Flavours of the Month: March 2012...

LOOKS:

The Walking Dead Season 2 - the second half of season two has been a storming success with Glenn Mazzara as the new showrunner. The scale of the look of the show has expanded, the pacing has been perfected, the drama has been ramped up even more, and boy-oh-boy did we zed-heads get some amazing zombie action too. I absolutely cannot wait for season three!

Deadwood - spotted it on sale, so figured I'd give it a spin and now I love this show. The first season is superb, as is the second (even if the dialogue became overly complicated and verbose ... as if the writers ran every word through a thesaurus), and while the third season lacks some of the propulsion and intrigue of the first two seasons (until the final three episodes when it gets nail-bitingly tense), you're so invested in the town and its residents, you don't mind that the final season has been a slower-paced affair with several vague subplots that never really developed. An excellent show all-round and I dearly hope we can finally get the much-talked-about, but never realised (thus far), TV movies that were intended to wrap up the storylines properly.

The Evil Dead - I've got it twice on VHS (cut & uncut), once on DVD (the 'Book of the Dead' edition), and now I've got it on Blu-Ray. It's a bit of an annoyance that we in Region B didn't get the original aspect ratio and a few other additional extras (as found on the now out of print limited edition that Region A got), but it's a spiffing way to catch up on some missed extra features from releases past, and get a remarkably good-looking spruce-up of the print.

Time for some fettling...

Well, the first draft of act one was finished a couple of days ago now, and yesterday I started fettling away at it, thinning it down, trimming off the fat.

I'm 20 pages into this, the second draft of act one, and I've so far managed to cut away 4 pages of waffle, so that feels good - plus it reads better, and looks better when staring at the page as a whole - again I'm taking inspiration from that recent Charlie Brooker Screenwipe special about writers, on which one of them said about keeping the writing as simple and punchy as possible so you hopefully avoid the reader's heart sinking when they see great big chunks of text all over the coming page.

So yeah - this fettling away makes it read better, and look better. I'm tightening the dialogue, fixing the odd sentence that needed changing/removing so that it made sense when something happened/was described later on.

But mostly it's about trimming down the descriptive stuff, taking out extraneous words, shortening words (so "zombie" becomes "zed", or a vehicle type becomes simply initials), that sort of thing.

It does take quite a while, staring into the void of white on screen, pocked with thin black text ... but it feels really good after a session of fat trimming.

As before, it's coming along nicely, and as you can see I forced myself to pause at the start of Act Two, head back to the beginning, and set about trimming away (it also helps to get your head into everything that has come before in a more condensed fashion, you remind yourself about what has happened, about the characters etc, and thus it helps when you get back to the beginning of the following act to continue writing anew).

This said, I do look forward to getting onto Act Two, there's a lot more happening in Act Two, in terms of variety - Act One was two segments on my brainstorm, while Act Two is four segments - and hopefully I won't be writing as long as I did for Act One. I think that first act just had a shed-load of action to describe, lots of visual elements to establish, to get the reader into the world at hand...it reads a little longer on the page than it would on the screen, is what I'm trying to say.

Aye, I don't bother doing a second draft of my blog posts, who's got the time and boring amounts of patience for that? Blogging is like emailing, it's rash and instant!

...

In other news - next week I'll hopefully be ordering my new PC, which will become my primary editing rig ... oh I do look forward to rendering Magic Bullet nice and fast, and yes - to finally getting to play STALKER: Clear Sky, which was sadly just too much for my current rig, a rig which will remain in constant use for all my other tasks - like script writing for example.

Tatty-bye!

I've got tha' feev'ah...

...the writing fever that is.

Have had a good couple of days hammering away at the keyboard in my spare time, I even managed to clock up 10 pages yesterday, so it's coming along nicely - I'm now at page 40.

Like I said before, this is still only the first act, so it's running long at this point, but I'll be going back over Act I after I've finished the first run through, and look to trim it down a bit, tidy things up.

I'm really starting to feel the script writing vibe now, I'm feeling much more fluid in my operation of Final Draft again, my fingers have regained their memory of how it all works - as I said before, it's been a while since I've written a script, so it's about getting my head back into it again - but that seems to have happened and it's going well ... have I said that it's "going well" enough times?

One more - it's going well.

In other news, I'm looking to get my ass a brand new computer specifically for the task of editing this month. I need some extra oomph to feed my Magic Bullet addiction, plus I just need to separate the editing side of things from my existing rig on which I do everything else.

For the past few months I've been researching for my custom spec, getting into the jargon, finding out any potential flaws, seeing who's the current tech leader, and generally getting my brain melted by the confusing world of knowing what you want to put inside your rig - off the shelf this rig most definitely is not.

Ooh I canny wait to get my mits on it! Getting a new computer, plugging it all in, booting it up for the first time, and generally creating your own nest of familiar software (and giving it a thorough run with a flashy game), is one of those joys in a guy's life ... like getting a new car and huffing that new car smell like it was going out of style, hell yeah.