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.

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.

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.

Epistemology pt 2: The Story of Hired Guns

I don't think I ever truly liked the name Hired Guns, this being one of DMA Design's Amiga games and one of the key things that I usually get hung up on whenever the subject arises.  The history of the project was somewhat troubled from my own perspective, even though I am still stupidly proud of my contribution and occasionally get misty-eyed over it.  Troubled, because of what happened after I spent over a year writing the background, story and characters.  It was going to be my first published story, really published, really genuinely making me a proper author.  This was going to be great!  I iz a writer!

    I sent the final copy to Psygnosis, who were demanding it at as soon as possible.  They then sat on it for a whole eleven months, before rushing to get the booklet printed by an outside company with only three weeks to go before the release date.  At no point did they offer any comment or criticism during that time.  And then the game was released and the first chance I had to see myself in print was tearing the cellophane wrapping from the complimentary copy I'd been sent, lifting the lid and leafing through the booklet.
    Where all the punctuation was missing.
    All of it.

    Worse than that, if possible were the instructions for actually playing the game.  Scott Johnston, the designer and programmer, had written pages of notes and given them to Psygnosis who were to write the instruction booklet with the purpose of saving time while I fretted away at the background material.  Only they'd taken his notes and pasted them in wholesale, entirely unedited.
    My first published story...

    I tend to get protective of Hired Guns these days, to the extent that I imagine that anything I have to say on the subject of the story is definitive by definition.  And where this impacts on Wikipedia, the results have been interesting.  I never created the Hired Guns entry but I have edited it to incorporate the description of the story, the description of which is simultaneously factually accurate, completely wrong and occupies that strange blurry interface between fact and fiction.  So ask what the Hired Guns story is about and the truth gets slightly odd.

    Let's start from the outside, and work our way in.

    On the packaging, the box which contains the disks and the booklets, it describes the characters as fighting “mutants” and since the outside packaging is the one that's most familiar to anyone – and easiest to research -  that ought to be definitive.  It's there in plain sight after all, and the packaging is not hard to find on the net as a scanned image.  For Wikipedian purposes, it's as easy and uncontroversial a citation as you could wish to find.

    But it's flat out wrong.

    Inside the box however there's the manuals (which I wrote – this is my background story after all) and the creatures described therein, which the main characters encounter, are not mutants.  They are genetically engineered weapons.  It's not just a piffling quibble over semantics either; why this is important is why the characters are there.

    So far it's just a mismatch of info, someone at Psygnosis got it into their heads that it was all about mutants, or perhaps it was even deliberate because “mutants” made for a better soundbite.  I'll likely never know.  But where it now gets interesting is with Wikipedia's description of the story itself.  Within the game itself, the  mission centres around the task of locating four nuclear warheads “backpack nukes” and blowing the crap out of the place to kill all the beasties.  But this is not what Wikipedia says.   There it tells us that the story is about a hostage rescue which proves to be illusory and is only planted to lure the mercenaries to the planet for a live test of illegal bioengineered weapons.  The whole thing is a trap: the planet is a weapons proving ground.
    But none of that appears in the game.

    So how did such an obviously incorrect description get into the Wikipedia entry in the first place?  Where is the source for such an outrageous assertion?  How did something entirely out of left field  come to be parading itself as “fact”?  This one is rather easier to track down, because it was me who put it there.  So does that mean I'm just proving a well-trodden point about the accuracy of Wikipedia and that the story description is plain invention?  An “aha, gotcha” motive made possible by stunt-editing?  Well it gets a bit blurrier here too.  It really is a genuine description, but of Hired Guns' original plot, before it got hacked to shreds.

    Limitations of memory in the Amiga meant that not everything we'd intended for the game was able to fit in.   As you can guess, it was the story which had to be substantially changed so that it could be described in less memory, with less demands on custom code and graphics; with appropriate amounts of complaining on my part.  I'd even written a large diary entry on that day that was decided (it was 12th Feb 1993) and it was fittingly enough pouring with rain, moulding itself snugly around my black mood.  Even so, there are still fossilised clues to the original story contained within the games dialogue and within the manual.  Hell, some of the dialogue I'd written was there purely to foreshadow the next four games which I'd been sure were in the bag.

    (In fact, as part of the plot I'd even managed to come up with an invention that wasn't realised in the real world until 2007, but that's for another post.)

    I'd written that in Wikipedia with a mixture of devilment and self-righteousness because, at heart, that's what I believe Hired Guns is really about.  That was the plot, that was the story I cared about.  Indeed in those dark nights alone in my flat at 2am, this wasn't a story I was creating but a true story that I was discovering by being an explorer in some vague space of probability, not a writer.  But here's the description from when the entry was created by a user called Imran in 2002 right up to my first edit in 2004:

“The plot is that your band of mercenaries have been picked from intergalactic 'non persons' and wanted criminals, and have been hired to shut down a mutation producing plant on an artificial planet called Graveyard.”

Intergalactic non-persons?  Mutation producing plant?  Artificial planet???  All that came out of nowhere and is completely wrong.  But where it gets interesting for me is that after my correction, no-one has contested it: it is assumed to be the self-correcting mechanism in action.  Perhaps it's just a minor game out of the many thousands out there and no-one cares, or perhaps piracy was so rampant that very few possess the physical manuals to fact-check with.  Maybe no-one really cares, and if that's the case then what does the truth matter?

    In the end, a fact may be more fluid and nebulous than we'd like. Yet the original story as I described it survived intact for the planning of Hired Guns 2, even to the last-moment addition of an extra planet in the manual.  Whatever the finer points of semantics or philosophy, I consider the original story to be the real one.  After five games (yes, I was optimistic) the background elements of the story arc would have come to the fore with a huge payoff. 
    That resolution, so far, has existed only in my mind.  Not on paper.
    And how on Earth could Wikipedia have a citation to that?

An Intrepid Update

This is mostly an Intrepid status update.  The Stone Unturned only needs a few pickup shots to be filmed for the shooting to be complete.  In the meantime, I'm now officially doing the editing.  To that end, I've been piecing it together scene by scene and have now got a rough for the first third of it.  It's been going together a lot better than Wheres There's a Sea did, something helped by the fact that there's fewer effects to worry about.  And also probably, possibly, because I'm improving as a director.  (At least that's what I'd like to think!)

To begin with, way back at the start of this moviemaking thing, I'd only be thinking about whatever scene we'd be filming on the day, with all kinds of practical issues to think about such as the noise the fridge was making and how much of the ironing board would be in shot: filming is easier when it's not in a kitchen.

Paradoxically, it also seems to help when there's less coverage to choose from: one bridge scene in Heavy Lies the Crown saw me ending the day with over thirty takes from ten angles.  Now there's fewer (much fewer!) takes but those are chosen better up front.  And by up front I mean five minutes in advance.

I'll have to work on that.

We also rehearse a lot more, which reduces the fluffed lines, though not to the extent that the blooper reel can be consigned to history just yet.

The other Intrepid items marked as 'current' in my brain are the Sisters Audio drama and Bit Patterns, which has been on the go for quite some time.  Sisters hasn't begun production yet, there being a character issue to sort out.  One of them has a lot of backstory and the timeline doesn't quite work out.  In any case I promised at the start that I'd write it and then be hands-off, which so far I'm managing to do with an attendand reduction in stress.

My script for Bit Patterns is weighing in at 56 pages and now I've got to figure out how to wrap up the various threads, in addition to completely replacing one character with another.  Why I'm doing that is the unexpected unavailability of the actor who was playing him.  A character who was right at the heart of the A and the B plot and tying the two halves together.

Well, I guess it's a challenge.

The name Bit Patterns is actually one that I recycled from a novel idea I had back in the nineties, but which never really got further than a couple of pages of notes.  The original title for that was The Moiré Effect, and was to have been a story about an AI researcher who dies in an accident.  The computer system he was working on is then apparently haunted. Genuine AI?  An actual haunting, or is the whole thing some kind of psychological experiment?  This was in the day of PCs maxing out at 100 MHz and were still pretty mysterious to the public at large.  Not sure how I'd approach it today, since any mysterious message coming through the computer is either email spam, Twitter spam, IM spam, miscellaneous spam or a phishing scam.

Bit Patterns for Intrepid is an entirely different story.  All that's made it online so far is that it involves two long range probes which vanished in mysterious circumstances and that - again - it proves that the Merchant Service and Starfleet are best when they work together.  I think I've also managed to get in some proper scientific terminology and methodology, something I feel strongly about given that I list astronomy amongst my nerdish passions.  (There was a TV mini-series a few years ago called Supernova which kicked off with some of the most stupid nonsensical "scientific" dialogue I'd ever heard in something intended to be serious.)

Also there's characters and a story.  Important to include that stuff.

Further updates as events warrant!

Hammond's Law

So, at the Iain Banks talk, I was originally going to suggest one of the 'laws' that might be appropriate, but then decided that I was going to keep it to myself; thought I think it rather fits in with the spirit of the Culture. So much so, that I might have subconsciously absorbed something like it from his novels. Anyway, Hammond's First Law – and the associated arrogance which goes along with it – is this: “Any technology distinguishable from magic is an insufficient hoot”.

Sounds like something a Mind would say.

Spooks Series 7: Episode 2

It's a terrible burden actually knowing stuff.  At least that's how the writer of this episode must feel.  There is a certain cuteness, it must be said, when the mainstream media tries to do technology, like a puppy trying to join in a game of football.  It'll make you go 'aw' but what you really care about is the team.

Strained analogy.  Sorry.

The episode had a distributed denial of service attack on the UK, carried out by a submarine tapping an underwater cable.  Which is, er, a single location.  The 'distributed' part of it was obviously merrily sidelined in favour of - gasp! - a big dangerous looking thing!

So of course the defence against this is to launch a 'zero day attack'.

Oh dear.

A zero day attack is making use of an undisclosed computer vulnerability, i.e. zero days have gone by since it was discovered and hence no defence is in place.

I actually laughed out loud when I heard this.  Politics and police procedures are carefully researched for that added authenticity, of course, but as soon as technology is involved, any old shit is made up.  In this case by someone who has heard the phrases but has clearly no idea what they mean.

And just for good measure, the zero day attack is also a virus.  Because as far as TV people are concerned, computer viruses can do anything.  Perhaps it should have been named the MacGuffin virus?

This kind of thing, being a flagship BBC program, should be beneath them; it turned the normally excellent Spooks into a cartoon.

Banks' Law

Back at the Edinburgh book festival, which I claimed I was going to write more about, we saw Iain Banks at one of the big events. Iain, of Culture novels fame – was giving a talk essentially about being Iain Banks, followed by a book signing. The whole thing was something I was intending to blog about immediately afterwards in the pub, as I'd done the day before, but a rather nasty headache overtook me and so the on-the-spot blathering was quietly dropped. Overall, though, I do believe I have added to the Banks' canon.

So here's how I remember it.

We turned up early, to the point of being first in the queue. In no way are either of us a fanboy or fangirl respectively.  Given that it was SF, does that make us fanbeings? In any case, we were first in the door and by happy chance none of the front row seats were reserved, which is how we came to be right in front of him, a mere smattering of feet away.

(I'm really racking my mind to think what was said, the danger of waiting a few months to note things down. As opposed to my memories of the computer games industry, where the notes have waited something like sixteen years.)

Anyway, the important thing happened afterwards at the signing. Lesley had given me Matter and I was dithering about whether I was wanting it signed, meaning that I worried whether I would be too star-struck to form sentences in front of the great man. Lesley contrived to escape from the signing queue, the better vantage point from which to watch everyone smile and nod and say their names and then Iain's autograph would be jotted down.

Most people brought a single novel; Matter was a clear favourite, being newly released. One or two brought a whole pile of books and the guy in front of us had a Kindle. The mystery of how he was going to get an electronic book signed was resolved when he also had a normal book. A Book, book. Someone asked for Iain to write “something inspirational” to which his response was “Don't let the bastards grind you down.”

I think we can all live with that.

But then it was my turn and in a sudden fit of inspiration I asked for his full Culture name! In the Culture, you see, your full name also includes your planet and star system of birth. Emboldened, I managed to mumble out the question that I'd been too chicken to ask in the talk itself. Given that Arthur C Clarke has a law and Asimov has his laws of robotics, does Iain Banks have his own law?

I was amazed that he only needed a second or two to think this over and come up with a clear answer on the spot, though as he said, laughing, it was still a first draft.

“Any worldview, indistinguishable from solipsism, is wrong.”

I left happy. The remainder of the evening involved the train back and watching a massive glow in the sky from what was apparently a fire at a chemical plant. But that's another story.

Intrepid: Sisters

Last night I put the final polish to the audio script for Sisters, something which I'd been meaning to do for the last week. Originally this was a short story of mine which I'd thought of as being akin to Intrepid fanfic, written while Heavy Lies the Crown was yet to be released and not really 'official'. So it was nice to see elements from it being incorporated into the proper background. That made it the real thing for me.

Micheal Hudson thought it would make a good audio drama and made an attempt to convert it, before realising that it might not be that straightforward. Almost the entire thing was either some visual imagery or else internal character thoughts; not something lending itself to audio very easily.

So I've been rewriting it, in some places quite substantially, to fit the new form. A narrator has been added for some of the exposition, while the remainder has been changed into dialogue divided between the characters. In some cases, new characters. It was an interesting experiment and now that it's in Micheal's hands I've promised to be hands-off while he gets it made.

That last part might be tricky - I can't help wanting to do everything!

Kid Kirby

I've just been doing some (rare) tidying of the house and an come across the legal disclaimer that I wrote for the Kid Kirby manual. Kid Kirby was a platform game that DMA were doing for Nintendo, before it unfortunately got canned at the eleventh hour. Here's what I wrote:

Disclaimer: Nintendo of America is utterly nuke-proof when it comes to legal matters. We employ a device called a High Energy Attorneytron which emits powerful Anti-Lawsuitino particles. Thus it is guaranteed by the very underlying physics of the universe that we live in, that you shall not at any point - no matter how many dimensions you occupy - have any claim against Nintendo of America. Not even if a direct causal connection can be established between this Game Pak and a high incidence of newly discovered comets striking your property. By glancing at this Instruction Booklet, you have agreed to the conditions laid down therein. Resistance is futile.

Somehow I don't think they would have went for it.

Update:
Found another one, this time intended to go at the front of the manual.

Purchase of this Game Pak implies the acceptance of the following conditions: Nintendo of America reserves the right to come into your room at night and shine bright lights in your face.

I don't think that would have got past them either.

NaNoWriMo Crash and Burn

Well, so much for all the planning. By some horrible co-incidence on Thursday, the very first day of the eagerly anticipated competition to write a novel in a month, my laptop decided that it'd had enough. Pausing for a half-minute and then a minute between coming out of standby and doing anything useful had now got a little worse. A minute became two minutes and then on Thu, indefinitely. So of course I blamed windows and got as far as wiping the whole lot before discovering that it was a hardware problem that could be fixed by, um, taking the laptop in both hands and flexing it slightly.
No, I don't understand that either.
In any case, this has had two effects. One is that in a fit of pique, I installed Ubuntu (very nice by the way) and the other is that I have abandoned NaNoWriMo for this year since as I write this I'm about 5000 words down before I've even started. Watching telly has never seemed so appealing this weekend.

More Rumbly Writings

I'll do better this time... Last year I entered the National Novel Writing Month competition and managed to rack up 19000 words or so before the deadline expired. Since that was a little short of 50000, it was a fail. On the other hand I've rarely had so much fun committing words to paper. I've decided to continue on the same novel as before, only this will be a fresh 50000 to add to the existing ones. After all, I seem to have a problem beginning writing and then seeing it through. Last year was also a tad problematical in that I was supposed to be doing a lot of other stuff. Actually, the same applies this time, but I don't feel so guilty! I was planning on writing, just not writing something else.

Elsewhere, I'm halfway through the first draft of a script which will hopefully become Intrepid's second full-length episode. It's been referred to on the official wiki for some time now, but it's only in the last few months that I've started working on it in earnest. (For various values of 'earnest').