Secret proejct

I've been spending a ton of time working toward putting together a film project - more news soon.

The bright spot in a really lousy week - life imitating art.

My week, and weekend so far, have sucked massive donkey...ears.

Started out well enough, I got a last minute call for some video work which was a wonderous little cash infusion in a usually completely dry month.

The first phone call came - a mutual friend of the other shooter and I had died due to cancer complications. Meh.

When I got home from the job, I found out that a college buddy's mother had passed away.  Then, I found out again.  Yep.  Two different friends, two different mothers, all in one week.

Two of the funerals took place on the same day, at nearly the same time.  It has been a long time since I've had a dilemma of this particular nature, and am not looking forward to experiencing it again.

I have about six million things that I'm obligated to work on, and can't concentrate on a single one.  (This blog has taken over an hour.)

To ice the crap cake, someone tore the rear bumper off my car last night.  

The one bright, and more than a bit surreal moment in an otherwise miserable chain of events:

As the officer I had filed the report with began to drive away, a woman poked her head out of the window of the apartment building that overlooked the parking lot.  

"I seen it! I seen the whole thing!"

I didn't even know anyone lived in that building. (Well, I knew, but in that vague, diaphanous sort of way, like 'the building isn't falling down and there are curtains in the window', but I had never seen anyone come in or out.)

A spark of hope?  Hanging onto that idea like a monkey with the last banana on Earth, I clumsily encouraged her to tell the story.  Luckily for me, she was more than happy to talk.  With the occasional 'shaddup' to some small creature at her side, we got an approximate time.  I felt like the MC of a mystery movie, where a 'deux ex machina' character pops out of nowhere to drop key pieces of evidence.  That bit was pretty cool.  Alas, no license plate number.  I do however, feel better about the neighborhood, and amused that there actually are people who spend the evening peering out of windows.  I totally would, except the sole window of my apartment looks over the HVAC systems in the middle of the building.

Being the brilliant (if someone hits me over the head with it, I'll notice) detective that I am, I didn't think to extend the conversation - but I did pick up a piece of the perp's car, left next to my dead bumper.

Hopefully, some light will appear at the end of this tunnel.

Happy New Year!

I hope your holidays were marvelous!  I was down for the count with a head cold that left me as a prime contender for the role of Reagan in the remake of Exorsist.

My first job of the new year involved creating a time lapse video of  the building of a windmill for a Christmas tree farm.  In four feet of snow.

You can read the details of the adventure here:

http://filmmakeriq.com/groups/screening-room/forum/topic/trying-out-this-time-lapse-thing/#post-new

Confessions of a literary voyeur

I love reading other people's blogs - mostly informational blogs: GalleyCat, ERECsite, Miss Snark, The Evil Editor

Sometimes, it'll be things like Forgotten New York, or the tidbits of obscure history from Cracked.com - interesting pieces of history and the human condition that may spark stories of my own, or introduce me to places that I can actually go visit and find out more about on my own.

Lately, most of my online reading has been personal blogs and anecdotes from complete strangers.  It's as though a million characters have opened their windows in this immense apartment building, graciously allowing the peeping tom outside a peek into some pastiche of their life.  More than allowing, I suppose.  They set out the fine silver and china, for many, painting ideological portraits of memories.  Others bring out the heavy metal posters and toss the mattress onto the floor (which you suspect was perfectly well made only moments ago) and sensationalize some event until it has all the believability of a morning talk show guest.

The ones that get my attention the best are a balance.  They don't so much sugar coat events as find that soft spot that makes us still love crazy Uncle Jemmy (not a real person) even though he pours Bud Light over his corn flakes every morning.  The trials and frightening parts of life are matter of fact, often responded to and written about with the wry humor of a survivor.

When writing fiction, it seems part of the difficulty is making the story compelling and human.  Creating fully dimensional characters with strengths, weaknesses, talents and foibles.  The more information you have to draw from, the easier this becomes.  Writing convincing fiction is difficult from a vacuum.

Don't plagiarize,  but do open your eyes and ears to all different kinds of stories, from all sorts of people.  The only way to make your imaginary characters feel real, is to make them 'real'.

Bo's Cafe Life

The art of the simple web comic.  I think this particular creator has drawn six panels or so - ever.

And it's a great comic!

Click on the blog title for the link

What's your writing goal?

I'm not talking about word count per day of letters here.  I want to know what your ultimate fantasy goal is with your writing career.

We spend so much time fretting about sentence structure and daily word count (or at least I do) that sometimes the 'big picture' gets lost under all those details. Lose track of it completely, and you risk losing some of the motivation that got you started in the first place!

For me, I want to make a living doing what I love.  Yeah, that's a little vague.  Ok, I want to write fun, engaging horror and fantasy stories that take people on a little ride away from their daily lives for a while.  I want to create worlds for people to get lost in.  I want to write so well that some person I've never met forgets their problems for a little while.

And I want to write scenes and dialogue for video games.  I'll be dating myself a little bit here - I remember when Nintendo came out.  It was cool for a while, then I could take it or leave it.  Sorry Mario.

One day, I bought this game called Myst.  I'm pretty sure that I lost at least a week of my life to that game.  The world was immersive.  It was the first 'sand box' style game I'd ever seen, where you could go where you wanted, and do what you wanted, in pretty much any order.  And the puzzles!  Oh, the puzzles.

There weren't all that many characters to talk to at the time, but technology has evolved since then.  There are more open style games with engaging characters, layers of mystery.  And I love the way the storytelling became built up, through unreliable characters, books, tapes, or diaries left on computers.  The player is left to build the story of what happened based upon the information received from various sources and the objects in front of them.

To me, that's the perfect form of gaming - and I want so badly to contribute to it, to help create these incredible alternate worlds populated with realistic people, and littered with their own complete and distinct histories.

So I guess, that what I really want to do is to be able to play pretend with the whole world.


What is it that you want to do with your art?

dan

dan
Originally uploaded by digitalis_vitae

Hey guys! It's been a kind of crazy season, which means not a lot of time for meaningful blogging.

What it does mean though, is new toys!! Such as the 50mm prime lens that came in the mail this week.

I hadn't had a chance to bust it out until this afternoon, and my darling SO was playing with some prop flavored items that we have kicking around the place. As a bonus, he happened to be in front of my new black backdrop!

The lighting is overhead bounce from our ceiling light, and the glow of the computer monitor he's sitting in front of :).

For some reason, all of my photos of humans tend to look much more posed than they really are - he didn't even know I had the camera out until I said 'HEY!'

I'm not sure why, as most (like this one) are completely unplanned.