Writes with
@PABastien
. Film, Television, Videogame writer and occasional director. Currently: working on things with
@mischiefdevelop
and on my novel Ashes.
People forget that Ellen Ripley being the protagonist of Alien is actually a twist that got lost with the knowledge of subsequent movies. Sigourney Weaver wasn't a big star when she signed on to that role.
Love that old PC commercials supposed a world in which the proper place for your PC was a mysterious room in a void with checkerboard floors bordered by columns
@xtinatucker
The other day I saw someone comment how a certain author should have “Gone to Therapy” based on a book he wrote in the 1950s when electroshock and lobotomies were common and there was a huge stigma against getting treatment for mental illness.
The worst part of pitching projects is when people ask you to lay out your trauma to justify why you are the best person to tell the story. No wonder so many writers are in therapy.
@brendengallager
People forget that in order to get the “Hollywood look” on a small camera you still gotta spend money on locations and crew to get it competitive in the film festivals.
That’s what I’m worried about with AI right now. It clearly doesn’t work the way people say it does and the examples that do work are cherry picked to play to it being terrible at rendering movement.
It 100% was a pivot to video scheme like Facebook pulled The kind that killed a certain kind of journalism to sell a service that didn’t actually work.
I often think about one of the reasons why South Korea has such a vibrant film scene is that in the 1990s the U.S. State Department and Hollywood lobbied for the killing of SK’s domestic screen quota and their guilds pushed hard back against it.
But anyway a lot of these AI companies are relying on technobabble to obfuscate that computer learning can be stupidly dumb at times with relatively simple concepts and while it has gotten good at building profiles for advertisers it hasn’t gotten good at cracking emotion.
You know, the thing that’s vital to storytelling? You can’t plug in feelings. It might figure out surface level aesthetics but it can’t tell the intention behind them.
But the software fixates on center straight on framing, not his hand trucked dolly shots or when he plays with light like this shot from Grand Budapest.
You could do this by photographing a bunch of the actors and actresses in suits from Disneyland and it would have more personality and emotion than the blank eyed stares I see before me.
Reminded of that time the screenwriter for The Rock was baffled UN testimony in 2002 during the lead up to Iraq contained “spring of pearls VX configurations” when it was something he made up to look cool on film.
If you ever get worried about your follower count I need to remind you that Steven Soderbergh is on here with only 22k followers completely unverified while there’s plenty of screenwriter influencers that don’t even have a credit with a check mark.
@Bitterstaff
That’s one of the reasons I’ve been pretty vocal on Blanks. Getting rid of blanks doesn’t solve the root issue which is penny pinching in spots it’s dangerous to do. It could have easily been a crane, a picture car or a stunt.
@sonofether
I feel the same way when people get mad about games with guns in them. Like I can understand the disappointment but to act shocked that one of the biggest genres of game is still going makes me feel like you don’t understand your own industry.
Microsoft ended its Xbox Games Showcase Extended with the beginning of Stalker 2. It has been delayed to 2023 due to the Russian invasion in Ukraine, where the Stalker 2 devs are located. Here's how they're living during the war 💙💛
We really need to teach film literacy because the amount of professional critics that think that depiction equals endorsement is a lot higher than it should be.
Films like Wolf of Wall Street and Nightcrawler are important because they remind us that our society rewards shitty people because they make money and not everything is a Save The Cat morality play.
And lets not even talk about how Ripley doesn't take center stage as the protagonist until after Dallas dies. Before then the film treats her as the rest of the crew save the one moment where she refuses to let them come through the airlock.
Lost my Grandmother today. Her husband passed away from COVID-19 a few weeks back and she had recovered. She caught it again and didn’t make it a second time. It hit me like a ton of bricks.
Fuck the President for his lack of testing and contract tracing.
@nevslin
@thetzechun
I got a note on my occupation of Japan set pilot that my Japanese American characters didn’t sound Japanese enough because their arcs were more about them regaining a sense of humanity in the face of wartime disruption and zero talk about honor.
The original trailer completely removes the context required to parse the plot of the movie and who would die where. Tom Skerrit, Harry Dean Stanton and John Hurt were the bigger stars of the day.
Metal Gear Solid has a weird distinction of featuring both a telekinetic psychic and cyborg ninja but also having a more or less accurate depiction of how DARPA, Livermore Laboratories, and Defense Contractors work together to make nuclear weapons.
It's really funny to me that Blake Snyder hammers home Alien as an example of the kind of story structure orthodoxy he's so keen on. It wasn't designed for that from the get go. Alien is first and foremost an ensemble film that picks off its cast until Ripley remains.
Oh Alan Wake’s (the character not the game) bad writing is 100% intentional. The man threw a fit and got real insecure after he killed off his cash cow and got writer’s block and relies heavily on Deus Ex Machinas.
From Episode 2 of Chernobyl by
@clmazin
How the hell are you gonna write a scene in which a character non verbally receives the worst news in the world if you don’t write it like this? (5)
Disco Elysium's achievement metrics are fascinating because they essentially show that the predominant political path that most players follow is the communist one.
@sonofether
Even funnier when they actually work on games with guns I saw this from an Apex dev and I was so fucking confused. My dude you work on one of the biggest gun games.
This image came up tangentially in a work related call prompting me to say the "If you think about it the pin up ladies on WWII plane noses was just a primitive form of Waifuism" and I immediately felt deep shame for making that statement.
It reminds me a bit how a lot of the promotional material for Knives Out treats Benoit Blanc as the protagonist despite the fact that a big story twist is that the true protagonist is actually Marta Cabrera who is absent for a decent chunk of the film's first act.
You ever think about how The Good Place made an explicit point about how the basis of our daily existence is built on a foundation of exploitation and cruelty meaning you actively have to make the world a better place instead of just “being nice” in order to offset that cruelty?
People forget that Stop or My Mom Will Shoot only got made because Arnold Schwarzenegger got his hands on the script, thought it was terrible and then put out a rumor that he was interested in it in order to fool his rival Sylvester Stallone into signing on for it.
I have creative partners in Australia and Canada who have talked at length about how the U.S. has effectively turned their industries into backlots for U.S. productions making it very difficult for their creatives to make a career outside of dwindling local content.
@MerrillHagan
I know a guy who works on a major kids show, one of the old salt writers is known for accidentally lapsing into his old habits back when he worked for Hollywood sitcoms and doing plot lines about divorce. The show is for kids between 3-7
Was interviewed about this today. The big summary I had for Silicon Valley now was “You can’t be the Wild West for too long before you realize half the stores are selling you snake oil.”
@vivaciousvandal
Honestly I wonder if this is one of the reasons why technical quality on shows and films has been declining lately. The people that know how to do stuff got burnt out of the industry in favor of a revolving door of people trying to break in.
I want to give an additional thanks to
@clmazin
for showing me that you can write a character's thoughts in italics for tonal detail a technique I would have never found out about if I didn't read the scripts for Chernobyl that he put on
Hate it when I’m at a party and this dude shows up and tells me he’s at my house. I ask him how’s that possible and he hands me his cell phone and tells me to call my landline. Sure enough he’s on the other end.
I firmly believe that having healthy film industries outside of the US, who are capable of producing their own content with broad mainstream appeal means Hollywood has to work harder to make better products. It’s healthy competition.
Disco Elysium opens with you, blacked out, engaged with your Ancient Reptilian Brain and your Limbic System in mental conversation. Honestly it's one of the strongest openings to an RPG I've seen.
@dertek
It's not like people weren't aware of this for years. Plenty of voice actors would refuse to come to cons that Vic was at because they were sick of dealing with his behavior. I first heard about it around 2012.
@Bitterstaff
There was a pilot I worked on with a show-runner that has an insane amount of shows on the air. There was a sit down protest by the background because they weren’t getting fed, not allowed breaks and not allowed to sit down in the hot July heat in wool period clothing.
Western Samurai media taking place post introduction of firearms by Nobunaga: “We don’t use firearms unlike our cowardly western enemies.”
Actual Samurai from 1590-1868:
Sometimes found on the feudal battlefields, these large cannon like matchlocks were usually carried by samurai. They were expected to use their greater courage and skill to locate and take on the most difficult targets…
#samurai
#gunsamurai
#侍 #火縄銃 #砲術 #松本城
A weird quirk of western politics is that every time someone dies they always talk about what a great guy he was even if he was a descendent of a man who instituted slavery in a colony In the 1930s and denied reparations to his victims.
Honestly the worst part of being a low level creative is the realization that your financial well being is entirely dependent on how long someone decides to drag their feet on making important decisions or paying you.
Sat on my reaction to it for about 3 days but I really do love
@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN
‘s
#DeathStranding
. I love what it’s trying to do with its game design by building empathy towards your fellow players and communicating the scale of a one man expedition across America.