graphics from the Amiga and hack them down into 4-colour character set displayable by the Commodore 64. Wednesday afternoons were free time as far as college was concerned, and that was when I’d tend to visit the office, bringing along the my latest efforts. It was during one of those days that I saw Mike’s famous Lemmings animation for the first time.

At one point in the late 90s, I came up with a small demo chapter to show what a History of DMA book might look like (a project which seems more relevant as time progresses; I never would have imagined I’d be getting interviewed by BBC Radio Scotland on this very subject two decades later.) Here’s a remastered version, without all the notes-to-self, or known typos, but with ‘restored’ text. At the time I wrote it, I was still very much influenced by the book Game Over, which was about Nintendo. The first section of the test chapter isn’t directly about Lemmings, but leads into it thematically, and is by no means a comprehensive account of its creation. In particular I haven’t mentioned Gary Timmons, who added much to Mike’s original animation and refined the appearance of the Lemmings themselves. The full story awaits a fresh text and a broader scope.

DMA Test Chapter (1996)
At the time of Blood Money, the output from the young DMA still couldn’t be accused of originality. Both of Dave’s shoot-’em-ups had been inspired by specific arcade machines. In one early demo which he showed to the KACC, Menace displayed waving tentacles on one of the levels. Tentacles of the sort which had been seen in Salamander.
A horizontally scrolling game was inevitably going to be the product of Dave’s initial efforts, Salamander being his favourite game; he played it constantly in the Reform Street arcade, Dundee’s largest. The Amiga had custom hardware to provide two layers of scrolling, making it easier (and less CPU-intensive) to display spectacular moving screens. Of the few games available for the Amiga so far, none had made use of this ‘parallax’ scrolling.
Dave had a definite philosophy about how to name his products. Out was weird ‘made-up’ titles and in their place was the sort of name which could easily crop up on the news, magazines, or in conversation. Words or phrases which were in the general public consciousness. His thinking was that the title would appear in the normal course of event and people would begin to associate it with ‘that game.’ Hence, Blood Money; a title which was at one stage going to be called IOU.
In later years, naming came full circle. The possibility of lawsuits made the use of such easily recognised words too risky and there was a return to made-up names such as ‘Tanktics’ and ‘Kraniaks.’ A name search by a legal firm even saw risk in the use of ‘space station’ in a title, but oddly, not ‘silicon valley.’ At the start of the 90s, however, such concerns never surfaced.
Admittedly, most DMA game names were only accorded the status of ‘working titles’ which nevertheless made it intact all the way to release day. It was this spirit in which Lemmings was begun.

Scott Johnston joined DMA after responding to an advert in the local paper. Setting something of a trend, he was one in a line of Science Fiction fans; something which his art portfolio clearly showed. On being accepted into the company, he was assigned to another embryonic project: Walker. Despite applying as an artist, he was soon to show that he had programming skills too, often combining them to good effect. Within weeks he had written a program to generate graphics for the Walker’s head, over which fine detail could then be hand-animated. Initially, however, he had to draw small characters for the Walker to stomp over. He elected to make them 16 pixels by 16 in size.
Mike saw this and told him that the characters could be at least half the size and still look good. Scott didn’t believe him.
“But I’ve seen it before,” Mike insisted.
What he’d seen - and later dragged out in evidence - were the characters from Beachhead which had made incredible use of the C64’s limited resolution. Each character had been exquisitely animated. What had caught his attention in particular, was a character throwing a grenade. It was everything that animation should be; smooth, detailed and ignorant of the computer’s limitations. Here, they were brought to life in a grid of a mere 8x8 pixels. Without a copy to hand, though, Mike decided to prove his point over one dinnertime.
Ignoring Dave’s ban on eating chips, which stunk out the room, he fired up DPaint and proceeded to create a simple animation with small creatures. One after the other, they walked steadily up a hillside to the top where they - in a macabre sense of humour - got blasted to pieces by a laser, just before they made it to the end of the cliff.
Biscuit thought this was hilarious, so much that legend has it that he literally fell off of his chair, laughing. (It was suggested in a later year that DMA needed another reaction like that.) Russell, immortally, said, “Just like lemmings” and followed it with the moment in which Lemmings was truly born. With a laugh he said, “There’s a game in that…” and wondered how it would be possible to go about saving the poor creatures. Dave remembers it differently, with himself playing the role of saying there was a game in the animation. Mike is openly dismissive of that.
For his part, Scott didn’t react much when he was shown it later, but sure enough the characters in Walker soon shrank to the same dimensions.

Russell began work on the PC version, purely because time was available to him, several months before the Amiga version got going. The most common PC graphics standard at the time was CGA, which had a fixed - and limited - colour palette; white, green, blue and black. Lemmings had to make use of these colours and that is the reason why Lemmings have green hair. After a while, Russell had to put work aside to focus on converting Ballistix to the PC, at which stage the Amiga became the lead development platform. Mike worked for a time on the C64 version.
As a result, 1991 effectively became the Year of the Magazines. Never before or since had DMA Design ever had so much coverage [Note: obviously this was written before GTA!]. Other games would soon be released by others, which had been inspired by Lemmings to a greater or lesser degree. Extreme satisfaction was to be had in DMA, seeing those magazines universally call these games Lemmings-like or Lemmings-clones. No doubt existed that Lemmings had been unique in games history, and had in fact kicked off an entirely new genre: the ‘Save-’em-up.’

Some More DMA Witterings

Wikipedia continues to confound me, and my feelings are decidedly mixed. Previously I'd written about how the DMA article claimed myself as one of the founder members, something which I found to be a rather amusing thought. I mentioned this to Mike Dailly, himself a founder member, and to my surprise he agreed with the article. I'd been thinking in terms of business, for which I'd played no part. But in terms of the four of us, including Dave Jones and Russell Kaye, sitting in the computer club canteen in 1984 discussing how cool it would be to makes games.... well, perhaps. It didn't exactly help in my post when I was in full obfuscation mode. And when the inventor of Lemmings calls me a founder member of DMA Design, I suppose I should listen. As Londo Mollari says in Babylon 5 , “I was there at the beginning...”

But it's odd how history is coming to judge this, and by history I mean the internet. Tonight on one of my not-as-frequent-as-you-think egosurfing sessions, I stumbled across an article which was written about Unirally , the Super Nintendo game. A couple of years ago I'd been asked a few interview questions, offered up my answers, and didn't think much more about it. Now I've found the article, The Making of Unirally, and am chuffed that some of my answers made it in. I'll post more about Unirally in due course, but suffice it to say that the manual I wrote was called “ often hilarious” in the article and “hilarious” in the comments. To coin a modern fanboi phrase: squeeee!

Which of course led to a more comprehensive search for myself with the qualifier “DMA”. This was the point that - contrary to information as recently as last year - the “founder member of DMA” infonugget is now everywhere ! This is what history, or at least the little corner which I'm in, will record. But confounding happens when, as tonight, I find that bits of my blog are being used as a Wikipedia reference. This is great! It means I'm an authority or some such damned thing. In the entry for Turbo Esprit, it repeats the BBC's Gameswipe claim that it was a direct inspiration for Grand Theft Auto, and uses my blog post as reference for the counterargument. Makes me sound controversial too! And calls me one of GTA's designers, which I'm really not. (Though Mike differs on this, maybe it was all my input on why it shouldn't be called 'Freeway' and the screeds of dialogue I wrote for it ). Perhaps, in the fashion of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently , I can make myself the brains behind every game DMA ever made just by the simple expedient of constantly denying that I'm any such thing.

And while I'm pasting in random thoughts, I had a vision of the future, of sorts. I now what picture my obituary will contain. When I sent off my interview answers, I also included a photo of myself for illustration which happens to be from the single weekend of my life when my haircut worked as advertised. It's about five years old now and makes me look like the sort of cool dude who's obviously super talented merely on the strength of the photo being both b/w and slightly out of focus. Which of course is why I picked that one. What I looked like at the time I actually wrote the manual was really, really geeky. And in colour.

And no, I'm not posting the picture just now, at least not until I've digitally removed the spot from my forehead.

ScotGovCamp

Hefting around a video camera from time to time, in the course of making Intrepid or otherwise just being idle, means that I sometimes get asked to wave it around for altogether more noble purposes.  T'Other'alf, for inscrutable reasons, was organising an Unconference; which as far as I could gather was a Conference but without the Conference bits.  The closest I'd come to this was reading about the Fortean Times' Unconvention, although the “Un” part of that seemed more to do with the subject matter – werewolves, flying saucers, conspiracy theories and so forth – than the actual structure of the event itself.  ScotGovCamp Blog

An Unconference, then was a conference without a fixed agenda.  Attendees would shout out topic suggestions at the beginning and then everyone would sit in on the topic and chip in or not depending on their disposition.  Oh, and it was also a GovCamp which is for people working in and around government; in this case government in Scotland.

And just like starting making Star Trek Fan Films back in 2003, I got involved because I had a video camera.

This was going to be different from amateur film-making, not in the least because I don't get an opportunity for a second take.  Given that I wasn't actually in control of anyone, I might not even get a first take.  And since the whole event was essentially an experiment to see how it went, I had little idea of what would be happening and where to position myself for capturing footage of the sort that I didn't know what it would be.

ScotGovCamp specifically was about digital Scotland, and drew together a wide range of people from local government, commentators on social issues, self-proclaimed geeks, librarians and civil servants.  My impression was that the subject matter was nebulous, but that was perhaps just me who felt to be a bit of an outsider.  Shooting was straightforward to begin with, before anyone had really arrived.  A handful of people turned up and before the actual event kicked off proper, there was a lot of setting up to do.  This was the easiest to film as I only had to wander around and point the camera at anything which looked interesting, such as setting up a display stand or people wandering past the Eduardo Paolozzi art installation.  I had some fun filming transitions, panning from the roof down to the group standing round the registration table, filming the flashing lights on one of the walls or panning from the sculpture to people just arriving.  I had no idea if I'd use them, it was just in case.

It was obvious early on that there was no way I'd be able to capture everything which happened on the day, given that it lasted much of the day and was split into three discussion rooms named Hume, Brown and Ferguson after Edinburgh University Alumni – Lesley's idea – and not after three varieties of quark particle  - strange, bottom and charmed – which I was pushing for.  But when everyone was still together in the atrium, I had a straightforward area of focus, Lesley and Dave Briggs giving the pep talk and assembling the agenda from the suggested topics.  It was immediately before this that something unexpected happened.

When I'm either directing or doing camera for amateur fiction, there is a script and what transpires is known and accounted for.  A live events means having to be responsive to things as they happen and when Dave asked everyone to introduce themselves and give a one-word response as to why they were here, something ever so slightly extraordinary happened.  I pointed the camera at whoever was talking, including myself after only three or four people (whilst failing to understand the concept of “one” word) but them I found myself following the “focus” as each individual in turn gave their name, and their one word.  Instantly it was one of those slick adverts, all soft-focus and warm fuzzies, selling you an emotion and a desire for something that you still don't understand.  And I was in the centre of it.  This was how I imagine a religious cult would indoctrinate me.  (I'm good at making spurious connections.)

This remained a highlight, since it was obvious how to make a neat little video – only  a couple of minutes long – from that part of the day.  Actually putting it together of course is something I'll still have to sit at the video editing suite (desk in corner of living room) to do.  Now a neat little video is something that is more problematic for something which represents the entirety of the day.  Not being able to film everything means that I need to convey the flavour of it and do so without dragging.  This is something that I'm still trying to figure out, since their wasn't a grand overarching scheme to begin with.  In any case, once the preliminaries were over with, I wandered in and out of the various conversations which were taking place, trying to get as many angles as I could, concentrating on whoever was speaking at the time.  What became obvious was that it would be extremely difficult even to cover a single train of thought form the participants.  Self-organising seating favoured a circle which meant that often a dialogue was being held where I filmed one person but could only get the back of the head of the other.

Even putting finished video clips of a continuous minute or two minutes on the web would lack context enough to make sense of what was being said.  Halfway through the day I was mooting the possibility of getting someone to provide a voice over in conjunction with any conclusions.  In other words, I'd given myself a bunch of work by volunteering to film and would be giving myself even more work (another thing I excel at) the more I thought about it!  And just dumping the whole two and a quarter hours worth of footage to the web would not exactly make for riveting viewing!

So what I have ahead of me is an exercise in transitions, crossfades, categorisations, titles and wishing that the video would self-organise too.  But failing that, the classic fallback position is to stare at the clips until a moment of inspiration occurs, and hope that being on holiday doesn't derail me too much!  But seriously, now it's just a matter of piecing it together.

Project MyWorld

I always thought I had a finite supply of stories to tell about my time at DMA Design. But an announcement from Realtime Worlds, which I only saw this morning, made me realise that even something which was only a few minutes long can still be relevant today. RTW have been working for the last five years on Project MyWorld, an ambitious online world which mixes social networking and gaming. No doubt the subtleties are more nuanced than that and most of us will note that five years is a long time in technology.

Mike Dailly, whom I've now known for something like twenty six years, had been working on it in complete secrecy. But now that the story is out, I realise that I've known the seeds of it since 1996, an entire fourteen years ago. Dave Jones, now Mr RTW and ex Mr DMA had clearly been thinking about it for that long. Back then I worked in DMA's Design Department alongside Mike and Dave would often come in to talk about whatever was on his mind; normally an idea for a game or about games in general. (Or about cars.)

Mike and myself were working on a project known informally as The Space Game, a name it's kept to this day, where each player would take control of a particular console such as tactical or navigation, instead of an entire ship. It didn't ultimately progress very far, but it was during this time that Dave wandered into the design dept and we told him something of the plans for it. This was also midway through the development of GTA and Dave said wouldn't it be great if you could find a planet in the game, fly down to the surface and find a city where a game of GTA was taking place. Not only that, but if you drove past some guys by the side of a river, those guys could be playing a fishing game!

This, we all agreed, would indeed be great but at the time I didn't think any more of it than just another idea in a sea of ideas. Any developer, I'm sure, will tell you that they have many more ideas than could ever be brought to fruition in several lifetimes. And that was it, a small conversation that didn't have any great significance at the time. Obviously Dave had the seed of an idea even all that time ago and has never forgotten it. What drives all the best ideas isn't stakeholders or technology, though they may enable them.

No, what drives them is simply asking "Wouldn't it be cool if..."

I have a Bacon Number of 4!

I was in Star Trek: Intrepid - Transitions and Lamentations (2009) with Nick Cook who was in Star Trek: Phase II - Blood and Fire part Two with Denise Crosby (2009) who was in Curse of the Pink Panther (1983) with Robert Wagner who was in Wild Things (1998) with.... Kevin Bacon!

A Lemmings Conversion in 36 Hours

Hello Slashdotters!  (I think that's traditional when your site gets a traffic spike, though in my case it's probably minimal.  It's certainly the busiest few days my blog has ever seen!  I've been registered for years, but hardly ever post.  And then two +5 Interesting posts in 2 days.)  So just to pick up the story, Lemmings – already one of the most widely ported games ever – has had another port, this time to the iPhone.

That wasn't a surprise to me, since Lemmings has even been ported to the ZX Spectrum (I own the machine it was developed on, or at least I did).  News that it was ported from the “original” PalmOS made me blink not an eye.  Doing it in 36 hours was pretty neat.  So I posted some links for more Lemmings information and thought not that much more about it.  I thought it was an official port, and as such it was a pretty delightful piece of news.

Nope.  I was slightly fooled by the use of the word “original” and the screenshots which clearly showed the classic Lemmings graphics.  Digging (pun!) more deeply, it was obviously the same sound samples, same music and same levels.  Everyone was referring to it as a port, meaning taking the original and re-writing to run on a different machine.  It certainly sounded official, but there was no connection to the original, and the guy was wanting to make it available on Apple's App Store.  Which was the point that Sony stepped in with a cease and desist.  All the graphics were their copyright.

I have to say that I agree with Sony.

Now I have to be clear that I've no problem with someone porting a game to another platform, particularly since he wrote his own code.  Let's face it, as the director of some Star Trek fan films, I can hardly be critical of wanting to play in someone else's playground.  But the problem begins when he has taken material from the original – the real original and copied it wholesale.  Had he then followed up the code with new graphics and new sound then what we'd have is a clone of Lemmings, a lemmings-a-like game or something which was clearly inspired by Lemmings.  An open-source Lemmings IV maybe.

And that would be great!  Imitation and flattery and all that.

Oddly, though, copyright issues aren't what bothers me most.

My problem comes down to respect.

Nowhere in the 36 Hour Lemmings blog is any mention of the original DMA creators.  As I once wrote in one of DMA's manuals, we are “real people”.  We have families, we have wives, we have girlfriends, we have children and this is how we earn our living.  We aren't just some anonymous barcoded numbers in a database.  We think, we live, we feel and we care about what we do.  To have spent two years working on a game just to find someone selling copies at a car boot sale (yard sale) as I've experienced, hurts dreadfully.  It's an insult and is disrespectful.

Copyright aside, getting in touch would have been a potent gesture, simply to ask if we were cool with making a clone, or even just an acknowledgement in the game itself.  (I once saw a complete rip of the Hired Guns manual text, which I'd written, complete with an extensive “thanks to” a list of cracker buddies, but no mention of anyone who spent years making the game itself.)

Some posters are delighted that he's sticking it to The Man, who in this case is Sony.  Sony didn't create Lemmings.  DMA Design created Lemmings, which was published by Psygnosis who were later bought by Sony.  The Lemmings concept, was created by Mike Dailly.  It was coded by Dave Jones with graphics by Gary Timmons and Scott Johnson.  There are more credits of course, but sitting in that office we were hardly the embodiment of The Man.  We were doing this because it was cool and because it mattered to us.

And for me at least, because ultimately our works are all that we leave behind.

BBC Radio Scotland

It's always amazing how persistant DMA Design has been in my life.  Immediately after the museum exhibition opened, I was interviewed by James Christie from BBC Radio Scotland as one of the founders of DMA Design.  You can read my thoughts on being a 'founder' elsewhere on the blog, though it's certainly true that, in the fashion of Londo from Babylon 5, "I was there at the beginning..."

It was to be a half hour documentary, and it has just aired this morning.  I'm always nervous when something is broadcast with a contribution from me in it.  And, yes, it's still amazing when I think about it, that I can casually write a sentence like the previous one.  This one, however, was especially nerve-wracking for reasons that I can't quite put my finger on.  Would I sound OK?  Did I make sense?  Would my contribution even get used?

Fortunately the answer was yes, and now I'm left with a curious mix of nostalgia and excitement, even as I realise that only a small fraction of my interview was used and only those parts which fitted the 'narrative' that documentaries use.  I'm sure it was the same for both Mike and Russel who were also part of it.  But it means that there's a huge amount of story that hasn't been told, that doesn't exist on Wikipedia or anywhere else aside from in our heads and the odd fragment on a website here and there.  I close my eyes and I can see the old, old, office.

I recorded some important events in a journal I kept at DMA in 1996, but I so wish that I'd done the same for 1995, 1994, 1993...  But of course at the time none of us had any idea that DMA would be important and very little was jotted down and nothing at all formally recorded.  It makes the piecing together of DMA's history an exercise in deductive work where I still have scraps of paper, or tickets to hint at the exact date something occurred.

And that's what it was like in the days before blogs, twitter and 24/7 recording, when it was still possible for a mythology to arise.

You're definitely over the hill when...

... you've literally become a museum exhibit.  Seriously, this has just happened to me.  I thought hitting 40 was a doozy, but it has nothing on this.  Incidentally I'm using the word literally in the sense of actually being literal.  Dundee's MacManus Galleries has just completed several years worth of refurbishment, opening last weekend.  Part of the exhibit is some comparatively modern Dundee history, namely DMA Design.  (Lemmings, Grand Theft Auto, worked for them, yadda yadda, you know the drill.)

I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but was informed by my family that my photo is part of it, and my name too!  Now this is all very lovely and I've no problem with that, especially since it was mainly enabled by Mike Dailly who, like myself, was there from the start and has a ton of stuff hoarded from the early days.  Early, as in late eighties onwards.

Being late on a Sunday, I ran down to the place since I am literally (in the sense of being literal) five minutes walk from the place, but unfortunately got there just as they were closing and told me to get out.  My ego is not quite at the stage where I can legitimately say "don't you know who you're talking to"...

Oh well, so I got out and so far haven't seen it yet.

All very lovely, as I say, but I can't help feeling that an invite to the opening would have been nice...

Long Overdue Update

There's plenty things been going on the last few months and they're all continuing.  I've finally got a mostly finished version of the Bit Patterns script currently at the being-scrutinised stage of development.  I'm hopefully going to get some feedback in the next few weeks at which point I have to write some additional scenes, make good any places where it's lacking (too many characters is an obvious one!) and give it a final polish.  With any luck, we can get it into pre-production by the summer.  Still very excited by this as it'll be Intrepid's first original movie.

I'm also working on a script/design for a computer game of which I can't say too much, suffice that it's still the early days and will likely take increasing amounts of my time as the year progresses.  And bear in mind that I do all this stuff in my spare time - which is only laughingly called free!  More details when I'm able to talk about it freely.

The editing of the Intrepid episode The Stone Unturned is almost finished.  Myself and Nick filmed the last outstanding scene last weekend, which went smoothly - I wish all the scenes were like that - and also a short scene for Star Trek: Odessey, another fan film series.  The only "setback" was hooking up the camera to the microphone, where a loose connection inside the audio connector box resulted in a lot of crackling.  So instead we used the HD camera in DV mode.  Nick was kind enough to edit together the Stone Unturned scene to take a little pressure off of me.

Speaking of filming, we're tentatively scheduled to do some filming in a fortnight's time for The Conviction of Demons, the latest Intrepid episode.  Nick is nominally directing this one, his first time, whilst I'm doing camera.  When we shot the first scene (production-wise, not Scene 1) in Perth a few months back, I was still so used to being director that I was shouting "Action" and "Cut"!

Finally, I'm dabbling away at a novel, the idea of which I'd had literally twenty years ago.  Only now am I feeling confident enough to actually write it, but I'm having to fit it in amongst everything else because other people are involved in the other endeavours and that's a commitment!  It's been simmering away at the back of my mind for all that time.  Part of my motivation for doing an Open University course back in 1998 - Astronomy and Planetary Science (passed!) - was to get a good handle on how a supernova worked, a central part of the book!

And finally, finally, I'm working on a large blog post about Body Harvest, an old DMA Design game which I was involved in.

There's other stuff I wish I had time to do, but I suspect that'l always be true.  Too many ideas and not enough time.

Alison Rowat and the Licensed Imagination

This post is possibly ever so slightly out of date, being a letter to the Glasgow Herald which I posted on the Intrepid forum three years ago but never quite polished to the extent that I was happy sending it to the herald itself.  Prompting this, and other rejoinders by Intrepid members, was an article by Alison Rowat about the then [Glasgow Science Fiction convention] which some of us considered tantamount to bigotry, had it been said against one of the traditional minority groups.  I've rewritten my rebuttal so that it flows better.  At the time of writing the original, I was very, very angry.  Perhaps it could function as an open letter to other media types – and there are many – who see us poor SF types as an easy and not altogether human target.

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Dear Sir,
    It's long been a truism that to gauge the accuracy of a newspaper, you should simply read a column about a subject with with you are closely familiar. So it is rather disappointing to be presented with Alison Rowat's article 'You wouldn't believe the warp factor' which contains nary a shred of anything approaching a keen observation, let alone a solid fact.
A little research surely couldn't have gone amiss?

Such as this odd obsession with tin-foil. It's a nice little hook to hang the rest of the article from, so it's a shame that tin-foil hats are synonymous with 1950s paranoia about communist 'mind-control'. Not exactly Star Trek or Star Wars, which are precisely two entries in the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction out of some four and a half thousand. Perhaps it's a surprise that there can be such a thing as an Encyclopaedia, but sure enough it turns out that SF is even a literary genre stretching back hundreds of years. Surely the people described in her article couldn't be... atypical?

Of course, says Alison, why would anyone wish to dress up as their favourite character at all? It's not like anyone dresses as characters from soaps, after all, although the remarkable upsurge in little girls named 'Kylie' at the height of Neighbours should give pause for thought as to exactly who is 'sad'.   I'm sure that a few of us have waved a lightsabre, imagined or otherwise, in anger. But so far as I know, no SF fan has ever sent a real cheque for 5000 pounds to help free a fictional character from a fictional prison, as happened with Coronation Street.
    I'll save myself time by blithely assuming that all non-SF fans have a blurred line with reality.

Of course I myself cannot 'fathom the insanity' that makes grown men dress in football tops. After all, on the basis of the last few years, you're seemingly more likely to be killed or seriously injured by a footballer than a terrorist. What kind of aspiration is that?

But I'm not a football fan, I'm an SF fan and as such I'm generally fair game to be mocked in the press and on television.  Somehow I'm now a stereotype, not an individual, but of now part of a group whom you can malign with impunity.

How well do I measure up to this image that you have in your head?  Spandex?  Don't own any.  Social skills?  Got some.  Women? Some close friends.  Relationships?  Had them too.  In one now.  Beer belly?  I'm a man in my mid-thirties, what do you expect I'm going to look like?  Would you like to call me a fat bastard, or is that not politically correct?  I wear glasses too, so I expect you'd like to call me four eyes or speccy or something.  You know, make fun of my appearance in the absence of anything with any thought behind it.

Or don't we do things like that in the 21st Century?  Such niceties don't apply to SF fans it would seem.  I like SF and so I'm some kind of freak and to hell with how it makes me feel when I hear you say that.

How appropriately ironic, then,  that one of the central themes of Star Trek, which you deride, is that in the future we all have respect for one another.  Imagine that.

I did, however, manage to retain my imagination.

Not, admittedly, a valuable commodity in these cynical days, cynicism being a theme often reflected in... oh... modern SF. Just as the subtext of some of those old novels about aliens was about what's it's like for a society to look upon anyone, anything, point and laugh for being something different that we don't understand.
Hmm, now where have I heard that before...

But soft SF is OK apparently – I can imagine Alison campaigning for tolerance zones where one may have an imagination with an appropriate license – but anything more that is implicitly 'hard' and to be discouraged.

Well this is where research comes in handy (you were once columnist of the year weren't you, Alison? Do you remember what “research” is?) since there really is a term called 'hard SF' which deals stories more closely coupled to real, solid, actually existing science and logic. About as far away from dressing up as your favourite character as it's possible to get.
Enjoying a story where you have to think? Preposterous and dangerous!

At this point I do have to apologise for attempting to use a 'philosophical' and 'intellectual' defence of my 'art' without exploring believers in flying saucers, on the grounds that the two groups are not the same.  Is this a surprise to you?
Oh sure there are UFOs in Science Fiction, but only in the same way that Eastenders is a police drama.

Without getting deep about it, I simply like Science Fiction. I'm in a minority, and don't I know it when there are so many pejorative terms for me. To deny that there really are people – people, not just men – with a more than everyday interest would be plain wrong. But to say that all of them are like the colourful minority is equally wrong. I was at a convention just recently and almost an entire half of the attendees were woman. One of them was dressed as Lara Croft and nobody there or in the press, oddly, felt the need to complain about that...

I'll anticipate the defence that the article was humour. Not a gentle humour by any means, not well observed humour, definitely not original and with an obvious lack of contact with, or understanding of, anyone being talked about. Just mean-spirited barbs thrown at crudely sketched caricatures.

Alison, it's obvious that you don't even know who your target is and would it be churlish of me to point out the logical flaw of writing 'they want to stay in their safe little worlds, not connect with others' in an article about SF fans gathering together in the world's largest convention?

Seriously, did you really write that?  I must have just imagined it.

But the final word must surely go to one of my SF loving friends who saw the article, read the part about sad single men and exclaimed: “That's hilarious, I'll have to show my wife.”

Regards,
     Steve Hammond

Grand Theft Auto (via Gameswipe)

Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe, being a BBC overview of computer games history, inevitably got to the point where it mentioned GTA. The programme was a fun once-over by the jaded eye of Brooker and I enjoyed catching all the old games I recognised, with a spark of memory, the ones I was familiar with and being amazed by the new ones since I departed the industry. Although I'd known of the controversy at the time, I hadn't really paid much attention, and seeing it in context was quite enlightening. Just how much passion had flared over this game was put into persective, with archive BBC news clips and talking heads decrying it. All the controversy, all the hype, but not much that I didn't know or was surprised by except for this little nugget: GTA was “directly inspired by” Turbo Esprit, a game for the Spectrum.

Um. What?

That was... different. Quick summary: I worked for DMA Design from 1991 to 1997, and hung around Dave Jones doing freelance graphics work for him before that and attending the same computer club and college as him; all going back to around 1984. Turbo Esprit is a new one on me. And naturally this is just an excuse for me to talk about GTA again and by extension, me. My involvement with GTA was tangential, as at the time my main concern was writing the story and background material for Body Harvest, but it did mean that I was present for a handful of meetings and acted as a kind of low-level disruptive influence. Other than dialogue writing, I play-tested it at my desk within the design department, so I had a fantastic view of the process of creating the most controversial game ever to come out of Scotland. Which is not to say that I necessarily remember all of it!

I've read a number of the “histories” of GTA which are dotted around the web and they all cover pretty much the same ground in not very much detail. GTA IV gets the bulk of the commentary unsurprisingly enough, being the acme of the supposed “murder simulator” genre. Not any of them that I've seen were written by anyone connected with the project. Dave is interviewed, but the origin of GTA isn't given much, if any, space. Indeed it's mentioned in places that if you are familiar with GTA IV, GTA the original will come as a surprise.

Everyone knows, it seems, that the original name was Race 'n' Chase, but no-one knows that one of the suggested names was Freeway, a name that I pointed out was also the name of the dog in Hart to Hart, at which point it got dropped. Mike Dailly coded up the graphics engine that was the basis of GTA. This system was informally called Legovision and I think the engine predated the concept of the game itself, which makes the Turbo Esprit influence nonsensical. No-one had ever mentioned it.

I have a better candidate for the influence of GTA and it dates back to 1990 when Dave had the very first office (I was freelance at the time), and we were taking part in the ITV Telethon. Our goal was writing an entire game in 24 hours, and it was a car racing game with a top down view. Being an amalgam of all the racing games we could think of, we called it Super Off-Road Hot Turbo Buggy Simulator. And at the same time a game we had been playing in the office was a Commodore 64 game where you drove a car around a city, called Siren City... How Dave got the idea for GTA, I can't say for sure, but there were more potent influences than Turbo Esprit.

One of the curious things within the histories is the occasional reference to the low production values of the graphics, especially since this was 1997/98. It's possible I was insulated from the outside world when GTA was being put together, but at the time – and as far as I can see it hasn't changed – all the big name games had the same colour palette. Doom set the template, and for years after it was murky greys, browns and dark greens. Most first person shooters looked the same. Indeed in one of the design documents I wrote at the time – unconnected with GTA – I pasted screenshots from Quake, Unreal and a few others to illustrate at a glance how difficult it was to tell the games apart. One of the other guys in the Design Department, Stewart Graham, was especially keen on not having dowdy visuals. Bright, cartoony graphics were specifically intended to make GTA look unlike other games. As a secondary concern, it fitted the nature of the gameplay which wasn't deadly serious; it was fun. What many people fail to remember is that GTA was in large part a pisstake. You only have to look at the faux adverts around the printed map to see that.

This I the point that I have to introduce Brian Baglow. Brian has, so far in my life, been the only person ever to land me in shit with the management on a charge of blasphemy. As architect-in-chief of our freshly minted intranet, I apparently bore the responsibility for everyone's profile Q&A. Brian's answers were slightly spicy, and not at all respectful of the, say, devout believer in a higher power. I passed them without comment because they were fantastically funny. But a single individual disagreed and I had to carry the can for it. Brian's response was to rewrite them to be as fluffy and cute as you could imagine... and equally funny. Brian's sense of humour drove much of GTA.

At the same time as I was writing never-to-be-used dialogue for the original, I was also throwing around never-to-be-used ideas and occasionally acting as a sounding board for Brian. Which is why for a brief moment, controversial though GTA was, it could have contained a rather different message. At the time, a number of arcade games had a prominent FBI logo stating “Winners Don't Use Drugs”, though quite how FBI jurisdiction extended to the high street of Dundee was never clear. Nevertheless, we both thought it was pretty amusing.

GTA, even before it was released, was obviously a pretty subversive game. In one of those meetings of just myself and Brian, more to get away from the hustle and bustle than a proper meeting, I came up with the idea of subverting our own subversion. When the main character opened the suitcase at the end of the game, the thing would explode and the game would end with a parody of the logo saying “Crime Doesn't Pay”.

We thought it was a funny thing to do, to be able to say “Hey, we're responsible and are conveying a responsible message!” Needless to say it never ended up that way, because it was around that time that the carrot of becoming freelance was once more dangled in front of me and I ended up taking it. It was only ever intended that I'd spend two months on GTA, and I'd like to think that my most lasting effect was inspiring Brian to ever-greater heights of lunacy. And as for Gameswipe, surely there is a case for digging out all those old industry mainstays and the BBC making a full in-depth series about computer games history. I for one would be delighted to contribute.
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Images in this post taken from Mike Dailly's Flickr stream, who got much of them from my DMA Design Macintosh (which I had from them as a leaving gift) where I stored them all, packrat style, in the first place!

The Circle is Complete!

A while back I wrote about the veracity of the Hired Guns background story as it appears in Wikipedia. Short version: you can't trust the article. Longer version: I can't add my own history because my recollections are not a proper reference, even though I wrote the damn story in the first place.

So now I'm delighted to see that the HG entry now links to a proper reference, in this case to Gamasutra – to a page discussing the history of computer games. The amusing part about this is the description it gives on the Hired Guns backstory; that the supposed hostages are merely a ruse to draw in some mercenaries for a live field test of their new weapons systems.

Now the only place that this version of the story has ever appeared on the internet is when I wrote it into the Wikipedia article, for reasons discussed in that other post. Which means that Gamasutra is obtaining its information from Wikipedia, which is now obtaining that very same information from Gamasutra!

The circle is, as they say, complete!

And for value-added lols, I now have an insight into the kind of time-travel story where a time-traveller accidentally kills Shakespeare as a young man and is forced to take his place and write all of Shakespeare's works to restore history (because he just happens to have them all memorised). Where, then, does the information come from in the first place?

The answer, of course, is a Wikipedian editor who lives outside of time.

Carl Sagan Sings!

A strange and compelling and downright geeky thing, that nevertheless I've been playing solidly for the last twenty minutes. I was given the book Cosmos as a kid and it's shaped everything since. Never since Sagan has science meshed so seemlessly with poetry.

Here's where you can find the original with some downloadables

Update from the Maemo

The 'maemo' being the Nokia N810 I bought a few weeks ago because my Samsung Omnia was being such a pain in the arse. So I'm attempting to blog from somewhere other than an actual computer. This may be less considered than some of my other posts. In any case, the miscellaneous requirements of being both a Sunday morning and in the back room compell me to write trivia. The N810 makes an excellent eBook reader and in conjunction with free eBooks and a small pile of real books I've borrowed and bought, I have much more pending being read than at any other time in my life! Time to prioritise.

All of which is making me slightly angsty that I'm not pursueing the writing as much as I think I ought to be. I've made decent progress rewriting Bit Patterns to be an original screenplay and my serious novel is sitting at 15000 words of background notes (which would be novella sized all by itself.) Oh, and I've now got a paid writing gig which kicks off in Jan. But I can't talk about that yet. ;)

All of which says nothing about Intrepid. I'm a quarter of the way through fine-tuning the edit of The Stone Unturned. Any more commitments and I'm going to sag in the middle!

Overpackaged

I ordered a keyboard adaptor - the tiny purple thing in the corner - and had to collect it from a neighbour, because it wouldn't fit through my letterbox.  So, Amazon.... what were you thinking?

Bit Patterns Redux

Recently I completed the first draft of a screenplay for Intrepid, that old Star Trek fan film for which I've directed a number of episodes.  The story takes place shortly after the events of the pilot episode.  It was quite a journey getting it to the point where it made sense to me, let alone to the stage where it made sense to anyone who read it.  Events in the Intrepid universe overtook some of the plot points and I had to rewrite it, an actor who played a key role wasn't available so that meant another rewrite.  A lot of headscratching and aha moments occurred before the stage where it was actually, genuinely complete.

The night that happened, I had a short list of items I needed to change, points I needed to make and dialogue I had to invent.  One by one I got through them.  Completing the script came as a surprise – adding the last item meant adding some extra lines just to bring that scene to a natural end.  And... oh.... it's done.

This was in stark contrast to the first major story (in terms of mere wordcount) I'd written when I was younger and didn't really understand the concept of polishing the work.  Even though there was a huge gap between writing the first half and coming back to write the second half, I'd know since the very first paragraph what the very last line was going to be.  In those days I started at the beginning and wrote linearly until the end.  Writing those last words was an incredible experience and I was bouncing off the wall for days.
So the unexpected completion of Bit Patterns may have been a hint that I wasn't done with it yet.  Oh sure, it was finished but that didn't mean it was done.

So.  A couple of weeks ago myself and Nick had an extended discussion about the future of Intrepid and part of that was the other possible projects that were always there but never seemed to get to item one on the agenda.  We'd always wanted to do an original piece of work once Intrepid was at an end (if indeed it ever was – I once said to him that if Intrepid was a success we'd never be allowed to stop making it.).

I'd been thinking about the timescales, which made me squeak uncontrollably.  The next Intrepid script, Nick's Conviction of Demons, is a monster.  After the readthrough, I estimated that it'd have a running time of at least two and a quarter hours.  And that means a couple of years making it, though that depends on how efficient we can get.  Bit Patterns was almost as large.  So that meant a couple of years plus whatever additional time before we could have something full-sized and original finished.  That's a while to wait, since we've been doing Intrepid since 2003.

So I made a suggestion that I'd been thinking about all the previous week and after much soul-searching, we're going ahead with it.

And that means I'm re-writing Bit Patterns to be an original script.  Not Star Trek.  Original.  And once I've finished  - really finished – I'll be directing a Science Fiction film.  It feels great to be able to type that!  Even if it means that I've just given myself a lot more work for the same total of completed screenplays: 1.

What this means is that I have to do the obvious things such as changing character names.  What's possibly less obvious is that I also have to change the character motivations and backgrounds and relationships.  I have to change the technology.  I have to change the backstory of the whole universe it's set in.  And that's the say nothing of all the additional scenes that will be necessary to do establishing in a way that simply isn't required for Star Trek.

This will be an interesting experience.

Adventurous Scots

That would be me.

Seems that there's been a recent study showing that we'd all rather stay in and watch TV or waste time on the Internet.  Well, that's pretty much true as far as I'm concerned, but nothing beats actual data.  So on this morning's adventurous trip to the shops with the express purpose of obtaining caramel cheesecake, to undo the cycling I did the other day, I was stopped by someone from the Evening Telegraph.

She was looking to speak to ten people and ask then what adventurous thing they'd done recently.  It's a regular feature in the paper where the public is asked a question.  What had I done?  Aside from visiting the crash site of the light aircraft in the park earlier on (the pilot was OK and more of which later), I thought the perfect answer was a plug for Intrepid.  After all, as I said, we'd been filming at Glen Doll which gave us the opportunity to go camping and do some hillwalking; an excellent antidote to sedentary habits.

I've no idea whether it's ten people or it's more and whittled down to ten.  Hopefully I'll make the cut!

Update:
Yep.  I've just been in the Mon 17th edition along with nine others.  Intrepid itself wasn't mentioned, although it did say about Star Trek fan films and the wilds and cliffs.  The actual quote from me contains about 60% of my own words!

Light Aircraft Crash

You'll probably have seen the news about the light aircraft which crashed in Dundee yesterday.  Luckily the pilot was OK.  I heard about this last night and this morning I took the opportunity to bike up to the golf course where it happened and take a few snaps before the plane gets removed.





And here's a link to what the aircraft was like in better times.  One of my hobbies is looking at newspaper archives in the local library.  I am absolutely sure that this isn't the first time an aircraft has crashed in Caird Park, the other time being in the 1940s.  However despite trawling through my notes, I can't find any reference to it.  Does anyone know for sure?

Update:
I was right.  The Evening Telegraph website now reports that a Hurricane had crashed in Caird Park on July 28th, 1943.  Damn, now if only I'd found my note I could have been the first on the web with this snippet of info.