Huge Tracts of Black

I recently completed the first draft of my first action screenplay. Some of the action sequences take up two-and-a-half pages of (two-lined) description. With no dialogue in between that. I use the 'montage' approach in the way you described in "Crafty Screenwriting". Should this be avoided this at any cost?

Why, no. Movies often have two-and-a-half-minute sequences where nobody says anything. And the screenplay should create the experience of a movie. So QED, scripts can have three pages without dialog. Of course it depends on the genre. THE AVENGERS is all about action with snappy banter. But if you are telling the story purely visually, well, that is what movies are supposed to do!

I am not allowed to play Crusader Kings 2 any more

Some games are just too much fun.

CRUSADER KINGS II is a turn-based strategy game in which you play a succession of heirs to a dynasty. Your dynasty keeps going until you hit 1453 -- or, far more likely, it dies out. Having only girl heirs can destroy your dynasty. Having your rulers die before they have kids at all is entirely possible, too.

It is an immensely complex game. You have councillors. They may like you. They may not. They may plot against you. You have vassals. They probably will plot against you. You have neighbors. They will attack you when you're weak and suck up to you when you're strong.

You can play an emperor, a king, a duke or a count. You can try to build your count up to be an emperor. That's almost impossible, but a boy can dream, can't he?

I played the Bagrationi dynasty, rulers of the Kingdom of Georgia. My first three kings did pretty well, expanding from four counties to maybe a dozen. I took two Christian counties back from the Muslims. Some of that was the doing of the Dukes of Kartli, also of my bloodline, and therein lay a problem: they all thought they'd make better kings than I. They were always waiting to overthrow me.

Then my last King had only a girl child. No sons. Then he died of the pox, leaving me playing a 2-year-old princess. None of her vassals liked her: on top of being a minor, and a girl, she was also a coward. (All the characters have a slew of virtues and vices you can do nothing to improve.) The duchess of Kartli (the duke had died in my prison) forced me to accept electoral succession; then a cousin got himself elected to the throne.

My now-demoted duchess saved her gold up until she was 16, and hired four thousand horse archers to take her throne back. She threw the amiable usurper in prison and put her brother on the throne. (I forgot to mention:  seven months after the succession crisis, my deceased King's Queen had a boy. If she'd just done that a year earlier, there would have been no succession crisis.)

That was about four in the morning. CKII is as addictive as CIVILIZATION, another game I have banned myself from playing. Turn-based strategy means you can fuss endlessly; there's never a good reason to stop playing. (Well, had I kept playing, the Mongols would have swept the Bagrationi from their throne well before 1453. There's no beating the Mongols.)

But CKII is to CIVILIZATION as DARK SOULS is to SKYRIM: you will eventually die. The fun is in staying alive as long as you can, and doing as much as possible, with the game actively trying to kill you. You don't play CKII for the graphics. It is all maps, numbers and sound effects.

But I found CKII to be one of the most immersive games I've played. The game mechanics are really well thought out. They recreate the travails of being a feudal lord. You struggle to find councillors who are good at what they do; when you do, you can't always use them. I had a courtier whose stewardship, 16, was significantly higher than my current steward, whose stewardship was only 14. Unfortunately the current steward was the red-bearded Duke of Kartli. I really did not want to offend my most powerful vassal by giving some courtier his job. So he stayed on, and the talented guy had to wait years -- until the Duke rebelled against me.

I knew I wouldn't be able to get to sleep with the game merely paused. So I deleted all my saved games. And threw the app in the trash. And deleted the trash.

Now I can get some work done.

Wait ... that wasn't actually the app I trashed ... I think it was just the shortcut.

It wouldn't hurt if I played just a little bit more... would it?

Copyright vs. WGA Registration

Larry Zerner, a copyright attorney in LA, has laid out very clearly why you want to copyright your screenplay, not register it with the WGA.

The problem with the Script Registry is that many writers are using it as a substitute for registration with the U.S. Copyright Office. As a result, in the event that their work is infringed, the writer will almost certainly lose thousands of dollars. And, in many cases, a writer who only registered with the Script Registry will be precluded from filing a lawsuit because the economic realities of litigation.

Read the rest on his blog.

Linkbait, but...

Linkbait, but this is a pretty good list of 10 networking tips for people who hate networking. 

"It's not a good joke. But it's worthy of us..."

... Jim Henson used to say about the ancient-but-still-edible vaudeville schtick that was the heart of THE MUPPET SHOW.

According to the NY Times, Adam McKay, director of ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES, has replaced all 763 jokes in the movie so that the studio can re-release it. The movie was shot improvisationally, so he has the outtakes to make a new, raunchier (not, he says, necessarily better) movie with the same plot.

Post production has got orders of magnitude easier. It helps when your movie has already grossed over $123 million and you can afford it. But this sort of thing is only plausible when it takes only a few keystrokes to move a sound effect. When I was in film school, everyone spent months building their sound tracks for their short films. Now I go into a room with the mixer and we do the sound effects while we're mixing the movie.

One thing I learned shooting my last short, WINTER GARDEN, is just how good actors can be at improvisation. I had a cast of veterans, headed by Enrico Colantoni, and they did all sorts of fascinating things in rehearsals once we got through the script and got into improvs. It's easy to see that shooting with a digital camera gives you more takes. It's surprising and fun to see what possibilities that opens up. Additional takes are still not free -- the clock is still running. But if you can add a few more takes, that means you can shoot the script pages, and then fool around for another take or two. Sometimes you'll find something amazing. Something you might catch a really great moment. 

Role Play at RVCQ

I'm very pleased that my short film ROLE PLAY will be screening at the Rendezvous du Cinéma Québecois, at 21h45 on Friday, February 21. It stars Juliette Gosselin (right) and Kat Garcia. 

Fiat Flux

Did you ever write until 1 am, and then have trouble getting to sleep?

Not the "Flux" I'm writing about.

There have been assorted studies that show that the relatively blue screen of a computer tricks your brain into thinking it's daytime. In fact, at 6400K, your computer screen is even bluer than sunlight, which is about 5600K. So when you finally close the computer, you're still in daytime mode. It takes a while for your brain to get into night time mode.

The nice people at Flux have written a free app that will change the relative color temperature of your screen so it's warmer -- anywhere from 5600K down to the 2700K of firelight.

(It has absolutely no relationship with Aeon Flux, whose picture is to the right.)

I tried it last night. I only put the color temperature to 4500K because otherwise it seemed just a bit too orange. (The FAQ says it takes some getting used to.) But I did feel a whole lot less wired when I finally stopped working around 11 pm.

The only odd feature of the program is that it depends on your location to determine when to turn the lighting of your computer down to night mode. So the transition happens automatically at sundown. In the depths of winter, I don't particularly want to feel sleepy at 5 pm. But it shouldn't take long before they allow you to set the timer manually.

Check it out.

The Banner Saga

Hunter bought me Stoic's Banner Saga for Christmas. It is a lovely, lovely game. It's set in a Viking Fimbulwinter world where you must fight obsidian robots called "Dredge" as they swarm across the land. But there is a rich mythology behind them, and their invasion is not what you might think at first.

The game makes the most of its Kickstarted indie budget. (They asked for $100K. They got $725K.) The music is majestic, Viking horns and drums. The visuals are stylized. Outside of combat, you're in a 2.5D world. Cut scenes are stills of the characters. Travel is a tiny line of animated characters walking across a highly stylized landscape. The credits say the world is inspired by the artwork of Eyvind Earle (Disney's Sleeping Beauty), but I prefer it to his work.

The game has consequences. Characters can die because of your choices. Your daughter can die. Your whole world can die.

To keep your clan alive, you sometimes have to be a bastard. Trusting strangers can get your people killed. Not trusting strangers can get your people killed. Hard to know which is which. So you really feel like a leader of men.

Combat is turn-based tactics, à la XCOM. I love turn-based tactics. I like being able to think out my moves.

What makes a great indie game? Totally delivering the goods on a game that is conceptually fresh but of limited scope. Taking advantage of your limitations to do something new. The stripped-down art style -- the 2D, only half-animated travelogue, for example -- creates a mood that 3D might not have done.

The mythology in this game suggests that there could be a sequel. I'm ready.

I really enjoyed this game. (Thank you, Hunter!) $25 on Steam. Worth every penny.