Monthly Archives: March 2010

art, Uncategorized, writing

Script Frenzy: Cause I’m Just That Insane

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Remember NaNoWriMo? Yeah, you know, the thing that spawned the book I’m still working on six months later?

There’s a version of it in April as well. It’s called Script Frenzy and it’s basically like NaNo, except you write a script/screenplay/graphic novel instead of a book.

So am I planning on participating?

…did you really expect me not to?

This is up my alley like you would not believe. Writing scripts and screenplays is my favorite creative thing in the world. I say this as someone who draws, coughs up electronic music, and writes novels. I am soooo stoked for this.

Unfortunately April is looking like it’s going to be a terribly busy month, filled with things like editing the aforementioned novel (I know, I know, I keep saying I’m going to leave it alone and I keep failing at that…) and also puttering around with some silly Real Life things that need to get done. But there was no way I was going to miss out on this. So I decided to compromise. In November I had a little more time on my hands and was able to get away with inventing a novel on-the-spot (I’m serious, I made the darn thing up as I went), which was thrilling and terrifying at the same time. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that this time around, considering how much busier I am, so I’m going to go back to a ready-to-go idea that has been kicking around my head for years.

Remember my Chemistry Post on Aspect of the Hare? And remember those anthropomorphic atoms that I mentioned?

Oh yeah.

This is a story I’ve been working on, on-and-off, since AP Chemistry in 2001/2002. The storyline has gone through several iterations but it has been nothing but fun the entire time and I’m excited to make yet another attempt beginning tomorrow.

My mind’s eye sees this as being a computer-animated movie: doing for chemistry what “Shrek” did for fairy tales. Something that can make science fun and silly and “new”. Hey, I never said I was sane.

I think this will be much more relaxing than NaNo was: really, I’m very visual when it comes to my stories and I’ve always felt that I take to scriptwriting like a fish to water. Plus, there’s no real self-pressure to “OMG GET PUBLISHED!” so I can just post up the finished result for everyone to see at the end of the month!

WE BEGIN AT DAWN! *twirls pistol*

classic video game monday, video games

Classic Video Game Monday: SimCity 2000

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I should preface this by saying I’m a huge SimCity nut. I should then add that I always sucked at SimCity games until I figured out the secret for cost-efficient city layouts.

Anyways, no matter how much I sucked at it at the time… I present to you the game that is solely responsible for teaching me what those mysterious signs in front of empty lots saying “Zoned Commercial” mean:

If you’ve never played SimCity, it might be one of those things that has you wondering “Wait, you find this fun?” You know, like Harvest Moon or one of those other simulation style games. Well, I’m here to tell you that planning and designing your own city is basically one of the most addictive things ever. Why? Because it goes beyond just the planning/design stage. You gotta keep your citizens happy. And make sure they have enough schoolhouses and hospitals and fire stations and etc. While somehow pulling in enough SimCash to do so.

Another way that they pulled you in was by dangling technologies in your face. Most SimCity games start by default in the year 1900. Not that SimCity is dying to be particularly historically accurate in most respects, but at the same time, they won’t give you much tech until you are actually able to use it. If you wanna run your city on nuclear power in the year 1900, tough luck. You’ve got coal and you’ve got oil. You’ll have to wait to get the nukes. SimCity 2000 was brilliant here, because not only did they give you presents of better power technology as you went along, but you got Arcologies, a.k.a. giant bio-dome-esque houses that would quadruple your population and also double as spaceships.

You got these babies in the year 2000. (Speaking of which, ten years on and we don’t have these in real life yet? What the heck? C’mon people!) And they were awesome.

For a bonus challenge you could turn on disasters and have to deal with things like hurricanes, fire outbreaks, or giant Godzilla monsters attacking your city– you know, just the normal everyday stuff you see in the newspapers all the time.

So yeah. SimCity 2000. Sometimes I wonder how many addicts of this game went on to become actual urban planners. Perhaps not many, because thanks to this game I have a tendency now to look at the way my own hometown is laid out and mumble about how inefficient it is…

life of pike, writing

On Writing, And Why This Is The Weirdest Adventure Of My Life

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What most of us refer to as “creative writing” is something I’ve always done. Always. Like breathing. Remember the “breathing” metaphor, it’s gonna come back. (A lot.)

I asked for notebooks for Christmas and my birthday and filled them up with stories. With story ideas. With character ideas. With journals. With poems. Lyrics. Anything.

I was always writing.

Got it?

Okay.

Now.

Apparently “always writing” as a child is not a common thing. Because everyone was always asking me if I was going to be an author or writer when I grew up.

And I would always look back at them as if they were crazy.

Of course I wasn’t. I was going to be a doctor/firefighter/artist/veterinarian/scientist/astronaut/horse breeder/chemist/animator/whatever I wanted to be at the time.

Asking me if I was going to be a writer when I grew up was like asking me if I was going to breathe when I grew up. If I was going to be someone who sat in a room all day and specialized in breathing. What an incomprehensible idea. Why would I want to do that?

I wrote stories because I had to. Because if I didn’t, I might die. Same as if I stopped breathing.

Didn’t mean I wanted to do it for a living. How absolutely preposterous.

I think my attitude toward writing drove some people nuts. See, I wrote not one, not two, but THREE full-length novels before I turned eighteen. And yet I had no interest in “being a writer”. A lot of people could not comprehend this, and were always asking me when I was going to major in English. Even when I was in college and majoring in film/chemistry/Japanese Studies/film again, people were asking me when I was going to wake up and smell the roses and change my major to English. (It sort of got irritating, actually.)

I laughed those people off. Every time.

Majoring in English was silly. Like majoring in breathing. I took AP English in high school because it was easy 5’s on the AP tests and thus easy college credit. I had no interest in pursuing it further.

So lemme tell ya, this whole NaNo thing where all of a sudden I’ve been introduced to a world of editing and critiquing and advice and “do and do not” lists and blogs and feedback and publishing and agents and proofreading and all this STUFF, is really throwing me for a loop. I’ve never really had to deal with any of this before. I’ve never looked into any of this before. What an utterly bizarre little world to stumble into.

I’m still not quite sure how to digest this whole process. The whole thing feels so absurd, in a way. Not bad absurd. But, “Huh, I need to edit my breathing” absurd. It’s just never even crossed my mind before.

So if over the course of the next few days… or weeks… or months… you see me flailing around here or on Twitter or LJ, babbling nonsense about this mythical novel of mine, please bear with me. My mind is a flurry of strange thoughts and new experiences and impatience and these characters that have been living in my head for the past six months.

“I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell…”

*twitches*

steampunk, supergeekery, Uncategorized

In Which Pike Fangirls Like A… Rabid Fangirl

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I have been informed that today is unofficially Ada Lovelace Day. Clearly I have to blog about my fangirling for Lovelace.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (for that is her proper name), child of the rather infamous poet Lord Byron, was born in 1815 and is widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer.

In the 1800s. Yes, you heard that right.

Cause around this time a brilliant guy named Charles Babbage (who I also fangirl over– his autobiography? Read it. Yeah. He had a hilarious childhood. But I digress) took a pile of draft paper and whipped up a bunch of sketches for mechanical computers. He had one called a Difference Engine, which was designed to calculate polynomial functions, and one called an Analytical Engine, which was much more complex and designed to be programmable via punch cards. Babbage’s ultimate plans called for it to be, essentially, a modern computer, except powered by gears and steam. Thus sayeth the Wikipedia:

There was to be a store (that is, a memory) capable of holding 1,000 numbers of 50 decimal digits each (ca. 20.7kB). An arithmetical unit (the “mill”) would be able to perform all four arithmetic operations, plus comparisons and optionally square roots. Initially it was conceived as a difference engine curved back upon itself, in a generally circular layout, with the long store exiting off to one side. (Later drawings depict a regularized grid layout.) Like the central processing unit (CPU) in a modern computer, the mill would rely upon its own internal procedures, to be stored in the form of pegs inserted into rotating drums called “barrels,” to carry out some of the more complex instructions the user’s program might specify. (See microcode for the modern equivalent.)

The programming language to be employed by users was akin to modern day assembly languages. Loops and conditional branching were possible, and so the language as conceived would have been Turing-complete long before Alan Turing’s concept.

First of all, does that not blow your mind? This guy was a century ahead of his time. Completed versions of these machines were never actually built in Babbage’s lifetime, due to a lack of funding, but some one hundred years later a group of people built one of his machines according to his plans. It worked. And to make things better, it was absolutely, breathtakingly gorgeous in action. Look at this thing move.

So anyways, Ada Lovelace, who happened to be an amazing mathematician, was doing documentation for Babbage’s machines and just started coming up with examples for how one might “program” the analytical engine. You know what else she said? She wrote about the possibility that “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”. She foresaw electronic music. In the mid 19th century. Ever sat down and dinked around with FruityLoops or a similar program? Yeah. Ada Lovelace totally called it 170 years ago. Just sayin’.

Now from what I can gather, the point of Ada Lovelace Day is to talk about women (or a specific woman) in computing/science/etc. Which is a pretty great idea, because I know from experience that contrary to the video-game-osphere (and WoW-o-sphere especially), where there are a lot of women involved, something like, say, the open source movement is considerably more guy-centric, and the idea of how one should approach this topic is actually something I’ve thought about a lot. So, I fully support the Ada Lovelace Day idea.

But honestly if you told me to pick a woman in computing/science to admire, I would’ve picked Ada Lovelace to begin with, anyway, because I am just That Much of a A Fangirl.

Plus, bonus points for anything involving Difference Engines/Analytical Engines.

P.S. Somebody built one out of Legos. It’s official. We will never be as cool as that guy.

classic video game monday, video games

Classic Video Game Monday: Banjo-Kazooie

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Think back to a world of awesome 3D platformers that were just coming into their own. Think back to something a little more refined than the formula started by Super Mario 64, but not an overboard collect-o-fest like Donkey Kong 64.

You know what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about BANJO-FREAKING-KAZOOIE.

(Attention: Please stop everything you are doing and listen to this remix:)

I remember when we first got this game. We got this at the same time as our Nintendo 64 and Yoshi’s Story. Yoshi’s Story was what we played first, because we all knew who Yoshi was but we’d never heard of this Banjo character. It was only a matter of minutes, though, before the Banjo-Kazooie cartridge replaced the Yoshi one, and there it would stay for a long, loooong time.

Let me explain the brilliance of this game for those of you who missed out. It’s a Mario64-ish platformer, as I said. You wander around a central “hub” world and visit “themed” worlds inside. You’ve got all your obligatory ones… the water world, the snow world, and so forth… but the way that they are done is so original that you don’t even realize it’s old territory. Not to mention the last world, Click Clock Wood, is actually split up into four different versions based on the seasons of the year.

The controls are intuitive and varied and make much use of, well, you being a bear and toting around a bird in your backpack. The humor is offbeat and quirky and quintessentially British (oh Rare, gotta love ’em.) and the music is some of the most memorable you will hear, particularly the main theme, a motif which is masterfully weaved into most of the other music in the game and done in different styles and tempos depending on location.

The game objectives themselves mostly revolve conquering various challenges to collect items, which is how most platforming games in that era worked, but in my opinion Banjo-Kazooie pulled it off just about right: lots to do without going overboard. The sequel, Banjo-Tooie, would later teeter close to being overboard in my opinion (but was still fantastic and had a lot of improvements, don’t get me wrong), but B-K just did it right.

And don’t let the cute fuzzy characters fool you, this game was challenging. I don’t think I ever beat it. I never quite had enough Jiggies (the game’s lingo for “puzzle pieces”, an item you collected) to get into the last world. And yet despite that, I still managed to dump countless hours into this game and I enjoyed every minute. This was platforming at its finest. Rare and I go back a long ways. I spent many, many days with the likes of Diddy Kong Racing, Jet Force Gemini, Goldeneye 007, and all three Donkey Kong Country games. All of these games are amazing and all of them would be top contenders in my personal “Best Games Evar” list.

But if I had to pick a fave Rare game?

It just might be this one.

“Stupid Bear and Dumb Kazooie, I’ll be back in Banjo-Tooie!”

life of pike, supergeekery

Rock Around The Clock

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I know I’ve offhandedly mentioned my Obsessive-Compulsive tendencies before on Aspect of the Hare. And because I’ve no shame, I’ll delve into the specifics out in the open for possibly the first time… ever.

OCD manifests itself in a variety of different compulsions. Some people wash their hands, some people check their door locks, some people have to arrange items in just the right way. For me… it was (scratch that… is…) numbers. Everything has to be counted. Steps on a staircase, magnets on a fridge, circles in a pattern. Especially if they are lined up in a row. Objects that are lined up in a row are just begging to be counted.

Sometimes random numbers pop into my head. If I do not know where said numbers are from, they must be written down, or Google’d, in case they are important and I just don’t know it yet. “Pike, that’s silly,” you say. “Yes, I know,” I reply. But that’s how it works with obsessions like that. There are some things that you just do. No matter how silly they seem.

Numbers are special. They’re “safe”. They don’t change. It’s funny, because growing up, I was always the writing kid. The English student kid. But numbers had an unchanging beauty to them that appealed to me somehow, and they sort of became my sanctuary.

You might be wondering where I’m going with this or if I’m trying to make some sort of serious blog post about mental disorders. I’m not, actually. This is just the merely-tangentially-related intro for the meat of the post.

The meat of the post is this: Timepieces are one of my favorite things in the entire world.

See, numbers are special. And you know what’s really special? When the clock says 9:00. Or 10:00. Basically any time with at least two zeroes at the end. I have no idea why I find this so appealing. I just always have. 9:30 is slightly less special, and 9:15 and 9:45 even less so, but those four numbers are considerably more special than any of the other 56 found in an hour.

So what is a clock? It’s my numbers obsession. On my wall. Or on my desk. Or on my wrist. Or in my pocket. As the case may be. (Because I carry two watches with me. And have at least one clock in each room in my apartment.)

It gets better, though. A clock is also

beautiful

mechanical

perfection.

A clock or watch is form and function in one elegant package. The ultimate junction of art and engineering. And I love it.

Okay, okay, one more thing, and then I’ll shut up.

Mechanical clocks, specifically, are an elegant timepiece from a more civilized age. An age when things weren’t cheaply made. When things were designed to be fixed if broken, rather than just tossed and replaced.

…yeah I’m one of those weirdos that takes apart clocks and things. I took apart my last one. It wasn’t designed to be put back together so I had to “break it” in order to do so. The ticking remains are sitting on my desk. I’m sure a lot of people would think I’m absolutely nuts. Well, maybe I am. The whole OCD thing, after all…

Anyways. That, in a nutshell, is why I am a clock geek.

We here at Clockwork Hare Enterprises hope you have enjoyed your foray into the Potentially Too Much Info Camp this Friday, and hope you have a pleasant weekend!

video games

I Think I’ve Seen About Everything…

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In my opinion, cracked.com is basically one of the most addictive websites out there. Worse than TVTropes and possibly worse than looking up old 80s cartoons on YouTube. As a Mr. Munroe once put it, “They could write a list of ’17 worst haircuts in the Ottoman Empire’ and I’d read through to the end, then click on all the links at the end.”

Anyways, I’m browsing the other day and they happen to have this article about World of Warcraft up there, so I was reading it and it wasn’t a particularly great article but it was mildly entertaining, and then I get to this picture:

And the first thing I think is, “How silly, the article is talking about mini-pets at this point and they show a picture of a hunter pet.”

And the second thing I think is, “That must be The Rake, since the hunter is in Mulgore and doesn’t appear to be a very high level.”

And then the third thing I think is, “…huh… actually… that looks pretty… familiar… is that… no… is it?”

I went on a searching spree on Aspect of the Hare. Scoured all my old screenshot posts. All my old “I rolled a new hunter” posts. I didn’t seem to be having any luck, though. Maybe it was just coincidence…

Then I went to my Photobucket:

A-ha. I knew it. I knew that wasn’t just any ol’ hunter and pet.

That’s Althalor. And Kolya. Yes, formerly the Rake.

You know, it’s funny. Screenshots of my hunters have been on WoW.com and I’ve been linked on all sorts of big-name sites, but nothing quite prepared me for having a (uncredited) spot on freakin’ Cracked.

It made my day.

classic video game monday

Classic Video Game Monday: Metal Gear Solid

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Lemme preface this by saying that I’m not really big into stealth games. I can appreciate them from a “that’s a neat idea” standpoint but I’m really horrible at them and I tend not to play them. Maybe we can blame it on Mario and Dig-Dug, but for whatever reason I’m just too used to running into the action and disposing of the bad guys first and asking questions later.

That said, Metal Gear Solid is one of the greatest games of all time. OF ALL TIME.

Since I’m not a big stealth game fan, I’m not exactly sure what it is about this game that is so appealing to me. I think it may be a combination of the following:

  • Epic storyline
  • Interesting and ultimately unforgettable characters
  • Fun and unique “lovechild of a Hollywood action film and a Japanese manga” aesthetic
  • Fantastic music
  • Breaking the fourth wall.  A lot.

Let’s talk about this breaking the fourth wall thing. One boss reads your memory card to freak you out, and you have to plug your controller into another slot to beat him. He also makes the screen go blank for seconds at a time to make you think your TV is on the blink. Another character has you looking at the physical game box to find her codec number. And they don’t tell you that you’re supposed to do these things– they drop hints and then you’ve gotta figure it out.

The characters I mentioned are another big strength of the game (and series, I think). Talk about a rogues’ gallery of villains rivaled only by Batman. Revolver Ocelot, Sniper Wolf, Vulcan Raven, Psycho Mantis, and the list goes on. The good guys have awesome characters too, including my personal favorite, Otacon the computer nerd. Because I <3 computer nerds. (As a side note, according to Wikipedia, Both Otacon's first name "Hal" and Solid Snake's real name "David" are both taken from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Which has just BLOWN MY MIND.) Speaking of movies, this is a very cinematic game. Hideo Kojima is known for being a big film buff and it shows with tons of fantastic cutscenes. To some people, this is a weakness, because they'd rather be playing the game than watching it. Me? Well, I already said I stink at stealth games, so all the cutscenes starring the great characters are A-OK.

Ah, MGS. One of the video game greats. I will always <3 you. And any references to hiding in a cardboard box.

windshifter, writing

Everything You Wanted To Know About Pike’s Novel…

23 Comments

…but were afraid to ask. Or, more likely, asked anyway.

So, here’s the deal. I’m going to be presumptuous and assume that if you’re reading this blog, then you either a.) like my writing, or b.) like me. (d’aww <3 by the way.) Otherwise, you probably would've stopped reading when I dropped Aspect of the Hare. And I'm further going to assume that if you fall into either (or both) of those categories, you're probably at least a little bit interested in this novel that I've been hinting around at since November. So, I figured I would address a few novel-related questions that I get asked from time to time. A sort of FAQ, if you will. (If you're really not all that interested in my book, that's fine, you can skip this entry =P)
So what is this whole novel thing?

I was challenged by several Twitterites to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so I did. It turned into a full fledged novel at some point. It’d be nice to get it published someday, so I’ve been working toward that goal.

Oooh! So what’s your book about?

I always waver a bit on this question because the answer is just so friggin’ out there. Usually I tell people “Well, it has dragons, airships, and giant robots in it.”

This phrase tends to confuse people, though, and they ask whether it’s a fantasy or a science fiction. Which causes me to hem and haw and waffle before I tell people it’s an “alternate-universe-ish historical science fiction”, which generally just causes more confusion.

So!

Short answer: It’s steampunk. (my possibly bizarre interpretation of it, anyway.)

Longer Answer: It’s an adventure story about anthropomorphic animals in an alternate universe that roughly– though not entirely– corresponds to our late 19th century. A few mythical creatures (in this case, dragons) are involved, although magic really isn’t. I was going for a sort of “His Dark Materials” feel, I think. Some fantastic elements, but not really fantasy per se.

Think of Jules Verne but with fuzzy animals instead of people and you’ll be pretty close to the mark.

Why fuzzy animals?

Lots of reasons.
1.) Easier to draw, and I like drawing my characters to help me in the character creation process
2.) Kind of gives the story a mystical/fable-like quality that I like
3.) Thematic elements (no, really. I’d like to think a classroom of AP English kids could pick up on this, but who knows if I wrote it that well?)
4.) I kind of wrote the book as a tribute to classic Disney animation and the effect it’s had on me and my artistic inclinations.

So it’s a kids/young adult book then?

I wasn’t really aiming at any particular age group when I was writing the book. If anything I think I wanted it to be a book with a wide age range appeal, like Harry Potter or something.

The interesting thing is that since then I’ve had five or six people read the early draft in its entirety and give me feedback on it. Almost everyone has told me it sort of “feels” like a young adult novel, with one problem: my choice of vocabulary is… very not-young-adult-novel. As in, “read it with a dictionary close at hand.”

This puts me in a bit of a dilemma. I’m fine with marketing my book as “young adult”, but I’m really wary about the idea of toning down the big-boy-vocab words. That’s just how I write. Besides, I don’t talk down to kids. I remember being a kid; I didn’t like being talked down to. Ya know?

So I’m just gonna say “it’s for all ages” and call it good.

You’re talking about stuff like feedback… are you done writing?

Yes and no.

“Yes”: The story has a beginning, middle, and end. There is a prologue and there is… well, not an epilogue. But the words “The End” are there.

However, I have a big ol’ list of “things to add and/or fix” that I have been whittling away at for a couple of months now. So, in that sense… “No.”

Can I read the draft?

Maybe. Not now, though, as it’s not ready yet. If I decide later to get “beta readers” outside of my family/close friends circle, I’ll probably post about it on the blog and ask for volunteers, so fear not.

The prologue has been up on my LJ for a month or so now and anyone is welcome to read that if they wish.

When are you going to be done?

Not sure. I’ve given myself a goal of “by the end of the month” but that may be pushing it. Editing is hard. >.>

And you want to get this published eventually, right?

Yep! Well, it would be nice. I’m not going to beat myself up over it if it doesn’t happen. And while I know… pretty much nothing about the whole “publishing process”, I sort of get the inkling that it might take a while. All the rejection letters and what not. But yeah, “eventually”. Let’s hope!

Okay then. Oh! One last thing. What’s it called?

“Windshifter”! ^_^

—

And if you’ve got any other questions, you’re free to ask me in the comments/on Twitter/what-have-you. I appreciate all the interest and support you guys have shown in my book thus far! <3

life of pike, lists, Uncategorized

Top Ten Things I Learned At Film School

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As most of you all know by now, I majored in film. This gave me two valid career options: fast food and retail. (I opted for the latter.)

Really, “What are you going to do with that degree?” is a question that will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. The reason I went was because I was hoping it would be an outlet for the stories in my head. See, I’m very visual; when I was writing my NaNo, for example, I had to keep stopping to draw pictures or make storyboards or what-have-you. I still can’t listen to most music without little “mental movies” springing unbidden to my mind.

There was a problem with film school, though; namely, there was sort of a… conflict of interest, I guess.

Professor: “So, what sort of movies do you guys want to make?”
Everyone Else: “Memento” / “Fight Club” / “Some black and white indie art film”.
Me: “THE LION KING!”
*Everyone turns to stare at me*
Me: “…what?”

…on top of that, take a wild guess on what’s cheaper to make on a shoestring college kid budget: “The Lion King”, or “some black and white art film”? Yeah. So as you can see the “outlet” I was hoping for turned into tagging around on everyone else’s art films while I daydreamed that I was making cartoons instead (although the senior film I ultimately worked on was trying to be “Buffy”, so I guess that was a decent compromise.)

Still, I look back on my time at film school rather fondly. I had fun and learned a lot of interesting things. Among them…

TOP TEN THINGS I LEARNED IN FILM SCHOOL:

10. “Apocalypse Now” is the answer to every test question.

Sound design question? Apocalypse Now. Editing question? Apocalypse Now. Directing question? Apocalypse Now. Seriously. Even if it wasn’t the original answer, you can usually convince the professor that it works somehow.

9. Everyone Gets to do Everything.

The professors hated when you did this and tried to lay down rules. “Everyone in your group needs to specialize in something! I don’t want to see you as an extra in your own movie!”

Yeah. Um. Not happening. In the senior film I ultimately worked on I was producer, co-executive producer, location manager, assistant camera/clapslate, boom operator, and yes, an extra. Good times.

8. Yeah, Hitchcock is cliché, but it’s because he’s a genius.

Yep.

(Oh, the shower scene from “Psycho” is your backup Answer-to-Every-Test-Question should “Apocalypse Now” fail for some reason.)

7. What the Difference Between a “Grip” and a “Gaffer” Is.

…but I’ve since forgotten.

6. 95% of foreign movies will inject insanity directly into your brain.

Exceptions are made for Kurosawa (’cause dude, SAMURAI), and Bollywood. Bollywood (aka Indian cinema) is basically big-budget Disney films except live-action instead of animated. And thus awesome.

5. Script Breakdowns Will Destroy You.

“Script Breakdown” is a nice way to word the following: taking a script and going through it line by line and making a note of every character, every prop, every location, every sound and every special effect in the entire movie, and then organizing them into various lists and charts. It will give you nightmares and it will be a good six months before you can watch a movie again without wincing because “uuuugggh that scene would be so expensive and such a pain and augh.”

4. Animated Movies Will Help You Learn2Story.

See, maybe I was on to something with this “Lion King” thing I was talking about earlier. We watched “The ChubbChubbs” in my screenwriting class as an example of setting up a premise and then delivering a solid story. And I have a very distinct memory of some Hollywood professional who had worked on several films coming into our class and showing us clips from “Finding Nemo” as examples for how to make a good story. I don’t remember anything else he said, except for his high praise of “Finding Nemo”.

3. “Don’t Be Afraid to Kill Your Babies”.

…rather less gruesome than it sounds, I promise. My editing teacher said it, and it was to prepare us for a moment that he knew would come in each of our little film-student-lives at some point where we’d have to leave some beautiful scene on the cutting room floor because it didn’t advance the story.

I still mutter this phrase to myself sometimes when working on my fiction writing.

2. Film Professors Say the Darndest Things.

“This must be a leftist VCR”, “Remember: Actors are sheep”, and “Fidel Castro was starting to get on my nerves, so I told him to stop it” come to mind.

and finally…

1. When You Give Your Story to the World, It Isn’t Yours Anymore.

Another thing my editing teacher said. At first, this sort of miffed me. It was my story, afterall, it meant what I wanted it to mean. But I’ve thought about it a lot since then and I’ve come to agree with him. Sure, my story means one thing to me, but to someone else it may mean something else entirely. And you know what… I think I like it that way.

(This may or may not have added fuel to what would become the Open Source Fangirl Fire.)

—

Ah, film school. Good times.

Maybe someday, I will get to make my “Lion King”. In the meantime, I daydream and doodle… and ramble on blogs…