Project Waldo

dil⋅et⋅tante       [ dil -i-tahnt ,   dil-i- tahnt ,   - tahn -tey , - tan -tee ]   Show IPA Pronunciation     noun,  plural  -tantes,  -tan⋅ti     [ - tahn -tee ]   Show IPA Pronunciation     , adjective –noun 1. a person who takes up an art, activity, or subject merely for amusement, esp. in a desultory or superficial way; dabbler. The sooner I prove I'm not one of these, the happier I'll be.

I guess it was a good day.  Something-something-something AK. About half of the Post-it wall was replaced this morning -- pulled out some flabby bits, tightened up the intro.  I also got rid of a cheesy subplot involving kidnapping and figured some things out about the conditioning process (hereafter to be referred to as "Training").  Jiyoung has been a willing sounding board, and after chatting with her for a while last night, a lot of things started falling into place.  She's being really, really patient with me.  This movie is just about all I ever talk about: in the shower, at breakfast, when we go for walks.  I should probably be paying her as a consultant.  Wait, no. The afternoon was spent rewriting the second half of the story document in Google Docs.  My first-pass dialogue is always horrible.  I guess there's a similarity there with drawing -- first you sketch, then you make your final drawing.  I hadn't understood that sketching was something you could ...

This morning I completed my first-pass treatment for the film.  It's just a high-level description of the story, with some light dialogue included.  It needs work.  Off the top of my head, it's got the following issues: Lots of plot holes.  It's not clear how people know what they know, or when they learned it. Events that involve small, underequipped groups defeating well-armed groups are not justified. Characters are flat.  There isn't an appreciable difference between the two protagonists. They talk the same way, they react the same way to events, and they're generic to the point that I can't, as a writer, anticipate their actions. In an effort to avoid too much exposition (the thing that annoys me most about both anime and Wachowski films), I may have left too much unexplained.  There are a few concepts that are kind of complicated, and it'll take some work to fit explanations into an all-action framework.  Also, I'm not sure how long a viewer will b...

Yesterday, I began fleshing out some scenes in Google Docs.  I think I have a basic sense of how to tighten up the third act, after a day of freaking out.   I'm really enjoying the process of removing things that aren't structurally necessary.  The story I started with was like a giant lump of clay, and mostly I've been carving chunks away from it.  Occasionally, something big gets pulled off, and the whole thing won't stand anymore so I have to slap on a new wad.  I feel like training as a painter may have helped me acclimate to this process, since most of what they teach you has to do with not letting any part of a work get precious.   This editing of the structure can get really tough sometimes, because a lot of my fantasies about this film were connected to specific moments: the unfolding of a space battle or the way a certain piece of music would heighten the emotion of a particular moment.  That kind of stuff seems to get cut first, because it only distracts from ...

My first day of work is finished.  I took a two-hour lunch and went for a long walk in the sun with Jiyoung.  A guy could really get used to this. I spent today covering my bedroom wall with Post-it notes, trying to lay out the basic story arc.  Things started off quite well -- I blew through the first half of the story before lunch.  Things started to bog down a bit through the afternoon.  That's at least partly attributable to my getting physically worn out, since I pace in a circle when I'm thinking.  I must have logged at least five tiny, circular miles today. Jiyoung and I had dinner with our friends Matt and Melinda, both of whom went to USC film school.  I asked them about story structure, and Matt explained how all Western stories since Aristotle have had a four-act structure (or, more precisely, a first act, two middle acts, and a final act), that in films these acts are usually each thirty minutes long, and that the third act is where most screenwriters drop the ball....

H i. My name is Nate. I'm taking a year off to make a feature-length video storyboard for a film called Gordon and the Stareater. This blog has been set up so that friends can track my progress over the coming year. In 1998, while attending art school, I began to fantasize about writing a graphic novel. It was called " Gordon and the Stareater ," and it followed the adventures of a gigantic sentient alien space probe and its only friend, a lowly employee of the Pan Galactic Postal Service. Over the next ten years, I made sporadic attempts to write a book, but it never really took shape. I began to realize that as long as I had a full-time job, I wouldn't be able to muster the energy or time to make serious headway on such a big project. A few months ago, I began to feel the tug of something new. My wife, Jiyoung, got me a book of storyboards for Spirited Away . Flipping through the pages, I saw that Miyazaki's drawings contained everything that was great ...