Fan To Pro - The Blog of Professional Geekery

Why You Shouldn’t Keep Your Projects A Secret

As someone who works with intellectual properties, and someone who knows a lot of people who also work with intellectual properties, I can safely say that a lot of us like to keep our ideas to ourselves.  There is a fear that if your idea is leaked, then there’s a team of coordinated and efficient coding enthusiasts that will take your idea and do it faster than you.  Probably better than you too.  And they all wear sunglasses and matching black leather uniforms with lightning bolts...

Where was I?  Oh, right, the fear of being copied.  This fear has a less-paranoid-but-still-paralyzing twin: the fear of someone coincidentally doing the same thing as you, making you look like the copycat nonetheless.

My advice to you is to fight that fear and show off (or at least talk about) your works in progress.  There are several reasons why this will help you rather than hurt you.

Warner Loses Big(ger)

Deadline.com reports Warner Music losses are steepening and that digital downloads aren't offsetting the loss engendered by slumping CD sales. Maybe that rumor earlier about the big music companies ditching CDs entirely isn't off the mark: at this rate they could save themselves some pretty solid coin by going to digital-only and burn-on-demand as their major revenue streams. (Funny to imagine the ubiquitous manufactured CD becoming a boutique format like 180 gram vinyl...)

- Serdar

Late Breaking Geekery: Google Music Service Introduced

At an event in Los Angeles today, Google unveiled its new music service, Google Music. It lets users store and stream as many as 20,000 songs online and listen to tracks on multiple devices (Android, of course, though users will also be able to share music via Google+). They claim to have partnerships with a thousand music labels and offer 13 million songs. Not coincidentally, this is hot on the heels of Apple's release of iCloud and the debut of the Kindle Fire - which is an Android device, but also hooked to the Amazon Prime streaming service. We'll see if Google can carve out its own place in an increasingly crowded market. - Bonnie

Steve Jobs, In Memoriam

Since I became active in fandom, I have called myself Sailor Mac. It was a name I chose on impulse, but it's one I've worn with pride. It's always been a tribute to the two people whose visions had a big hand in shaping my life - Naoko Takeuchi and Steve Jobs.

When I heard Steve Jobs had passed on, I did something I rarely do when I hear about celebrity deaths - I teared up. Because we lost more than an American businessman - we lost one of the founding fathers of geekdom.

Lost in Translation Number 10 - We're on an Adaptation from God

In 1976, Dan Aykroyd introduced metalhead John Belushi to the blues. The two went on to form The Blues Brothers, a musical sketch on Saturday Night Live, singing blues standards to a crowd that normally didn't listen to such music. The duo then took the act out, performing at nightclubs, including their own afterhours club.

Aykroyd spent time working on a script to give the Blues Brothers a backstory. After judicious editing - Aykroyd went to great detail in his work - a filmable script for a full-length movie was produced. John Landis took the helm as the director of The Blues Brothers. The movie was released in 1980.

The plot was simple. Jake (Belushi) and Elwood (Aykroyd) Blues were asked by the nun who ran their old orphanage to earn the money needed to keep the orphanage open. She didn't want any tainted money; the money had to be properly earned. After a search for an idea and seeing the light, Jake and Elwood decided to get the band back together. The first half of the movie followed the Blues Brothers as they recruit the old band members and get instruments. The second half followed the band as they work to get the money at a variety of gigs, ending with a massive concert. During this, the Blues Brothers ran afoul of the law, starting with a speeding violation and expired licence and building up from there, the Illinois Neo-Nazis, the Good Ol' Boys country & western band, Jake's parole officer, and Jake's ex-fiancée. The action culminated in a massive chase involving the previously mentioned plus the Army, Coast Guard, Reserves, and state, county, and city law enforcement as the boys try to make the deadline to pay the orphanage's back taxes.

The plot, while basic, serves as the framework for the music. Ultimately, The Blues Brothers is a musical, featuring a number of blues artists, including John Lee Hooker, Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, and Ray Charles, showcasing a number of different blues styles. The soundtrack has placed consistantly in the top ten blues albums sold, reaching an audience that had never heard the blues or never considered the blues as listening material. The car chase through Chicago was recorded at speed, hitting over one hundred miles per hours, and setting a new bar for chase scenes for movies following.

The potential for trouble starts with taking a five minute musical sketch and stretching it to an over two hourrunning time. This issue was mentioned in the discussion of The Naked Gun, with the added problem of having almost no characterization of the Blues Brothers prior. The stretching problem would become a inevitable for any Saturday Night Live sketch made into a movie; sometimes, a gag can only go so far. Fortunately, Aykroyd's background work, much of which never was shown on screen, helped him work out the motives of the characters in the film. Staying true to the original sketch also helped; the sketch was all about the music, and so was the movie. It's easy to fill in much of the running time when all that needs to be done is link from song to song. Random destruction, such as police chase through a mall, also fills time, especially when the scene adds to the motivation of two of the pursuers.

The movie is an unqualified success, especially at the core reason it was made; to get a wider audience for the blues. By staying focused on that goal and adding action and comedy elements to attract an audience that wouldn't normally go to a musical, The Blues Brothers will remain a classic.

Next, a look back at what we've discovered so far.

Launch or Be Lunch, Day 13, - Realism vs. Reality vs. Realization vs. Real Estate? (Quick, Come Up With Another Word!)

As we discussed yesterday, research is the key to getting everything right - or at least plausible - in your works.  But in all that, there's a question that should really be asked.

Why?

Or rather, does everything need to be true and accurate in all details?  Yes, it helps to know that the point end of the sword is not the part that you hold, and that the moon is not made of green cheese.  But what it if was?  What if ol' Luna were composed of Swiss? (sorry, couldn't come up with a gouda enough variety).  What if there was air in space?  What if we just threw the book out?

And, of course, it goes without saying that some things just don't mesh well in a realistic setting.

Launch or Be Lunch, Day 17 - Originality is SO Original, Part 2: Composition is Not a Crime

Aaaaaaand we're back.  Yesterday, we talked about the concepts of originality vs. unoriginality, and why unoriginality isn't rated high enough or that originality is overrated; in the end, it's how you treate the unoiriginality in an unoriginal manner.  In a sense, it's like the concept of Fair Use in copyright: it's the transformative and new meaning to the source that counts.

And now it's time to get into that little shibboleth. Hang on to your pens and pencils, boys and girls, because what I'm about to say is probably going to turn a few heads at best and floor people at worst.  Also, because I could go forever on the subject and all its different permutations, I'm only going to stick to how it related to manga and comics; I'll acknowledge that it happens all too often in other media and others can cover that better than I can.  

So with that, let's get started.

Originality is Overrated

My latest kick has been complaining to anyone who will listen that there’s no originality anymore.  I glare at them through my thick black frames, over a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and whine that “it’s so cliché.”  ...Okay, not exactly, but I’m sure that’s how I seem to people who tell me “You know, there’s no such thing as originality.”

And they’re right.  There are only seven different plotlines in the world if you ask a writer.  There’s only one if you ask Joseph Campbell.  By the same token, striving for originality as your only goal leads to disaster.  I should know.  I was a film student* and I had to sit through quite a few films that were essentially “let’s expose a filmstrip to a slab of concrete for twenty minutes and call it art.”  Was that original?  Yeah, I guess.  Was it art?**  Or, for a better question, is it something that people can genuinely enjoy and identify with?  Nnnnot so much.

Spider-Man: Turn Off The Comics Musicals?

About 10 years ago, I read a book called Not Since Carrie, an entertaining look at how some Broadway shows went horribly wrong and flopped. As the title indicated, the authors considered the gold standard of Broadway failure to be the musical version of Stephen King's iconic novel, which sought to portray teen angst with flashing lasers and Solid Gold-like dancing. (If you're too young to remember Solid Gold . . . trust me, you don't want to know).

It seems that the yardstick has been reset by Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a sensational, slow-motion, expensive disaster (which, at least of this writing, seems to at least still be selling tickets - but can it recoup its cost?). Which is a shame, because it's done damage to what has the potential to be a thriving genre, if done well - the live comic adaptation.

The Post Mortem

If you are part of a regular publication, or a product that has regular release dates, I recommend doing a “post mortem” analysis after each new edition.  Pick out a few things that worked well.  Pinpoint the things that didn’t work out so well, and brainstorm ways to improve.