Txt Msgs On Screen

We've been watching Steven Moffat's reboot of Sherlock Holmes on BBC. Moffat's Sherlock is contemporary, so he's always getting text messages.

Rather than shooting an insert of the phone, which is a pain to shoot, Moffat simply puts the text message on screen as a title.

This seems so obvious, but I don't think I've seen it before. You could probably also do it for emails and texts on a computer: rather than trying to get a shot of the computer screen and a shot of the actor, just shoot the actor and lay the screen text over the actor as titles.

Describing this it sounds like a bit of a kludge. But when you see it on screen, it is immediately obvious what you're looking at. Which makes it more of a hack.

Shooting Good iPhone Video

Tuesday I shot a bunch of interviews on a Sony EX1 for a promotional video for the game I'm working on. Not all the interviews turned out to be what we wanted, so, not wanting to spend $300 to rent it for another day, I wound up shooting more interviews today on my iPhone.

The picture quality on the iPhone is pretty good. I had two issues with it. One is that its has an omnidirectional microphone that picks up the person talking and every air conditioner and truck backing up for miles around. The other is that it constantly adjusts its virtual iris to light conditions, so that if you pan past a bright window, it will reduce its light sensitivity over the whole frame ("stopping down"), which makes everything go dark except the window.

There are theoretically external microphones for the iPhone. I'm considering buying the Owle Bubo. This is an aluminum frame for holding the phone or attaching it to a tripod; a wide-angle lens; and an external microphone. I have no idea how you switch inputs so that you're not using the internal microphone.

Somewhere out there, maybe there is an app that records video but allows you to manually adjust the virtual iris and lock it down. At any rate, there ought to be one. Anyone know of one? Anyone want to program one?

Incidentally, two lessons about promotional videos. They can eat up days of your time. They also eat up quite a lot of the rest of the team's time; you wind up pulling people off their jobs so they can pretend to be working somewhere else in the frame that works better in the shot.

But the upside is they force to think about what you're delivering. It's easy during the creatie process to forget what you're selling to the audience. Shooting a promotional video focuses you on your main selling points. Then as you go back into your creative work, you may be able to spend more time on delivering on your main selling points, and less time on the frills.

"Culture is not an expense..."

"New measures to spread Québecois culture," reads the headline on this Parti Québecois campaign graphic; at the bottom, it reads "Culture is not an expense but a profitable investment, both economically and socially."

That's what I've been saying.

See, in Québec, culture is the third rail. Voters want to hear about how a party is going to support culture. Parties that don't seem to "get it" about culture lose elections.

If only I had more confidence that the PQ considers me part of the "culture Québecoise" that they want to spread, I would probably vote for them.

Papo & Yo

Video games are getting more and more impressive every day, but as an art form they're still in their infancy. DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION and WITCHER 2 may have convincing characters, moral choices and permanent consequences. They are my two favorite AAA games. But you wouldn't call either of them a deep emotional experience. You wouldn't say they say fresh, true things about the human condition.

But every now and then a game comes along that pushes that envelope. PASSAGE was a teeny little iPhone game that managed to say something about the shortness of life and the permanence of decisions. And now along comes PAPO & YO from creator Vander Caballero and game designer Ruben Farrus, downloadable on Playstation Network.

In PAPO & YO, you're a little kid in a hallucinatory barrio where houses can be coaxed into sprouting cartoon stilts and walking around; only by rearranging the landscape can you chase after the little girl who keeps taunting you.

Your best friend is a giant rhino-esque monster, who generally only wakes up for coconuts. By bouncing on his belly (see the pic), you can jump places you can't get. He can also open gates for you. You need him.

But, whenever he eats a green frog, he becomes a true monster, belching fire and beating the crap out of you if you don't run. He's terrifying. Your quest, you discover, is to get him to a shaman who can cure him.

And to do that, you have to manage his rages. Sometimes, you need to feed him a green frog so he'll destroy an obstacle you need destroyed.

So here's where this becomes personal expression. The game is about the creator's relationship with his abusive, alcoholic father; it's dedicated to his sisters and mother, who survived along with him. He needed his father, but he needed to manage his father's rages.

I grew up with very reasonable parents who rarely even raised their voices. I don't think I've ever seen either of them drunk. Intellectually I know that an alcoholic parent is terrifying. I've seen it in movies. People close to me have had parents or lovers who were abusive. I've always wondered why, given the choice, they stayed with their abusive lover. I've always wondered how there's still affection for the abusive parent.

This game taught me something about that. You can't reject Monster. You can't leave him behind. You need him. Most of the time, he's kind of cute, in an ugly way. You wind up forgiving him for his rages. That's just the way he is, after all. It's your fault for not getting out of the way, for not running fast enough, for not hiding better.

I mean, I knew that. But I didn't get it.

PAPO & YO barely has a story. It's a puzzle platformer. But its simple game dynamic and stunning visuals make it a real emotional experience. The mechanics tell the story.

The game's mechanics tell a story. Is there any higher praise I could give a game for its artistic expression? I think the creators have really shown what games are capable of. I hope when CONTRAST comes out, we will have risen to the same standard.

One Scene

The AVClub talks about how David Mamet added exactly one scene when he adapted GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS from the stage to the screen.

You guessed it. "Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is, you're fired."

Creative Conflict

I listened to Margaret Heffernan's TED lecture, "Dare to Disagree" today. It starts with an anecdote about Alice Stewart, a scientist who was able to prove that it's not a good idea to X-ray pregnant mothers because she had a great collaborator. He was her statistician, and his job, as he saw it, was to prove her wrong. Only by mining the data sixteen ways from Sunday, trying to dredge up any way to show that X-raying pregnant mothers was not correlated with childhood cancer, could they prove that it is correlated.

In a writing partnership, you want a certain amount of creative conflict. If you agree with each other all the time, who needs two of you? You need to be willing to criticize and shoot down each other's ideas. To say, in Denis McGrath's old catchphrase, "Here's why I hate that."

This is hard to learn. (Unless you are from New York, in which case you have to learn when to shut up). In companies, most people often feel they can't voice their concerns. The whistleblower is the odd man out. Or look at American politics, where almost no current politician dares criticize the country's utterly insane drugs policy.

In a creative partnership, you want different points of view to clash.

On CHARLIE JADE, Sean Carley, aside from being a very fine writer, was the guy in the writing room who would call shenanigans on Denis and me when we came up with something he didn't believe.

After all, if someone in the room doesn't believe it, what are the odds that the audience will?

What makes creative conflict useful is restraint. You have to agree on the underlying premise. I've got notes back on my writing where the analyst did not buy into the basic premise of the material. That kind of note is not constructive. (It may be accurate, just not constructive.)

You also have to agree on what you're critiquing. If you're working on our premise, you critique your premise. If you're working on your outline, you critique the beats, and maybe you critique the premise if the beats cannot be made to work. If you're working on pages, you should no longer be critiquing the premise. A creative partner who keeps going back to the drawing board will hold you back. This is particularly true on a TV show, where you just don't have time. But at a certain point you just have to have faith that your premise will hold up.

It's crucial because about 40% into anything, you'll probably start to question whether the idea has any merit. You'll also question whether you're capable of writing it. Or writing anything. You will possibly get the idea that you have lost any talent you had, if indeed you ever really had any. That's why I call 40% in "The Sucky Point."

In the WaPo, Emily Matcher makes the claim that overentitled millenials can help, since they expect everyone to listen to their thoughts.

Criticism is essential to making anything good. But just like heat applied to steel in the forge, what makes it productive is focusing it on the right part of the material at the right time.

Showrunners at JFL

I had a chance to attend a panel discussion on “Showrunners” at July’s Just for Laughs Conference with TWO AND A HALF MEN co-creator Lee Aronsohn and BIG BANG THEORY showrunner Bill Prady, moderated by Variety's Steven Gaydos. A few takeaways:

Lee likes to cast “people I can’t stop looking at.” Talent and charisma are two different things. You can’t teach charisma. But it’s not enough. You need talent and professionalism. Charlie Sheen might have been the star, but “the engine that is Jon Cryer” powered the show.

Some standups are terrible sitcom actors. On BIG BANG, there’s only a single standu, Melissa Rauch. Everyone else are professional actors, many with theater degrees, or who were child actors – all serious veterans. A day player can get by on charisma, but a recurring role needs chops.

(I cast a standup once. He could not memorize his lines for the life of him. And he wouldn’t rehearse, either. We had to make cue cards.)

Bill Prady says he lets his casting director filter actors, but he hires writers without a filter. “Sitcoms are made by writers,” he said, and agents are terrible filters. He told a story about an agent who insisted he put a script on the top of the heap. It was terrible. He called back and asked what the agent liked about the script. The agent couldn't answer. Because, you see, he hadn’t read it.

Bill read 400 scripts to make the BIG BANG THEORY room. He didn’t read them all the way through, of course. But he read each one enough to know whether he wanted to work with the writer or not. “Only I know what I’m looking for, and I generally find it in the first five pages.”

Lee Aronsohn said he’s also hired people into the room based on their standup act, or their plays. He hired a woman based on her blog once. 2 ½ MEN does “gang writing” – 9 people in a room at once – so not everyone has to be a structure person.

Bill Prady mentioned that he had been able to rescue a bunch of Chuck Lorre vets who had gone to “kidcoms” (e.g. iCarly) – which are functioning as a sort of farm team for sitcoms now.

The key to survival in a room, therefore, is to know “when to speak and when not to speak.” Don’t be the guy who alwayshas something funny to say, but only 5% of it is relevant to the part of the script you’re working on.

So standup is an easier route to staff writer than it is to performer.

Bill talked about the two pilots he shot for BIG BANG. He considered that a stroke of luck – almost no pilots get reshot, and even fewer get picked up after the first pilot fails. The network thought the pilot was bad because the actress cast to play Penny, Amanda Walsh, came off as too crass and “hookery. Only one scene worked.”

The writers realized the problem was actually that the role was written too crass. They rewrote Penny, and recast her, and this time the pilot worked.

Bill talked about the habit among successful show creators of getting a bunch of friends to punch up the pilot over a week, and “everyone gets an iPod.” This reminds me of the work that the Seth Rogen / Judd Apatow / Owen Wilson / Steve Carell mafia do on each other’s scripts. I think all our scripts would be better if we’d take the time to work on each other’s material. Wouldn’t they?

An audience member asked about submitting spec pilots versus spec episodes. Bill Prady wants to see both. A spec pilot takes him into your world. A spec episode proves you can work in his; but “it better be better than anything I see on the show.” Because the show episodes are written in two weeks, with production concerns, and he assumes that you’ve spent six months on your spec episode.

Another question was about demographics of the writing room. Bill Prady remarked that the BIG BANG writing room was the first one he’d ever worked in that was majority gentile. It is, of course, mostly men. He insists that he never looks at the title page until he’s evaluated the writing sample, so his room is “a true meritocracy.”

To some extent he blames agents, who send him many more scripts by young white guys than by women, minorities or 60-year-old writers. “Agents are not looking to represent 60 year old writers.” To get an older room, you may have to look outside agents.

Of course, he may just like what men do on the page better than what women do. Certainly BIG BANG is bound to skew male, since it’s about very smart nerdy guys and a relatively dim pretty girl.

“I will say,” he added, “that it is a rare member of a writing staff who is a Protestant who came from money.”

I never did get to ask Bill what he'd learned about writing from his days selling Muppets merchandise. One day, maybe.

Also, check out what The Hollywood Reporter’s took away from the panel.

Photos by Dan Dion, courtesy JFL.

The Newsroom

I'm having trouble with The Newsroom. Dear friends of mine love the show. And yet I find it to be a pompous show about people whose jobs are not really that important.

In THE WEST WING, the characters made decisions that affected millions of people. Their struggles really mattered. In STUDIO 60, the characters made a fluffy variety show, but it was sort of funny that they took their jobs so seriously. And the show was more about the personalities, anyway; we weren't expected to root for whether one skit got on the air or not (except if a character cared about it for her own sake).

But THE NEWSROOM actually seems to be about whether the characters manage to get their sound bites on the air before, or better than, their competitors. It seems to take it for granted that I should care, as if the characters were, say, cops, or soldiers, or doctors, or firemen. I'm experiencing a failure of stakes and jeopardy here. I'm having trouble buying in.

Is it about the wonderful, fresh, witty characters, and the unique and surprising situations they get into?

Are you buying in?