Blocks of Time Come in the Wrong Sizes

Because I only had about 65 minutes to spare at work tonight once I was done with my actual jobs, I didn’t do any editing on the movie. Instead, I caught up on browsing some artist galleries stuck in my Instapaper backlog. I’ll tell you what, people: there is some amazing digital art going on out there. But you probably knew that.

Anyway, here is a piece by one of them, Sakimichan, on deviantART (I can’t find a real name for this person). She/he does amazing things with hair:

That is all; my clients are getting up soon.

Some Love (and a Little Hate) for Comics

I was thinking this morning about the amount of time and mental energy I give to indie comics and wondering if I should spend more time reading screenplays and online short stories instead. For example, if you’ve been paying attention to my recent posts you’ve probably seen references to at least some of the following:

• Dresden Codak
• The Meek
• Kiwiblitz
• Bad Machinery/Scary Go Round
• Gunnerkrigg Court
• Rice Boy
• Lackadaisy

And these aren’t even all the comics I read–just the ones I love the most and spend the most time on.

Later in the day I decided that the answer is: No, I don’t spend too much time on these. It seems like a lot in the aggregate, but really it only takes a few seconds to read a comic page, so even the ones that update daily don’t usurp too much of my attention.

(I’m going to conveniently ignore the time I spend re-reading the same ones over and over. Scary Go Round, I’m looking at you, you sexy, addictive beast.)

Anyway, even the comics that suck up a significant portion of my time are ultimately still “literature”, and they provide most, if not all, the same benefits that reading narrative fiction or watching movies provide.

For exmple, I’ve been puzzling over why the characters in Scary Go Round are so very delightful and endearing. You’ll have to go read it yourself or just take my word for it, but the majority of the characters are selfish, blindly-inconsiderate people with no real ethics of any kind. You should really hate them, and you would if you knew them in real life, so why do I actually love them so very much? I finally figured it out (I think): because they’re all just big kids.

John Allison, the writer of Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery, gets away with writing alarmingly near-sociopathic characters because he writes them like 5th-graders–non-empathetic beings full of life and cheeriness and curiosity. They can be thoughtlessly cruel one moment and overwhelmingly affectionate the next, then throw relationship out the window to wander off on some vain and quixotic adventure.

This may have significance for me because I struggle with giving my characters flaws. Maybe my way into creating people who have actual bad qualities lies somewhere in this notion of turning them into pre-adolescents, who can be forgiven because they’re just so damned cute.

Urgh. Don’t judge that last sentence too harshly; I’m still following up this train of thought.

Anyway, Shut Up! I’ll keep reading comics if I want, and you should, too. Start with the ones I listed; if you like one of them, move on to other comics they recommend.

For example, Gunnerkrigg Court is a particularly wonderful blend of sci-fi and fantasy and British boarding schools.

‘I can think TWO things!’ - Monica Gellar

Found this artist through The Art of Animation. Can I like his style and think these warrior women are strong and beautiful and also think it’s silly and unnecessary that they all have Triple-D breasts and wear impractically-revealing clothing/armor?

[ broken link replaced ]

Yes. Yes, I can.

Entrepreneurial Trials

One of the drawbacks (or perks, depending on what kind of person you are and how much time you have on your hands) of trying to work for yourself or be an independent artist is having to do many things yourself that most people would probably just pay someone else to do.

I designed this website myself. It runs on the well-regarded Movable Type platform, which is basically the same kind of thing as the much-more-popular WordPress. Movable Type is written in Perl, which I know almost nothing about except that its syntax is difficult to follow and that it used to be referred to as “the duct tape of the internet”.

I’ve already lost 80% of you by this point.

This week I decided that I wanted my blog to auto-post to Twitter, like some other popular blogging platforms. I figured (correctly) that this would probably just involve some googling and the subsequent download and installation of a Movable Type plugin.

Boy, that word “just” does a lot of heavy lifting, doesn’t it?

I did find the plugin, Twitter Tools, by MT-Hacks, a well-known Movable Type plugin developer. His installation instructions were pretty clear, so I whipped through them, navigated to the Movable Type Content Management System interface, and instead of seeing the login screen, received a mangled error message something like this:

can't use string ("TwitterShortEntryURL") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use

Fantastic.

Lest I lose the remaining 2% of you still reading by this point, I will not chronicle all the steps I went through to solve this issue. I’m only pretty sure what ultimately ended up working, anyway. I’ll just mention two things:

1. Installing a Movable Type plugin is not like installing desktop software; it’s basically just copying a bunch of text files to various locations in your web host. While doing this, I took a couple of shortcuts by replacing entire folders instead of replacing the individual files in them one by one. I ended up having to manually revert to previous versions of all those folders before redoing it the way I should have done it in the first place. Lesson learned: when doing things you only barely understand, follow the instructions slavishly; do not interpret.

2) The thing that I think fixed the issue was updating to the newest version of the LWP Perl module (oh my goodness, seriously… no one’s reading this now). I decided to do this because the plugin author said, right there on the Twitter Tools web page, that this was something you might have to do. I feel like this is the same lesson as Lesson One, above.

Anyway, good web-dev times. When you have more time than money, you end up doing things like this (or whatever the equivalent is for you)–chores that you would almost certainly be better off paying a professional person to do, were it not for that pesking time-money imbalance.

This is the first post I’ve made since installing Twitter Tools; now to see if it works!

Update: It does.

Sadness Vodka is for Pity Parties

I’m not going to go into it, but I’ve been feeling sorry for myself and flirting with depression quite a bit over the past few weeks. That’s over now.

Earlier this week I was listening to the most recent episode of Back to Work, and Merlin Mann seemed to be talking directly to me. Specifically, his larger point (although you should really listen to it yourself) is that even if you’re in a less-than-ideal work situation you should still act like you’re the one in charge of your own destiny. Because you are. (Feel free to keep your Calvinist-based comments on this concept to yourself, fellow Christians.)

(P.S. If you’re going to listen to that episode, you should probably skip to about the 35:00-ish mark, because Merlin spends the first chunk of the podcast talking about super-nerdy stuff like TextMate Bundles.)

Anyway: No, I have not been using alcohol for self-medication, as the title of this post might suggest, but I have been acting like someone without agency, so no more of that.

I’m actually pretty lucky in quite a few ways. One of those ways is that I currently get to edit a movie. That I wrote. And produced. And directed. No, no one’s paying me to do it. Yes, it was still a pretty fantastic thing that I got (and get) to do, even if it never results in money. How many other people got to make a movie this year? Probably only about 10,000 in the entire U.S., and that is not very many, proportionally.

If you’re curious, I’m about 40% of the way through the rough cut of the movie. A little bit that’s because it just takes a long time to edit movies, and even more it’s because I don’t have as much spare time as I used to have at work (I work a third-shift gig with some dead hours in it for accomplishing personal tasks). But it’s also a little because I’ve been allowing myself to be distracted and pulled in multiple directions, and that’s where we circle back to that concept of agency.

I am not naturally good at multitasking in a macro kind of way. I’m pretty decent at micro-multitasking, such as when three of my clients at work ask me to do things for them all at once and I have to prioritize those requests and get them all done before the next thing comes up. I am not good at the kind of multitasking where I have to manage three or more different projects for several weeks or months and give each of them exactly the right attention at exactly the time they need it.

Recently, this has meant that I’ve ignored a lot of emails or answered them late, not finished blog posts in a timely manner (or at all), let personal chores slide while I worked on other things that ultimately turned out not to matter very much, and heavily used the internet for procrastinating because I felt overwhelmed by all the other tasks clamoring for my attention.

On the plus side, I discovered Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery by John Allison, which you should totally go read right now if you like funny and endearing comics.

So henceforth I will be focusing on two (2) things: editing this movie, and another thing. Which I won’t tell you about. It’s a secret, and you can wait along with everyone else for the official announcement. Builds character.

In other news, there’s a new Dresden Codak page coming soon! Look at this preview from Aaron Diaz’s blog:

Breaking Story

On Saturday I had a meeting with Myles Miner and Ryan Hill to start some more focused development on the Safe House web series (see the Projects page).

We had already shot most of episode 01, and production went well, but we needed to come up with a cohesive story for the six episodes we plan to shoot this fall. Here are some reasons this is important:

1. Shot lists are good. Since I’m also the AD for this project, I need to know how much we have to shoot every day so I can actually get everything done on schedule. This doesn’t work when you just waltz into each shoot day without a clear idea how many shots you have to get and how difficult they are.
2. Pre-production is better when you only do it once. The script for episode 01 changed several times right before we shot it, so that much of the pre-production work had to be done multiple times. When you’re shooting on a tight schedule with no budget and limited access to talent, you can only get away with this for so long.
3. The best stories are ones you don’t make up as you go along. After we shot episode 01 it turned out that it was really episode 02. This is fine, as we were able to outline the other episodes to fit around it, but you can imagine the kind of wreck the story would be if we did this sort of thing every time.

The meeting went very well, and I really like the story outline we have now. Myles is going to go off and write it, and I’m sure it will evolve and grow as he does, but it was a great start that gives some structure to our planning.

We also talked through some issues of tone, style and character, which helped Ryan get a feel for exactly what he was getting himself into. Since he’s relatively new to acting, I think starting to take ownership in this meeting will build some confidence in his own ability to pull this off.

On a more “meta”, career-oriented note, I continue to learn about all the different ways making movies (or web series) is awesome.

I Made a Movie.

(Along with about 25 other people)

If you’re someone who follows this blog (what’s up, Jeff?) but doesn’t follow The Murder! A Love Story site (nearly everyone), you might not be aware of it, but in the time since I last posted the film went from being “in pre-production” to being “in post-production”, and it brought along its own set of arguably unnecessary quotation marks.

Either way, I’m now editing the feature film I wrote and directed.

OK, actually I’m syncing audio for the film. Which isn’t quite editing.

And I’m not really doing that right now. I’m organizing a film festival. Which starts tomorrow.

So NEXT WEEK I’ll be working away like mad on turning video clips into an actual movie, but right now I’m finalizing film festival programming, planning Q&A questions to ask filmmakers, going to the venue to set up equipment, and hoping really hard that people actually come to this thing so we can do it again next year, only better. And with more money.

But enough about me. Look at this preview of the new Dark Science by Dresden Codak!

Murder! Kickstarter

Ten minutes ago I launched a Kickstarter project for Murder! A Love Story.

For those who’ve never checked out Kickstarter, here’s how it works: You decide to back a project by pledging money to it. If the project reaches its pledging goal, hurray! The project receives your money and moves forward. The project also gives you a pre-decided reward, based on the amount you pledged. If the project doesn’t reach its goal, it gets no money at all. That’s right: you’re out a whopping \$0.

So please consider supporting Murder! A Love Story on Kickstarter. All of our budget is going to hard costs like food and equipment and travel; we promise we won’t spend your money frivolously.

And if you want to go the extra mile for us, spread the word! We need all the help we can get.

Thanks! Hopefully you’ll hear soon about our success in raising the funds to complete the film.

Quick and Dirty

Yesterday I shot a teaser trailer for my film, and it reminded me that production never goes how you expect.

We had four “scenes” to get. Three of them were single shots. One was about 10 shots, but they were all of the same thing and handheld, so they were easy. Easiest part of the day, actually.

First shot: an overhead pan, camera looking directly at the floor. I’ve done this before sans jib using a technique I won’t describe because you’d really just have to see a picture to get it. But it doesn’t matter, because this time, it didn’t work.

Apparently turning 30 makes you old and shaky or something, because I could not get a smooth shot. We ended up just taking a still shot from farther away, which we’ll pan in editing using keyframes.

Second shot: dolly of a still life. I actually knew this would be tricky, because I don’t have a dolly. I have a rolling mechanic’s stool I borrowed from a friend, on which I managed to mount the camera, but that’s not the same thing.

For one thing, dollies have tracks. Tracks keep you rolling straight. Rolling straight keeps your very carefully- and shallowly-focused shot from going out of focus.

I think you know where I’m going.

The solution was what I knew it would be: run the shot 20 or so times until it comes out right. So I’m pretty sure I got something usable.

The third shot is an effects shot, and since I’m not going to be rotoscoping anything on my schedule, the camera was locked. And it’s a shot of a wall. So that was easy.

The scene with 10 shots was great. Knocked it out in 20 minutes. Watch footage, wrap set, go home.

We’ll see how it comes out in post.

P.S. Special thanks to Chris and Evie Jones for the loan of their Nikon D7000, on which we shot all this footage.