I know it’s not a real movie in the traditional sense but I’ve always thought it would be cool to do something within a program like Moviestorm.

http://www.moviestorm.co.uk

What I wanted to do was to basically create an animated story board to go along with a script.

I remember watching a “making of” video on the movie Shrek and they created incredibly basic animated story boards. They looked like crap, but they were able to show pacing and camera angles…etc.

Machinima kind of spawned Moviestorm and these types of programs are snowballing. Getting more and more features.

The Red Vs Blue guys got quite popular with their Machinima movies made with Halo, but I’d rather wait for a full blown movie making program than try to hack video or code.

Hell, I’m having a hard enough time just trying to learn how to write a proper script. :) Still, it’s a tool that someone could use if they had the time.

Upset with him WHY? That makes no sense to me. UPSET? LOL.

Interesting.

Unk

And when people make “over 30 movies” they take all of the fun out of them. I like to laugh, cry cheer and even think, but I want to think AFTER I enjoy the other stuff.

Read it yesterday and quite a few readers sent me the link via email.

GOOD STUFF. I’d work with Mechanic ANY DAY.

Unk

Here’s an excerpt:

Nine years ago, I was a healthy and occasionally happy studio executive. I had taken Fox over a 7 year period from a doormat to the #1 studio and before that had spent 9 years at Disney building a then-dormant minor player into a muscular and, for the first time in its history, a real force in the studio world. I left Fox with 5 of the Top 10 films in history and departed Disney with 19 of the Top 20 Videos ever and as the #1 International distributor.

I had fought with Rupert Murdoch over my desire to create a business for Fox in the world of animation. He felt no one could compete with Disney. Nevertheless I started up Fox Animation. ANASTASIA was a start, it made money. TITAN AE a misstep, and lost. Even though that is the nature of the business, that not everything works, he didn’t want to wait for ICE AGE to finish production. I didn’t have a foot out of the door before Fox tried to sell off the film. Luckily for them, they couldn’t get a deal done.

Here’s the link.

http://www.deadline.com/hollywood/bill-mechanic-on-moguls-bad-decision-making/

It’s definitely insightful.

The greatest I’ve ever met? It’s a tie between:

Ernest Lehman and William Goldman.

Unk

Thanks for some great feedback and advice.

Just curious, you ever met Charlie Kaufman?

Who is the most brilliant screenwriter you ever met?

But a lot is the “lack of work.” I think I can say it takes me 1-2 months to really know my “mise en scene.” And then write the damn thing. You may have to study physics or economics. Watch out for those psychological thrillers that need a “slight” understanding of psychology.
Hell, even a vampire movie requires a plausible reason for the ability to turn to smoke.

OK, no rants tonight. Gotta write web sites for the day job.

You asked:

“100 years in the future will there be more writers like Charlie Kaufman?”

Uh… Nope.

Next question…

Who you should listen to? LOL. Listen to YOU. Take ALL the information IN and let it roll around and coat your insides and just keep doing what you’re doing. Nobody ever said to LISTEN to someone in particular. In a hundred years, we’ll all probably be dead anyway.

Christian,

These people are so confused as to what to make right now… Every guess seems to be wrong. It’s SPAGHETTI THROWING TIME with fingers crossed that the next noodle STICKS.

One of the problems I personally SEE a lot of right now is screenplays without the WORK. They’re getting whipped out and some of it’s okay but a lot of it is shit which usually means somebody whipped it out in a short amount of time… SHORT obviously being subjective because what is short to me might not be short to someone else. But the WORK just really isn’t there… Still derivative. Still cliche. Yada yada.

RML,

You said:

“Why should we (the artists in this) go along with the meme of the accountants and investors — determining the “success” of a movie by how much it makes in the theaters.”

Probably because we’re trying to make MOVIES. And NOW, it’s harder than ever for a low to no budget Indie to make a film and expect ANYTHING to happen from it because distributors want to see at least 1 name. Don’t get me wrong… There will be those exceptions to the rule… THERE ALWAYS IS but for the most part, I see it more as the major players in the film industry just trying to stay in the game and keep their jobs and the fallout ends up being REAL Indie filmmakers who try to make good movies. They hardly had a fucking chance in hell before… Now it’s worse.

You said:

“This is (almost) 2010, and we, as screenwriters, can’t come up with a better delivery system for our stories and ideas than the status quo?

Why are we afraid to even put our heads together about this?!”

I don’t think WE are afraid to put our heads together… But we are screenwriters. We write screenplays. Screenplays are stories for movies. Who makes movies? Not screenwriters by and large… Studios and prodcos be they large or small.

And the problem isn’t that these places won’t make movies from our screenplays… The REAL PROBLEM is getting your script READ. You could have a blockbuster sitting on your hard drive but you can’t get anyone to read it.

That’s ONE problem.

The other problem is that at least 98% (probably more) of the scripts that get written and plug up the system are SHIT. That’s a lot of SHIT to wade through. Which is another reason why this business does run a little smoother when a referral is involved.

Having said all that… Sure… If we could get a million screenwriters to pool their resources and plunk down say, $100 apiece and then everyone submits a screenplay that carefully selected judges filter and choose to be the absolute best i.e., based on being COMMERCIAL but not cliche or derivative, then this ENTITY could very likely hum right along and make some cheap films with good stories that MAKE MONEY and round and round we go.

Only how do we round up all these screenwriters? LOL.

We might be able to scrape together a couple of thousand but then what? More money per screenwriter and MANY of these screenwriters would have to DEAL with the fact that their screenplays just don’t get it done. How long would they stick with a system like that?

Egos are egos after all but yeah, I would LOVE to do something like that. Movies made by screenwriters…

Lead me to it.

Unk