September 2004

Stewing

by Suw on September 30, 2004

Funny how sometimes ideas seem to ferment, then suddenly there's all this build up of bubbles and you pop your cork, gushing white wine all over the parquet floor.
Ok, bad metaphor. Really bad metaphor.
Stuff's… brewing.
Spaced extras are A1 tiptop fanfuckintastic, btw.

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Spacedaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!

by Suw on September 28, 2004

Three DVDs.
Out-takes.
Extended scenes.
Extra footage.
Stuff.
Bliss.
Bliss on toast.
Stating the obvious was always my strong point.

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Egogooglebombing Simon Pegg

by Suw on September 28, 2004

Looking for a transcription of Shaun of the Dead last night, I discovered that I rank #2 for a Google search on the term 'shaun of the dead transcription', although somewhat mistakenly Google links to one of my old Lawrence Lessig posts which has the word 'transcription' in it.
This set me wondering, so I searched for 'Simon Pegg' and 'Shaun of the Dead' and discovered that (unsurprisingly) I don't come up anywhere in the top 10 pages, despite repeated mentions here of both Simon Pegg and Shaun of the Dead and Google's alleged love of blogs. My train of thought and a discussion with Kevin Marks, who always gets me in trouble, resulted in the thought of egogooglebombing – googlebombing on someone else's name so that if they ever go egosurfing they'll find the googlebomb post. In this example, the aim would be to get CnV to rank unfeasibly high in Google for the search term 'Simon Pegg'.
Of course, this is purely hypothetical – just conjecture really. I'd never stoop to the level of attempting to googlebomb Simon Pegg because that would be sad and make me look like a strange stalkerperson. No, this is just a discussion of the concept of egogooglebombing Simon Pegg and not an actual attempt to do so.
*cough*
Where's the door?

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Spaced at Forbidden Planet

by Suw on September 27, 2004

Last Thursday I was walking down New Oxford Street in London when I thought to myself that it had been a long time since I'd spoiled myself with a trip to Forbidden Planet and that maybe now I could afford to fill in a gap in my collection of Hellblazer comics. Distraught, I was, to discover that Forbidden Planet appeared to have vanished from New Oxford Street, despite the fact that I'd seen it there – and specifically told a friend not to let me go in – just last week.
Disappointed, I walked straight past the small comic store nearby – the sort I never go into because they're populated by people who look at me with that 'You're not geeky enough, please piss off' look. Disconsolately, I wandered down Shaftesbury Ave, only to find the new Forbidden Planet Megastore. W00t!
Wandering round, rather dumbstruck by the sheer volume of stuff there, I noticed a small poster stating that Messers Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright would be there today, signing copies of the new Spaced Collectors Edition DVD. For a moment there, bearing in mind the fact that finding out about this event was an involved and complex stroke of luck which obviously made it a 'sign' of some sort, I considering hanging round in London for an extra couple of days so I could go, but then I thought, hang on a moment… how would this really play out?
I'd spend Monday morning hanging round, getting backache from carting my rucksack around and just generally nervous. I'm perfectly calm when meeting famous people that I'm working with, but I'm crap at that fan-star thing. Last time I met someone famous on a fan-star basis it was Martin Carr from the Boo Radleys who was presenting the film Midnight Run at the National Film Theatre. I nearly vomited on his shoes.
Eventually I'd go to Forbidden Planet and join the queue, which would likely be long. I'd probably get rained on. I don't think it did rain this morning, but it would have had I been there. Law of nature.
I'd have to buy a copy of the DVD, which I've already bought from Amazon, thus landing me with two. Now, I'm a fan of Spaced, but not that big a fan. As the queue moved forward, I would become increasingly nervous and would start reciting to myself a few words like 'Hi, I'm a big fan of yours, and I'd really like a copy of the Shaun of the Dead script please'.
Eventually, I'd reach the head of the queue. At this point, I would be bright puce with embarrassment and probably shaking, despite all my attempts to calm myself down and put it all into perspective (it's only Simon Pegg, for fuck's sake). Gut churning, I would thence thrust the DVD under Mr Pegg's nose and mumble something incomprehensible along the lines of 'um fan er script mumble dead um, *cough* yeah, thanks', he would scribble on said DVD and look at me with an expression akin to curiosity but with a hint of something unfathomable that I would then spend the rest of the day trying to interpret. Lather, rinse, repeat with Mr Frost and Mr Wright.
I would then leg it.
So, tell me… Where precisely is the added value in this experience? In what way would my life be enriched and enlivened? Undoubtedly my gut would be very enlivened, but frankly I can get the same effect with laxatives and a lot less stress.
Ironically, were I to meet Simon Pegg on equal terms, not as a fan but as a colleague – let's say I interviewed him for the Guardian or was discussing script development possibilities – I would be cool as a cucumber. Wouldn't bother me at all. I used to hang out with some biggish bands when I worked for the Maker, and it never really flustered me. Everyone's the same when you're talking about Pet Rescue.
The conclusion I've drawn from this is that I am really not suited to being a fan and should therefore avoid all fannishness in future. I think I'd be better at having fans than being one, although don't hold your breath for that one to pan out.
(Oh, and in case you were wondering – I didn't buy anything from Forbidden Planet in the end. My phobia of record/comic shops reasserted itself and I slunk off like the lily-livered coward I really am.
Thank fuck for online comic stores, eh?)

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Memorial Gig for Elliott Smith

by Suw on September 25, 2004

On the 22 October 2003, I tearfully wrote with the news that Elliott Smith had died. An extraordinarily talented singer/songwriter, Elliott wrote some of the most delicate, emotive, beautiful music I have ever heard. As part of the Elliott Smith community over on the Sweet Addy message board, I had come not only to love his music but to feel a strong empathy for him, as many of his fans did.
When he died, aged 34, on 21 October, I was totally shocked and deeply upset. We all were. Unfortunately for me, Elliott's death came hot on the heels of one of the hardest, most unpleasant periods of my life, after my business had collapsed, taking me with it. I was red raw from spending eight months trying and failing to save my company.
In the days after Elliott died, people asked me why I was so upset – he was someone I had never met, never would have met, who never knew I existed. Why should I be crying over him? But Elliott didn't feel like a distant pop star to me, more like the brother of a close friend. Someone who was a palpable presence in my life, despite not being actually there.
Partly this was because there were people on the Sweet Addy board who did know Elliott, including Charlie who looks after the Sweet Adeline fan site which eventually became the official site and upon which I helped out in a tiny and insignificant – but significant to me – way. Partly it was because occasionally Elliott would pop up on the board to squash a few rumours. Partly is was because his lyrics were so honest, so vulnerable, so powerful – in the mirror he held up to the world, we all saw ourselves.
When my business went under, I had been forced to return to live with my parents, so I had neither the privacy nor the strength to really face Elliott's death at the time. I found I couldn't listen to his music without crying, so I stopped. Completely. Even thinking about him or his music upset me greatly, so I did all I could to avoid it.
Last night at ULU was held a memorial gig for Elliott, raising money for the charity Kid's Company. Last night, for the first time in nearly a year, I heard Elliott's voice, heard people singing Elliott's songs. For the first time in 18 months I met up with some of the wonderful people from Sweet Addy, people I had had the delight of hanging out with in Manchester in Jan 03. It was both a sad and happy evening. I finally had the chance not just to grieve, but also to bury some hatchets, to move on.
Right now, I am listening to Figure 8. I feel kinda sad, but the sadness has been largely replaced with the familiar warmth that the beauty of his music engenders. It's the first time I've put it on since he died. At least now I know that it won't be the last.

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The end of summer

by Suw on September 22, 2004

Today is the Autumnal Equinox, the last day of summer and the beginning of the slow descent into winter. It feels like summer ended weeks ago, actually, but today it's official. So now I fix my eyes on the Winter Solstice, the day when we start climbing out of this dank, miserable pit and begin looking forward again to spring.
I really do need to overwinter somewhere warm and sunny.

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How's that for a slice of fried gold?

by Suw on September 20, 2004

Warning: ***Spoilers. But only little ones.****
Ok… so we all know I'm obsessing over Shaun of the Dead right now, and obviously it's not everyone's cup of tea, but to give myself a bit of a change I decided tonight to watch About A Boy, which I'd picked up in a three-for-18-quid deal on Saturday. Seen it before, a while ago, and laughed quite a bit at the time, but somehow it really doesn't stand up to even a second viewing, let alone the sort of repeated heavy rotation I've given Shaun lately.
Now, About A Boy is not a bad film, really. I've seen plenty worse, but it doesn't have that… *thing* that makes it rewatchable.
So, what is that *thing*?
I think it's all down to layers. You have the story. That's layer one. But if that's all your film has, then it's a bit of a one card trick. Beneath the story is the subtext which gives the film a bit more oompf, but even then there's not all that much there – it's a two horse race.
For a film to be really rich, really watchable, it needs more than just story and subtext. It needs stuff in the background that you only notice if you look hard – in Shaun of the Dead, for example, it's little things like a still-running lawnmower with an arm attached, or Shaun calling David 'four eyes' at one of the rare moments in the film when he doesn't actually have his glasses on, or the repetition and mirroring of certain bits of dialogue or scenes, or the foreshadowing when Ed outlines their plan for the evening which plots out the whole of the rest of the film (except you can't see that first time round).
The fourth layer is made up of 'in jokes' – references to other films, tv shows, music, etc. that you don't get unless you have some sort of prior knowledge. I think that, done badly, this layer can be very tedious, but I think Shaun of the Dead does it well because it doesn't detract from the other layers. So when you see the character Tyres from Spaced turn up as one of the zombies, it's funny, but only incidentally so. The homoerotic non-subtext between Shaun and Ed similarly echoes word for word a scene in Spaced, but again it doesn't matter if you haven't seen it because the overt joke is still funny.
Furthermore, I think that the way that Shaun of the Dead changes mood in the blink of an eye is a major asset. They go from humour to pathos to horror and back again, yet they never lose the momentum. The ludicrousness of the standoff in the pub, where you have what is a stereotypical gangster/heist movie style Mexican standoff, except instead of guns, they have one rickety old Winchester rifle, broken bottles and a corkscrew.
About A Boy also tries to do the mood change thing, from humour to pathos, e.g. when Marcus, Will and Marcus' mum's friend come home to find that Marcus' mum has overdosed. Yet although that works as a plot point, there's no subtext there. In fact, I found the whole film to be somewhat lacking in depth, which is a shame because I'd like to see Hugh Grant do something with depth if only to prove that pretty boys can have brains. (Vain hope, but I am an optimist at heart.)
Question is, how do you create this depth? Surely some of it happens when you come to designing the sets – all that background stuff, e.g. the posters on the wall, the playstation game that Ed is playing (Timesplitters 2).
But the main element to creating this depth is simply spending enough time developing the script, and that's helped by having the people who wrote the script also directing/acting because the development never has to stop. You can bet your bottom dollar that Pegg and Wright spent ages bouncing ideas off each other, throwing out the stuff that didn't work, refining the stuff that did, right up to the moment they shot it.
Same thing with The Matrix I (let's pretend Matrices II and III never happened, shall we?). The Warchowski Brothers obviously spent ages honing the script, adding in layers of meaning, little details that you could then pick up on when you rewatched the film. Unfortunately, Matrix was such a big hit that suddenly they were thrust into the situation of having to make II and III without having spend enough time in script development. (Note: I'm being generous here. It could just be that they were shit scriptwriters to start with and just got lucky with I.)
So you end up with a nasty case of Second Album Syndrome. Look how long it took the Stone Roses to manage Second Coming (which, for the record, I quite like). Second albums are notoriously difficult because you used the accumulated best bits of years and years of work for your first album, but you only have a year or less to write your second. Suddenly, your nose is against the grindstone, you're still touring and promoting your first album, and yet you're expected to come up with the second one, fucking around on the tour bus with a four-track, a pounding hangover and the biggest case of sleep deprivation since the Stanford Prison Experiment.
If you're lucky, you started writing your second album before you'd finished your first, or you had enough quality material left over that you’re not under too much pressure, but the difficulty in producing that second masterpiece shouldn't be underestimated. Psychologically, success can be as scary as failure, whether you believe that success was deserved or not.
So, two three points. Firstly, I hope Pegg and Wright don't do a Second Coming on our ass. Hm, ok, let me rephrase that in a slightly less wishful manner. I hope they get the opportunity to spend enough time developing their next script so that they can make it as good as, or better than, Shaun. It'd really suck if their next film blows.
Secondly, one reason that the film industry in this country closely resembles Tyres' undead persona is because there are not enough resources for script development, not enough time spent on the story, on the subtext, on the layering. It's as if people are saying 'Hey, let's make a film! Let's cobble a script together and go shoot it!' without ever stopping to ask if the script is actually any cop. Thus the majority of films that get made are, well, shite.
Thirdly, this is all stuff I have to pay attention to. It's all well and good recognising it, but I've gotta work all this theory into my scripts too. I'll be the first to admit that it's easier said than done, easy to criticise other people's work but not so easy to replicate the ideals in your own. What can I say? I'm working on it.

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Building work has begun

by Suw on September 18, 2004

Just started drafting out a prose version of Screenplay #3, or a 'treatment' as it's called.
It's funny how it doesn't matter how long you spend looking at the plans and thinking about the design, it's not until you start digging the foundations that you really start to get a feel for how the house is going to look or what it's going to be like to live there. I've been mulling over this story for a few months now, but haven't really made much progress in terms of thinking about structure and character arcs and the like. Now that I've started writing the treatment, all that is becoming much clearer. Already scenes have been dropped, new ones added, and motivations explored. And I'm not even a whole page in yet.
In case you're curious, this one's a romcom. No zom. Absolutely no zom. But I do have Simon Pegg in mind for the lead.

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Wahey!

by Suw on September 18, 2004

Just discovered another two reasons to watch Shaun of the Dead – the triva subtitles track and the storyboard comparison track! Wahey!
*cough*
Don't worry, they're coming to take me away very soon.

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The pros and cons of laptops

by Suw on September 14, 2004

Pro: Laptops allow you to while away the half hour wait before your next train – the last of which you missed by only a few seconds – by doing useful things such as writing blog posts and replying to emails.
Con: It distracts you from the fact that the train you thought was arriving at platform 4, the platform upon which you have a seat, is actually arriving on platform 5, which is over the footbridge.
Pro: Mac laptops allow you to put them to sleep temporarily by simply closing them, (no need to power down), which means you can almost instantaneously shut them and shove them in a bag.
Con: My legs felt all wobbly as I hurtled up the stairs.
Pro: Luckily I didn't go ass over tit on the way down the stairs. Caught the train by the same margin of error by which I missed the last one.
Con: It took me a good few minutes to catch my breath again. Sheesh, I am so, so unfit.

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Shaun of the Dead – the extras

September 13, 2004

So, having been totally blown away by Shaun of the Dead when I watched it on Thursday, I spent my few, precious spare moments over the weekend watching all the extras, and two of the commentaries. The extras are excellent. I think Shaun of the Dead has the best extras I've seen on a DVD […]

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Tunnel vision

September 13, 2004

I really don't want to drop off the edge of the blog radar, but sheesh, life is busy right now. Worked all weekend, off to London tomorrow for four days, working, meeting clients, and going to a BlogWalk. That luxury, of a day out of the working week, will take its toll cos Saturday is […]

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Shaun of the Dead

September 9, 2004

Sometimes, being a film maker and scriptwriter means that you become overly critical of films. I couldn't really relax into Spider-Man 2 despite the fact that I'm an avid fan of the first and think Tobey Maguire is perfect for the role. There were too many sub-plots, too many similarities between Doc Ock and the […]

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Should I rip this?

September 9, 2004

Complicated flow chart to help you decide whether you should rip that CD you're holding in your hand. Alternatively, just say 'Yes!', kids. Rip it, and if you like it, distribute it, blog it, buy it. (Ta for the link, Imajes.)

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Unmissable tips for the proud home-maker in you

September 7, 2004

My top tip for cleaning houses ready for the return of their rightful owners after an eight week holiday: 1. Gather all mess together. 2. Put mess in spare room. 3. Close door. 4. (Optional) Press 'Detonate'. Quick! Easy! Effective! Contra-advice: Never put anything on your bed that you're not willing to sleep on top […]

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