S P Hannifin

But what I really wanna do is direct…

I’m still mentally plotting my second screenplay (I have to know exactly how it will end before I begin writing), but I’m thinking it will be called THE SHADOW PRINCE.  Doesn’t that sound exciting?  Of course it does.  I’m not quite ready to say what it’s about; that will have to wait until I’m completely done plotting.  But daydreaming of the plot has been very fun.

Anyway, the more I think about films, the more I daydream about really being the one in creative control.  I guess that’s everyone’s dream, though, huh?  Earlier today I was browsing Amazon for some professional but cheap camcorders in $1000 to $3000 range.  You see, part of me is saying “Yes!  Buy a camera and make some shorts!  Maybe even film a simple feature!  Why wait until you have $100,000 to invest in production?  Just buy a decent enough camera and start now!  Experiment!” And it’s very tempting.  But then the other part of me says “A couple thousand dollars?!  Are you crazy?  You need to be saving your money!  And it’s not like you’d be able to make anything that you could sell to help you regain your loss!  Even with a nice camera, what are you going to film, the family dog?!  You’ll have no sets, no lighting, no actors, no big group of friends that will do as you say for no payment… you’re really gonna have to wait until you have more $$$$… a LOT more…” and then the other side says “But it would be so much fun!” and the other side “But at what cost?”  So the internal battle rages on.

By S P Hannifin, ago

You have to learn rules to break them? Nonsense.

Just a quick little post…

I was ruffling through some books on screenwriting (like books on writing in general, some look interesting, brilliant perhaps, but most look like over-analytical, repetitive, worthless blither), and I saw the phrase “You have to learn the rules to break them!”  That phrase seems to pop up a lot in books on artistic instruction.  I’ve never been very fond of it.

There either are rules or there aren’t.  This “you have to learn rules to break them” is a lazy middle ground for scared confused people who don’t want to think one way or the other.  If there are rules, then they have to name them, and then someone else comes up with counter-examples, and they fail.  If there aren’t any rules, it might make the point of a book or lesson seem useless.

I guess the problem really lies in that creativity and art in general cannot be taught, making books about creating art seem hypocritical.  So, to justify the writing of their books, authors try to pull out “rules” … otherwise, the book is just a collection of subjective opinions, isn’t it?  Well, yes, actually it is.  That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily unhelpful, but it does mean the author can’t always be objectively right.  And for some reason a lot of artists and authors really want that… for it all to be objective… if even in some small way.  That’s either because the artist is too afraid to think for himself and wants to create an objective way to think about the arts, or the artist wants everyone to agree with what he thinks based on things greater than mere opinion.

I would say there are rules, but they are psychological, complex, and many times subjective.  We can’t yet write books on them, and merely knowing what they are might change them.

However, we can write books on our opinions and patterns we find, and I think it’s perfectly valid to say that those patterns emerge from the shadows of those subjective currently-unknowable rules.

But to say “you have to learn the rules to break them” is just an excuse for people to teach them.  If it were true, it would imply that rules could only be broken within a set of other unstated rule-breaking rules, for which the rule of learning the rules to break them doesn’t apply, which of course is hypocritical nonsense.

What people should just go ahead and say is: “You don’t really have to learn this, but here it is if you’re interested.  And you might discover it by yourself anyway.”

By S P Hannifin, ago

Avatar is so anti-American! OMG!

I’ve been hearing quite a bit about how the story for the new film Avatar is “anti-American” or “anti-military” or whatever. I don’t really get it. I saw the movie, the images were fantastic, especially in 3D. The climactic battle sequences with rocket guns leaving 3D trails of smoke and futuristic helicopters duking it out with giant alien birds were probably the best battle sequences I’ve ever seen in cinema. The story, however, was (like Star Wars) pretty basic. Not that that’s bad, it could’ve been much much worse. It’s probably good that it was basic; makes it that much more accessible, which it almost has to be when you’re spending a bazillion dollars on the special effects.

Unlike Star Wars, though, Avatar does not take place a long time ago in another galaxy far far away, but in our future with our very own great great grandchildren (or whatever, I didn’t do the math) in our galaxy. So I guess some people are thinking “Wait a minute, are you saying that’s that what we’re gonna be like? Evil industrial money-hungry warmongers who don’t mind killing other beings who are as conscious as we are? How dare you!” Now, that could very well be exactly what Cameron is trying to say, but at no point in the movie did a character look at the camera and say “You better watch out and not end up like this, America!” so I can’t respond as if one did.

And if you do sense an anti-American theme, what about the Americans that end up being the heroes? The theme would obviously have to be that indigenous people are too stupid and weak and distrusting to save themselves and must depend on external help, and American people provide such help! American people are actually so much help that a race of thousands can be saved with just the help of three or four (short and less symmetrical) Americans! This is a message to the world! We are America; we are powerful enough to crush you, and benevolent enough to stop ourselves.

But I can’t buy any of it. Everybody agrees that war is bad. What we argue about morally and politically is the nature of its necessity. Similarly, no human is going to prefer living in a flat grey cold metal room when the beauty and wonder of Pandora is just outside the window, especially when the Na’vi (the indigenous aliens of Pandora which are conveniently quite human-like but just a bit more visually interesting) seem to stay very clean, well-fed and sheltered, out of danger, and have no waste management problems. The only reason we humans would prefer a less beautifully green living atmosphere is to make the aforementioned aspects of life more practical. A toilet may not be the most beautiful thing in the world, but it’s extremely practical. Most humans would probably want to stop being humans and become Avatars, as the main characters in the film do.

Here on Earth, you’re perfectly free to live as naturally as you want, so why don’t people who claim to want it actually pursue it? Because they don’t really want it. They want to keep using their toilets and air conditioning and email, and then complain about the evils of industry. Meanwhile, beautiful green nature will freeze you and burn you and starve you and get you dirty everywhere. Woohoo. (But not Pandora!)

I digress. In Avatar, the differences between good and evil are pretty easy to recognize. The story might’ve been more powerful (to some audiences) if the differences were more ambiguous, but that would’ve also made it more challenging, and thus more risky business-wise. If you find it anti-American, I guess it’s because you feel the film is negatively stereotyping Americans. But in the film, you really only see the Americans that are part of the story’s conflict, so you’d have to be assuming an awful lot about the Americans in that future that are not part of the battle and/or that are still on Earth. Kinda seems like you’re doing most of the stereotyping yourself.

(Also, I don’t recall America ever invading any country as different and beautiful and wondrous as Pandora, so I don’t see any important similarities between the Pandora invasion and any real-world historic or current invasions.  If Cameron wanted to make a statement that such beauty and wonder are inherit in any culture we invade but are in the eyes of the beholder, he wouldn’t need many special effects for that.  And he wouldn’t make as much money.  And I think others have already tried.)

By S P Hannifin, ago

I wrote a screenplay… now what?

(Disclaimer – I don’t really answer the question in this post, I just blather about possibilities.)

I met my first (and maybe only) goal for the new year: finish my screenplay. Well, the rough draft at least. I finished writing THE MELODY BOX yesterday. It’s about a young lad who is given a music box that writes infinite melodies. Ah, what a wonder it is! It’s 93 pages (really 92, because the last page is comprised only of the words “FADE OUT”). Many resources I have looked at say that the standard screenplay length for a beginner is 90-120 pages, and I was aiming for 90-95, so I’m kind of happily surprised that just by following my outline it worked out to just around what I was hoping for. I guess that is a sign that I am brilliant.

Okay, so I’ve got my first ever screenplay. Now what?

I don’t know.

From online screenwriting blogs and some books I ruffled through, I think I need to do a couple things.

1 – I need to polish this screenplay. I’ve given a copy to a some friends, and look forward to any feedback they might give. Hopefully I can force my parents to read it as well. Also, I need to get my mind off of it, because right now I’m so close to it that I’d probably be afraid to change much of it. So I need to–

2 – Write more screenplays. I’ve actually read you shouldn’t try marketing your first screenplay until you have written several, because potential agents or producers might say “I like your writing, but this one isn’t right for us, what else ya got?” and if you don’t have anything else, you’re kinda shooting yourself in the foot, especially since the chance of anyone saying that is pretty low to begin with. (Some also say that your first few screenplays will be complete garbage anyway; you just have to write them for the practice.) At this point, I don’t know if I’ll be able to resist dipping my toes in the water and trying to sell THE MELODY BOX before I finish anything else. I guess we’ll see how long it takes me to polish it and/or write another screenplay. It’s very tempting to just try marketing the screenplay RIGHT NOW, but I’ll resist.

3 – Try marketing it. A lot of the books I ruffled through suggested that one should get an agent, but some blogs I’ve read suggest that if you’re new to screenwriting and nobody recognizes your name, an agent might not be much help. So I’ll probably try marketing the screenplay directly to producers. I’m not quite sure how to do that, but from what I can tell, it involves sending out query letters, giving people a short description of my screenplay and asking if they’d like to read it. 99.9% will say no or never respond. If someone does request a copy, I send them the whole thing. And then, if the gods really favor me, they buy an option, which means I can’t sell the screenplay to anyone else for a year or so in exchange for $$$$. And then, if the gods really really favor me, they buy all the rights to it and make it into a real movie, and I win an Academy Award and become famous and all my dreams come true. I guess. (Of course, it could be purchased by a more low-budget studio, and might go directly to DVD or whatever, in which case, no Oscars.) Anyway, even if it’s optioned, they might not ever buy the full rights, or they may hold on to the option for several years, which means it can take a screenplay over a decade or two to actually be realized, if it ever is. So this really isn’t a very good get-rich-quick scheme at all.

One really confusing aspect that came up a lot in my research is the WGA, the Writers Guild of America. I don’t quite understand their role in all this, but from what I can tell, the big studios in the industry are “WGA signatories” and will only hire writers that are members of the guild. In turn, guild members can ONLY work for these WGA signatories. Want to join the WGA? Well, you can’t, at least not until you’re actually writing for a WGA signatory. So I’m not quite sure how exactly you get in.

My guess is that I really don’t have to worry about it until some WGA signatory producer or production company actually buys or options my screenplay, and then I’ll be pretty much forced to join. This would be very good, as I think it would imply that there’s a good amount of money involved (and then the WGA would always take 10% of all my writing profits). But if the screenplay is produced on a low budget, it’s possible that my screenplay could be produced by a non-signatory company. The thing that kind of bothers me is that, if I am lucky enough to have my screenplay purchased by a signatory company and am forced to join the WGA, I have to completely STOP marketing my screenplay to non-signatory companies. Which means I have to find out whether or not a production company is a signatory before I query them, which seems like it would be a pain.

And, to make matters even more confusing, the WGA doesn’t even really seem to exist. There’s actually a WGAWest and a WGAEast, each of them for different halves of the nation. I’d have to join East, since I’m in Virginia. Or I guess I could quickly move to California and join West?

So the entire business of screenwriting seems ridiculously confusing, at least for someone just starting to explore it. I guess I really don’t have to worry about much though since the chance of my screenplay being optioned by any producer or studio in the first place is very VERY small.

Anyway, for now I’m just waiting for feedback on THE MELODY BOX while plotting out some other screenplay ideas and trying to decide what to work on next. (And I’ve got TONS of ideas…)

PS – My recent obsession with screenplay did make me fail one of my goals–to keep updating my daily comic. I still have plenty of comic ideas, just less enthusiasm with which to draw them and post them. Hopefully I will continue though, eventually. I’m paying for the domain, after all.

By S P Hannifin, ago

The new year is boring so far

Mostly because I haven’t been up to much. I spent New Year’s day sleeping in as long as I could, and then I spent the day after at work, and I plan on spending Sunday asleep or at work (hopefully not at the same time, of course). And same for Monday.

Actually, I did spend some time playing Super Mario Galaxy on Wii a few hours ago. It’s fun.

I also applied for a couple jobs last night, raising the number of jobs I have applied for this year to 2. Let’s see how high the count gets.

Oh, I’ve also been writing a ton of melodies in my head. But I haven’t been writing them down, so they are getting lost. Nothing to fear, though, since my melodic creativity is infinite. Well, maybe not infinite, but close enough that I don’t notice the difference.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Goals for 2010

I don’t think I really like the idea of giving myself goals, at least not these kinds large goals that are so easily influenced by uncontrollable events in my life.  But I’m going to do it anyway just to see what happens.  It might give me a bit more focus throughout the year.  Or I might become too disinterested in them and try other things instead.  I guess they can be considered “Goals I currently think would be interesting to achieve in 2010” and not so much “Goals I will use to judge myself at the end of 2010.”  In other words, I’m not going to strictly hold myself to them; it will all depend on where my interests lie when I have the time to pursue them.

And so here they are, the Goals of 2010:

1)  Get a full time job. I kind of have to put this on.  Obviously.  The alternative is to go to grad school.  But, c’mon, can you see that happening?

2)  Continue keeping Hannifin World updated daily for the entire year. This shouldn’t be too hard as long as I can keep thinking of ideas and don’t run out of ink and paper and the scanner keeps working.

3)  Finish writing a novel. Or a novella.  Or a novelette.

4)  Continue practicing sketching. I hardly did any sketching at all this year, but I got some extra drawing supplies for Christmas, so I should try to spend some time practicing with them.

5)  Finish writing screenplay for The Melody Box. This was a screenplay I started this year that needs to be finished.  I don’t know what in the world one does with a finished screenplay, but it was fun to write; I really need to get back to it.

6)  Get started on animating a short film. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for the past few months.  It doesn’t need to be long, it doesn’t need to be drawn very well, but I should at least get started.

7)  Finish album! This is something I’ve been working on since the end of 2008, and I’m still not finished!  2010 should be the year for that.

8)  Listen to all of Mozart’s work. In other words, finish the Mozart Listening Project.

9)  Make some sort of progress on a machine creativity program. Either make progress on my music generator (which still doesn’t generate music), or try creating a story generator.  This [machine creativity] is the subject I’m most fascinated by at the moment, but it’s also the most frustrating and hardest area to make any progress in, as it floats near the invisible edges of the impossible.

10)  Become a millionaire. While I’m at it.

Well, there are only 2 goals I know I definitely won’t achieve!  A-heh heh heh…

2010… a nice decade-ish number…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Christmas aftermath

Hope y’all had a wonderful Christmas.  It was a very good Christmas here.  It was actually a white Christmas here, since we still had some leftover snow from a snow storm the previous Saturday.  The storm was so nice that it got me out of having to go to work for the entire week, thus it exceeded my expectations.  It’s melting away at a good pace now, unfortunately.  I love snow… mostly because it gets me out of work…

This picture represents my best Christmas gifts.  I was a bit surprised to get the book “The Creative Process” … it’s a somewhat expensive academic book.  It’s about machine creativity in the area of storytelling.  It’s a bit outdated, having been written in the early 1990s (I think), but it’s still full of ideas I find rather fascinating.  Maybe in the year 2010 I’ll try my hand at programming an automatic story generator, eh?  Yes, I think that would be fun.

And I know my whole family is jealous of me for getting the first 100 episodes of Spongebob.  Oh yeah…

Despite programming somewhat obsessively for the past week, I still haven’t made much progress on my Automatic Music Generator: Version 2, but I still have quite a few ideas left to try.

Anyway, I’m going to take a break from doing anything too intellectual for just a short while while I watch my new blu-rays and DVDs and read my new books and play my new computer games.  This is not because of laziness or anything, it’s simply because I need to make sure right away that everything is working properly to make sure I don’t need to return anything.  Of course.

I’m looking forward to New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day now.  4 days left!

Oh, and I’m quite proud of myself for so far having been able to keep Hannifin World updated everyday.  Not sure the comics are always very funny, but who cares about that, right?

By S P Hannifin, ago

Your business is dumb but I like you as a person

The Internet has created a very unique, fast, and easy way for businesses to connect with their customers. In many ways, this is very good. But in some ways, this is also annoying and bad. The blog post focuses on the bad.

I don’t want to be treated like a customer until I decide to be a customer. For example, when I order food from McDonald’s, I don’t want the cashier to make chit-chat with me, ask me about my day or anything. I want to be treated like a customer: ask me what I want, tell me how much it costs, then give me what I ordered. McDonald’s doesn’t have to try to advertise the burger when I’m in the restaurant; I didn’t go there to browse.

When I’m not in McDonald’s, it would be extremely annoying to have McDonald’s employees giving me their cards and asking me about my fast food preferences and what I think of McDonald’s. This might seem absurd because the fast food industry tends not to do that.

But with the Internet, some businesses and artists promote themselves very much in this way. They get on Twitter and auto-follow people who mention “social media”, they search for blog posts on certain topics, and they encourage people to become their fans on Facebook.

SHUT UP ALREADY!

If I’m looking for a business or an artist, I’ll go out myself and find what I need! I don’t need or want to be found! (At least not through “personal connecting” … if you find me through a Google ad or a banner ad, that’s OK.)

And if you connect with me as a person, by either commenting on my blog or messaging me on Twitter, of course I’ll probably be nice. Being nice to other humans is a good and decent thing to do. But that doesn’t mean I think all business ideas are wise or my business preferences can be changed or influenced with simply a personal connection. Are books on marketing telling people otherwise?

If I rant about not liking a company, being contacted by someone in the company isn’t going to help much (unless trying to contact the company was what I was ranting about). The business’s goal should be to not cause those rants, not deal with them when they find them. Of course I’ll be nice and polite to another person, but a business is not a person. I can loathe a business but be kind to its employees.

So, to anybody out there who’s in or interested in marketing and branding: stop putting so much interest in making pseudo-personal connections. They’re “pseudo” because if you’re not truly interested in me as a person and are just connecting with me as a form of advertising, then it’s not really a true personal connection. If you want to make a real personal connection, you better not be doing it for your business.

That’s all, thanks for reading this post! I just want to mention one more thing, because I can tell you’re a reader with good taste: I’m a music composer, and I’m available for hire for all your music needs…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Ugh… Internet connection

Our stupid Internet connection keeps dropping out. Luckily I have the web on my phone, but typing on this little keypad isn’t quite as easy as using a real keyboard.

Anyway, aside from going to work, I’ve continued work on my music project, trying to come up with some new algorithms to use that can process a lot of data more quickly. The programming can become a bit obsessive as I lose complete track of time trying to solve little problem by little problem. I’m still not at the point that my newer music generator (which I hope will be able to generate entire pieces of music) can give any output that I can experiment with (and of course it working even a little well is, I guess, a farfetched daydream, but the impossible is still worth pursuing, yes?). So I’ve still got much more work to do.

We’re supposed to get a lot of snow tonight… I’m hoping it will be enough to get me out of work on Saturday, though I guess that will just make Sunday all the busier.

7 days left until that happy day arrives… but the end of tomorrow seems far away enough for me…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Java programming blather

I spent the day doing some more Java programming on my melody project. I’m attempting to add some new features (with different algorithms) to the program so that it will work with music of any length, and with multiple melodic lines, thus different instruments and the emerging harmonies. But of course to say it is difficult is an understatement. The algorithms work; that is, they run. But they go far too slowly and take up a lot of memory. I think I can fix the memory problem by greatly reducing redundancy with some algorithmic improvements, but I’m still not sure how I can get it to go any faster; the algorithms simply have to do too much calculating. So I’ll probably have to abandon the algorithms altogether and try coming up with new ones. Since the program is going so slow now, I can’t get it to output anything but gibberish, and thus can’t really tweak the current algorithms to improve them. Anyway, if I can ever get it to work and create musical output that actually sounds musical, the musical mixing possibilities would be pretty cool. It’s just too bad computers aren’t faster and don’t have more memory; I could sure use it.

If I do get my musical-mixer-generator thing to work as well as I do in my daydreams, I can’t quite decide what I’ll do with it. Part of me would like to sell it and make $$$ off of it, but another part of me is quite tempted to keep the software a secret and use it to create hundreds of thousands of musical pieces under a pseudonym and not tell anybody my secret power. Both possibilities are still distant daydreams, of course, but I guess I’d probably sell it, since that seems more honest, and would probably result in a lot more $$$. But the other choice remains a temptation, and if I choose that road, I won’t blog about it, bwahahahaha!!

By S P Hannifin, ago