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Wouldn’t it be Cool if…

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…life was really like this?

This video put out by TNT is a fun piece of marketing which really runs with the idea that people need drama in their lives. Everything that happens there is all about “blockbuster film.” I just wonder what the civilians were thinking as they saw this spectacle unfolding before their eyes. The look on the faces of the people who pushed the button says it all – they are awe-struck, nervous, and downright thrilled by the eruption of drama that they have – all by pushing that one little button.

I get this feeling every time I read a great book. I love the thriller genre, and I am having a lot of fun exploring the pulp genre of the 1930s and 1940s. It’s that feeling of being taken away and dropped into dramatic situations that you get to experience through the protagonist’s eyes, and trying to find out what happens next. How does the protagonist get out of the very deep hole the author has dropped him into? That’s all part of the fun – and something that I want to make sure happens in any story I create.

I want you to be able to pick up my story and thrill to the challenges faced by the characters, and follow them as they try to get what they want despite everyone else in the story trying to stop them. I want you to lose yourself in the worlds that my characters inhabit, whether they’re in the shadows of our own world, or in places that no one could imagine. I want you to shudder as the villains try to find ways to bring their own form of drama to the story, and fight to keep from skipping ahead to make sure the protagonist is all right.

In short, I want to add drama.

Sure, videos like this are over the top, and books and movies that show events like this occurring almost never happen to people in real life. That’s why we want the thrills – even if they’re from the nice safe distance of the pages in our hands, or the screen before our eyes. That’s why we look for stories that add drama.

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First, I Shall Entertain

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When I was a lot younger, I lived to go to the local convenience store. Of course, it wasn’t called a convenience store at the time – it was a “Dairy Bar” – a combination convenience store/ice cream shop/laundromat/bottle recycling depot run by a crusty gent who made sure that the shelves were filled with what made him money. Nothing wrong with that, and in a small prairie town, the Dairy Bar proved to be not only an entrepreneur’s invention, it also was a community gathering place and entertainment hotspot.

What can I say? It was a really small town.

Every week, the owner made sure that there were fresh comic books on the spinner racks. Batman, Spider-Man, Captain Canuck, Scooby-Doo, Richie Rich and Casper the Friendly Ghost, and who knows how many other comics. And then there were the paperbacks that he brought in that I noticed when I was old enough to start digging into them – I must have been maybe 10 years old at that time. Star Trek novels, horror novels, movie adaptations, Conan, and later Executioner and science fiction novels, as well as Starlog and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines. I must have spent a fortune at the Dairy Bar on books, comics, magazines, and video rentals – never mind the arcade games and candy that were in there. For a kid growing up in the Canadian prairies, this was like Disneyland available every single day, for less than a dollar.

A few years ago, I ran into the old owner. He remembered me as one of his best customers, even long after he had sold the place and gone off to enjoy a belated retirement, and he confessed that the Dairy Bar, had once been the small town’s movie theatre. Providing entertainment, it seems, was in that building’s DNA.

Sadly, the new owners had not done as well. They stripped the shelves, carrying only the “convenience items” and eschewing anything resembling entertainment. Videos were long gone, as were the books and the comics. Magazines? There were a few, but the racks sat mostly empty, a sad legacy for the years of reading pleasure that they had once provided.

Not even looking at the place through a rosy glow of nostalgia could make that dying husk of a store seem anything like what it once was. No longer a community gathering place, this one-time entertainment hotspot has been converted into a place waiting to be shuttered.

We can draw some parallels to the fate of the Dairy Bar and the North American entertainment sector. Books and publishing have been taken over by the literati snobs who demand craft for craft’s sake, while they ignore the purpose books are written – to be read and to entertain. Movies and television have fallen into the death grip of celebrity/reality/paparazzi voyeurism fighting with endless procedurals/sitcoms/award-bait for viewer’s eyeballs. Radio has abandoned the field to classic-rock-retreads mashed with autotune hell and scattered pockets of bloviation masquerading as talk radio. And let’s not even talk about the fanboy disaster that is the modern comics industry.

If you have been thinking that there’s something wrong with entertainment these days, you’re not alone.

Entertainment has stopped being…entertaining.

Entertainment is the lifeblood of culture, and without entertainment, culture dies.

There are still hints of a heartbeat out there in the culture, a culture that refuses to simply lay down and die. Independent web series, self-publishing, indie comic books, web comics, the new pulp movement, fan films, human wave SF, among others – all the torches picked up by individuals who want to be entertained and, finding nothing worthwhile out there, have instead started to create the entertainment that they want. They have remembered the first, and only commandment of media.

And their commandment is also my commandment: “First I shall entertain.”

Every work created is made for an audience – even if that audience is just the creator himself. It is the audience that ultimately judges the creation by giving over their time and treasure to experience it. And if the creator has failed to give them value in return, then the audience is not shy about letting him know it.

Now, I have been writing and creating a long time. There are a lot of notebooks and computer files that I have filled over the years, all in the desire to tell stories that I enjoy. I create the stories that I want to hear and see, and I’m more than happy to have other people come along for the ride.

Saddle up. We’re going to get entertained.

Mike Kaluta's Shadow

Mike Kaluta’s Shadow. Back when comics were entertainment first.

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Getting Started

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Everyone’s got ideas. The especially cursed among us have got too many ideas.

It’s too easy to let ideas come flowing one after another in a torrent that cannot be stopped – ideas are like that; they never stop. You have to let the torrent flow over you, and to get those ideas written down and saved somewhere, whether it’s in a notebook, your computer, your blog, Evernote, etc. If they’re good ideas, then they will continue to resonate for months or even years after the idea has struck.

Instead, the challenge of creating anything is defining the scope of the project. The idea has to fit within a certain box, be it feature film, ongoing serial, short animation, novel, short story, and so forth and then bringing this grand idea that you had down to the point where it fits into the box. You have to go at it with machete and chainsaw, cutting the idea down to the point where you can actually do something with it.

“But I’ve got a great idea for an epic fantasy story that will need no less than five feature films to tell.”

Well, that’s great, but what can you really do with it? If you’re not able to bring the idea down to the point where you can actually start creating something tangible – something that you can show off to the rest of the world, then you are essentially procrastinating. You have to be able to produce something, or the idea is worthless. It doesn’t matter how great the idea is, or how much it haunts your waking hours, if you don’t produce something with that idea, then you have wasted your time.

It’s not easy paring ideas down, making them fit the container. There’s just too many resonances, too many tangents that we could include. And each tweak of the idea is like your own newborn. But we have to kill those newborn if they don’t fit. By all means, write down the tweaks and the cool little bits, but you have to get the idea down to size.

Don’t worry, the ideas will still be there. They can still come to life later on–after all there are a lot of incarnations that an idea can undergo. After all, how many Star Wars re-edits have there been? How many times have we fought about “Han shot first?”

So, trim that idea down. Focus on what you can get done and produced. Don’t say that there will be more, or other stuff forthcoming, just get the project done and out so that you and the public can look at it. That way, once you’ve gotten it done, you can start examining what you learned from the process and you can keep building on it.

You want to do a web series? Fine. But you have to work up to it. Create a still image first, or a trailer. Create something that is a clip from that movie that takes no more than sixty seconds of film time. Sixty seconds, at 30 minutes per frame of render time will take 60 seconds * 30 frames per second * 30 minutes per frame equal 54,000 minutes of render time, or 15 computer-hours of the render nodes in your render network chugging away, let alone the assembly time or compositing time. And 60 seconds of film time is next to nothing.

So, start with the still, or the trailer. Learn the lessons from that as you analyze your workflow. What can be improved? What can be changed? What worked best? The number of lessons you can learn from a short 5-shot animation will be able to be scaled up to much larger productions.

The other advantage of getting something done is that it also breaks through the perpetual planning stage that the torrent of ideas imposes. Since you are chasing so many ideas, it becomes too easy to just keep on planning – you become really good at planning, but not so good at execution. Cheat, use off the shelf assets, voice act yourself or use a voice synth if you have to, but get the project out there so that the public can see it.

And do it so that you can see it too. You have to see finished work in order to get something really started. There are no other ways that you can do this than to keep on getting finished work out there.

Also, never do anything as a Work in Progress. Everything is finished work. Period. Show off your work, and let people comment, but make it clear that this is finished work and that you are committed to working on the next project.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below:

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Breaking Radio Silence…

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