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.

Lost in Translation - Recap 2 - Eclectic Boogaloo

Over the past ten weeks, I've looked at a mix of hits, misses, and cannonball caroms. What can we take away from the morass? Well, again, taking care of the original work plays an important part.  How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is a sterling example of not only having the creator take part in the process but also finding the right people. In contrast, Johnny Mnemonic, shows what happens when the creator is left out of the loop. The former had Dr. Seuss involved at several levels, including producing and lyrics. The latter had an exec take the final product and recut it before sending it out to theatres.

Executive meddling can be an issue. Flash Gordon had producer Dino DiLaurentiis and his wife casting the leads and making deals for cross-promotions that could have torpedoed the movie. However, the director was able to cast for the supporting roles and brought in veterans who could hold their own and make the inexperienced lead look decent at the same time. Coupled with a kick-ass soundtrack by Queen, the movie survives as a cult classic. Sure, not a financial success, but the movie is remembered. Having the right people can save a movie.

As Steve pointed out, sometimes the best thing is finding the right fit for the work.  A Game of Thrones definitely fit best as a TV series over a movie. There is just too much happening that is too important to cut. The build up of the threats and conflicts required the time that a weekly episodic format allows for. Likewise, the weekly format is working for Once Upon a Time, allowing for the mystery of the story to be built properly. As movies, both would lose far too much in the translation.

Sometimes, going from TV pilot to cinematic feature causes problems. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was originally the pilot to a second Star Trek series. However, the decision was made to turn the script into a full-fledged feature film. Unfortunately, this required the script to be extended. Most of the filler came from loving shots of the USS Enterprise, as the camera flew around and over her. Long shots became the order of the day, giving the movie a far slower pace than a pilot would have. Compare Star Trek: TMP to "Encounter at Farpoint", the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Both are cerebral, but "Farpoint" builds up the action through character interaction and twists while TMP relies more on lengthy approaches in space.

What about works where the creator is either long gone or a corporation? Where the work is part of a larger franchise? For this, I looked at three movies.  Rookie of the Year adapted the game of baseball into a family narrative. The plays on the field were believable; in fact, there have been stranger in the game. The movie was faithful to the sport while telling its story. It is obvious that the writers, the cast, and the crew have been to a ballgame or two. The other two, however... Oi.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was, in short, a mess. It had several good scenes tied together with a plot a 3rd grader could find plotholes in. The promise of the opening scene - Cobra's assault on an US Army convoy - provided a glimpse of the potential that was never reached. Meanwhile, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li just really wasn't a Street Fighter movie. What happened? In the case of GI Joe, it looks like the license was available and was used with a quick script that did take into account the characters and groups but, well, forgot about cohesion.  Chun Li, on the other hand, felt like an available script was taken and had the Street Fighter aspects grafted on. Both movies had potential never realized.

And that leaves Dungeons & Dragons. The movie had decent scenes and a decent plot, but completely fell apart during execution. It seemed to be suffering from having the wrong people involved. It missed on what made the game D&D interesting and didn't have many of the game's iconic monsters. Unfortunately, many studios decided that the takeaway was, "Don't make movies off tabletop RPGs".

Overall, again, respect for the creator and the work heads the list of how to make an adaptation successful. Followed, though, is making sure the adaptation is in the right format. The right format can get the work's full impact; the wrong one can mute it or draw out the impact to the point where it's not felt at all.

Next time, year-end round up.

 

Magrathean Diary #5: Organiz-ized, Pt. 1 (Getting Organiz-ized)

When I was a kid, my idea of organization was about the same as any other kid’s: throw everything into the closet and worry about it later. Or throw everything into the rollout bins under my bunkbed, and dig them out only after a centimeter-thick patina of dust had grown on them. I forgot assignments, mislaid money, lost library books. In the latter case, one of the volumes that went missing for the better part of a year was a skinny little thing that ended up sandwiched between the pages of a much larger book that I rarely opened. I’d used it as a bookmark in a moment of haste.

I’m a lot better now, not just thanks to computers (Outlook’s to-do feature is a godsend), but thanks to my own willingness to develop the right habits. Write things down. Keep things sorted. Create action items and takeaways. Learn to separate forest- and tree-level details. (“Do my taxes” is not a task; “sort out my expenses for the year” is.)

Most people are able to get some semblance of organization into their own personal lives. It isn’t hard for most of us to stay on top of our bills, our phone calls, our social obligations, and what’s playing in the theater. But the idea of creating a whole world, or a whole universe, and staying on top of that—it sounds like a tailor-made way to intimidate yourself. If heads of state and chroniclers of history can’t stay on top of their own respective nations’ narratives and policies, how is li’l ol’ me supposed to do that?

And what’s more, how do you get into something like that if you’re not the most organized person to begin with? How do you organize something as massive as a world—or a universe, depending on your ambitions—without either a) dying of old age from trying to tabulate all that detail or b) going batfruit insane from same?

The first step is the part everyone hates: getting organized. Or, for you Taxi Driver fans whose eyes lit up when you read the title: getting organiz-ized.

Far more systematic and diligent people than I have written books about the virtues of organization. Most of what they agree on, as far as it applies to what we’re doing here, can be distilled down to a few basic points:

1. Record-keeping and metadata.

Make maps, keep lists, write things down. But most importantly, find a way—your way—to make all this stuff searchable and accessible. You’re reading this on a computer (I presume); don’t use old-school technology when you’ve got the new-school variety staring you in the face. If you don’t know how, I’ll talk more about that in a future installment.

2. Habit-building.

If you’re not in the habit of writing stuff down, get in the habit. Easier said than done, to be sure, but this is where having someone else to bounce your ideas off comes in handy. They can help remind you to commit all those wonderful spur-of-the-moment insights or involved digressions to something more reliable than your own memory. That way less and less slips through the bottom of your mind, and more and more of it ends up recorded somewhere. And you also need to get into the habit of mopping up after yourself, which brings us to …

3. Maintenance.

If you throw everything into your closet for long enough, eventually you end up with a Fibber McGee Avalanche when the door is opened. If your note-taking and record-keeping isn’t cleaned up and systematized over time, it turns into a big ball of mud—an unmaintainable pile of stuff that has no particular organization or intent. Maps may need to be redrawn, not just to add new information but because the old ones are a mess of fold lines and scribbled annotations. Character summaries need to be rewritten to accommodate new aspects of the story. Plotline summaries almost certainly will need constant touching-up. The point isn’t to do all this stuff at once, but to commit to a regular rolling schedule of doing so. Clean your closet.

Each of these three things involves you and the work in different ways. The first involves the work itself; the second involves mainly you; the third involves your handling of the work.

Next time I’ll start going into detail about the exact organizational methodology I adopted for my own work, and how you’re not obliged to do the same.

-- Serdar Yegulalp

Lost in Translation 20 - Cyberpunked

The 80s were a turning point in media. Between the heyday of the music video, the breakout of shows like Miami Vice, and a new crop of writers. the approach to storytelling changed. One of the literary movements of the 80s was Cyberpunk, a mesh of man and machine in a distopian world where corporations have become monolithic and governments exist only at their pleasure*, where people outside pleasant society act as go betweens and expendable assets for the corporations and for the criminal organizations. The vanguard of cyberpunk was "Johnny Mnemonic", a short story written by William Gibson** and published in 1981 in Omni magazine.

The title character of "Johnny Mnemonic" was a data courier, with the equivalent of a hard drive*** implanted in his head. He ran into a problem with one client and had his bacon rescued by Molly Millions, a razorgirl with mirrorshade eyes and razors implanted under her fingernails. The criminal organization from whom the client stole the data now in Johnny's head wanted the data back and traces of it eliminated, sending a killer who had more replacement parts than original body to clean up. Johnny and Molly turned to Jones, a war vet dolphin with a smack addiction, to retrieve the passcode for the data and to the Lo-Teks, a anti-technology gang, for protection while sending a snippet of the data to the criminal group to get them to back off. The killer, meanwhile, has tracked the duo down and takes on Molly on the Killing Floor.

In 1995, Gibson worked with director Robert Longo to bring the story to the silver screen. Althought the original script was more an art film, desogned to be made for under two million, they pair went with Sony who saw the Internet as a potential draw. Sony provided $30 million. Several changes were made to the story. Because the character of Molly was already licensed out to another company, she was replaced with Jane. Unlike Molly, Jane was on her way down, having been infected with Nerve Attenuation Syndrome (NAS). The criminal organization was replaced by a pharmaceutical firm that had discovered a cure for NAS but wanted it buried because their treatment program would be more profitable.***** Johnny, played by Keanu Reeves, became the main mover in terms of plot and action, where as in the original short story, he directed the plot but left the heavy lifting for Molly.

With Gibson and Longo working together on the movie, what could go wrong?

Executive meddling. According to William Gibson himself, the movie was recut at the last moment by the American distributor, and recut badly. The flow fell off. There was some criticism of Keanu Reeves's acting ability, but, in retrospect, he managed to portray a man who had part of his brain removed and altered to become a data courier believably. Unlike How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Johnny Mnemonic didn't keep the creator in the loop at a crucial stage in editing, and the movie suffered as a result.

Next time, a summary.

* So, all we're missing today are USB ports in our heads.
** Other early cyberpunk works include /Neuromancer/ and /Mona Lisa Overdrive/.
*** I really hope IBM isn't going this route with racetrack memory.
**** Superconducting quantum interfence detectors.
***** Okay, cyberpunk waned because it started to look good compared to reality.

Magrathean Diary #4: What Worldbuilding Isn’t

For the first few installments of this diary, I’ve been touching on all the things worldbuilding is and what it requires. Now I’m going to talk about what it’s not.

Worldbuilding is not a dumping ground

Worldbuilding is not about finding excuses to insert things that you’ve been dying to use somewhere.

Well, to some degree, it is—hell, I do this all the time, gleefully. We all want to find a place for that perfect comeback line, that zinger of a description, that amazing bit of alien technology.

But I can’t throw in stuff like that blindly. And you shouldn’t do it without performing at least some kind of test of fitness for the material. There are some elements that will complement your world—and, by extension, your story. The more worldbuilding you do, the more obvious it becomes what fits and what doesn’t without having to break your story (if only in a given draft) in the process.

Worldbuilding is not a work-avoidance exercise

I’ve touched on this before, and I’ll keep harping right on it until my tongue flops out of my head: The best reason you engage in worldbuilding (and for some folks it’s the only reason) is to make your storytelling work—to create the place where your story happens, and to give it a living environment to unfold in. If you catch yourself using your worldbuilding as a way to avoid writing, to duck out on word-count quotas or to forestall writing that really difficult clash of wills between protagonist and antagonist, quit kidding yourself.

Worldbuilding is not a way to justify lazy storytelling

This is a parallel concern with #2 above. Don’t use worldbuilding as a wholesale way to avoid blatant deficiencies in your story. If something happens that is obviously a cheat, don’t try to change the construction of your world to accommodate it.

Note that this isn’t the same as using life’s own inconsistency and incompleteness as part of the story itself. If you have a character who has an eccentricity which you can build on and maybe make part of his social background, that’s one thing. If he has an abrupt about-face of motivation, don’t try to explain that way with the same trick. Fix it on the appropriate level in the story.

Worldbuilding is not for showing off

This may seem paradoxical: What part of worldbuilding isn’t meant in some way to impress the reader? Don’t readers respond that much more to an author with vision and imagination? (I’m going to be addressing this particular canard in a future installment as well.)

Some of this, you can indeed get away with and make your story that much sexier. But when you start flirting with elements that only justify their existence as attention-getters and not as genuine story components, you need to pull back.

A random example of this is when you have a 19th-century setting that has some stray piece of 20th-century technology (e.g., radio, lighter-than-air craft) thrown in for the sake of making things snazzy. Unless you’re prepared to defend how every single one of the several hundred allied technical discoveries required for such a thing were somehow present in your setting a good century before they were ever feasible, leave it out.

Since this last rule is largely a matter of applying discipline to one’s imagination, that’s how we’ll segue into the next installment ... wherein I’ll discuss what we talk about when we use that rather overused word.

Magrathean Diary #3: What’s Kept In And What’s Left Out

Martin Scorsese once said cinema was about what’s in the frame and what’s out of it. Storytelling, and worldbuilding, are the same way: what you leave out is as important as what you keep in.

Many people assume the editing process is confined to the story itself—that the world is like a darkened room, and the story is like the flashlight you shine around that room to illuminate it selectively. This is true, and it’s a useful analogy when you’re actually writing the story.

Lost in Translation 14: Adaptation of the Universe!

In 1934, Alex Raymond created a comic strip to compete with Buck Rogers in the newspapers. The strip, called Flash Gordon featured the titular hero, an athlete, caught up with reporter Dale Arden in an airplane crash caused by a sudden meteor showers, who is kidnapped by Dr. Hans Zarkov to travel by rocket ship to find the source of the meteor assault on Earth. The trio discovers that the meteors were sent by Ming the Merciless, rule of Mongo. Throughout the publication of the comic strip, Flash and his companions meet the peoples of Mongo and unite them to rebel against Ming to free the world from his cruel domination.

The comic strip had been turned into three serials, each starring Buster Keaton as Flash. The serials stayed to the core of the comic strip, though minor changes were made. Flash, originally a polo player in the comic, became a wrestler. Dale, originally a brunette, was played by Jean Rogers, who had her naturally dark hair dyed blonde to take advantage of the popularity of the hair colour in film. Still, the serials had a following and were the first science fiction serials produced.

In 1980, Dino de Laurentiis produced a screen adaptation of Flash, simply called Flash Gordon. Written by Lorenzo Semple and directed by Mike Hodges, the movie brought the comic strip to its core elements, showing Flash, Dale, and Dr. Zarkov uniting the peoples of Mongo to defeat the forces of Ming the Merciless. Flash Gordon didn't do well in its initial theatrical run. Several problems plagued the film, mostly related to executive meddling. Sam J. Jones was cast as the hero after de Laurentiis' wife saw him on a game show. At the same time, de Laurentiis himself worked out an arrangement with Bob Guccione of Penthouse to have some of his models as extras. A decision was made to use bright colours at a time when realism was the order of the day for films.

However, the movie is considered a cult classic. What saved the film from the millstone of mediocrity and being tossed into the fountain of the forgotten was director Hodges being able to cast the supporting actors. He turned to veterans of stage and screen, people who could carry the film while the rookie actor Jones learned the craft. (And, yes, you can see Jones's acting ability improve as the movie progresses.) Max von Sydow turned in an understated performance as Ming the Merciless, bringing a subtle menace to the role instead of chewing the scenery as Raul Julia and Jeremy Irons had. Topol, best known from the theatrical and cinematic versions of Fiddler on the Roof, played the indomitable Dr. Hans Zarkov, delivering lines that would be cheesy under lesser talent. Timothy Dalton, who would go on to be 007, played Prince Bain of the Treemen. Richard O'Brien, he of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fame, played Fico, one of Barin's men. And Brian Blessed, veteran of many British productions, played Prince Vultan of the Hawkmen, bringing a boisterousness that defined the Hawk Prince. ("What? GORDON'S ALIVE?!")

Coupled with the supporting cast was the soundtrack. Written and performed by Queen, the music provided a strong rock beat that mirrored and accentuated the action on screen. Scenes that would cause massive eyestrain from the eyerolls became fun, if still implausible; scenes such as the football fight in Ming's court. "Flash's Theme" reached Top-40 radio stations.

Overall, the movie should have been a disaster. Executive meddling created many hurdles for the director. The visuals of the film went in the opposite direction of other movies made at the same time. The special effects looked more like a throwback to the serials than the cutting edge pushed by Lucasfilm.  Flash Gordon should have been MST3K fodder. Yet, the little things pull the movie up. The supporting cast was far better than the movie deserved. The soundtrack itself saved the film from being forgettable. Little details, lines added for humour (Barin to Zarkov while awaiting execution: "Tell me again about this man Houdini."), background gags ("All citizens will make merry upon pain of death" on a "space blimp" during the wedding), all of this added up to get people to watch the movie again. Success? Not really, few people go out to make a cult classic (Rocky Horror notwithstanding). Failure, then? Again, no, the movie is enjoyable and the problem spots start taking on their own charm.  Flash Gordon falls into a gap between success and failure - the movie has a following, but not for what the creators had hoped. It is a cult classic.

Next time, from action figure to action movie.

 

Lost in Translation 12 - Boldly Going Again!

The first of this series (ignoring the introduction) focused on Star Trek: The Next Generation, a series that featured a new cast and even a new USS Enterprise. However, this wasn't the first attempt at a reboot for Star Trek. As mentioned in the first entry, the series made the jump from the boob tube to the silver screen in 1979 with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This movie became the first of nine feature films, including a reboot movie in 2009. Each Star Trek movie had its strengths and weaknesses in varying amounts. Yet, it is Star Trek: The Motion Picture that had the highest gross at $$139,000,000 until the 2009 reboot. How?

As mentioned before, a new Star Trek series was being developed in the late Seventies. As the work continued, airing commitments fell through, though the door opened to turn the project into a movie. The original pilot script for Star Trek - Phase II got reworked for the big screen. The plot centred on an alien cloud making a beeline towards Earth. As Star Fleet worked to get a ship ready to intercept, a communication from the commander of a Klingon task force showed the danger of the cloud - three Klingon battlecruisers were obliterated one at a time despite their fearsome weaponry. Naturally, the job fell to Star Fleet's top vessel, an upgraded USS Enterprise.

However, the ship wasn't helmed by James T. Kirk. Kirk had accepted a promotion to Admiral after successfully completing the Enterprise's five year mission to find new worlds, seek out new life and new civilization, to boldly go where no man had gone before. In his stead was Captain Decker, a young man following Kirk's footsteps. Alas, for Decker, he got bumped from command when an admiral decided to get back into action.

After the crew, including fan favourites Bones, Scotty, Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov and new crew member, the Deltan Ilia, arrived (via shuttle, not transporter due to messy technical issues), the Enterprise left Earth's orbit to intercept the dangerous cloud. Along the way, a problem with the warp drive caused the Enterprise to enter a wormhole. The crew manages to escape it, but the imbalance in the nacelles makes even Warp Factor 1 a hazard. Fortunately, one man heard about the problem and arrived in a warpshuttle to assist. Mr. Spock, now retired from service to pursue the Vulcan state of Kohlinahr, docked with the Enterprise and provided his skills to get the ship warp-capable.

The Enterprise  reached the alien cloud, who sent a probe to inspect the ship. During this, Chekov is injured trying to prevent the probe from downloading information on the defense of Earth and Ilya is killed, vapourized by a blast. Shortly, after a number of probes were launched from the Enterprise and lost, an intruder was detected in Ilya's quarters. Kirk, Decker, and a security team responded, only to discover a new probe taking the Deltan's form. The probe!Ilya explained that she was there to facilitate communications between the crew and the the alien cloud, now known as V'Ger. V'Ger's mission was to find the Creator and deliver all the information it had gathered.

After an unauthorized spacewalk by Spock, who used his trip to try to mind meld with V'Ger and got far more than he expected, a landing party consisting of half the ranking officers (Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Decker, probe!Ilya included) made their way to V'Ger's core. There, they discover that V'Ger was really one of the Voyager probes launched from Earth in the Seventies. V'Ger's plan was to become one with the Creator, and did everything possible to force the Creator to go to it. In an act of heroic sacrifice, Decker took the place of the Creator and received all the information V'Ger collected, combining with the probe and Ilya to ascend.

Ultimately, the movie consisted of an extended Star Trek episode, with starship porn to help stretch the time to over two hours. Kirk's shuttle ride from Spacedock to the Enterprise included a long fly-by past, under, and over the starship before docking. Interstitial footage between scenes included loving passes over the Enterprise, to the point where the starship should have gotten billing in the credits. Later Star Trek movies would have a more intricate plot, more action, more humour, even better scripts. So how did an extended television pilot with extensive filler become the most financially successful (before 2009) Trek movie?

The key to the movie's success may be just in the timing. In 1977, Star Wars tore up box office records with an action-packed plot.  Star Trek, though, was always a more cerebral series, even when there was action or humour. ("The Trouble With Tribbles" was obviously a warning about removing a species from its indiginous environment.) Also, in 1979, the original series had been in syndication for ten years, far longer than anyone would have expected. (And still is in syndication even now. Not bad for a show that lasted just three seasons.) The fanbase grew as a result. Conventions, fanzines, fanclubs (official and unofficial), comics - the demand for more Trek was there. Thanks to Star Wars, people had a taste of science fiction and wanted more, and Star Trek provided. The idea of watching a movie multiple times in the theatre helped; video cassette recorders were rare at the time so the option of purchasing a copy of a film after its theatre run was non-existant. Thus, possibly the weakest entry in the Star Trek movies has the best theatrical returns, proving that, if the demand is there and effort is made, the fans will come.

Next time, take me out to the adaptation!

What Fandom Has Given Me

This is the week of Speak Out With Your Geek Out, a time of celebrating fandom.  Because I am an active member of many fandoms, I couldn’t pick just one.  Therefore, I’m writing to you about all that my various fandoms have done for me.

Happy Birthday to Geekery As We Know It

Forty-five years ago today, a certain TV show premiered on the NBC network. At the time, it didn't make a hell of a lot of noise - it got so-so ratings and lasted three seasons. But it would be the show that would go on to create geekery as we know it.

Happy Birthday, Star Trek.

Now, some people may argue that geekery was around before Gene Roddenberry's little space opera hit the airwaves. They can point to early sci-fi zines and Sherlock Holmes societies. But fandom was never as organized, or as creative, on a mass scale as it was when Star Trek captured people's imaginations.

Just about everything we associate with fandom originated with that first group of Trekkies. Organized campaigns to persuade the Powers that Be to see things the fans' way? How do you think the show got that third season? Fanfiction? Look no further than the first run of Trek zines. (Yep, you can thank Trek for slash, too - K/S was the very first pairing of that type). Cons? Yes, they originated that, too.

The fact is, every fan group today, from otaku to Bronies, owes their fan culture to the pioneering work of that first group of Star Trek devotees. Oh, and by the way, those Trekkies weren't the stereotypical pimple-faced nerdy boys with Spock ears, either – many of them were middle-aged, suburban moms, finding their first real creative and social outlets at a time when women were still far from equality. Yes, we just may be able to thank Star Trek, in part, for feminism as well.

And from a fan to pro standpoint, Trek has been responsible for innumerable careers – including a number of people getting involved with NASA. Heck, Star Trek marketing – books, merchandise, films – has often been a career path in itself.

So as you go about your fannish business today, take a few minutes to remember where it all began. Live long and prosper, Star Trek – from contemporary fandoms whose worlds you've made at least 20% cooler.

– Bonnie Walling