#i just KNOW the script writers and editors had the time of their lives editing that lmfao | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

clonewarsarchives · 2 years

Photo

NOTES FROM THE FRONT LINE (#132, APR 2012)

It’s generally accepted that Walter Murch (along with friend and colleague Ben Burtt redefined the role of the cinematic sound engineer, coining the term “Sound Designer” for Apocalypse Now (1979), which was foreshadowed by his “Sound Montage” credit for The Conversation (1974).

Murch later turned his hand to directing, helming Return to Oz, the 1985 sequel to the beloved classic. It was his friend George Lucas who offered him the opportunity to take the director’s chair again for The Clone Wars season four episode from the Umbaran quadrilogy, “The General.” Interview by J. W. Rinzler

Star Wars Insider: How did you first get invited to direct an episode of The Clone Wars?

Walter Murch: I heard about Bob Dalva, who’s a friend, film editor, director, and cameraman. George Lucas had asked him to be a guest director on the show (Season Two’s “The Deserter”) and I kept tabs with him, checking how it was going. He was having a great time doing it. I think it was a year later that George said, “What about you? Do you want to be a guest director?” Based upon the experience that Bob had, and my own general interest in the interface between art, story, and technology, I thought I would see what it was all about.

Did you choose a script from the four episodes of the Umbaran story arc?

They just said here it is. I didn’t get to choose. I think I would’ve been overwhelmed if I had to choose, because I didn’t know anything about the process other than what Bob and George had told me. It was much better just to get an assignment and not have to make a choice, weighing variables that I had no knowledge of at that time.

What did George tell you about the show?

Not much. He said, “It’s great, you’ll love it!” What he’s interested in with guest directors is people coming on board and injecting whatever it is that makes a metal into an alloy: a little extra something that’s not normally in the metal, but that helps to turn it into something else: iron into steel, brass into bronze, hopefully stronger. There are four directors on staff—very talented directors who are each working on three projects at once in various stages, whereas a guest director is only working on one thing and doesn’t hang around after the job is done. I wasn’t involved at all in the final animation. It’s just a very specific 12-week gig—to learn the software and produce the work.

George also wanted to bring in, with Bob and me and Duwayne Dunham—another guest director who has done two shows—someone who has experience in live action. George wants an infusion of a live-action sensibility into the process of doing animation, so it becomes scene-based rather than shot-based. Animation tends to be shot-based work because of the expense of producing animation; you want to minimize the amount of work, so shoot only what is absolutely necessary. Whereas with the zViz software (a proprietary software platform developed by George Lucas and Lucasfilm that helps directors compose shots), which is what we were working with, it doesn’t cost anything to keep the shot going, especially in a dialogue scene. It’s covering the dialogue the way you would cover a normal dialogue scene in live action from many different angles, which allows you to choose in the editing how the scenes will be constructed.

So you had 12 weeks. At this point was the script already written?

Yes, it was finished and, other than meeting at the end of the process, I never had any interaction with the writer. [Supervising director] ave Filoni did ask, “What do you think about the script? Any ideas?” In this story, the two clones, Fives and Hardcase, have to penetrate an alien airbase and there’s a perimeter fence around it. In the original script, they walked up to the fence and turned it off with some device they had. I thought we should make it a little harder, just to get a bit more action into it; also, if you can do everything with your own devices, it makes the opposition look weaker. So the whole idea of climbing up the tree, and then booby-trapping it to distract the guards —that was my contribution to the story.

So once you did the script, it went to the story reel phase using zViz. Was there anything in between those stages?

There was a lot of work already done in set and character design, all of which I inherited. They just said, “Here it is!” I slightly changed the nature of what some of the weird creatures were—that was another script idea I guess—I made the weird flying creatures into vultures so that they would try to eat the bodies of dead clone troopers. In the script they were just seen as passing clouds, but since they looked like vultures mated with manta rays, I thought, Let’s give them a personality and a purpose. What do these guys do? So that was another thing. I didn’t modify the look of the creatures, but I did modify what they did.

You then moved onto the zViz story reels.

I went to zViz class for the first two weeks. I had a one-on-one tutor and I was learning the software. Co-incident with that, in the afternoons, I started to play with the set and the characters, and reading the script, and working out how we were going to stage everything; just arranging the basic elements of the “soldier” aspect of the work, which is: “Here’s the army. There’s the enemy. Our army is moving in this direction. They’re coming from that direction. They’re in single-file, and so on.” At that stage, only basic camera parameters had been set, so I went through the script scene-by-scene and blocked it out using zViz. I had a team of four story artists who were going to be working with me—Bosco Ng and Dave Brickley would sometimes be standing next to me saying, “Don’t do that. It’s more efficient to do this,” just like when you learn to drive a car. You have an instructor there to prevent you from crashing. I got about two percent into using zViz. Maybe five percent. Maybe I would have been able—for the story reel—to do some actual story reel animation, but this particular show is so full of action that I left it to the artists that were working with me.

What was the next stage?

After the blocking? The story reel. I assigned scenes to the story artists and they would phone me up four hours later and say, “Want to take a look?” And that would give me other ideas and I’d make suggestions and they would work their way through the scenes.

As with live action, do you have to choose the “virtual camera lenses” you use?

Yes. I began to sketch that out in the plotting stage. But I generally left that up to the animators, except for a few specific places like that shot of the first emergence of the scorpion tank: I wanted that to be a telephoto lens.

Did you find it liberating?

Yes, it was. I felt insecure during the two weeks when I was learning the software and not knowing how much more I had to learn. If we had all the time in the world, it would’ve been different—but this is an ongoing series and you have to hit schedule milestones. And I was very happy with the work the story artists did; they saved my bacon a number of times when there were things I couldn’t quite figure out. Based on their own experience being animators and working on The Clone Wars, they knew what could be done and that would trigger ideas from me. So it was a very good collaboration with all four guys.

Did you have any involvement with the direction of the actors?

Yes, once we’d recorded and cut the temporary voices in. and then made any adjustments, we went down to Los Angeles and recorded the actual voices of the clones and Krell. So I was there for the final recording. It’s very important, I think, for the director of the recording.

The episode has a lot of action in it, but is also quite violent. There’s a scene where some Umbarans walk past and the clones shoot them in the head.

That was another idea I had. And another was the amount of stomping that the scorpion tanks do. There are many clones that get killed by being stepped on. This was an idea I came up with based on exploring the ability with zViz to articulate the character’s movement, like a puppet. The scorpion tanks are a six-legged mechanism. It wasn’t specified in the script what those legs could do—it just walked forward and shot. I thought it would be more interesting if it appeared to be alive in an animalistic sense and, working with Dave Brickley, we started tooling around with these creatures. We made them stand up on their hind legs, so to speak, and put the front legs up in the air. Once you did that, it was clear that it would be good.

These ideas arise spontaneously out of the directing process and if nobody stops me, then I’ll do them. It’s grisly—people killed by being stepped on, and the idea of finishing off this Umbaran pilot—and it begs the question. “If they didn’t shoot him, what were they going to do with him?” Then there’s the whole idea of these vulture creatures feeding on the flesh of clones. I plead guilty to the grisly parts of the story, or emphasizing them anyway.

Is that because you think kids today can handle it?

I think so, but I wasn’t thinking about the audience spedifically. It’s shown at eight o’clock at night, and I know that the viewing age ranges very wide. I thought it was my duty—I’d been invited in to do this stuff and they were looking for somebody from the outside. So I guess I was pushing the edge of the envelope. And I think that’s one of the very interesting things about the show. It gets into some pretty deep, philosophical waters about what an army is: Who are the soldiers in an army, and what are they really doing? Do they obey orders without thinking or are they obliged to think on their feet and countermand an order if they know a better way to do it and what’s the cost of that? How does identity emerge out of group of soldiers who, in this case, are literally bred to be the same. And yet different identities do emerge out of their DNA—how does that happen? How do you cohere as a military fighting force where the idea is to sublimate your identity and not be individuals? Once you start thinking about all that, you get into some pretty interesting areas.

It sounds like it intellectually engaged you.

Yes, it did. But all this is not specifically limited to my episode. That whole Umbaran arc in particular is about the assassination of a kind of Hitler. When do you kill the guy who’s supposedly your commanding officer? What he’s doing is wrong and against all military code, and yet you have to obey him. it’s a dilemma that the human species confronts over and over. I looked at maybe 12 other episodes in the course of 12 weeks. and I was really impressed with the range of subject matters and the implications of some of the ideas that were being explored.

Also, I was taken with the density of the storytelling in a 22-minute session; I would be watching one of these episodes, looking at the animation and being impressed with the style and the production design and all of that, and then the seven-minute moment, the commercial break, would come and I’d realize, wait a minute, that felt like 20 minutes not seven! It felt like a lot had happened and it had only been seven minutes. Each of these 22-minute episodes feels like an hour in terms of the visual and thematic complexity of the stuff that’s being explored. Those experiences quickly eliminated any sense that I was making a film for kids. But by the same token, Return to Oz, which is essentially a film for kids, also has some heavy-duty stuff in it. I think kids can take it.

Did you get to see your episode before it went to air?

Yes, but the first version I saw I thought the picture was way too dark. I would not have animated things the way I did if I had known it was going to be that dark. I had been told Umbara was a dark planet, but I didn’t know it was going to be that dark. There’s a saying in England: When you do live-action night shooting, you’ll get the question, “Where is this light coming from?” And the answer is, “That’s ‘Customer’s Moonlight.’” In other words, the audience paid to see the movie—the light is there to allow them to see what they paid for. But when I saw the aired version of “The General”, the darkness had been lightened. I don’t know what knobs they twirled, but there was much mom light. And yet it still looked like a dark planet. So I was much happier.

Is there anything that you’d like to have differently?

The Clone Wars animation is getting on good. particularly for certain characters. that I would like to see them move even more in a live-action sense. There’s still a tendency, especially in the story reel stage, to over-articulate body language. There are lots of hand gestures, kind of in a marionette sense, and you tend to fall into doing that because there is no facial animation at the story reel stage, only rudimentary changes from anger to joy. And with the clones wearing helmets, you don’t see any face, so there is a tendency to over-compensate with body-language. I think that may have been necessary in the early days when the animation wasn’t as sophisticated. Now it’s getting so good, it might be time to back off from the marionette aspect and treat them more like real people, real actors.

Do you think they should invest a little more in that?

Yes, but with some characters I think they’re already there! There’s a wonderfully evil female character Asajj Ventress. She’s fantastic—both as a character and how she’s animated. I love that character.

THE CINEMA OF WALTER MURCH

Walter Murch enrolled at the University of Southern California in 1965. In its School of Cinema, he met George Lucas, future writer/director John Milius, author Donald Glut (who penned the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back), Director of Photography Caleb Deschanel (who shot 1979’s More American Graffiti), and a host of other luminaries who came to prominence during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. After Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola founded American Zoetrope, Murch helped edit and mix sound on the latter’s The Rain People (1969). His résumé soon filled out with a series of Lucas and Coppola projects: THX 1138 (1971), American Graffiti (1973), and The Godfather Part II (1974), before winning an Academy Award in 1980 for his sound design on Apocalypse Now. His subsequent credits include, among many others, Ghost (1990), The Talented Mister Ripley (1999), Cold Mountain (2003), Jarhead (2005) and The English Patient (1996), for which he netted Oscars for both film and sound editing.

#season 4 #408 #crew #insider #i132 #the clone wars #guest directors #got real detailed into the process and the episode!

19 notes · View notes

firespirited · 4 months

Text

The creator

Review: Overwrought and shallow, style over substance. Brilliant actors sidelined by a gazillion, mostly unnecessary, excruciating death scenes of mishmash asians™ treated like props.

Tell me why I am supposed to care about a man who lived among sentient life for years unwavering in his belief they were unfeeling and unworthy of life? A guy who takes 75% of the movie to see a child as more than an informant machine? Where are the supercomputers and non-bipedal robots? Their evolution and salvation is dependent on a single genius human: what is this?

Why is a british-punjabi actor playing a thai super-cop? Don't get me wrong Amar Chadha-Patel is a scene stealer who is going places (if they'd made him the new Witcher, people would be gagging for the next season).

Who overrode the editors: 135 minutes and 90% of it rote action junk instead of letting us bond to anyone? The double fridging: are you kidding me??

It looks amazing of course, Thailand is stunning and "otherworldly" since we rarely see it on film. But for goodness sakes, this thing needed a script doctor, a writer's room, anything but "ya boy made a good film this one time, let's let him single-handedly make another because auteurs are magic".

Top-notch ending but you literally could gut a whole hour of "action" from this film and it'd be more effective... mostly because we wouldn't spend that hour wondering why the main character has had no growth.

At some point you have to trust your actors to do more than deliver lines which means either working on fleshing out their characters with a team or letting them have some input and then putting that in your film: these are people who embody stories for a living and are very talented at it. Instead, we get to watch some brilliant character actors moved around like set pieces and attempt to give some texture to the paper thin character they've been handed. It's insulting.

Editing to add that: yes it's visually incredible, just beautiful, every design element (aside from the physics of explosions) was crafted with care, these are clearly people who love worldbuilding.

I happen to love stories above all else even if the sets are cardboard and the robots made of tin foil.

And also think it's the height of arrogance to not have your storytelling vetted (by people who'll be honest) or handed over to others when that's been a critique before. You created a collaborative piece of art that respects all the designers which is great but not the actors, and of course the audience who are there for spectacle but also an emotionally resonant experience. There is no shame in knowing when to get the right people for the job.

This kind of design and film work deserves a solid story skeleton and there are many brilliant sci fi writers whose work deserved that fantastic design treatment. I'm harshest on movies with great wasted potential.

This could have been mind-blowing with someone else's script.

#saf #movie reviews #the creator #you get really good at spotting incoming orientalism watching french films about ''indochina''#ps: the animatrix did it better in 18 minutes

1 note · View note

denimbex1986 · 11 months

Text

youtube

"Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you to say."

"There’s a relationship, but no. The dictating went the other way, and the thing we’ve done with the platter over the years, because when I started working with IMAX film it was okay, two-and-a-half hours, that’s it, and then we got to Interstellar, which went up to two-forty-seven; and what they were able to do for me is engineer the platters a little bit wider so it has an extra rim, and that got a little wider and a little wider over the years. And then on this, I went to them and I said, “Okay, I’ve got a 180-page script. That’s a three-hour movie on the nose. Can it be done?” We looked at it, they looked at the platters, and they came to the conclusion that it could just be done - and they’re telling me this is the absolute limit because now the arm that holds the platter, we're right up against it. So this, this I think is finally the, the outer limit of running time for an IMAX film print."

"That’s a really hard one to answer because I’m a writer-director, and so I do write, whether I co-write or I write by myself, that final draft of the script I very much have an editing hat on already. So structurally, the films tend to be fairly disciplined, I would say, but the discoveries you make in editing are complex and multi-varied, and things transform over time. The, the approach Jen Lane, my editor, and myself take is to view the film as a whole, and so we’re watching it every week. We’re putting it up, usually inviting one or two people in who don’t know anything about the script to watch it with us; see it through their eyes.

And every film presents unique challenges, and I think in the case of Oppenheimer, it was very much, very much being guided by the balance between the color sequences where we’re trying to see everything from his point of view, be in his head, see through his eyes, and then the black and white sequences, which are much more Robert Downey Jr.’s point of view - Lewis Strauss is the character he’s playing. I try to balance the subjective from the objective and give sufficient momentum to those two timelines, that they're gonna - there’s a feeling of confluence at the end. But every film is different. Every film has its unique challenges, and some films are improved in the edit suite through tightening and speeding things up a lot, and that’s very often our process. Other films, Interstellar was one, where you couldn’t just keep squeezing it; it wouldn’t help the pacing - you actually needed to let things breathe. You know, you needed to let the sights and sounds you were experiencing with the audience breathe a bit, hence the bigger IMAX platter."

"There are no CGI shots in the movie."

"Well, one of the first people I showed the script to was my visual effects supervisor, Andrew Jackson. And I said to him; he’s very well-versed in CG, but he’s also very, very well-versed in practical effects and understands the value of that. And I showed it him very early on, and I said, “Okay, what we need in this film is a thread between the interior process of Oppenheimer, his imagining, his visualizing of atoms, molecules, those interactions, those energy waves. We need a thread that runs from that right through to the ultimate expression of the destructive power when that force is unleashed. It has to be - it has to live in the same family.” And I think computer graphics, they’re very versatile, they can do all kinds of things, but they tend to feel a bit safe. That’s why they’re difficult to use in horror movies. Animation tends to feel a little safe for the audience. The Trinity test, ultimately, but also these early imaginings of Oppenheimer visualizing the Quantum Realm - they had to be threatening in some way. They had to have the bite of real-world imagery. The Trinity test, for those who were there, was the most beautiful and terrifying thing simultaneously, and that’s where we were headed with this film.

So he spent many months working on extremely small things and extremely large things in combination with Scott Fisher, our special effects supervisor, who is second to none in the world of blowing things up on a vast scale. And so it was really a combination of scales, and ultimately, that spoke to the whole of the film because quantum physics and the expression of quantum physics through nuclear weapons is really about the incredible disparity of scales. You know, the laws of quantum physics work at this, you know, tiny, tiny level and then they find expression out in the stars of black holes and supernovas and all the rest. So we were really trying to embrace both ends of the scale, and Andrew’s methodology and how he achieved those things truly did embrace both ends."

#Oppenheimer #Christopher Nolan #IMAX #Andrew Jackson #Robert Downey Jr.#Lewis Strauss #Interstellar #Jen Lane #Scott Fisher

0 notes

cheesysaggychick · 2 years

Text

Truman Got It Wrong

(A Kabataan Essay)

Imagine being the main character of your own story. Your life has already been planned out from the day you opened your eyes. There are cameras watching your every move and directors that will dictate how you live based on the writer’s script. You don’t have any real friends because everyone around you is an actor hired to follow the flow of the plot. Even with the food that you eat, the soap you use to bathe, the toothpaste you brush your teeth with, they are all from the sponsors to keep your life running for people’s entertainment. Basically, you don’t have to worry about anything. You just have to live your life stress-free and hassle-free! Nope, this is not a movie, nor it is an advertisement. Breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out. So..what do you think?

At the ripe age of 15, I had the world in my hands…at least it seemed like it. I am doing great in my academics, I am thin, I’m closer to my friends than I have ever been, and I even have a boyfriend. Whaaattt? Sounds like I only need to be mean and have everything pink to be Regina George. Meh. My Kopiko 78 would be an insult to possibly her sweet tea with artificial sugar and some berries in her glittery pink cup. That day was a normal Thursday. No, it was not. It was our 4th quarterly examination, and Math and Science are all on the same day. I was psyching myself that I did good in the Math examination I had just finished. It was trigonometry. Nobody understands trigonometry, right? Since when did Math have kites you solve and diamonds you find the function of? Math has never been my favorite. If only this was a movie, I would not care. I would be wearing my chucks instead of the hurtful black shoes, sleeves rolled up, piercings blinding my teachers’ eyes, sporting a massive hangover due to the endless partying the night before yet I would still be able to pass all my exams because I’m the main character!

In a blink of an eye, people were suddenly breaking records saying

“Saraleo”,

“Raikantopeni”

and even

panties fell for Sara--Ti--Sara... I don’t know who for, Tine or Sarawat. You choose. (editors note: not me rewatching 2gether while editing this for the vibes)

I am so confused, I thought I was on a different planet. The Boy’s Love industry has suddenly taken over the world, specifically, my world. The world is on lockdown, which I don’t even know what that was about. What’s a lockdown? Isn’t that what they do in zombie movies when patient zero gets loose? Since we have nothing better to do with our spare time, people really said “since you are so deprived of any romantic stuff right now, why don’t we watch two actors play as a couple, right?”. People is me.

Well, that was toxic. Obviously, there are always two sides to the coin, which is in this case, the bad and the worse. The first is straight homophobic actors benefiting from the roles they have as homosexual characters. Secondly, the toxic “delulu”, a slang for delusional fans who treat the acting as real. Also, it has become a trend for BLs that year to have sexual assaults as the major plot or the twist of the story. Still, I waited every Thursday for the new episode of 2gether. I know, I’m a hypocrite. Am I? But imagine being in those series, experiencing tropes like enemies-to-lovers or fake-dating, and the wonder of all tropes, the friends-to-lovers. Ahhh, if only.

With nothing more left to do, I scrolled through my phone for the nth time. It had been my greatest companion during this time of isolation. As I clicked on Facebook and scroll through posts, everyone seemed to have been productive. It was #fitnessgoals, #quaranthings, #lockdownbody.

I suddenly became self-conscious. So, I broke up with my boyfriend. Random? Yeah, I know. I didn’t know people have been doing all these “healthy” things, meanwhile, I have been punishing myself with all the junk that I have been consuming.

The following day, I immediately got my phone and typed Chloe Ting for the first time in a long time. (The only clickbait I knew yet I still clicked anyways)

The more reps I’m doing, the more desperate I was getting. Slowly, I am getting lightheaded and started rethinking my life decisions. Why am I doing this again? I know it’s not to build my own endurance, gain muscles, or lose fat. I still don’t know until now. All I know is that people liking you is equivalent to your liking yourself, and I have seen society kinder to skinnier people than those of my size so, I guess I just answered my own question.

Honestly, for years I really thought I was fat, I knew I was. At least that is what was etched in my mind, by my family, and my relatives, I was even bullied for it. I hated the sight of measuring tapes, fitting rooms, and even weighing scales. Now looking back to my pictures before, I really wasn’t. But people were not nice, so what was that about? I feel like I had to be the nice and funny one because no one dislikes the nice one, right?

So, I starved myself. Yes, I know, it sounds dumb but that’s what I did. For months and on, I did that, and guess what happened? People stopped looking at me with their judgments peeling my skin off like a chemical peel. If this were a movie, I would just need a friend who “knows it all”, then one day just walks into school, hair falling, skinny waist, thick booty, and a miracle glow-up that even my closest friends will not recognize me.

Speaking of glow-up, I… was obsessed with my hair. And what do you do when you are obsessed with something? You kill it, right?

So, I chopped it,

then chopped it again,

and again all on my own, then for the fourth time, I finally went to the salon.

Obviously, people 18 and below are not allowed to enter the mall so I showcased my oscar-winning acting skills. After chopping my hair for the millionth time, guess what I did.

I bleached it, then bleached it again, then again, and again, until I finally dyed it, and dyed it again, and again, and again. By then I have more roots than hair. Honestly, I felt so much of a badass entering that Teams chat with different hair colors every week. Again kids, what do you do when you are obsessed with something?

You kill it. I have witnessed people who feel superior to others kill because of differences. I have seen people die due to the corrupt system the country is still built on. I have seen people fail just because their own government betrayed them and neglects their rights. I have seen people surrender because however loud they scream, they plea, they are never heard.

Why is it that the most valuable thing which is life has become so easy to be stripped of now? Killing has become as normal as breathing. Dying has become a great escape. Failing has become what was expected. Surrendering has become the end for all the hopeless. We have been so obsessed with how people live their lives that we don’t even recognize our own issues. We don’t try to learn for the sake of unlearning.

But, if these were all in a movie, I would make it as if death is not the end. But I told you from the beginning, nope, this is not The Truman Show, nor it is an advertisement. You are not Truman nor you are Regina George. You worry you stress, you hassle. Comfortability is a privilege. Like art, its meaning lies deep within, but one remains, art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. We cannot afford to be nonchalant as our time is limited.

Yes, our life is a story, but like any other story, it will eventually reach its end. The moment we open our eyes, it is unjust to ever close them again. There will be judgments, not cameras watching your every move. There will be prejudice, not the director that will dictate how you live your life based on what your parents demand. There will be strangers who will snake you and bite you which will make you fall. Finally, you will have everything that you ever need, and yet still have nothing at the same time.

Breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out. Although it was all for a show, at least it was perfect, right? Truman Burbank was wrong. So..what do you think?

1 note · View note

vonter-voman · 2 years

Photo

Awesome interview with Anne Collins, writer, story editor and main executive story consultant for the Wonder Woman TV series from the middle of Season 2 onwards (1977-1979)

Read the full interview here, courtesy from Marc Tyler Nobleman for his website Noblemania.

Some highlights:

How did you end up writing for Wonder Woman?

Somewhere in the process of writing three scripts for Hawaii Five-O in the mid-70s, the show’s Story Editor, Curtis Kenyon, helped me get an agent, John Schallert. Though I was working at a PR firm and living in Denver at the time, John successfully pitched me to the people at Wonder Woman, who were looking for a woman to join its writing staff. So I packed up my VW Rabbit, sublet my apartment, and drove out to LA, fully expecting to return within a month once they discovered how inexperienced and untalented I was.

But to my surprise, I discovered I could, in fact, hold my own when it came to working with and, frequently, heavily editing the work of the (mostly male) freelance writers to whom the show was giving assignments. The Supervising Producer, Bruce Lansbury, was such a joy to work with and so creative and sooo supportive that I stayed in LA for the next seven years and never looked back.

Did you pitch storylines on your own or as part of a team, or were writers assigned certain premises by producers?

Bruce, the studio and the network had a vision for the show, which in its second season saw it move from WWII into the ‘70s, so there was already an informal list of suggested and approved storylines. At that time TV programs were required to utilize freelance writers. We would contact writers we thought would “get” the show and assign a story area to them, though they were also free to pitch their own ideas if they wanted. I, too, could and did pitch ideas, of course, but as story editor I mostly helped outside writers develop their stories and would rewrite/polish their final drafts if/when necessary.

Any other funny/inspiring/weird anecdotes about your Wonder Woman experience?

There was one Saturday or Sunday early on in my Wonder Woman stint that I absolutely had to get into my office to write/rewrite something (this was eons before laptops, remember). However, to my horror, the key I was given to the WW office suite would not work. Desperate to get to my typewriter, and more than a little pissed at the key, I took the door handle with both hands and shook it in utter frustration. Causing the lock to break and the door to limp open. I went straight to my office and got to work.

Next thing I know, a wide-eyed security guard was peering at me from around the corner of my doorway, hand on his nightstick, ready to use it on whomever had broken into the suite. I apologized for breaking the door but it was an emergency. I just kept working, and he finally went away to get the door fixed. He also filed a report, so that come Monday everyone knew the story and thought it was quite amusing, and appropriate, that a woman employed by Wonder Woman had busted down a door.

At the time, did you reflect on the number of women vs. number of men writing for the show?

No, because at that time, there were very few women writing action-adventure, and there was also nowhere near the pressure to hire women and minorities back then that there is now. True, I was hired by WW largely because everyone, including Lynda, felt the show could only benefit from including “a woman’s POV,” but I’m not sure my gender ever really had a big influence on the scripts we churned out.

Did you interact with Lynda Carter, and if so, what was your impression of her? Did it change over time in any way?

Lynda was a sweetheart. We didn’t hang out, but our interactions were always pleasant and she always came across as genuine. She wasn’t hired because of her acting skills, and she no doubt knew that, which had to’ve made showing up for work every day somewhat terrifying. But by golly she did her best, and I have to say, whenever I happen to catch an episode, I’m struck with how likeable she comes across on screen. Not just because of her considerable physical beauty, but she has a nice, watchable presence. Probably because she is/was basically a sincerely nice person.

What is your favorite episode that you wrote and why?

“Phantom of the Roller Coaster,” probably because it was such a colorful arena (who doesn’t love amusement parks?) and I have an affinity for Raggedy Man-type stories. It started out as a single episode, but the shoot at Magic Mountain went so well that we made a two-parter out of it, though I forget when in the process that decision was made, or exactly how much more shooting was involved.

#Wonder Woman #Anne Collins #Lynda Carter #Interview #Writer #Vintage #70s #Television #Warner Bros #Bruce Lansbury #CBS #Behind the scenes

62 notes · View notes

universitypenguin · 3 years

Note

Hey, I just want to know do you do writing for a living, because it seems very professional. I mean I didn't know aftershock existed before I read your fics. Plus the details, they just feel so well researched. Either way I love your writing keep going♥️

I do not write for a living. I actually work in healthcare, and I'm on an emergency and trauma team at a major hospital.

But to answer your question, I have written professionally before. It was all ghost writing for other established authors and that prevents me from sharing it, or taking credit for it publicly.

After realizing how well the books I sold did for the authors who bought them, I've been wanting to write under a pseudonym. I'm working on editing an original novel at the moment. My real job is crazy right now, so I've fallen behind. (See followers, it's not just my blog I'm neglecting!)

On a different note, I've noticed a lot of fanfic writers on Tumblr worry about being "good enough" and compare themselves to other writers. Believe me, I can relate. Consistent effort helps you learn how to manipulate a story and fix errors that you're prone to. But it's worth mentioning that the quality of my writing is because of experience. I have ten years of practice to draw from. I've had my work professionally edited over and over again until it was ready for market. And those editors did not care about my feelings. It was brutal. By the time we were finished I think there were like fourteen drafts of the same novel and I could barely stand to look at it.

As a younger writer, you don't read a novel by Paula Hawkins or Fredrick Bachman and then go back to your own work and feel great about your ability. After I read "A Man Called Ove," I sat down and thought, 'I'm never going to do character that well. There's no chance.' When I read the twist ending of the thriller "Into the Water" by Paula Hawkins I was in awe of her skill.

You know what helps when you feel like that? Go read their reviews.

"Into the Water" had 63% bad reviews according to Book Marks. There's a one star review of "A Man Called Ove" that reads:

"An episode of Sesame Street is more nuanced than this story. This book reads more like a script to a bad TV show." (Credit: Good Reads)

So, yeah. It doesn't matter how good you actually are. Someone is always waiting to tell you it's awful. In the words of Stephen King:

“I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Being in a fandom is new to me, as is writing on social media. What I've noticed about Tumblr is the competition that occurs between fandom writers. It's usually over re-blogs but from what I can tell, Tumblr just has a bad algorithm. Likes certainly don't make you a good writer. Fifty Shades of Grey made millions. Christopher Paolini's "Inheritance Cycle" was formulaic and populated by one-dimensional characters. They were tremendously successful. Their writing was awful.

I'm here to write because there are some of you who really enjoy the content I put out. Your feedback keeps me going and helps me figure out what's appealing to readers. For me Tumblr is a skills lab and a chance to "walk the dog." I love being able to get feed back while I hone my writing ability with practice.

I need to write fanfic. Because editing my original novel is freaking boring. I've had the errant thought of forming a beta reader group for my original writing, drawn from my fanfic readers. But I have no idea how to go about that, or how to manage the risk of having my writing stolen. If my fanfic was stolen, I wouldn't care too much. Horrible, but more embarrassing for the person who thinks they need to steal. You can prove it was posted on your page first and the matter is settled.

Anyways, thank you for noticing the quality. I'm always aiming to improve. I do try to keep the effort I'm putting in on my fanfictions consistent, but sometimes I get lazy with the editing.

#penguin replies

7 notes · View notes

msclaritea · 2 years

Text

The novel The Power of the Dog had been percolating for some time in the back of the brain of filmmaker Jane Campion, previously an Academy Award winner for writing the screenplay for The Piano. Eventually, she felt compelled to adapt it for the screen.

“It intrigued me for many reasons: I couldn’t guess what was going to happen, it was incredibly detailed, and I felt that the person writing the story had lived this experience,” says Campion. “It’s not just a cowboy story from 1925 of ranch life. This is a lived experience, and I think because of that I felt a real trust for the story. I loved how deeply it explores masculinity and that it’s also about a hidden love.”

At the center of The Power of the Dog is Montana rancher Phil Burbank (played in the film by Benedict Cumberbatch), a charismatic but unflinchingly cruel figure that dominates his ranch hands. When his gentler brother George (Jesse Plemons) marries, Phil levels his brutal, bullying sights on George’s wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and her sensitive son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). But Phil’s toxic barrage disguises an agonizing inner struggle, which once exposed, could be his undoing.

“He’s so complicated and cruel but, as mean and unkind as he often is, he’s also the tormented lonely lover safe only by treasuring feelings from a long gone past,” says Campion. “He is in an impossible situation of being an alpha male who is homophobic and also homosexual. It’s incredibly painful and complicated. I found Phil moving and I found the mysterious relationship between him and the boy exciting and satisfying.”

“I saw the potential of this as material for Jane,” says producer Tanya Seghatchian, a frequent Campion collaborator. “It’s a rich psychodrama with extraordinary roles for the central characters, has an incredibly cinematic landscape, and a chilling and surprising ending that really works.”

Our approach to the adaptation was to boldly fillet the book to make it tighter and more propelling for film, whilst honoring Thomas Savage’s vision, of course,” says Seghatchian. “Jane has an instinct for finding hidden notes and knowing how to intensify sensuality. One of her real gifts is making invisible emotions visible. We pinpointed themes and emotional gaps to explore more deeply and Jane crafted scenes only partially described in the book in a visual language. Jane is a master at highlighting desire and making it come alive cinematically.”

In an attempt to capture as much of the flavor and spirit of Savage’s work, the New Zealand-based Campion made a foray to Montana to gain a deeper perspective on the region. While there, she visited the Savage family ranch and soaked in as many details about the author’s life and lore from his descendants, further informing her take on the source material.

She also consulted with novelist Annie Proulx, who authored the short story Brokeback Mountain and penned an afterword to a 2001 edition of Savage’s book, discussing the iconography of the American West and Savage’s intensely masculine tale from the perspective of a female writer.

“I really do honor other people’s work, and I wanted to honor Thomas Savage with this film,” says Campion. “When I read a book like this, I don’t take the adaptation lightly. I want it to be as good as it can be. I wouldn’t say I’m a perfectionist, but I do like to do things really thoroughly!”

Click below to read the script for the pic from Netflix, which released Dog in theaters around Thanksgiving and launched it on the streaming site December 1. It has been one of the buzziest titles on this season’s awards circuit since its Venice Film Festival debut, where Campion won the Best Director award. It was named one of the films of the year by AFI among a slew of critics group honors, and took the Golden Globes’ Best Picture – Drama award. It has 10 Critics Choice nominations to go along with numerous acting noms for Cumberbatch, Dunst and Smit-McPhee, and directing and writing honors for Campion (though notably the screenplay is not eligible for the WGA Award)

#benedict cumberbatch #kirsten dunst #kodi smit mcphee #jesse plemons #the power of the dog #Director Jane Campion #Thomas Savage

2 notes · View notes

life-observed · 3 years

Text

How To Keep TV Real The Anthony Bourdain Way

How To Keep TV Real The Anthony Bourdain Way Anthony Bourdain didn’t start out developing TV shows. But seven seasons later, his No Reservations is going strong and, together with production partners Zero Point Zero, he’s launched a second show, The Layover and is working on a range of new projects. Here, the author/chef/restaurateur/TV show creator and star and Zero Point Zero principals talk about keeping TV real. BY ZACH DIONNE7 MINUTE READ Seven seasons deep, Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations is doing something right. The show, which revolves around the brash chef/author/all-round personality indulging in transformative stints of eating, drinking, and traveling, airs on the Travel Channel and is a product of Bourdain and Zero Point Zero Productions, the same company that just helmed a successful first season of a Bourdain offshoot, The Layover. Co.Create sat down with Bourdain, Zero Point Zero executive producers Chris Collins and Lydia Tenaglia, and managing director Joe Caterini to dig into why Bourdain’s shows stay afloat in a sea of programming, how multi-hyphenate creative types are working to adapt to new content paradigms, and why comedian Louis C.K. should be emulated in all things. Co.Create: You’re filming No Reservations’ eighth season. What’s the first trick to keeping the show fresh? Tenaglia: We understood very early on that if you’re really going to get to know a location well, it’s got to be through the characters that live there. Many scenes live or die by a good sidekick. Bourdain: Fixer selection is huge. Do they know the area as well as they say? Are they capable of doing all the logistical shit a fixer’s gotta do? But also, do they have a sense of humor? Are they fun? Do they drink? We’re not looking for the best of a place or everything you need to know about a place; we’re looking to have as close to a local experience as we can get, and have a good time and do something interesting that hasn’t been done before.

With Anthony’s writing background, are you doing much scripting ahead of time? Bourdain: We don’t script. We never do any writing beforehand. The Queens of the Stone Age show, it was like, let’s go to the desert and see what Josh Homme wants to do. All we really know for sure is he’s going to provide music for the show and we’re gonna be in the desert. If you think you’ve already figured out what the show’s going to be about or what you expect out of the scene, that’s a lethal impulse.

Does it get tricky to stay away from a fixed template? Tenaglia: Each year the show keeps evolving. Tony has an inimitable style and strong point of view that informs the creative, and we have an incredible creative team, very multi-platform, from animation to incredible graphics to unbelievable shooting and cinematography that informs the show. It truly evolves out of this process of intense collaboration, and then having these incredible creative tools to basically tell a story in any way, shape, or form. Bourdain: Let’s face it, ordinarily this is a very restrictive format. The story is always the same: Guy goes somewhere, eats a bunch of stuff, and goes home, presumably having learned something. The core of whatever we do is to fuck with the format as much as we can. Let’s find a way to tell what is basically the same story, different setting, in as disturbing-to-the-network fashion as possible. Why? Bourdain: Because television, if it’s a success, if it works, they wanna replicate it. That’s the death of creativity. Then we’ve settled into a groove, then I become bored, the people I work with become bored…it’s a mortifying process. If this isn’t fun and interesting to us, there’s no point doing it. Collins: We continually want to push further in the storytelling. We understand that with television you’ve got to work within certain parameters, but within those 42 minutes and 30 seconds, how can we play with this thing?

One way you did that was with an entirely different show, The Layover. Bourdain: That’s an even more restrictive concept–this is a format that’s been done a million times. Everybody loves the damn thing, but it took me a few episodes to figure out how to do it. No Reservations is about me, me, me–they’re basically essays. The idea of going to major cities and doing a “useful” show really goes against the grain.

What are the driving principles behind Zero Point Zero as a content production company? Caterini: The heart comes from a true vérité documentary filmmaking tradition. Bourdain: You don’t want people saying, “Could you say that again?” We’d rather miss the scene than fuck up the scene you have. That dynamic is absolutely essential to why our show is different from all the other travel shows. The show looks slick, it’s beautifully photographed, beautifully edited, but you’re never going to get those transforming human moments out of a character reenacting them for you. You’re never going to get real generosity, any kind of chemistry or any kind of fun, for that matter, if you’re muscling and you keep hammering home the theme. Caterini: Our primary goal is to be able to work on projects in the way we want to. We are looking to learn about digital technology and distribution and other ways of making content that don’t have to fit into the TV business formula. TV, being advertiser-driven, is all based on predictability and consistency. Predictability means you can’t take risks and consistency means it’s dreadfully boring. We’re fortunate we can bust those two barriers down, but it’s really hard to sell new TV shows when that’s your launch pitch. Why does it work with No Reservations? Caterini: The creative process is executed very well. We create situations that optimize that. We feel lucky we got greenlit and got on the air. Now we’ve proven that it works.

How do you take it forward? Caterini: We had a big eye-opening moment when we launched into social media, and looking at it as simply another medium in content and storytelling; truthful storytelling in different size bites with a different arc of time. We’re connecting directly with who really matters, which is the audience, the people who want to enjoy what we’re creating. That really did open up the doors for us to think about ways to go straight to them. For a lot of content creators that’s extremely exciting, and the revolution really hasn’t even happened yet.

📷You must be familiar with how Louis C.K. sold his latest stand-up special directly to fans for $5 via PayPal. Bourdain: A heroic pioneer. It was a huge, tectonic moment. Tenaglia: What’s really fantastic about him, and I think it mirrors a lot of what we do here, is he’s the producer of the piece, the writer, the editor, behind the scenes, in front of the camera–he’s extremely multifaceted and nimble and flexible and self-contained. I think we have a lot of those same qualities. We don’t go out with big, bloated crews of 25 people. We can create something pretty extraordinary with a team of one or two. What’s the key to getting content made, and seen, with these new paradigms? Bourdain: People in the television business have a vested interested in keeping it as close to the way it was as possible. You don’t want to cut the ground out from under your own feet. We’re in a more luxurious position to adapt to the situation on the ground. I like making television. But I definitely have both eyes on what’s next. Caterini: The creative people have to shift the content paradigm. We look at social media as a big medium in and of itself, and we’ve successfully developed and in fact exploded growth in an audience. So it’s working. Then unfortunately we have to say, “Is that a business or not?” But that has to come second. I think we’d ideally like someone to build the perfect platform for creators to work off of. There are bits of it. No one’s actually figured out how to turn it into money right for the creator, though. I think either the platform will come along or we’ll have to do some of the business a network does–market our own stuff, sell our own stuff. Bourdain: A person with a television show generally lives or dies by the Nielsen numbers. I don’t really understand why anyone would care. I care how many people over time see and like the show and are interested in seeing more stuff. That’s the only number that counts.

What about your personality as a brand, Tony? How does it factor into all this? Bourdain: I’m happy to use the word “brand,” but listen, I’m doing a lot of things: I’m doing a comic book, I’m writing for Treme, I’m making two television shows, publishing books. I do these things because they’re fun, and interesting, and because 12 years ago I had no opportunities to do anything. It bothers me when people say I’m “expanding the brand.” You expand the brand so you can land a Pepsi-Cola commercial. You haven’t seen me endorsing any products yet, though I am asked. I’m doing it ’cause it’s fun. What happens when things become not interesting? Then it’s a job. I had a job for years, I know what it’s like to show up every day and do the same thing the same way. I don’t know how Howie Mandel gets up in the morning. I don’t ever want to be that.

#anthony bourdain #interview

7 notes · View notes

uzumaki-rebellion · 4 years

Note

Curious minds want to know, how old are you? And when did you first get into writing? What made you want to start writing? Were you always this good? 😉

I’m grown grown. Lol! I just earned my Auntie status! Most women are raised to want a man and kids but all I wanted was to be the cool Auntie who lived a cool life and be that person that everyone always wanted to have around. And I became that chick! Bucket list check!

I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I am a voracious reader. I started writing in journals first, then making my own little comic strips, and making up little plays. A friend introduced me to writing scripts a few years ago, but I just wanted to be a history teacher and gave that up. I wrote a bunch of Black Western Epics and Black Supernatural books for fun, but never actively tried to publish. I just loved making shit up about people who looked like me. I also started collecting myths/legends/folktales from the Black Diaspora. Just really reading a lot. About 8 years ago I started running with a serious professional sci fi/fantasy writing crowd because I went to a lot of conventions and fucked with fandom heavily. I’m from San Diego so we have the biggest con here, Comic-Con International. Knowing pro writers gives you access, so I started sending stuff out. I’ve been published in books and magazines and I’m slowly getting back into screenwriting. I would like to create a Black supernatural/horror TV show, make a lot of money and go live on an island with a parrot that cusses and eat plantains, peas and rice, and tacos all the time. But now there’s a pandemic and that parrot has to wait.

3 years ago I hated how Black women were treated/depicted in all media so I started reading Black romance books to see Black women being loved up and just to lift my spirits and embrace my natural freak nasty kinks. But I was kind of bummed because none of the big trade publications were selling the stuff I wanted to read. I discovered indie publishing on Amazon and read a bunch of stuff. I got it in my head that I wanted to write erotic romances for Black women. I went to a Black women’s writing conference down south and found my people! Black women who wrote smut in all genres! God is good. I needed a break from trying to publish sci fi/fantasy. A lot of my writing friends were getting published and winning big sci fi awards (a lot are Black women too!). However, I just wanted to free write like I did as a kid. Writing for pro publications is a grind, especially working with editors and trying to hustle, and also dealing with rejection. I just really wanted to get back to writing for fun and joy and just telling a story with amazing Black women in it.

And then Black Panther happened.

T’Challa said “Hi” to Nakia.

M’Baku said “We have watched from the mountains...” to Wakanda.

And Killmonger said “I’m just feelin’ it” Then choked a bitch.

I was ready! *cue Elmo on fire with arms raised”

At first, I just wanted to tell N’Jobu’s story because no one had written it in the fanfics, and then I found a great excuse to write the stuff that I love: Black love, Black joy, Black eroticism/smut, Black women being the center of the universe. Bonus: I have no deadlines, I don’t have to line edit or be perfect for an editor or change anything that I don’t want. I can be melodramatic, cheesy, indulgent, give myself fan service, steal Black actors I love and make them the stars when the real world overlooks their beauty and talents. Extra bonus: I have fun again with writing while doing it.

I was always a good writer in my head. I never planned on being a writer, but I had to because no one else was writing what I wanted to read. I am very well-read in fiction and non-fiction, and I got tired of not seeing me. I say this all the time, Octavia E, Butler told us to write ourselves in. So I had to get random stories out of my head and get it on paper.

Writing these fics allows me to write like I did as a kid. I write and just post. I don’t correct anything. Mind you, I have gone back and read some of my stuff and said, “Sheesh, I should do a couple of spelling/grammer/ repeat words/phrases corrections on all this shit!” In my real life writing I do a lot of passes: Spelling checks, grammar checks, dialogue checks, re-writing, re-writing, re-writing...more re-writing. That’s what pros do. This would kill me writing fanfics. I just want to get the story out even though I do cringe when I see mistakes that my regular writing life would never let me allow to see the light of day. But I allow it in my fanfics because I’m tapping into joy and not trying to please an editor.

This is probably the opposite of what many fanfic writers aspire to. I know many springboard writing fanfics into a pro career. I know a few BNF writers who have done that. I have sat with one literally eating chips as she wrote her next pro book that became a movie and tv series while we were shooting the shit about Comic con. Fanfic writers on this path work really hard to get their words perfect with Beta readers, and re-writing. They are learning the craft and how to write the thing. I love that.

But, me personally, chile I ain’t got time for that, I’m just trying to ease my anxiety. Black Panther was a balm for me. So when y’all read my stuff and see typos/ spelling mistakes and shit and think “Man, she should’ve gone over this to correct stuff, I’m over here doing a shoulder shimmy cuz I refuse to do none of that. I’se free! I can just write without my perfectionism anxiety.

I always give long ass answers during this pandemic. Thank you for your question. It’s more than you asked for probably!

20 notes · View notes

terryballs · 3 years

Text

My favourite Doctor Who writers

10. Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is one of the most talented people to ever write for Doctor Who. Of course, talent alone is not enough - Douglas Adams, Alan Moore, and Naomi Alderman all miss out on this list. What makes Gaiman special is his fairytale, fantasy approach to the show. He has big ideas, full of heart, and I am always delighted by them.

Why isn’t Mr Gaiman higher up on the list? Simply because he has only done four stories. One of them, “The Doctor’s Wife”, is an all-time classic, while the others are at least good. With a couple more stories, Mr Gaiman would surely be higher.

9. Paul Magrs

Coming in at #9 is one of the most important writers of non-televised Who. Paul Magrs has written nine Big Finish Main Range stories (most notably “The Peterloo Massacre”), three Companion Chronicles, and two Eighth Doctor Adventures, including the exceptional “The Zygon Who Fell To Earth”, as well as a huge number of spin-off adventures.

It’s in print where Magrs really flourishes, though. It’s quite hard to get across just how influential Paul Magrs has been. Firstly, his three books in the Eighth Doctor Adventures range - The Scarlet Empress, The Blue Angel, and Mad Dogs and Englishmen - are hugely ambitious metatextual delights. These stories introduce Iris Wildthyme and the Smudgelings to the Whoniverse, and have each inspired their own spin-off series, collectively called the “Magrsverse”. Iris’s parody of the Doctor is a rip-roaring delight whenever she appears - and as you know, she’s famous for it - and will prove a lasting legacy for Mr Magrs.

I suppose, at this junction, I should mention Lawrence Miles, who has had a similar influence, but I just don’t find to be quite as good a storyteller as Magrs.

8. Rob Shearman

You probably know Rob Shearman for “Dalek”, the first good New Who story. What if I told you that “Dalek” is Shearman’s worst DW story?

The titles of Shearman’s audio plays are enough to send shivers up the spines of those who have heard them. There’s “Jubilee”, the loose inspiration for “Dalek”, which explores the Daleks as fascist iconography. There’s “The Holy Terror”, where the Doctor and Frobisher the Penguin Shape-Shifter have a similarly horrifying experience with a religious cult. There’s “The Chimes of Midnight”, possibly the definitive Eighth Doctor story, and “Scherzo”, itself perhaps the most experimental story in Doctor Who history, and “Deadline”, in which the villain is Doctor Who itself.

Like many of the writers on this list, Shearman has an eclectic back catalogue full of obscure oddities. But few people have quite his capacity for knocking it out of the park.

7. Chris Chibnall

It’s true that Chris Chibnall’s work before becoming showrunner is inconsistent at best. “42″ is bad and “The Hungry Earth” is uninspired. “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” is a fun romp, while “The Power of Three” is a great story that is let down by the ending which had to be re-written hastily due to unforeseen production issues. And Chibnall’s contributions to Series 11 range from “fine” (”The Woman Who Fell To Earth”) to “bad” (”The Battle of Ranskor Av Kolos”). But in “Pond Life” and “P.S.”, Chibnall shows that he knows how to write affecting character beats.

It’s in Series 12 that Chibnall really takes things up a step. His stories become sprawling and ambitious: globe-trotting thrillers crammed full of ideas. He’s still occasionally guilty of trying to throw too many ideas in, but his love for the story really shines through. There’s barely a weak moment in Series 12, and that’s largely because Chibnall himself steps up to write or co-write hit after hit after hit. It all culminates in the epic three-part finale, “The Haunting of Villa Diodati”/”Ascension of the Cybermen”/”The Timeless Children”, a hugely ambitious story that crosses space and time and pulls together disparate elements from the history of Who. It’s a million miles from “The Battle of Ranskor Av Kolos”: a fan-pleasing story that is truly epic.

6. Vinay Patel

Why is Vinay so high? Good question. Thinking about it, I can’t really justify this placement. Patel reliably produces great stories - “Demons of the Punjab” alone marks Patel out as a great, and to follow it up with “Fugitive of the Judoon” shows that it wasn’t a fluke. But Mr Patel has only got four stories to his name - the aforementioned TV stories plus “Letters from the Front” and “The Tourist” - so for similar reasons to Mr Gaiman, a high position is difficult to justify.

So instead, let’s give this position to Terrance Dicks. Mr Dicks has a bit of a reputation as more of a “jobbing” writer than someone like Chibnall or Shearman, Terrance Dicks was, first and foremost, a script editor. Yes, he co-wrote “The War Games” and was the sole writer for “Horror of Fang Rock”, but he’s best remembered for script editing the Third Doctor era (and part of the Second Doctor era), as well as producing an absolute mass of Target novelisations. But that’s not all - Mr Dicks has written original novels (VNAs, EDAs, and PDAs alike), Quick Reads, audio stories, two stage plays, and even the Destiny of the Doctor video game.

Sure, Mr Dicks didn’t burn as bright as Mr Patel. But his contribution to the Whoniverse is unparalleled.

5. Nev Fountain

Comedy writer Nev Fountain has written several of the very best Doctor Who stories. For some reason, these stories tend to centre around Peri (Fountain is married to Nicola Bryant). “Peri and the Piscon Paradox” is the best Companion Chronicle by far, due to a combination of great acting by Bryant and Colin Baker and Fountain’s sizzling script. “The Kingmaker” is an outrageously funny historical with incredible dialogue and multiple ideas clever enough to carry a whole story.

Frankly, those two alone should be enough to convince anyone of Fountain’s brilliance. But there is so much more - “The Widow’s Assassin”, “The Curious Incident of the Doctor In the Night-time”, “The Blood on Santa’s Claw”, “Omega“... if you like Doctor Who, make yourself familiar with Nev Fountain.

4. Robert Holmes

More than anyone else, Robert Holmes is responsible for the esteem which the Fourth Doctor is held in.

Holmes first wrote for the show all the way back in Series 6, with “The Krotons”. He wrote the very first Third Doctor story, “Spearhead From Space”, in which he also introduced the Autons. They reappeared a year later in “Terror of the Autons”, which introduced Jo Grant and the Master. In “The Time Warrior”, Holmes introduced the Sontarans, a pastiche of imperialism.

It was in the Fourth Doctor era that Mr Holmes really made his mark. He took over from Mr Dicks as script editor. In his own right, he wrote “The Deadly Assassin” and “Talons of Weng-Chiang”, but he also turned “The Ark In Space”, “Pyramids of Mars”, and “The Brain of Morbius” into usable stories, even appearing in “The Brain of Morbius” as the Doctor.

After stepping back from script editing, Holmes returned as a hack to write stories like “The Caves of Androzani” (probably the most popular story in Classic Who) and “The Two Doctors”, before dying shortly after his 60th birthday.

3. Jamie Mathieson

Putting Mr Mathieson above Mr Holmes really shows my bias towards New Who, but honestly, I’d rather re-watch “Mummy on the Orient Express”, “Flatline”, or “Oxygen” than any of Holmes’ stories. Mathieson is very inventive and extremely good at maintaining pace and tension. I’m sure we’ll get more stories from him in the future, but the ones we have so far should be used as inspiration by anyone wanting to writing exciting Who.

2. John Dorney

It is hard to exaggerate Mr Dorney’s contributions to audio Who. He may lack the external fanbase of Mr Gaiman, the influence of Mr Magrs, or the legendary status of Messrs Dicks, Chibnall, and Holmes, but make no mistake, Dorney is exceptional. In almost every range he tries his hand at - Lost Stories, Novel Adaptations, Third Doctor Adventures, Fourth Doctor Adventures, Fifth Doctor Adventures, Dark Eyes, Doom Coalition, Ravenous, Time War, Companion Chronicles, Short Trips, Jago and Litefoot, Missy, UNIT, Diary of River Song... Dorney reliably writes the best story in the set.

In particular, Dorney’s stories are notable for the way they focus on character drama. Look at stories like “A Life In A Day” or “Absent Friends” for particular examples of stories that use sci-fi concepts to draw emotion out of characters, particularly the stoic Liv Chenka. Other highlights of Dorney’s include “The Red Lady” and the “Better Watch Out”/”Fairytale of Salzburg” two-parter.

1. Steven Moffat

What more is there to say? Moffat is truly exceptional, reliably writing the best stories in TV Who for several consecutive years. The classics are too numerous to list, but the stand outs amongst the stand outs are “Blink” and “Heaven Sent”/”Hell Bent”.

Some of Moffat’s best work comes away from TV. The minisodes “The Inforarium” and “Night of the Doctor”, the novelisation of “Day of the Doctor”, the short stories “Continuity Errors” and “the Corner of the Eye”, and lockdown stories like “Terror of the Umpty Ums” are Moffat deep cuts which deserve to be held in the same regard as his great TV stories.

Moffat’s imagination lead to him creating multiple iconic monsters - foremost amongst them, the Weeping Angels and the Silence. Moffat emphasised the use of time travel within the stories themselves; other themes in his work include memory, perception, paradoxes, identity, sexuality, and responsibility. He is, without a doubt, the greatest Doctor Who writer, and I am so lucky to have lived through the period where he was active.

#Doctor Who #top ten #Steven Moffat

11 notes · View notes

spaceorphan18 · 4 years

Note

What do you think about Kurt and Blaine’s chemistry in season 5? for some reason I’ve always felt like it was really off in the New York arc. I’m not sure whether it was the fact that the writers were only giving Klaine tension instead of happy moments or whether it was due to Darren/Chris, or if I’m just imagining it. Kurt just definitely seemed so cold during that period of time.

You know, I kinda figured I’d get this question eventually, lol.

So - let’s talk about the New York Arc and Advanced Television Production.

This question has /layers/ lol.

For a simple answer, so you can check out if you’d like, I think their chemistry was fine, I think production was super rushed and flimsy at points, and I don’t really think Chris or Darren had anything to do what you might feel is /off/ but since actors are the face of the show, they get the brunt of the feedback.

For a longer answer (and I mean long) follow under the cut!

So, among being an avid fan of film production where I’ve picked up a lot of the industry knowledge (to which I’m not very -- just a fan) I’ve been listening a lot to The Office Ladies podcast, and they’ve been bringing some stuff up that I think is important to remember about film and tv production. There are a lot of parts that go into it. There’s the writer’s intentions, the director’s vision, the editor’s cut, the producer’s needs, and the actor’s performances. And between those things - the show becomes what it is.

1. The writing - The writing of Klaine in the New York Arc makes more sense when you look at the thing as a whole within context. Kurt and Blaine were headed down a path towards a break up. Kurt felt like he was losing his individuality and wasn’t communicating that well to Blaine, there were also some unresolved issues due to the previous break up, and the fact that Kurt was so stubborn on his stance about marriage. Meanwhile, Blaine was so insecure, he depended on his relationship to mend those feelings, and tried to preserve that perfect feeling instead admitting that he needed help and the relationship wasn’t perfect.

I’m oversimplifying, there are a lot more complex parts going on but neither of them were truly happy despite them feeling grown up adults in the city of their dreams. The point being that they needed some time apart to grow up and mature a little to understand what being in an adult relationship means (explored more in season 6 after the break up).

One of the problems, in general, with the writing is that it was so focused on the more dramatic moments of the Klaine story, we didn’t get to see much happy down time or times when they did work better. This is a fault of Glee in general being a story about big moments and broad brushstrokes rather than zeroing in on the nuances of a complex relationship.

2. The direction - believe it or not, the actors are kind of vessels for what production needs them to be. Chris and Darren are both professionals (I’ll get to them in a minute) and if the director wanted more angst he’d give them another take. Ultimately - the director makes the call whether or not he’s happy with how the scene is playing out. If the directors weren’t happy with Chris or Darren’s performance, they would have done it over again.

3. Editing - so, I’ve studied Glee long enough as an artform to now have paid attention to things like editing. And let me say this -- I have long had issues with the way this show is edited. I’ll have to do a separate post on it if you really want it, but let’s say -- how you put together a TV show from various takes makes a huge difference. And by season five, the editing was choppy and often misleading. Part of it is because the scripts weren’t great. Part of it is because at this point I think they were under pressure to get things done in a short amount of time. And part of it is, I believe, by season 5, most of production didn’t have their hearts invested as much as they used to.

This goes and in hand with...

4. General production -- I do think this context is important. A beloved member of their family - Cory Monteith - had just passed away. That is /hard/. It’s hard to work around, it’s hard to write around, it’s hard to produce a show when someone you care for just isn’t there anymore. On top of that - Glee was not as popular as it once was. They were probably getting pressure from the network to do the show with less money, which meant less time to do all the normal production stuff -- and because glee had to incorporate things like musical performances, they were always pressed for time, which can cause sloppy production values.

5. Notes from the Network - there are always some -- I have no idea what they were, and what the network insisted they had to change, but the network always hand some kind of hand in shaping the show for better or worse.

6. Chris and Darren -- okay, let’s talk about this, even though I’m a little over this one, cause I’m tired of the two of them getting blamed for things - especially in season 5.

First of all, I don’t know either of them personally. And I think it’s unfair to speak for them. Unless they come out and say specifically how they felt about that time period, I would say take this analysis with a grain of salt.

No. I don’t think Chris was checked out. I’ve often said that Chris’s time on Glee is a lot like going to college. Sometimes it can be the best times! Sometimes it can be the worst. I know when I finished, I just wanted it to be done and over so I could move on with my life. I do think Chris was tired of certain aspects of the show -- I think he was tired of having to grow up on camera and in the media. I think he was tired of people constantly thinking he was dating his costar when he (clearly) was not. And both he and Darren were vocal about not really wanting Kurt and Blaine to get married (or being boring in the background of scenes).

Do I think he hated his job? No. Do I think he hated Klaine? No(ish). I think he wished Kurt had his own story line, and I do think both he and Darren actually enjoyed the heavier emotional stuff they were getting by the time season 5 came around. I also think that Chris does not want to be known as Kurt nor as one half of a popular TV couple because it impedes on his individuality. And I also think Chris was ready to move onto other things in his life.

Do I think that bleed into the show? No, I really do not. I think Chris knew how the season was going to play out - and played it accordingly.

(As an aside - I want to point out that Kurt during the NYC Arc is generally unhappy with more than just Blaine. And in fact, I’d argue, he’s more irritated with Rachel at any given point than he is with Blaine. Go watch Old Dogs New Tricks again -- he could have stuck it to Darren/Blaine, he did not. He stuck it to Lea. But that’s a completely different topic for later.)

Meanwhile, Darren! So, I’m going to preface this by saying -- I love Darren, I really do, and under good circumstances, he can be a great actor. And he has some just stellar moments in the NYC Arc. He also has some not so great ones, too - and out of the two of them Darren wavers in acting quality during this time period. I promise, it’s not a slam on Darren (I do love him!) but there’s some over-acting (and a little underacting) that’s going on, which doesn’t help much.

Also, I want to point out, that a lot of issues Chris was vocal about concerning Klaine, Darren had as well, he was just better about being diplomatic to the fans about it. He also wasn’t (as) bothered as Chris was about the whole tinhat thing (unless it involved verbally assaulting Mia, which then he put his foot down - yes that happened.)

So.... let’s talk a little about the episodes in NYC Arc and hit up some of the problem points, shall we?

New New York

The biggest issue people always seem to have with this one is the performance of You Make Me Feel So Young - which is off putting out of context. They’re supposed to be happily living together, right?? What’s going on?? Well, we’re a good nine months after Blaine moved in, it’s the morning after the bedbug scare where they were up half the night, and Kurt is a person who just needs his space and they’re living in a place that doesn’t have any walls. On top of that - Blaine is pushing a little hard on his fantasy of wanting to be an old married couple already. I’m not surprised Kurt isn’t all roses and daisies about it.

Am I sad we didn’t get to see the first few months of sunshine and rainbows? Yes absolutely! They definitely allude to the fact that they’re having a lot of sex -- and I’m sure there were a ton of sexy times in the beginning. But living in one room with five-ish other people is not fun, especially for someone who needs alone time and space to recharge. Or someone who just wants to have sexy times with his fiance and can’t because roommates.

No, You Make Me Feel So Young isn’t the most feels-y, but I’ll also argue that Kurt isn’t the most checked out either. There are moments in there where Kurt is genuinely happy and having fun messing around with Blaine. And the point of the song is that they are young and shouldn’t be singing that dumb-ass song about being old marrieds anyway.

The other thing is the whole Blaine moving out stuff. Which... is entirely because it propels the plot of everything else going on, not because logic. I do not really believe any young, engaged couple wouldn’t kick their friends out to their other friends house if that was an option so they could be together. But the show needed Kurt and Rachel to remain living together so Kurt could continue to be Rachel’s emotional prop. Whatever. And they wanted to set up the ending where Blaine moved back in again as a full circle moment (even though they end up breaking up again, lol I’ll get to it.)

So writing nonsense aside, I think they handled the important scene at the end of the episode really, really well. It’s one of my favorite Klaine scenes because it’s a time when Kurt actually expresses what’s in his heart - that he’s conflicted because he’s figuring out that love is not all you need to make a relationship work and he doesn’t know how to navigate that -- or if ultimately, the relationship is what he wants. But, it is, and his saying that his relationship with Blaine is one of the most precious things in his life is one of the strongest affirmations about anything that Kurt ever gives. Happy or not happy in that moment, Kurt values his relationship with Blaine above everything - and will protect what he thinks the relationship means at all costs -- even if it means breaking his own heart in the process.

Bash

This episode is a mess, and the weakest written episode of the arc. It’s essentially two very different plot lines unevenly stapled together. Kurt being bashed doesn’t get enough screen time, and it ends up being a morality tale for Rachel rather than delving into the impact it has on the actual gay members of the group. Blaine’s POV is very limited, which is a shame because there’s an entire story there they really should have told.

I’m using the still above to show that, yes, as awkward as the set up the scene above is - Kurt’s happy to see Blaine when he enters.

Why is Kurt so cold during the scene where they lay flowers at the dude’s attack scene? I don’t think he is? I think he’s recovering from getting the shit beaten out of him, and I’m under the impression that they guy actually died in the initial shooting of the scene and they changed it in post to have him live. On top of that - Blaine’s feeling clingy because he almost lost the person whom his entire self worth is relying on at the moment.

Tested

Tested is super, super complicated, and I’m just not going to rehash it here... again. Please read my meta on this one - I do go incredibly in depth on it.

I will say this -- Tested is an episode that is densely packed, and relies on subtext to tell a lot of its story. While I love this episode, the episode needed to be 100% focused on Klaine to really do the stories they were telling justice, and a lot of it is up to interpretation.

The biggest push back I always get on this one is the ending, and Kurt seeming ‘cold’ here. And I’ll say this -- You can love a person deeply, and still be as affirming as you can, and still be upset about how they were treating you. You can be sympathetic to their plights and frustrated that these conversations keep having to be had. Blaine’s insecurities are feeling heavy to Kurt -- that is a part of being in a relationship, that is a part of being in an adult relationship. Your prince and knight in shining armor is going to eventually be a human being with problems that you can’t always solve. And sometimes that is tiring - no matter how much you love a person.

Opening Night

There is zero Klaine in this episode - because it’s Rachel’s episode, and Kurt was needed as the gay best friend emotional prop. Do I think there was an missed opportunity to show Kurt and Blaine happily dancing together at the club? I do! But I don’t think it has anything to do with any interpretation of their characters. I think they told the actors to go have fun - and they did.

The Back Up Plan

I don’t necessarily have any major faults with this episode, nor have I heard much push back against it? Out of all of the episodes - this is the one where I do have some minor quibbles with acting, some of it being from Darren not clicking Blaine on for ten seconds or so at the beginning, and some of it from Chris being over-the-top in a few places, but nothing that fully takes me out of it. Neither of them are being different in scenes with each other than they are in scenes with other people. And there are some really solid Klaine moments in the episode itself.

Old Dogs, New Tricks

AKA The one that Chris wrote. Here’s my thing... there isn’t very much Blaine in this episode (wisely so). I think a) Chris wanted to write Kurt a story line that didn’t involve Blaine so Kurt could have a story line that didn’t have Blaine -- and that’s fine and valid and b) I don’t think he wanted the pressure of writing for Blaine, so wisely didn’t have him in it much.

He wrote a very sweet Klaine moment that incorporated the overall story. I have no complaints. And I’ll add -- Chris (purposely so I assume) directed all the passive-aggressive writer-y things towards Rachel. I do believe if he ultimately was having issues with Darren (or Blaine) he would have had zero compulsion about bringing that into the script.

The Untitled Rachel Berry Project

Do people have issues with this one? -- I really only have one, and that’s the end of the scene referenced above with the still. And it’s a good example of how I think production effects story. This is a beautiful scene, until the last few beats. We have this big emotional moment for Klaine -- and then it’s capped with a really dumb joke about Blaine being the luckiest guy in the world and a throwaway, badly edited kiss (scored to some upbeat, tacky scoring). If it were me - I’d let the emotion of the scene continue, let the boys stay on the steps, let them kiss in an emotionally driven moment, and then they can go run up stairs to have sex and not make a joke about being turned on by birds. The last ‘joke’ can be left on the cutting room floor because it’s really not needed. But Glee being a ‘comedy’ felt the need to cap the moment before the break with a joke because it’s Glee.

See what I mean? That’s not Chris or Darren’s fault. That’s one part writing, one part directing/editing, and one part my opinion of it not working.

Otherwise, I really don’t have issues with this particular episode.

I’ll say this though -- a) Kurt is incredibly happy to have Blaine move back in and that means something. b) the reason this is left on such an upbeat note, and not necessarily foreboding of what’s coming next season is that there was a real chance they weren’t getting a next season -- and they wanted to make sure the characters ended in happy places in case this was the series finale. c) we were shortchanged two episodes from this season -- who knows what more they could have developed if the had had more time.

*****

I don’t know if any of this helps (or if any of my additional meta helps) but I suppose I’ll say this -- I’ve meta’d these episodes so much that I see the cracks in the production, but I don’t really take issue with them anymore. I like the story being told, and all things considered, I don’t think it’s all that bad.

I think one thing to keep in mind is how Glee tells stories in general. Are the couples happy? Well, then they’re in the background not doing anything. Are they having conflict? Yes - well that’s front and center. Also, keep in mind that Glee prefers telling stories about couples getting together more than them being together (or breaking up). We start season 6 after the break up, and even season 4′s break up happens at the beginning of the season - why? Cause Glee loves writing angst-y couples who eventually get together in a big moment.

And I’ll add to that -- did you notice that Sam and Mercedes go through a similar arc as Klaine during the NYC arc? No really - do you know why Mercedes breaks it off with Sam? Because their lives are just in different places and she wants to preserve her good feelings for Sam -- and that’s very similar to Kurt’s reasons at the beginning of season 6.

No - this season isn’t happy, flirtiness of Kurt in season 2 (and I’ll argue that was Kurt’s story - not Blaine’s, and it’s also somewhat flimsy in structure when considering the love story aspect of it). It’s not the background moments of season 3 - because they’re together, and there’s not a classroom to be backgrounds of. (Could they have done a little more in the group scenes? Sure - but it’s not that bad.) It’s not the angst fest of seasons 4 and 6. And not helping is the fact that the first half of season 5 really had very little Klaine development at all.

so, back to the beginning, I feel like the story they wanted to tell was about Klaine having conflict and resolving said conflict, and getting them to grow into an adult relationship. Do I wish there were more happier times to balance that out? Of course I do! Do I feel like there’s a lack of chemistry or that Chris and/or Darren are to blame? Absolutely not. Hope this helps a little Nonny - and feel free to ask me about specific moments if you need to <3

#Anonymous #that's how s.o. sees it #what I did instead of finishing chap 10 #oops #there's more discussion in my finding kh meta - please go check that out too for more details on the episodes

23 notes · View notes

writing-in-the-tiny-house · 3 years

Text

Order of Dust, with Nicholas J Evans

Follow this link to check out Order of Dust:

https://amzn.to/2Vx9LN2

Follow this link to check out The Ones Who Could Do Anything:

https://amzn.to/3ttCvCQ

The following is a transcript for this episode. For the complete transcript, please navigate to the show’s website.

[00:00:00] So I have a very important question for you, my dear friends, and this is how we're starting off this episode. Are you passionate enough about the things you like to do? And because this is this podcast, are you passionate enough about writing to be able to release something bad at first, knowing that you will get better later that going through those trials and going through the process of releasing something is part of the experience of getting better. Then you need to take a second and listen to today's guest, Nicholas J. Evans, who went from writing a collection of short stories in high school that he was convinced nobody would want to read to landing a three book deal today on Writing in the Tiny House.

[00:00:58] Hello. Hello. Hello, and welcome to the show. Welcome to Writing in the Tiny House. I am your host Devin Davis, and I am the guy living in a tiny house who is here to show you that you can write that work of fiction regardless of how busy you think you are. And the perfect example of that is today's guest Nicholas J. Evans. He is 30 years old. He works full time. And in his spare time, when he's not playing with his kids, he writes. And he has a beautiful message to share. And we will get to that message here in half a second.

[00:01:58] As far as announcements go with this podcast, I have teamed up with Editor Krissy Barton, from Little Syllables Editing. She was on the show back in March, and we had a wonderful show. I fully recommend that you go back and listen to the final show that happened in March. She was here with me in the tiny house, talking about the process of editing. Anyway, I have teamed up with her to roll out kind of a new program. And I say that as a way to kind of tease.

[00:02:35] I apologize right now, but I want to let you know that fun things are rolling out, provided things work out according to a specific schedule. Sometimes I get some hairball ideas and sometimes the execution is kind of hard to do, kind of impossible to do at other times. And so we are discovering different ways that I can share my writing with you, my listeners, and also with people who don't listen to this show.

[00:03:10] So basically I have started writing some smaller things. I have blabbed on and on and on about my book about my works in progress, and I still have those. And those have certainly not been like thrown in the garbage or something stupid like that. They have been put on the back burner for a second, just because I am eager to share my writing. On this podcast I blab all day long about the tips and tricks to do it. And so I actually want to show examples. Release something for people to read sooner than a book, sooner than a full blown novel, which can take up to two years or longer to write or produce or whatever, especially if you're not already published through a major publisher.

[00:04:03] And so I have started doing some shorter things. They all tie into the books that I'm writing. They are short stories set in the same world as the books that I am working on too. And these, I am going to put on a schedule. I will tell you more about what that whole schedule will look like in a later episode of Writing in the Tiny House, but be excited.

[00:04:30] This whole process is so fun. Writing something according to a schedule is hard and awesome. And it really gets me excited about writing and it gets me more eager to share it with you, my listeners, what I can do, what I have done, some of the ideas that are in my mind. And so it's not just about advice or guidelines anymore.

[00:04:59] Now we are going to actually have the real written word to share with you on a regular basis. So I will touch base on a later episode to give better explanation and better description as to what all of this is actually going to be. But I wanted to share with you today that things are in the works. And so that's super exciting.

[00:05:26] So without further ado, let's go ahead and meet our guest. Nicholas J. Evans.

[00:05:35] I'm originally from New York and I've moved a lot over the course of becoming an author, and I'm writing novels and writing short fiction, so I lived in Delaware for a brief period of time. And I currently live in Maine with my wife and our three very young children. We have three daughters, all under the age of five and I work full time.

[00:05:56] I travel for work which means I, am not home as much as I would like to, be, but I try and use that time to my advantage. And that's where I work on a majority of my stories. So I work on them when I'm in hotels. I work on them when the kids are asleep at nap times, pretty much whenever I get the opportunity. Even going as far back as to when I started writing short stories, I would work on them on my phone, just so I would have the time during brief periods of the day.

[00:06:22] As you can see, Nick is a busy man and the idea of fitting in writing where you can fit it in is not new to most writers. Most writers do not support themselves with their craft. And so to be working a job and to be cranking out novels in his spare time is something that a lot of us are doing, which is so cool and so admirable.

[00:06:44] And so I wanted to find out a little bit more about his published works and what he's working on now.

[00:06:52] I began writing Order of Dust, which was my debut novel all the way back in 2017. I actually was working on a different novel at the time and I had hit writer's block. It was a completely different genre too. And I was like, I need something to work on. What am I going to be working on, while I'm just sitting here staring at a screen not knowing what to put down?

[00:07:11] So I began writing something that I originally thought I was going to release as a graphic novel. Actually, I began writing it in a script format with the hopes of sending it out that way. and I found that might've not been the right medium. So I turned around and started drafting it into a novel. And then around 2018, I was finished up with the second draft of it. And then I had started sending it out to publishers directly because it was my first work. I didn't want to get anything agented. I didn't think I was there yet. And I was lucky enough to get picked up by the Parliament House for a trilogy for my series. So I was very excited about that and I mean, that led to where we are now with the novel release in 2020, which was a weird time for books to release. It was a little bit of a different experience because everything had to be pushed digitally. We couldn't do signings. We couldn't do cons. We couldn't do anything. so a lot of it had to be just reaching out to different digital agencies to take care of things for us and hope that things were going to go well. Luckily enough, they did go well, which led to me working on throughout 2020 after we were already edited and everything was finished up for Order of Dust. I ended up working on the second novel of the series. And I had just finished a different novel, that I'll go into in a little bit that is actually releasing this September for a different publisher. COVID was very, very unfortunate and working from home was very difficult, but at the same time I was able to try and use as much downtime as possible to really hammer this out and give what I feel like is even a better product than the first novel.

[00:08:48] So the name of the trilogy is For Humans, For Demons, which will make sense in the grand scheme of things? So it's For Humans For Demons. The second, book comes out January of 20 22, no release date on the third, but I am halfway through the first draft of it and very excited. And then, Like I said, I do have another novel coming out with a different publisher in September of this year.

[00:09:11] The For Humans For Demon series is essentially about what if modern religion collapsed Similar to what we've seen in history where different religions end up taking the forefront. And this is about what if it's turned on its head and what if in a modern society what everybody believed to be true ends up not being? And everybody finds out about that truth and the chaos that ensues.

[00:09:36] So bringing that as the larger universe, it focuses on the story of one character Jackson Crow who dies at the hands of the Unascended, which essentially to bring it to better terms a soul in this universe is called a Dust and sometimes they do not ascend for different reasons. So they end up remaining and taking on a host basically. They take over a body of a living person and they hide among people. Jackson was unfortunate for him and his fiance, were assassinated by one of the Unascended, which leaves him with a little bit of a grudge, and he gets the chance from the true higher beings to come back and basically work for them to take care of the issue, which is these Unascended who are hiding as normal people are committing heinous crimes that they are not actually being targeted for.

[00:10:28] So it's all about his story, about getting revenge. And then it slowly opens up to this bigger issue at hand, which is the world around him that is essentially collapsed because people do not have a belief structure anymore. And that goes for all of the different religions and how it affects the different groups of people, which really ends up coming out in the second and the third books

[00:10:52] So I have read Order of Dust and it is a wild ride. It is fast paced. It is exciting. It is filled with action and all of the things you could hope from a book like that. And so I wanted to figure out what was his inspiration to write a book like this.

[00:11:10] I wanted to write something That was, based on religion. I wanted to go that route. But originally when I was doing this, the only idea I had was what if somebody had to hunt people? What if somebody had this job where they had to hunt people cause they were different? And it just kept breaking down until I was like, well, what if he's also different? A lot of the influences for that book came right from graphic novels from monga, from old scifi, noire stories. So things like Philip K Dick or even things like Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman. A lot of inspiration from Yasuhiro Nightow who is best known for writing Trigun in the nineties and Gunn Grave. So a lot of that I want it to kind of mush together and I was like, this would just be something fun. And, and that's what I did.

[00:12:00] Book number two was Wing Clipper, that one releases in January of 2022. And that one is going to break into the larger world. The first book was very focused on Jackson, focused on introducing characters and introducing some antagonist, but the second book really opens up. It is longer. So it won't be as fast of a read. But that was the goal. I wanted to introduce people in a way, almost like what Stephen King did with Gunslinger, the dark tower series. The first book gunslinger is very short. It's a very quick read and then slowly gets longer.

[00:12:31] That was my goal here is I want to get people drawn in and then really open it up in the second and say like look how everybody else has been affected by this. And then the third book right now is called The Arm of the Savior. In the third book, we'll close everything out in a very large scale. I've been building up to something with these hoping that it ends in a larger way than it started, where it starts very narrow, very singular, and it ends more global. And that one does not have a release date as of yet just because the second book's not even out, but I would say that's probably going to be somewhere around, early to mid 2023.

[00:13:07] Now while his trilogy for humans for demons is with one publisher. Nick has done what many successful writers have done. And he is publishing another book under a different publisher. Another publishing house picked him up for this book for this idea. And so. Just depending on contracts and agreements, it is entirely possible for a person to put out work under various different publishing houses.

[00:13:39] And Nick has done that too with his upcoming novel that releases this month, even though in the dialogue here in the audio, it says it releases in September. We get to remember that it is now September and this interview wasn't recorded this month. So please don't get confused.

[00:13:57] The book releasing in September is with a different publisher, Black Rose. What ended up happening was I was working on another while I was doing the editing process for Order of Dust. I wanted to work on something else, but I didn't want to dive into the second book without first working with the different content editors, the line editors to kind of get their idea and feedback on that first book. But I wanted to work on something.

[00:14:19] I had been writing a lot of shortstories, and I wanted to break it up from the normal. And at the time I had just come up to Maine for work. So I was very far away. My wife and kids were down in Delaware. On the weekends I was driving down there 10 to 12 hours to see them and then driving back So it was a lot of alone time for Monday through Friday. And I just felt like I needed to do something with this time, so I wrote the book.

[00:14:43] It's called The Ones Who Could Do Anything. And it's an urban fantasy, but it's mainly just about dealing with struggles. I don't want to give too much away, but surviving after something terrible happens. And it follows just a group of young people who find each other because of their misfortunes and discover that they have some innate abilities that lend themselves to each other. So it's, again, it's something that at first, and this is, this is what I loved when I had brought up to the publisher at first, they were like, this sounds like, like the premise of it, like something that we've read a hundred times.

[00:15:21] And I was like, I know, you know, I'm not trying to give you something that everybody already knows just by looking at the cover of the book. But luckily they were like, you know, We read the first three chapters of it. Can you send us the rest of the manuscript? And when they did, they really like, they're like, this is different.

[00:15:37] As many writers bring out a certain work or certain ideas or bring these different things to life. Oftentimes there are specific goals that they have with these things. And I wanted to find out what was the reason behind four humans were demons and this new book, because they are so different, different publishing houses.

[00:16:06] Different ideas, different concepts. And so I wanted to figure out more about that.

[00:16:11] One thing I would love for everybody to know is everything that I write and put out. I want to be very different. And I think the people who enjoy For Humans For Demons and enjoy that series, maybe would read The Ones Who Could Do Anything and feel like, this is different. It's a little bit darker and more base of reality rather than something that's completely scifi.

[00:16:33] But I want everybody to be open minded to that. I think some of my favorite authors branching from every different medium, have always tried to dabble in that a lot of their books are not linear. Obviously there are authors out there who do release very similar books and they do very well. But when I think of my favorite Neil Gaymon I don't feel like his books are the same. I feel like I pick up any of his books and they're different and that's my overall goal. And I wanted to let people know that right from the start, because I want people to pick up different books and be like, this is different from that one. And I love them for what they are.

[00:17:06] And so came the big question. How did any of this get started? How far back does this go for him? When was the first time he put pen to paper in a creative way? And how did all that go?

[00:17:24] I appreciate this coming up because I don't get to share this a lot because I don't want them to intertwine, but I've been in bands my entire life. I was a musician for most of my life. I'm 30 now. I was in bands all through high school and everything.

[00:17:36] And then in 2011, I was in a band called Nora Stone, and we were a post hardcore group. I say we were, but they're still together. A hardcore group. And we ended up releasing a short EP and it got us on a label. We did a lot of traveling. We did a lot of touring. So were on the road, a good amount. We did Metal Mayhem Festival.

[00:17:56] We did Crowd Surf America with CHODOs and Blessed the Fall. This is all a bunch of Warp Tour bands. But we did a lot of that for a very long time. And after the birth of my first daughter, I realized I had to start dwindling it down. I had already started the career I'm in now.

[00:18:11] And I was like, what can I do? And back in high school, and when we're on the road, I would just write short stories. A lot of it, I'm going to be honest with you. If anybody remembers my yearbook shout outs to to New York, if anybody remembers my yearbook, it asks something about what do you want to do?

[00:18:26] And at the time I want it to be a graphic novel writer. And that is in my yearbook. So I would just create characters, write backstories for them. And that's what I would do on my phone to pass the time is what I thought was fun. So when I moved to Delaware and parted ways with the band, I needed something to occupy my time and I did not want to dive back into music.

[00:18:45] I had done it for too long. I didn't want to start over. I ended up just writing short stories again on my phone for fun. And my wife had actually read one of them and she was like, how come you never release anything? Like, how come you just sit here and write in the notes section of your phone and then delete it.

[00:18:59] And I was like, I don't know. I don't think I have anything people want to read. I worked on something and she read the first draft of it and was like, I really like this. Like, you should just try and get this published. And I was like, I don't think people are going to like it, but okay. And then it got published.

[00:19:13] And then all of a sudden I have my mother, my friends, my family, who were like, you know, I like this. I don't understand why you didn't do this sooner. And I'm like, I, I don't know. You probably wouldn't like what I wrote in high school.

[00:19:23] And so this is actually the take home, this upcoming little statement that Nick makes for me during this interview. And this is why I opened this episode with that question of, are you willing to release something bad or at least release something that requires some refinement and requires some work in order for you to get better?

[00:19:45] My biggest piece of advice, would first, I guess we'll start with one. Right. Even if it's bad, even if you just have a story in mind and you're like, I'm not going to put these words together properly, and people are not going to like this Cause that's where I was at. Write. And then just send it in. Have faith in yourself, send it in and trust me, trust me When I say the publishers are going to tell you when it's bad I've had a lot of publishers. I've had my own publishers tell me it's bad. And that's just part of the process is how you get better. And I've said this in the beginning, but I feel like every time I write something new, it gets better.

[00:20:24] And for new writers, that's going to be the case. The first thing you put out there might not even get published. And then you have to really look at the feedback you got and say.

[00:20:31] Okay. They didn't like it for these reasons. Is it the story? Is it me? Is it something I need to change? But at the same time, you want to maintain your own voice and you're not going to please everybody.

[00:20:42] And eventually you'll get good enough. And eventually the right publisher will come along, have faith in your project and really carry you through the way. And second piece of advice, listen to your publishers. If you're going that route, if you're going self published Listen to your beta readers and listen to the editors that you bring on.

[00:20:58] But if you're going a traditional or an indie publisher route, listen to them. Because most of the time, 99% of the time from my experience so far, they want what's best for your book without removing the parts of the book that make it yours. So definitely just write whatever you can send it in. They're going to tell you it sucks and then listen to them when they tell you it sucks.

[00:21:22] And that is the biggest lesson with developing any form of talent, just like learning to play the piano or learning to play a musical instrument or learning how to paint or draw or whatever. It may be different skills that you have at work. So wing. I don't know. All of these things are talents and talents require practice and paying attention to feedback.

[00:21:49] And so that means that sometimes you get to be brave and you get to write something that may not be great. And you get to give it to a few trusted people in order for them to find the holes in it that you don't see. And in order for them to pick apart some of the clunky things and to offer some guidance and some advice.

[00:22:10] So that, that bit of work can be even better than it was when it, when you began it. And so that is the take home from me to you. If you are looking to seriously get into writing, and it's not something that you do all the time, just start, write anything and then give it to somebody to critique.

[00:22:34] The feedback is the most important lessons. With writing so that you can get better hearing how your work can improve is a very vulnerable space to be in. But it, like I said, it is the biggest lesson on how to do it better and on how to make that specific piece better. So that is it for today. If you are interested in reading Order of Dust or The Ones Who Can Do Anything, go ahead and follow the link in the show notes and you will be able to check those out.

[00:23:09] Otherwise, thank you so much to my patrons who donate to this show every month without your generous donations, the show could not be possible. Go ahead and follow me on social media. My Instagram handle is @authordevindavis and my Twitter handle is @authordevind. Thank you so much for listening and have fun writing.

[00:23:33]

Check out this episode!

#writing #writer #author #fiction #am writing #wip

1 note · View note

papermoonloveslucy · 3 years

Text

EQUAL PARTS TALENT & HARD WORK

December 26, 1965

Below is a verbatim reprint an article by Edgar Penton based on his interview with Lucille Ball. Bolded and italicized text indicates quotes from Ball. The publication may vary by newspaper. The above illustration was by Robert Thompson.

During a recent discussion between a television producer and a network program executive on the problem of casting a top role for a big television variety special, the latter remarked, "If we could just get somebody like Lucille Ball we'd be in clover."

The producer mulled that statement over for all of one second and said, "There is only one Lucille Ball, and if you can't get Lucy there's no such thing as somebody like her."

That statement comes pretty close to a capsule explanation of Miss Ball's unparalleled success as a star in all phases of the entertainment business.

Of course, Lucy's career can't be embraced with a single anecdote, but it serves to underscore the fact that there really IS only one Lucille Ball.

From that landmark evening, Oct. 15, 1951, when CBS launched a new comedy series called "I Love Lucy," to the present, Lucille Ball has never left the hearts and screens of the nation's television viewers.

The vivacious and irrepressible comedienne enjoys the distinction of being the only star to score twice in a hit television series her latest, of course, the current “The Lucy Show” still on CBS, Monday evenings.

To evaluate the success of a Lucille Ball, however, a person must go beyond the popularity of a television show. Let's take a look at Lucy, herself, and then perhaps we can understand something about the talent that creates so many memorable moments of entertainment.

Lucy (hardly anyone calls her Lucille, except her mother) candidly attributes her success to hard work. As a matter of fact, that's the advice she gives to all newcomers who ask her how to make the grade -in show business.

"I know it sounds rather easy and simple to tell an eager youngster to get out and work hard," Lucy explains, "and they get a lot of advice like that from parents. But show business is no different than any other business.”

"If you want to reach the top, you've got to start somewhere near the bottom. Learn to be a good listener and remember what you learn.”

"Of course, luck sometimes plays a part in everyone's career, but you can't rely on it. Even if fortune did place you in an advantageous position would you be prepared to deliver? I like busy people who know their capabilities and utilize them at the proper time.”

"It may only be part of the overall goal, but there's nothing wrong in having a series of goals, and realizing one at a time.”

"It's great for the confidence, and will win you respect and recognition at a time when you least expect it."

Miss Ball says she considers it necessary for an aspiring performer to be able to communicate with others, exchange ideas and philosophies, develop a sense of values, and not to expect what you don't deserve.

"When I was a youngster my family taught me that you get out of life what you put into it," Lucy says.

"By the time a lot of people learn the soundness of that philosophy, they find it's too late to retreat to a sensible position, and spend much of their lives trying to overcome ill - conceived notions about what life owes them.”

"Faith in yourself and your ambitions doesn't necessarily mean you have to put aside all the graces in your race for success. Yet I say you can afford to be a little selfish as you progress.”

"But I don't mean 'selfish' in a negative sense. For example, be selfish about your time. Don't waste it. Don’t let a party or a good time dilute your effectiveness on the job. Don't try to do too many things to the point of not being able to do a few things well."

Lucy says that during her early years she felt a great insecurity about her own ambitions. She thought her personality was flat, that she had no poise; after losing half-a-dozen jobs . she was just about ready to give up show business.

"I felt down, but not quite out," Lucy recalls. "Even when a New York drama coach told me but kindly ; that I was not cut out for the entertainment world, something within me wouldn't quit. I took other jobs, in, around and near the theater.”

"I finally got a job as a model. I wasn't acting or performing in a true sense, but I gained confidence and I haven't stopped working since."

Few would argue the point that Lucy is one of the hardest working gals in show business, but it should also be recalled that the spirited redhead from Jamestown, N.Y. brought a little item into the entertainment marketplace called talent.

Over the years she has managed to shape her endowments into what today is regarded as one of the great comedic talents of our time.

Her ability to grasp a situation or scene and transform it into riotous fun is one of the many reasons why her appearance is sheer joy to watch. And she has also developed a remarkable ability to do startling, realistic impressions of other personalities.

Tribute to Lucy's rare and wonderful versatility as a comedienne comes from every writer who has had the opportunity to pen a scene or create a characterization for any of Miss Ball's adventures before the cameras.

Her long-time writers on “I Love Lucy,” Bob Carroll Jr., and Madelyn Martin, Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf, who came back to launch Lucy's return to television on “The Lucy Show,” admit they create some almost impossible situations for Lucy.

But they have never been able to stump the adept Miss Ball, who didn't mind one bit swinging from a chandelier, going up with a balloon or flying like Peter Pan.

Milt Josefsberg, principal writer on the current Lucy Show, says that he no longer has misgivings about whether Lucy is capable of meeting demands of certain scripts.

"Since I've been on the show, Lucy has wrestled a bear, played with a porpoise and single-handedly wrecked an entire motion picture set. Yet when she is earthbound, she's peerless when it comes to timing and delivery.”

Today, Miss Ball is the president of Desilu Productions, largest television film producing facility in the world. She is the mother of two talented youngsters (Lucie, 14, and Desi Jr., 12, children of her marriage to Desi Arnaz), and the wife of comedian Gary Morton (they just celebrated their fourth anniversary).

She just completed a season of radio on CBS (”Let's Talk to Lucy”), took time out to star in two one-hour television specials, completed a year as national chairman of the Easter Seal Campaign, and is talking about plans for next year.

Like Lucy said, it takes hard work.

Although the text of the article was basically the same in all newspapers (sometimes edited for length), syndicated columns would often feature different headlines, photos and other enhancements. This is the headline and photo collage of the same Edgar Penton article in another newspaper.

On the same date, Chicago television editor Larry Walters retired after 36 years and counted Lucille Ball as one of his most memorable performers.

On December 26, 1965, the Miami News reported that Vivian Vance was returning to the Coconut Grove Playhouse to perform in the Neil Simon play Barefoot in the Park. In August 1965, co-star Darryl Hickman and Vance had appeared on the TV game show “Call My Bluff” together.

The day after these articles hit newspapers, a new episode of “The Lucy Show” premiered titled “Lucy Discovers Wayne Newton” (TLS S4;E14).

#Lucille Ball #The Lucy Show #Lucy #1965 #Edgar Penton #Green Bay Press-Gazette #Wayne Newton #Vivian Vance #Barefoot in the Park #Darryl Hickman

7 notes · View notes

recentanimenews · 3 years

Text

INTERVIEW: After 13 Years, Indie RPG Masterpiece Ruina is Finally Available in English

All screenshots of Ruina: Fairy Tale of the Forgotten Ruins taken by author

This article was made possible through the invaluable contributions of translators Dink and bool, and further aided by context generously provided by writer, translator, and RPG Maker scene dweller Kastel (@kastelwrites). Sections from their answers were excerpted for this piece and edited for clarity and content.

Last year, at the start of the pandemic, a lapsed member of the RPG Maker community known as Dink stumbled across a screenshot while trawling Japanese free game websites: a black obelisk standing in the midst of ruins. “This is going to make me sound like I've been huffing paint, but this image spoke to something quite visceral for me — like I'd been waiting to find this game. Something about the sepia tones, the light and shadows, the elegance of its very archetype. I knew I had to play it.” Dink had stumbled across Ruina: Haitou no Monogatari (Fairy Tale of the Forgotten Ruins), one of the most acclaimed free RPGs ever made in Japan. Released in the antiquated RPG Maker 2000 engine in 2008 by developer Shoukichi Karekusa, it retains a strong cult following and has even been translated into Chinese. Yet unlike its RPG Maker siblings Yume Nikki and Ib, Ruina is practically unknown in English-speaking countries. Dink decided to change that. “Once I realized that it had yet to be translated into English,” he said, “it was like I’d become possessed.”

Ruina is unique. A role-playing game that takes direct influence from tabletop games and gamebooks, it boldly defies conventions established by classic console role-playing games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. Rather than controlling the main character across a top-down map, the player slowly uncovers a hand-illustrated map of nodes. Survival in the dungeon requires the use of ropes, pickaxes, and oil for your lantern, resources that are all expendable. Your party members are valuable not only for their combat skills but for their out-of-combat abilities: thieving, sneaking, even swimming. Most of all, Ruina allows for choice and consequence, a phenomenon far more common in western RPGs than Japanese RPGs. Say you stumble across treasure in a dungeon, but are ambushed by thieves who want the treasure for themselves. Do you give the treasure to the thieves? Stand your ground? Or attack the thieves before they can do the same to you? Since your ability to save in the dungeon is heavily rationed, you may find yourself having to choose between restarting a save or living with the messy outcomes of your choices.

There’s something to Ruina that grounds it in the Japanese RPG tradition, rather than a straightforward riff on Wizardry or Might & Magic. Those earlier games gave you several choices as to building your party, but little in the way of story or character. Ruina is a far more curated experience. On starting the game, you’re offered four “backgrounds” that align you with certain other characters, just one year before Dragon Age: Origins would pull a similar trick. Rather than being given the full freedom to explore a sprawling world, your options are limited to navigating a single, contained dungeon. The characters available to be recruited into your party have defined personalities and quirks — some are already good friends of yours, others are insufferable, and still others have significant flaws that speak to the kind of person they are versus their gameplay function. These are NPCs out of the Baldur’s Gate school, given the illusion of life, rather than the team of personalized murderers you’d recruit in an Etrian Odyssey game.

Very little else in the Japanese games scene is like Ruina. You could draw comparisons with games like Unlimited Saga and Scarlet Grace, representing the legacy of controversial SQUARE ENIX auteur Akitoshi Kawazu. You could similarly connect Ruina with Yasumi Matsuda’s experimental Crimson Shroud, which takes influence from tabletop to the point that it has the player rolling dice in-game. But Ruina is more accessible and polished than a Kawazu game, and far more fleshed out than Crimson Shroud. Even Etrian Odyssey, with its comparatively barebones story and characters, doesn’t quite compare. Ruina stands alone in the Japanese free games community, a legendary title that people respect but don’t fully understand how to replicate.

A few days ago I reached out to Kastel, an academic, writer, and translator who is very familiar with Japan’s RPG Maker scene, about where Ruina fit in Japan’s wider field of indie games. “I know many people in the furige (free game) scene who love the game to death,” they said. “But they also found it to be a hard sell due to its unique, almost western take on the scene. The fact that the game is even this popular speaks to something.” Despite its crunchy mechanics and niche inspirations, the game is popular enough to have spawned light novels, an honor not unique to it (other RPG Maker games have accomplished the same) but certainly significant. Kastel drew a comparison between Ruina and Darkest Dungeon, another weird and uncompromising game that draws from both Japanese and western RPGs. “Ruina is sorta different from everything, but you also see dungeon crawlers get inspired by it,” they said. “Not all games take direct inspiration, but you can’t help but see a little bit of Ruina here and there.”

So why did it take so long for anybody to translate Ruina? Dink isn’t the only person to try his hand at translating it into English; just last fall, another forum dweller placed an ad recruiting a translation team to tackle the game. The unfortunate reality is that translating text within the RPG Maker engine into English requires intensive and repetitive labor. “There’ve been tools developed by vgperson [a prominent translator of RPG Maker games] for RPG Maker 2000 and some other machine translation tools for newer games, but they all remain difficult to use for translators,” Kastel says. “The way games are scripted uses events inside the map and developers rarely name them. So not only do you need to edit it via the appropriate RPG Maker engine, but you also need to go through each event contextless unless the creator actually notes things down.” So, the enterprising Ruina translator doesn’t just need to translate all the text in the game into English. It isn’t even a question of whether or not to manually edit the game’s many pictures and custom menus into English by hand. It’s the sheer difficulty of navigating between thousands of (often poorly labeled) events and variables in the RPG Maker engine, ensuring not to introduce any new bugs or errors in the process, while also finding the time to do all of the above.

Dink was assisted by a friend of his named bool, who played through the game alongside the translation process and gave invaluable advice and fixes. “Uncovering the mystery in the game's story sort of ran parallel with the translation of the game itself,” bool says. “As the story progressed, the characters would decipher and learn more about the lore of the eponymous ruins within the game, and as the translation progressed, the same held true for us. It really captivated me to be a part of this process, and I started to look forward to each new area that I could explore and each new morsel of the story I could understand.”

Without bool’s efforts, it might have taken far longer to put together something workable. As it was, it took four exhausting months. “I worked long hours — 12+ hours a day, 6, sometimes 7 days a week on top of my day job — and very rarely used my free time on anything else,” Dink says. “I did manually input the text in RPG Maker 2000, which has raised some eyebrows because there are some very nice tools available for game translation that would have saved me a lot of time. However, a huge advantage of working directly in the editor is being able to see the game more or less as it appears to players. A Notepad file streamlines the basic translation process, but it also heavily obscures context, whereas the editor allows you to see what switches and variables are being used, what music is being played, and sometimes even helpful creator comments, all in the same relative order you'd experience it from within the game.” Dink had one more secret weapon up his sleeve: the experience of working with the RPG Maker engine as an adolescent. RPG Maker has a reputation of being a tool designed to churn out Dragon Quest clones with ease; but nobody knows the intense difficulty of forcing the engine to do something, anything, like a former RPG Maker developer does.

The English version of Ruina, as it currently exists, is a workable but inevitably compromised version of the game. Running the game requires installing the Japanese RTP pack of visual and audio resources for RPG Maker to function, along with the use of the EasyRPG player to provide English-language player name entry. There’s the matter of the custom menus, as well. Several of the menus have been replaced with functional English equivalents, but by Dink's own admission they could use an expert's attention to better compare to the original. Other pictures, such as place name displays, have yet to be replaced by English-language equivalents at all. And the strict character limits of RPG Maker 2000 led to some creative truncating when translating from Japanese to English, especially with item and skill descriptions.

But the existence of an English-language Ruina, one that renders the whole game playable from beginning to end with a readable script, is a miracle. Speaking for myself, I started the long process of learning Japanese two years ago in part so that I could one day play this game, never expecting there might one day be an alternative. Others in the Japanese RPG Maker scene, knowing the brutal difficulty of translating a game made in the earlier engines, were shocked that a game of Ruina’s complexity and length was successfully translated at all. Speaking for themselves, Dink and bool insist that their own story doesn’t matter much. What matters is the quality of the original game and the hard work developer Shoukichi Karekusa put into its creation. Anything else is an addendum, another version of the game that — while it cannot ever be the original — might at least make something resembling that original experience accessible to others.

Frankly speaking, I think there’s something to that. The “true” version of Ruina will always exist in its original form, released for free by Karekusa in 2008. It stands as the defining work of a creator who sought to create a unique experience combining the appeal of console and tabletop roleplaying games, with no concessions to market sensibilities. A creator who not only released their baby on the internet for free, but insisted that a game like Ruina must always and ever be free. An austere monolith, it stands side by side with Yume Nikki, Ib, and even Cave Story as one of the great works to come out of Japan’s independent scene. Now any English speaker can pick up and play this new version of Ruina, and learn what that monolith is and where it leads to.

You can download the English translation of Ruina here. For those who want to learn more about the Japanese RPG Maker scene, I recommend checking out Kastel’s page here.

Are you a Ruina fan? Let us know in the comments!

Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. When he is not working through exercises in Wanikani, he sporadically contributes with a loose group of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? You can find him on Twitter at:@wendeego

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a feature, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Adam Wescott

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

4 notes · View notes