any sufficiently advanced blogging is indistinguishable from blather

Short story and animation and screenplay, oh my

11 days until Christmas!

Just a couple updates on my life:

1. Be sure you’re signed up to get some Daily Science Fiction! Even if only for a day. My story, Maker of the Twenty-first Moon, will appear tomorrow, December the 15th, making it my fictional debut. You don’t want to miss this historic occasion. I plan on baking a cake tonight to celebrate. Might seem arrogant, but all excuses are valid for cake.

2. The second semester of Animation Mentor is just about over! I’ll post my second semester reel later this week. The semester really flew by. While I think I definitely improved this semester, I know there are plenty of areas I definitely need to keep working on. This semester was quite challenging, but overall, I’m still very happy with Animation Mentor, and I’m looking forward to the third semester, starting next month.

3. I got this email in regards to one of my screenplay query letters (for The Melody Box):

Hi Sean,

Thanks for your intriguing query.

I’ve attached my bio/producing credits and can be reached in New York City at: [censored].

Let’s talk first.

Best,

[censored]

At first, this got me all excited. I forgot the first rule of the artist’s creed: don’t get excited. After Googling the producer’s name a bit more, I found that he ran a script consulting service, and I’m sure that’s what he wanted to try to sell me on. Ugh! No thanks.

That said, I have been fortunate enough to get a few actual genuine requests for the screenplay, woohoo!

I guess that’s all I have for today…

By S P Hannifin, ago

I wrote a screenplay… now what again?

18 days until Christmas! Yay, woohoo, and such things.

Over the last week or so I’ve been editing my screenplay The Melody Box and it’s at the point now where I’d like to try selling it.

Most books and blogs I’ve read about selling your first screenplay strongly suggest that you write several before trying to sell one. I started writing another one earlier this year, but I lost interest and don’t really feel like continuing work with it. Quite frankly, it seems like a waste of time to write a screenplay if it’s not going to be produced. It’s a waste of a story. Might as well write a novel. The only reason I wrote The Melody Box as a screenplay is because music is essential to the plot. It could work as a play or a movie, but it can’t be just prose; the audience has to hear the music.

(I do have another story idea that must be a screenplay just because certain things must happen visually, but I don’t yet have a good grasp on the story, and, again, I really don’t feel like putting a whole lot of effort into something that would most likely go nowhere. Maybe that’s a bad attitude to have, but I’ve got plenty of other more interesting ways to use my time creatively.)

So I might be shooting myself in the foot by not working on some more screenplays, but that’s a hole in the foot I’m willing to have. I’m not really trying to become a full-time screenwriter; I just want to get this particular story out there somehow.

So I’ve got my screenplay. I prepared a query letter and a synopsis for it, which I plan to send to producers in Hollywood. Today in fact. There are hundreds out there, so this will probably be something I’ll be doing over the course of several months.

The idea / hope is that a producer (or someone involved with the producer’s creative material acquisitions) is interested in the query enough to read the synopsis, and is interested in the synopsis enough to request the script. I send it to them and they like it enough to option it or buy it. (In case you don’t know, buying an “option” basically means they’re not sure if they want to buy it, but they’re interested, so they pay you a certain amount to not sell it to anyone else for 6 months or a year or something while they make up their minds.) I’d be happy enough just to get to that point, but then the real dream-come-true part would be it, you know, actually getting made.

Wish me luck! I can read your mind, and appreciate the luck you have just wished me subconsciously…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Life lessons… copied from elsewhere

I came across this blog post the other day: Ten Life Lessons from Richard Branson.

I thought I would just repeat the lessons, but give my own explanations for them. Hopefully this will help you have a better life. OK, here goes…

1. “Ridiculous yachts and private planes and big limousines won’t make people enjoy life more.”

At least, I assume. I mean, they look nice, and you’d probably enjoy yourself while you’re using them, but ultimately they somehow won’t give you happiness. Having those things implies you have a lot of money, and more happiness will come from your bank account and the not-having-to-do-work-you-don’t-want-to part of life, not the big yachts. However, once you have riches like that, it’s not very polite to continuously talk about how happy it makes you.

2. “I enjoy every single minute of my life.”

I just think of what it’ll be like when I’m rich. Once I am rich, I can just remind myself that I’m rich.

3. “But the majority of things that one could get stressed about, they’re not worth getting stressed about.”

Really, the only thing to stress about is losing your money. Everything else is pretty pointless. Don’t worry about stuff that doesn’t involve boat loads of money. If you don’t have boat loads of money, you shouldn’t be worrying about anything at all. Your life is ultimately meaningless.

4. “You can’t be a good leader unless you generally like people. That is how you bring out the best in them.”

Nobody wants to follow someone who is mean to them. People like getting praise, so giving it to them is a good way to get power over them. Just don’t go overboard, or they’ll think you’re insincere. Give them just enough to keep wanting more and you will have them on a leash.

5. “There is no one to follow, there is nothing to copy.”

If you want to be a leader and have power over others, you have to make sure no one has power over you, you have to make sure you don’t become one of those mindless followers.

6. “I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money. If that is the sole motive, then I believe you are better off doing nothing.”

You want to make sure you’re rich enough that if the business fails, you’re not dependent on it. Also, if you’re in it just for the money, then I don’t want to compete with you, because you might succeed beyond belief and I don’t want that kind of competition.

7. “I never had any intention of being an entrepreneur.”

That’s a big word with weird spelling. I’m not quite sure what it means.

8. “I made and learned from lots of mistakes.”

Looking before you leap is overrated. If you want to get ahead, it’s better to learn from mistakes than planning research. There’s always a chance you could succeed without thinking, and that’s the best kind of success to have. If you find that you are doing actual work, what’s the point?

9. “If you can indulge in your passion, life will be far more interesting than if you’re just working.”

Like I said, work is for losers. Get your followers to do the work.

10. “Right now I’m just delighted to be alive and to have had a nice long bath.”

After all, that involves no work whatsoever, and that’s what makes life awesome.

OK, I hope these tips have helped you. I didn’t really tell you how to make money easily, because that is a secret that must stay closely-guarded. If I want to maintain my power, I have to make you think my life is a whole lot better than yours, and as long as you think I’m always happy and always have been, then I’m happy enough.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Remember to remember the 15th of December

Please excuse the blatant self-promotional nature of this post, but December 15, 2010 looks like it may become quite historic. According to SF Signal, it is the day I will have some of my fiction professionally published for the first time. (And, considering how undedicated I am to the craft, perhaps the last…?)

You can subscribe to Daily Science Fiction by email for free.

You’ll also see that a story by Eric James Stone is scheduled for the day before mine. If you recall my first post about Maker of the Twenty-first Moon, I mentioned that I got the idea for it (or at least a part of it) while reading one of his previous short stories, Taint of Treason. So it’s a fun coincidence that my story should come right after one of his.

Anyway, subscribe to DSF, mark your calendars, and prepare for much celebration… I think I’ll bake a cake that week… maybe write some music for it…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Pan and Worldshaker … future movies?

I also found this article to be interesting:

If you saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 this weekend, then you most likely marveled at the gorgeous animated sequence where Hermoine tells the tale of “The Deathly Hallows”. … Variety is now reporting that the director of that sequence, Ben Hibon, is attached to direct the fantasy action thriller Pan. Based on a script by Ben Magid and originally set up as a directing vehicle for Guillermo del Toro, “The film puts a dark spin on J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan with Captain Hook as a haunted former police detective in pursuit of a childlike kidnapper.”

…

Hibon, along with his producing partners Renee Tab and Tarik Heitmann, have also optioned Richard Harland’s steampunk novel, Worldshaker.

That Harry Potter animation was the best part of the otherwise disappointing film. (The nude kissing was the worst part; entirely inappropriate for a Potter film; it’s awful how they’ve been trying to sexualize these stories, shame on you filmmakers! Shame shame shame!)

Anyway, Pan sounds very interesting, I look forward to it.

Worldshaker sounds even more interesting. I now really want to read that book. Then again, Hollywood tends to mess up steampunk-type books, like City of Ember and The Golden Compass. Something stylistically they just can’t get right about it… though they might actually get Hugo Cabret right, considering its director, who usually knows how to make a good movie.

By S P Hannifin, ago

No more princess fairy tales for Disney?

I found this article to be interesting. It states:

Once upon a time, there was a studio in Burbank that spun classic fairy tales into silver-screen gold.

But now the curtain is falling on “princess movies,” which have been a part of Disney Animation’s heritage since the 1937 debut of its first feature film, “Snow White.” The studio’s Wednesday release of “Tangled,” a contemporary retelling of the Rapunzel story, will be the last fairy tale produced by Disney’s animation group for the foreseeable future.

Actually, I think most of the “princess-ness” of Disney came about in the 90’s with The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Pocahontas, all released in less than a decade, and all following a similar Broadway-influenced romantic comedy formula. I’m sure Walt Disney himself never meant for his company to be defined by fairy tales or princesses. They did Snow White in 1937, then didn’t do Cinderella until 1950, and didn’t do Sleeping Beauty until 1959. That’s only three princess-oriented fairy tales done in old Uncle Walt’s lifetime.

The article mentions that their Princess and the Frog didn’t do as well as they’d like. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but looking at the previews, it certainly didn’t look that great. It was tauted as introducing Disney’s first black princess just as the nation was getting its first black president. A film decision like that should never be made for political brownie points. And they were, dare I say, racist, playing to stereotypes and setting the film in New Orleans and making the music score jazzy. The film shouldn’t have been set in America at all. Unless the intent was to make the movie about racism (which I doubt, and there are already plenty of movies about that), the movie should’ve treated the princess just like any other princess.

Anyway, I digress. My point is, I don’t think this news is really all that breath-taking. It’s natural. It’s obvious.

I think it’s kind of silly to guess at what the public wants, because I don’t think you really can know, beyond certain genre generalizations. Like “vampires are popular now” or “wizards are popular now” … but that doesn’t tell you what sort of story people would be interested in seeing, or what sort of stories they would not be interested in seeing.

I think filmmakers should step away from looking at the profit numbers (as long as there’s a profit at least) and just do whatever interests them the most, whatever story gives them goosebumps just thinking about. The audience does matter, but only to a certain degree… not to the degree of dictating what sort of film to make next. Really, audiences have no idea what they want.

Not that that’s not what Disney is doing. I can’t really tell from the article what they’re doing; who knows how they’re making their decisions?

Oh, and did they really want “Tangled” to appeal to boys? Firstly, its style is all wrong for that, from the colors to the guy’s facial hair pattern. Secondly, the preview doesn’t show enough thrilling action. Instead it shows “Here comes the smolder…”

The article also mentions that they’re no longer doing Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow Queen. Though it’s been dramatized before, I’m rather happy about this. Firstly, I’d hate to see the story Disney-ified. The story has a darkness to it that Disney (or Pixar) would probably ruin, even if they ruin it well. Secondly, I’d like to do it myself. Not ruin it, that is, but turn it into an animated feature. I guess there’s really not much of a chance of that, but if Disney had done it, there’d be no chance, so at least now there’s a one billionth of a percent chance.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Birthday and shopping and such

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. We had a bunch of family over, which was really nice. It did, however, prevent me from spending as much time as usual on my Animation Mentor homework… but oh well!

‘Twas also my birthday on Thanksgiving, so I’m now 25 years old, quarter of century! Let’s look at my list of accomplishments thus far in my life: hmmm, empty. (Is that self-deprecation, humility, or honesty?) Let’s look at my list of future accomplishments: hmmm, empty as well. When you’re a quarter of the way to nowhere, you’re actually already there! And so I regret to announce… this is the end. I’m leaving now… I bid you all a very fond farewell. (I’ve put this off for far too long.) Goodbye.

Oops, nevermind, I lost the ring.

OK, on to other matters that don’t matter. Black Friday! There were… no deals. No deals I was interested in, anyway. I only got the fifth season of House on DVD for $15 and Total Recall on blu-ray for $7 or $8 at Best Buy… those were the only interesting deals I could find. What’s happening to the economy?! Not that I looked very hard… I don’t need or want much at the moment. Amazon had the best deals. Bought some blu-rays from them, including the first season of Dollhouse on blu-ray for only $14… excellent deal. Now if only the second season was that price too… argh, I’m still disappointed they cancelled that show, it was great.

(On a side note, since I referenced Lord of the Rings, I’ll admit it was very tempting to buy the Lord of the Rings trilogy on blu-ray seeing them marked down to only $7. But I resisted. I want the extended editions, not the theatrical editions!)

Hey, it’s Advent! Which means we can start counting down to Christmas without seeming too desperate. 26 days!

By S P Hannifin, ago

The crime-twins problem

I had a weird dream the other night. (It was random and dream-like, like dreams often are, but for the purposes of this post I’ll pretend like it was more understandable than it really was; the gist of it is the same.) I was the judge of a no-jury court case. It involved a man who had stolen priceless paintings. All of his illegal activities of breaking and entering and stealing these paintings from a museum were all recorded by security cameras. His face could be seen very easily.

Unfortunately he had an identical twin brother. They were both sitting there in the court room before me, both claiming innocence, both with the same solid alibi of walking around a bookstore that night, which was also caught on camera. They both knew exactly what one of them was doing at the bookstore. I questioned them separately (I’m not sure if that’s really something a judge would do, but I did), and they both told the same story, which supported what was on camera.

There was no DNA evidence left behind by either man.

Lastly, I did not have the lie detecting skills of that guy in Lie to Me, so I couldn’t do anything very dramatic involving catching one of them in a lie or giving them the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

And in the dream I thought it was a riddle, as if there definitely was a way to solve the conundrum and I just had to figure it out.

But I woke up with the riddle unsolved.

Is there an answer? Or is that the perfect way to get out of a crime?

The dream made me wonder if DNA would really help such a case anyway. It might! According to this article from Scientific American:

The discovery of this genetic variation gives hope for an obscure but pressing issue in the case of a criminal suspect who is an identical twin. “If one twin is a suspect and the whereabouts of the other twin cannot be determined, then the jury is often left without the ability to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” in cases that rely on DNA evidence, says Frederick Bieber, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School.

“If the twin issue comes up in a criminal investigation it’s possible that if there are [copy number variants] that differ between the two twins that might help sort that out,” Bieber says.

Given that there are 80 pairs of identical twins in Virginia’s convicted offender database alone, this might not be as small an issue as it may sound. And such genetic variation also matters to the population at large.

Ha! Not a very original idea for a dream at all, I guess. Subconscious fail.

By S P Hannifin, ago

The Bill Nye incident…

According to this article:

Popular TV personality Bill Nye collapsed onstage Tuesday night in front of hundreds of audience members during a presentation at USC, campus officials said.

…

“Nobody went to his aid at the very beginning when he first collapsed — that just perplexed me beyond reason,” USC senior Alastair Fairbanks said. “Instead, I saw students texting and updating their Twitter statuses. It was just all a very bizarre evening.”

This led some people to blame this bizarre event on mobile technology and social media. Actually, I think it’s more a case of the bystander effect. If you’re part of a large group of people, you’re less likely to take certain actions, thinking someone else will do it, or someone else is in charge of it. And what exactly do you do with someone who passes out anyway? A medical reaction is not common sense… we’d probably just go to his side, try to wake him up, ask if he’s OK and if he wants some water, and maybe call an ambulance if it seems like something we can’t handle. That’s not a very trained response.

Furthermore, what do you do when you’re not even sure what’s happening? According to one comment on the article:

When he first collapsed he was talking about gravity, and the audience believed it was part of his act.

Perhaps this is a risk for anyone who likes to joke… what if you’re not joking? How will people know? There was that British comedian Tommy Cooper who died of a heart attack during a performance on live television, and the audience just laughed because they didn’t realize what was really going on.

Anyway, the point is that I think this phenomenon is rooted in our psychology, not so much our technological culture, not our desire to update twitter.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Garritan World Instruments coming soon…

Today on the Garritan forum, Gary Garritan posted a link to the catalog of instruments that will be available in his upcoming World Instruments library: World Instruments List.

There are plenty of instruments to look forward to here. Irish whistles, bagpipes, panpipes, celtic harp, didgeridoo, the various Chinese, Japanese, and Indian woodwinds, ocarinas, bamboo flute, bone flute, fife, conch shell, temple bells, temple blocks, lava stones, Tibetan singing bowls, rain stick, plenty of percussion I’ve never even heard of before, koto, hurdy gurdy, mandolin, dulcimer, ukuleles, harmonium, steel drums, melodica, and plenty more. Definitely check out the list.

I have no idea what I’ll compose when I get my hands on this new set of sounds, but I’m really looking forward to it!

By S P Hannifin, ago