Tuesday, April 6th, 2004 |
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It’s raining today, and that’s actually put me in a pretty good mood. It’s amazing how the weather can change emotions so effectively. I guess thats why it’s used so often in movies, but it becomes so cliché after a while. Like, I was watching Gothika last night, and the first 1/3 of the movie was all in the rain, a dark and stormy night. I’m thinking how appropriate, but how unoriginal. Why don’t paranormal suspense thrillers take place under different environmental conditions. It’s like a mandate, if there’s going to be some spooky, other-worldly, horrific event, there’s just got to be thunder. I guess it’s all about the good guy wearing white and the bad guy wearing black. Get the viewer in the right state of mind as fast and efficiently as possible. We’ve been trained to associate certain weather, times of day, colors, fashions, and other such nonsense with specific subtext in a movie (or on TV, or even in books) and the writers know this, so they know they can save time and energy (since at least in movies and on TV, there’s a budget on time, so you need to save as much as possible for the good stuff) by using hackneyed clichés to get over the simple concepts without having to spell it all out, then spend the rest of the time concentrating on their more original ideas. It’s effective, and it works well, but its overly obvious to me sometimes, and it’s at those times that it seems a little trite.
I was making predictions about the movie the whole time too, and while a lot were wrong, not all of them were. I signed up for www.whattorent.com the other day and it asks:
You are viewing a film. After about 15 minutes you can predict most of the plot for the remainder of the movie. You:
Absolutely Hate Predictability – Pretty Annoyed – Mildly Annoyed – Who Cares?
Since I answered somewhere between “Mildly Annoyed” and “Who Cares?” (it was a slider), I was pretty happy making my little predictions along the way. I started thinking, I should write these predictions down somewhere because it’s possible, since I never seem to have a good jumping off point for story ideas, that I could use these misguided predictions to write the screenplays I wish I was writing. Of course, half or my predictions are based on the fact that I’ve seen a lot of other movies, so really all I’d be doing is writing the movie that potentially inspired the one I’m currently predicting, but the names and dates have been changed to protect the copyrights. Oh well, what a vicious circle.
Its quiet, I need music. Though I didn’t think I’d be in here this long.
So anyway, I do want to write scripts, I want to write movies, but I never know what to write about. I just don’t have enough experience writing. I need start wirting just to write, even if it’s crap, just write endlessly. Most if it will be crap, but I need to make a practice out of it, I need to get my mind used to creating and developing, to thinking literally. I mean I’ve spent years writing for my games and developing stories for them, but I’m even kind of out of practice with that. Maybe that’s why a lot of my games have been slightly less than successful recently.
3 Comments to
I’m with you on the writing. I had an idea for a comic book the other day, and I’m writing it out, just for the exercise of writing, not because i expect it to ever see the light of day. Amy will probably be the only one who ever reads it. However, it is good practice, and its helped my sanity these nights at work while the computer is still gone. Hell, I came up with a story idea after having annoying loud screaming black girls in the row behind me during Dawn of the Dead. It was going to be a horror movie about 4 girls coming home from ruining everybody’s good time at a horror movie, and being trapped in a haunted cinema, and the theater patrons would be trying to kill them. The title would be “Don’t Go In There!!!”
“Don’t Go In There!!!”
You should write that, it’d be funny as hell.
I just might. If the computer at College Inn gets infected again, I’ll write it.
April 6, 2004