Tuesday, October 10, 2006

GO THOU

Go thou and rent or buy the DVD's of Firefly, and listen thou to the commentary by the Joss. Hunter and I listened to the Joss's commentary on the pilot. It's illuminating to see how he sets up the characters -- and in some cases, sets up the characters with intentional misleads. (Simon is clearly the villain of the episode -- whoops, he's not.) Also a good deal in there about camera and lighting. A bit too much about Nathan Fillion's pants splitting, but it's illuminating to see how Joss convinces you that Kaylee's dead, pulling out all the cinematic stops -- and it's a mislead -- to warn you that any character can die -- and that you can't be sure you know which way the story is headed...

3 comments:

Chelley said...

His commentary on "The Body" is also quite illuminating. It's like sitting in a filmmaking class with Joss at the helm.

ME said...

I just bought it ... got a killer sale and it was only $25! Now to find the time to watch it all. I need to train myself to sleep less.

Chelley said...

There is a huge difference between the pilot and what actually aired as the first episode, but the difference came from the network. The Network didn't like the dark Mal. They wanted a lighter funnier Mal instead of the cark conflicted Mal that Joss wanted. They wanted more moments like the "Kaylee's dead" moment. That a long with the Network not wanting to air the 2 hour pilot is what lead to "The Train Job."

I personally feel that the actual pilot introduced us to the characters much more sufficiently instead of just throwing all this information at us at once. There was a reason why someone said something instead of just exposition which was a lot of what "The Train Job" was. Joss has even said that the Mal that he wanted would've taken the medicine despite the hundreds of sick people on that planet.