Better Rested

Hi again.

:D

I reread last night's entry and was surprised at how coherent it was, lol! I was thinking about the entry during a smoke break at work and couldn't remember making any sense.

I found this podcast a few days ago called Screenwriters' Toolkit and I LOVE it!!! It's really, short, but each podcasts list 3 exercises to free up a writer's imagination! I just checked out the website, which is here and I love that too! If you write for fun or profit, I SO recommend this site!

I used on exercise in particular and was, frankly, astonished at the results!!! It's called something like "Our Divergent Paths" or something, and what you do is you think of a character in a situation, then think of three different journeys that character might take during the course of a movie. THEN, you think of 5 major events that might happen along each of those three paths.

The result is a sort of sketch of 3 different movies (or novels) that could stem from that single situation!!!

This is super-cool, because this is how animation studios tend to develop their flicks. One of the reason good animated features SO kick live-action features' asses is that animation story teams will explore every possible story avenue they can think of.

Which really makes a lot of financial sense for them, because their medium is REALLY expensive! It costs so much more and takes so much longer to animate something (even if you were talking about 2-D animation, or Flash animation, for that matter) that a live-action feature.

So animation story teams tend to make sure (well, as much as humanly possible, anyway) that they have the BEST possible execution of their story. Because it's gonna take A LOT for them to make a profit on their investment.

However, there's no reason live-action filmmakers can't use this same technique... At least to some degree. Rather than developing the first line of action that occurs to us, we can explore different lines of action, and see what sort of cool scenes arise in our imaginations from each.

And something I discovered today is that sometimes, with a little creativity, a cool event from one throughline can be fit into a different throughline... But you had to explore that other throughline in order to even come up with it!

Another thing I noticed from my experimentation with this exercise is that a seperate throughline could become a subplot to enhance the main throughline! (When you're writing a screenplay or novel, I have found, you can never really have too much story -- you simply leave out what doesn't fit when you're writing -- but you can EASILY have too little story! This isn't precisely true, as you can have too complex a story or simply too much going on to fully explore each important moment, but it's a decent Rule of Thimb because it's much easier to pare-down than it is to come up with more stuff.)

Blah.

My sweetheart's not online. :( And it's a full hour earlier than I usually log on.

But she usually works on Saturdays, so she may be asleep. Or maybe having computer problems.

Still, I had a really naughty dream about her last night, so I feel close to her even though she's not online, hee-hee.

I probably shouldn't blog about stuff like that, huh?

It's not particularly classy of me.

But then... It is IMPORTANT to me, hehe.

I guess I'm kinda rambling now.


Does this bother you?

When I ramble?

Do you find yourself thinking "Why do I bother to read this putz if he's got nothing interesting to say? Why do I do this to myself? What's wrong with me? What's wrong with HIM that he WASTES the opportunity to say something important, to move people, to touch people, but just writing crap until he gets bored with it and I've LONG stopped reading?"

Just curious.

Anyway, hope you have a SPECTACULAR Friday night and weekend!!!

Ooh! Do something weird this weekend! Something that will make a cool story to tell at the next party you go to!!! Just think of something bizarre that might make a good story, and try it! remember that sometimes everything going wrong can make a better story than everything going right!

It''l be fun! You'll see!

KISSES TO MY GNOMEY GODDESS!!! x o x o x o