Quantum Storytelling

Whoa folks! How are you all doing?

I’ve been very, very, very, very, very, very, VERY busy lately. This is going to be a busy year in fact. The era of me posting every single day is going away for the forseeable future. Work & Real Life are devouring me whole. But enough of the excuses and onto some content…

Sunshine

Recently watched this movie. Loved the style. Danny Boyle should do more sci-fi. That said, I wasn’t crazy about the story. Once you get over the absurdity of a team of space adventurers bringing a payload to detonate on the surface of the sun in order to re-ignite it, there just isn’t that much of a logical story there. If the story seems familiar, that’s because Solaris, Event Horizon, and Sphere got there first. On the positive side the cast was great, the music was great, and the entire style, feel, and vibe of the film were excellent. The story was the weakest link, which is not really the thing you want being the weak link, mmk?

We Own The Night

I’ve been a fan of James Gray since Little Odessa. The Yards was nothing to write home about, but interesting nonetheless. We Own The Night is like a re-imagined Yards infused with some of the battitude of Little Odessa. I found a lot of similarities between this movie and David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. Cronenberg and Gray should just get it over with and make a movie together. It can feature Russian mafia, gratuitous throat-slitting scenes, and hard-hitting tension between family members caught on both sides of the criminal divide.

That’s all for now…

P.S. What do you think of that Indy 4 trailer?

Been going through my story making it work in script form and what I’m finding is I may have to rewrite the novel portion. Rather than be the disappointing kind of realization, it’s an exciting one. From now on I’ll write the script version first.

Upon recently telling a friend this, he asked a great question; Doesn’t culling it down in script form reduce the amount of material you have to work with prematurely?

With the process I use, the answer is no. If culling the story down to its essentials and focusing on the most visual, action, and conflict based material is what it takes to create a good script, well — to me that also creates a great story. If the novel is lacking those things then novel needs to change. Novel or not, I always generate more at the outset, and end up pulling back later on to focus only on the most important stuff.

And think about it this way; It’s easy to expand, harder to contract. I’m growing to love the idea that a novel version can include my own camera directions and focus on detail — I get to play the director, not just the writer. A novel may also feature “deleted scenes,” making it the version with extras vs. something radically different in a fundamental way.

For these reasons, a script seems like a better blueprint than a novel for being more story-focused. What do you think?