Archive for July, 2008
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
‘The Dark Knight’
With ‘The Dark Knight’ and its marketing serving as such an inspiration for this project since 2007, it felt weird to actually sit down and watch this tonight.
While I try and be as mellow as possible these days, ‘Cinema Rage’ is the easiest way to make my blood boil. Generally, I try and go at quiet times so as not to end up being arrested for trying to smother noisy cinema patrons to death with their own seat. So it was with some apprehension that Heather and I went to the cinema tonight. Granted, we had paid to see a preview screening before the film comes out on general release this friday, but that meant that the cinema tonight was sold out long ago.
I held my breath as the credits rolled, waiting for the first irritating sweet paper rustle or mobile phone bleep. But so did the rest of the audience. It soon became clear that the entire crowd were all petrified that some git was going to ruin the film for them. But no one did. Even the poor lad next to us who clearly had a rotten cold was visibly waiting for things to noisily explode on screen before he dared blow his nose. Bless ‘im.
Anyone who knows me can probably guess that I really enjoyed this film. I was desperately worried that it had been overhyped but it was worth the wait and I still think Gary Oldman is the unsung hero of these films. But anyway, knowing that the film has already broken box-office records in the USA, I wonder if Warner Bros. were able to attribute any of their millions of dollars - even if only in part - to the brilliant viral marketing campaign for the movie!
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
If someone asks if you want to draw a god, you say ‘Yes!’
Good news - I have managed to twist the arm of my good friend Richard ‘Cookie’ Cookson into illustrating the ‘Saxophone Deity’ webcomic for the project. A fantastic artist and excellent writer in his own right, I am pleased about this. Subconsciously I now realise that this entire project has been all about getting Cookie to draw me some original pictures so I can use one as my desktop wallpaper on my laptop 
The webcomic will probably take the longest to complete so this will be the first part of the story I will actually sit down and script.
In other news, I have decided to remove the ‘treasure hunt’ aspect of ‘The End is Nigel’. Originally I was going to hide Verity’s blog all over the internet and only Day One would be unprotected by passwords. Little puzzles would then reveal the location of her next blog entry which you could only find having emailed characters who then email you the password. It’s just too confusing. Especially to send round as a promotional introduction.
As said in the last entry, I think this sort of thing would work fine in the big online version where you are updated every couple of days for a few months. But right now, I think it’s better to ease the audience in gently in the hope that they will sit down and click their way around this first chapter all in one go.
This is my biggest worry at the moment: with the attention span of us kids today, is half the audience going to have clicked away to a more interesting/illegal website before my story has even started?
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
Plotting
The temptation here is to just set as many plates spinning as possible. But knowing that this first chapter might be the only part of this project that ever becomes produced, I would like to at least have a sort of a mini-ending - even though it would leave a lot of questions still un-answered and plot threads a-dangling.
Plus I really don’t have a lot of money for this. While my project outline has changed, unfortunately (although perfectly understandably) my budget remains exactly the same. Most apocalypses are pretty small though, right?
So after drafting this one-page pitch for the project - for myself as much as anyone - I then went on to plot this little opening chapter of the story. Here’s the eventual five-page summary if this sort of thing is of interest to you. I think it introduces enough of a bigger world to show that there are plenty more stories to be told within it but it also focusses on one protagonist. This gives me a chance to work on a solid character now rather than quickly introducing ’some kids with flashy mobile phones’ that my last incarnation had. To be pretentious for a moment, it also gives me room for the subtext that while the world might in fact be ending within the world of the story, protagonist Verity’s world is definitely ending as she nears the end of her university safety-net and her life begins to fall apart.
From a writing point of view, I’m also looking forward to being able to write the different styles of website required in the story: we have two different people blogging, a corporate website, a movie website as well as the basic fun of writing an over-the-top webcomic about a saxophone-wielding god!
The only downside I can see of this so far is that with this chapter being a finite story, there’s no real purpose in running it ‘live’ on the net. It all just has to be there for the audience to go and look around at their own pace. What I liked about ‘The Dark Knight’ and its fragmented, all-encompassing online campaign is that you would receive small e-mails and updates from the story world every now and again whereas here, I’m just going to drop the audience in it.
I just have to remember that this is essentially a promotion chapter. Ideally, when ‘The End is Nigel’ inevitably receives all sorts of unlimited bugets and resources to do whatever it likes, this story would run for two or three months as if it were happening in real life. ie - if the characters said something was going to happen on September 22nd then it would happen on actual September 22nd.
Although…there could actually be a trick here. In writing the blogs as if they were happening now, it could be then revealed that these events happened a while ago. Hmmn. Playing around with time like that could be a bit too much like the ‘Saw’ movies though.
We’ll see.
