Here's a link to an interesting piece on selling your ideas/concepts/characters to your readers and getting them to emotionally invest into your stories.


http://io9.com/5833461/how-to-sell-your-readers-on-your-storys-main-ideas-in-x-easy-steps

The death of books??

Here's a link to a very interesting, sobering, and somewhat depressing article from The Guardian regarding the changes that are happening within the publishing industry.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/22/are-books-dead-ewan-morrison

Conan The Barbarian 2011 style... Sigh...

Watched the new Conan flick last night. I will say this in its favour. Jason Momoa was a good choice to play Conan, a much better choice than Arnie. It's just a shame that he wasn't in a good Conan film.

A kind of remake of John Millius's take on Conan, in that as a child Conan's father and village are all killed and then Conan spends the following 20 years searching for the man responsible who has now risen to great power, much like James Earl Jones' Thulsa Doom character in the Millius version.

Like with the Millius version, this version of Conan doesn't bother to adapt any of the utterly brilliant stories by Robert E. Howard, opting instead for a very standard revenge story which really does not even come close to doing justice to the character or Howard's works. Referencing 'The Tower Of The Elephant' in a line of dialogue is pretty lame, but by doing this the film makers obviously must feel that this is enough to keep fans of Howard's stories content.

I visited the website of Paradox, the studio who made this version of Conan and they have all the rites to Howard's works and incredibly, The Tower Of The Elephant is actrually being adapted... for mobile phones. Yes, this is the mentality of these people. Truely makes me weep.

This is also the same studio that gave us another of Robert E. Howards characters Solomon Kane which starred James Purefoy. I'm not sure if anyone actually saw that flick as it got a very limited release.

Anyway, another thing which I didn't really enjoy about this version of Conan, was that visually, it looked like it had been shot on video. It had a very flat, bland and washed out look to it. There was no depth or atmosphere to the cinematography. At least the John Millius and Richard Fleischer versions had that going for them.

Perhaps in another 15 or 20 years or so, some other writers/directors/producers will
attempt to tackle Conan again and maybe, just maybe, they will come closer to getting it right. Until then, I'll stick to reading the books thank you.

This week...

I finally got the first draft of my Lovecraftian Fishmen script finished. So, now I need to get it typed up and then begin the rewrites. Once I've typed up a first draft I usually have a bit of a break from it and go work on something else. Then I come back to it and work on the rewrite. It's taken me roughly a year to write it. My job and hectic family life means I'm lucky to get a few pages a week wrote, so it takes me a long time to get something done, and keep the interest and momentum flowing. But I chip away, one page at a time.

So, I'll now be returning to my urban magic/horror story which I was working on before I started my Fishmen tale. I'll be doing another rewrite on this which should finally get it into a shape that I'm happy with.

Watched a few films this past week. Cars 2. Zookeeper. And Captain america. Y'know, I quite enjoy the first Cars film. I have it on dvd and pop it on sometimes to watch with my son. But Cars 2 just left me cold. It wasn't crap, but it wasn't all that good either. It was just there, if you know what I mean.

Zookeeper was one that I had to watch as part of my job as a projectionist. A truely awful film. Bad on every level.

Captain America was a totally silly, campy, cheese-fest. Very heavy handed and preachy. Not sure if I liked it as such. All the stuff with Hydra made me think of Hellboy, but I totally prefer what Mignola did. Like with most of the Marvel assembly-line movies, it didn't really leave me feeling anything one way or another. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either. Personally, I think that The Rocketeer (also directed by Joe Johnston) is a much better film. With Captain America, Johnston is covering a lot of the same ground as he did with The Rocketeer, but that film had a charm and honesty to it that didn't feel forced, unlike Captain.

But, I did like the make-up for The Red Skull. There were some shots in which it looked oddly feminine, which was kinda creepy.

Potter thoughts...

FADE IN:

Ahhhh, cinema. Y'know, at around 9:30pm on wednesday night, I was just finishing off making up Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Pt 2, and looking at the last frame of film on reel 7 just before the credits kick in, and I thought to myself that this is the last Harry Potter print that I will ever edit together. I can't remember if I did the first one, even though I was working in projection at the time, but I definately made them all up from the second one onwards. There would indeed be no more Potter prints for me.

It made me feel a little sad to be honest. You see, as I'm sure many, if not most, people will know that the cinema industry is a-changing. There will soon be no more 35mm prints of films, everything will be digital, wheather it is 3D or 2D. There is something rather magical about seing a 35mm film projected. The sound of the film as it zig-zags its way through the projector head: the motes of dust that drift around, catching the light like fragments of dreams within the darkened projection booth... There's a part of me that will really miss this. That part of me, whenever I think of cinema, will always think of this.

Instead, there wil be computer hard-drives with the films existing as nothing more than data: lots and lots of little ones and zeros. And the humble projectionist, who spent much of their time in a world of shadows and light will have quickly faded away. I wonder if any, other than the bean-counters, will notice our abscence.

The Lord Of The Rings trilogy also came to mind (as it often does). I thought of the anticipation of editing all of those reels together for each film. Of seeing those frames of film and wondering what majic had been captured there on celluloid. I remember the prints for The Two Towers getting delivered at midnight on the very day before they were released. By the time I and my fellow projectionist got them made up and watched, it was 5am when we left and I was back on shift at 9am. First shows were at 9:30am. But when The Hobbit is released, it will be digital. And minus its Projectionist.

So I had much of this flickering through my mind as I looked at that last frame of film on Potter. A frame that showed Harry 19 years later. I wonder where I will be in such time. Still chasing after fragments of dreams perhaps.

FADE OUT:

A new Evil Dead film?

Well, I must admit that I honestly thought this would never happen. I know it's been talked about and speculated ever sinse Sam Raimi set up Ghost House. But, a new Evil Dead flick has been announced and it has a director, one Fede Alvarez. Who? Well he's made a bunch of short films, his most recent being Panic Attack in 2009 which was about an invasion of giant robots. It got a fair bit of coverage online at the time. It was nicely done with some decent looking CGI and pretty slick. But, CGI is generally a bit of a turn-off for me ( I like puppets, rubber and models thank-you very much!) and whilst I though good on him for getting something made, I really didn't go nuts over it or anything.

It's a shame that Raimi isn't helming this himself, but maybe he's been put off directing horror for a while after the poor box office reception to Drag Me To Hell. It was shocking that that film didn't do better considering all the shit horror remakes and sequels that were (and still are) making tonnes of money. I really enjoyed Drag Me To Hell, but I didn't like all the crappy CGI. They could have done it practically and it would have looked 100 times better.

The thought of an Evil Dead flick with lots of CGI really fills me with dread. Will it be a sequel? A remake? Reboot? Will Bruce be in it? Will it be a return to the graphic stylings of Evil Dead 1 & 2 or will it be totally goofy like Army of Darkness?

What am I reading?

I've been on a bit of a Tolkien kick lately. I've read Lord Of The Rings a couple of times over the years, have a beautiful hardback edition illustrated by Alan Lee, but I had never gotten around to reading The Hobbit. So with the new film in production and Peter Jackson posting videos and images over on his Facebook page, I thought it was way overdue to get it read. I really enjoyed it, it was certainly worth the wait. So I then decided to read Children Of Hurin which was again really good but man was it grim. Incredibly grim. So after that I thought to myself that I may as well read the Silmarillion! Now, there was some brilliant stuff in it, his attention to detail and world-building is second to none. But I must admit that I did struggle with it in places. However, I wasn't too fussed on his concept for Middle-Earth being created by God and then the Angels were all fighting over it. In this case God was called Iluvatar and the Angels were the Ainur, with Satan (Morgoth) being one of them. All of the races in Middle Earth, Dwarfs, Elves, Humans, just sprang into being. I don't really like that. But, those niggles aside, it was worth a read.

So, what now? Well, my wife has a lot of Terry Brooks books and I've been wanting to get stuck into the Shannara series for a while so I'm on with The Sword of Shannara. I'm only about 90 or so pages into it but so far I'm enjoying it. Brooks' concept is that his fantasy world is actually our world in some distant future long after a huge war pretty much destroyed everything. It's an interesting concept. He's actually wrote a series of prequel books what detail all of this. I'll get to those eventually, haha. He has a very nice website if anyone is interested in checking him out:

http://www.terrybrooks.net/