The Dotted Logline

Well, advice I never seem to take seriously, but…

Always alway ALWAYS back up your writing regularly. Then you won’t have to have a nervous breakdown in the midst of trying to salvage your thesis off of a malfunctioning computer a day before you fly out to defend/submit it.

The worst part is, this is the third time I’ve had a computer go kaput on me and not had a recent backup. I can make my excuses about the DVD burning software not working, but the truth of the matter is, I’m just an idiot.

Scene From Hell (n): The one section in a piece of writing that is constantly a thorn in the writer’s side, despite undergoing far more revisions than the rest of the piece.

“It’s a shame… The SFH in my thesis would actually be my overall favorite scene if it didn’t keep pissing me off so much.”

While I wouldn’t say I’m a huge Kevin Smith fan, I have enjoyed the movies of his that I’ve seen (which is all of them except Mallrats) and especially liked Dogma. But the bad reviews of Jersey Girl had kept me away and I wasn’t terribly interested in seeing it when my family rented it.

But I was pleasantly surprised. There were some odd contrasts, with it feeling like a family film one moment and Liv Tyler talking about how she masturbates twice a day the next. But the acting was good, the writing was funny, and the story flowed reasonably well (though it could have been a little tighter in some spots.) Overall, it was an enjoyable movie, and I regret I avoided it for as long as I did. Though when I checked, I found Roger Ebert gave it a good review, so yet again I find that I should look at what he says more than any other critic.

I suspect this is going to become a regular feature…

Scalpeling (v): The stage of revision that entails making small, precise edits that may be indistinguishable to some readers but nonetheless have a very large impact on the work as a whole, bringing forward important story elements. One step above tweaking, two steps above proofing.

Yup, that’s pretty much what’s going on with my thesis right now.

I went and saw The Incredibles again, this time with my dad and sister. My father is pretty blah on anything animated, but he rather enjoyed this movie.

My dad pointed out something I hadn’t noticed the first time I saw the film. As he loves to point out, night scenes in movies are often filmed during the day using night filters, resulting in a scene that looks like it is nighttime but still has very strong shadows from the daylight. The night scenes in the jungle in The Incredibles had the same shadows. However, this was a computer animated film, which means the animators actually ADDED those shadows to make the scene resemble something with a night filter.

I love it when artists add little details like that that maybe only one in a thousand viewers will catch. It speaks volumes about the care and attention they lavish on their work.

I’ve started working on the fourth draft of my thesis and am trying out a new approach to revising. Previously, I would go through linearly and change things I didn’t like as I came across them. That only worked so well; the script moved about halfway in the direction I wanted.

So currently, I’m not even looking at the script.  I just run the current story in my mind, as well as the elements I want brought to the forefront and character elements that need to be explored farther. I keep doing that until the lightning strikes.

It sounds half-baked but it’s actually been working quite well. I’ve been making tons of changes that I feel are really shaping the script into what I want it to be.

In fact, it’s working a bit too well. I haven’t figured out how to shut it off. I’ve been up until 3 or 4 AM almost every night recently because I need to get all the changes down before I go to sleep, or else I risk losing them. The trials and tribulations of revising…

I went and saw The Incredibles today. I’d really been looking forward to it, not in the least because I’m writing a superhero satire myself. Overall, I really enjoyed the movie. There were a few points where I just couldn’t follow the character’s thought process  but that might have just been because I was very tired.

This is definitely not a movie for little kids. There were a quite a few at the showing I attended and I’m sure a number of them are still traumatized. There were a couple of points where the darkness surprised even me. Maybe I’m just too used to family movies that  show the bad guys parachuting to safety when their vehicles blow up. One of the things I admired about the last movie by director Brad Bird, The Iron Giant, was its unflinching acceptance of the reality of death. Still, there’s something inside of you that just cracks when you see a mother explaining to her kids that the bad guys won’t hold back on account of them: “They WILL kill you.”

I have to say that this movie really showed what it really takes to be a superhero. The secret isn’t the super powers.  It’s reaction time and adaptability. The action scenes are amazingly frenetic, to the point where you can still manage to follow along but you can’t understand how the characters, animated or not, are able to take out that many enemies and avoid that many blows in that little time. It’s even more amazing (or incredible) when you consider that most of the scenes involve heroes either brand new to the game or badly out of practice.

Over all, it’s a fun movie that explores the human side of superheroes, a great step forward in computer animation, and a loving satire of comic books from someone who’s clearly a fan. This is the first movie in a long time that I want to go see in the theater again, as well as buy lots of fun merchandise from. God help me.