From The Morgue

I don’t think I’m an uncompromising pacifist. There have been too many dangerous powers in history for me to be absolutely confident that diplomacy will always be a better alternative than war.
But I’m a pacifist, nonetheless, those caveats noted. And I think all human beings would be pacifists as well, if we fully understood what war does.
Ethics training as a response assumes that the Haditha massacre was an aberration, an avoidable blemish, not how things are done. This is a lie. Haditha is to be expected. Whether the war in question is a noble determined stand against evil or a petty oil-grab annexation is irrelevant to this truth – incidents like Haditha will happen during war. We are human beings. Give us guns and the idea of an enemy, and innocent people will die horribly.
War makes us beasts.

I was in the writing team for the 48 hr film challenge. I admit to some trepidation – although I back myself in the writing arena, my two counterparts were hix and Sean, who have a long history of collaboration and whose work I admired long before I met them. (Yep, I was one of the people who saw and loved Hopeless on the big screen, woo! And check out that user comment, huh? Nifty.) My experience in writing for screen, and working collaboratively, is pretty thin in comparison.
But mostly I was excited. I was confident it was all going to go well.
So the writing crew gathered at base-camp Indigo City for the 7pm announcement of genre and required elements. We watched the elements being decided live on TV, and shortly after that the cellphone call came telling us our genre: Monster Movie.
We whooped. We actually whooped. I’d always wondered what a genuine whoop sounded like, and now I know. See, Jenni’s Angels was well-supplied with a bunch of assets that other teams didn’t have. Of specific interest to the monster movie genre – we had a great make-up artist, and a small but eager team of stunt performers. This was good.
The required elements were the character Robin Slade, who is an eternal optimist; a mirror; and the line ‘that’s what I’m talking about’.
Getting Ideas Flowing
We got stuck into the brainstorming. The brainstorming group was fairly large – director Jenni and the three writers, plus a contributing presence from Steph, Svend and Lee. This worked out quite well, as we nailed a bunch of clever ideas quite quickly. One of them, which jumped out and grabbed us all very fast, was that the characters should be monster hunters.
We decided to build our short around a classic feature of such movies – two ex-lovers who are forced by the monster to work together and overcome their differences as a result. With Robin Slade as the optimist, the counterpart we settled on was a pessimist. This suggested a conflict of methodology, with the optimist seeking to understand the monsters and avoid violence, while the pessimist was enthusiastic for the violent solution. We had the conflict that would drive our film.
Getting It Done
We gradually settled on a series of scenes and started working through the beats we needed to hit, and finally the three writers got stuck into the business of actually churning out script pages. We divided the film into three and each of us wrote one of the three segments. (I started with the beginning.) After each iteration, we read through it together, dissected what we’d done and where the problems were, then took a new section and wrote that. After three cycles, we had something we were happy with.
Actually, we were more than happy – we were damn proud, I think. We had something quite special on our hands and while we were a bit fatigued from being inside it for ten hours, I think we knew it was the basis of a kick-ass film. (Although, somewhere in there, we made the fateful decision to film the entire thing on location in the bush.)
Through this process, I was definitely the junior partner. Sean and Steve were full of good ideas and snappy lines, and their sense of where the meat was in scenes and what bits were falling flat was very astute. I contributed a bunch of things, but they made most of the calls, and rightly so. I learned a hell of a lot, actually. In fact, I think I learned more about scripting for screen in this one writing session than in the entire rest of my life. It was good 🙂
Stuff I contributed that I was quite proud of
The line “We need to figure out what it’s trying to tell us,” which conveys a huge amount of Robin Slade’s character and approach very deftly and is way better than previous attempts at that line.
Giving the ‘It’s trying to tell us we need swords’ response to sidekick Nick, instead of hardcore Diana as it was originally written. It not only gave Nick his greatest and most perfect line, it also solved all the issues with a very problematic beat.
Diana’s “I already have a team” line, delivered just before the entirety of Diana’s team is taken to pieces by the monster. I angsted about this line for a while before I realised that it was exactly right, and the performances would sell it.
Difficult But Awesum
The hardest part of the process was the cutting back. We had to keep slicing out wonderful lines, over and over again. Some incredibly funny stuff was removed for the best of reasons – it wasn’t part of the story we were telling. And all that ruthlessness worked, and worked well. The proof is in the produuct: the film rockets past, never flagging and never pausing and never losing its momentum, which is a sign of a well-honed script.
Another thing I’m particularly happy with, and I hope the judges care about it, is the way we included the required elements. They weren’t just tacked on – they’re each fundamental to the story. Robin’s optimism is the basis of the entire story. The ‘That’s what I’m talking about’ line is a crucial turning point in the narrative and the film’s tone. And the mirror not only provides a nifty early gag, it turns out to be the keystone to the entire resolution. The way we used the required elements makes me very proud indeed.
It was an awesome experience. We had a satisfactory draft done at about 4.30am. hix set to work assembling it, tidying it, and emailing it to our crew, while I headed out home. I walked in the door about 5am, and didn’t manage to get to sleep until about 5.30. But the weekend was only just beginning…
My Fave Cut Line
In closing, here’s my favourite line that we had to cut, which came from a hix draft I think:

ROBIN (to Nick)
Our chain of command is much simpler. Me, you, monster. Monster at the bottom.

I had a wonderful weekend. (Monday and today: not good. But anyway.) Three big reasons:
48 Hour Film Challenge went really well. I will write more of it at some stage. For now, let me just say that our allotted genre was Monster Movie, and the following image should give you the rest:

(cool poster by the lovely Debz & Matt, I believe)
Good news from Seattle. My buddy Aaron (award-winning chef, fellow West Ham supporter and dodgeball advocate) is coming to NZ in September – his work visa is all arranged. This took me by surprise, the best kind of surprise.
RPG writing goes well. My first sole-credit RPG product, a D&D adventure available in .pdf. was released this weekend. The retro-titled Spawning Pits of the Tomb Bats promptly picked up a 5-star review. This pleases me.
There were some other lesser reasons, too. The 48 was overwhelming and great and there’s more to say on that subject. I’ll get to it.

The 48 Hour Film Challenge begins tonight…
…how was it that I didn’t know until this week that the frontman for the challenge is Ant Timpson, NZ’s own filmic connoisseur of the incredible and incredibly strange?
…how cool is it that we have two professional stuntmen in our team?
…how excellent is it that we have team t-shirts? I love me some team t-shirts.
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This deserves to be widely read: the mayor of Bogota (Colombia) who used mimes, superman costumes and thumbs-up cards to turn around a city on the edge of chaos. It’ll restore your confidence in human beings, and increase your frustration with the ill-built systems that negatively structure so much of our behaviour.
Located by the other moose, unsurprisingly. Go read his blog, it is always interesting. Although, fewer pictures of birds, more pictures of boys tearing their skulls apart.

An’ a fantail!

Happy.

Today’s bird-just-outside-the-window is the kereru, or native wood pigeon. Great big plump thing, too.

I remember encountering a silhouetted kereru in the near-pitch darkness of Central Park when walking up the hill to Brooklyn, and using its presence as an excuse to say something to the mysterious footsteps keeping pace behind me. The footsteps turned out to belong to a scared young woman new to the city who didn’t know that the Central Park shortcut ran out of lighting a third of the way along, and was keeping pace with me because I seemed to know where I was going. We had a nice friendly conversation until the top of the hill, where she went along one path and me along another. I never saw her face; it was completely dark the whole time. The pigeon, for its part, seemed quite happy to sit on a branch arms-length from me even when I stopped to point it out.
Listening right now to the sounds of Aquaboogie, soon to listen to Group Five, both CDs acquired during my fleeting appearance at their joint CD release gig last night. Which looked like it was going to be a lovely night. And I’m sure that it was.

There is a lovely tui hopping around in the tree just outside the open door, about two metres from where I’m sitting. It doesn’t seem too bothered by my presence. I haven’t seen a tui in many years. This living on a hill lark has its benefits!

I love that little white collar ruff they have going on. Very stylish.
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Over on his LJ and Xenodochion, Matt M discusses the Justice Therapy industry:
“This Justice Therapy industry makes it personal, it makes it about “getting the verdict we need”, it makes it about dragging the people who hurt you through court so that you can get some vague sense of closure. It is wrong on so many levels.”
I’m not entirely convinced that it is appropriate to call this an ‘industry’ – my instinct is to locate the cause here in systemic factors and broader cultural trends – but it’s a great piece. Go check it out. A reply is going into the bubbling stew of ‘blog posts I will write real soon now’.
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Also, Buffy fans who don’t read my LJ will really seriously want to check out this link. Not kidding.

This coming weekend is the 48 hour film challenge, in which teams have 48 hours to produce a short film. The genre and some content elements get assigned at the start, then 48 hours later you turn in your finished product. There’re hundreds of teams entered up and down the country, and the top 7 films will end up shown on C4.
I’m part of the writing team for Jenni’s Angels, more or less the same configuration of folks who last year produced the delightful Its A Wonderful Library short, which missed deadline by a matter of minutes. Needless to say, we’re determined that this isn’t going to happen again!
And, I have to say, I’m confident. We have an extremely talented group, with a number of highly experienced people in key roles, and extra motivation from the heartbreaking deadline-missing of last year. Whatever we make is going to be good, because we’re going to make it good.
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Dentist was happy. I crave the approval of my dentist, so, hurrah. Being the only backpacker in Europe carrying floss was worthwhile after all.
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In email today: new baby photos from a friend in Syria; catchup message from friend in Mexico. I am happy with the world.
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Out the window, I see rain come down into the valley in drifting misty sheets. The ferns are shaking in the wind.

I am up a hill. New digs – house-sitting in the hillside suburb of Tirohanga. Have set up to work on the dining table, facing an amazing view of NZ bush (mixture of native and introduced foliage) and, beyond, the middle stretch of the Hutt Valley. It really is a nice view. I get woken in the morning by native birds singing. Lovely.
There is a cat to feed. Judging by this weekend past, I will see the cat precisely twice every day, for morning food and for evening food.
Downside of being on a hill is the total inaccessibility of public transport. Not my preference at all. So I have long-term borrowed the family’s second car, and am blatting around in that when I need to go places. In a sense, it’s been quite liberating – the lack of options means I get to enjoy the driving without my inner tree-hugging hippy scolding me for not taking the train. And I do like driving. Cars are awesomely cool things, and it is damn good fun to race around in your personal race-around device.
Later today I go to the dentist for a checkup. First time since 2001 or so. Yeek.
Gosh, what a content-free blog post. Oh well.

I haven’t checked in on the nastier right-wing blogs since getting back to NZ, and something at This Modern World prompted me to take a look and see what they’re yammering about.
Three big themes on the front pages today. The first is crowing about the possibility of civil war in Palestine (which pretty much tells you all you need to know).
The second is championing the cause of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who used fraud to enter and gain citizenship in the Netherlands; and mocking and ridiculing the cause of Mexican illegal immigrants in the US who are looking for more rights and legitimacy.
Yeah. Huh. So they’re still not that good at joining the dots.
Actually, that’s too glib. That whole scene is not driven by any kind of coherent ideology. Its responses to any given situation are driven entirely by whether the rhetoric espoused furthers or diminishes their self-justifying and self-righteous paranoia.
This, I note, is not irrelevant to NZ – the Kiwi online community takes many of its cues from what’s happening in the US version, both on left and right. It’s just a shame that the right-wing sites of choice are basically paranoid, semi-fascist incoherent racist hatemongers. The long-running stream of anti-Islam letters to the editor in the local rag are, I’m convinced, built on “talking points” that are directly sourced from right-wing US blog sites.
Anyway, it’s a waste of energy thinking too hard about this stuff. There will always be nasty populists exploiting our base fears. Lets keep on with our own project of building and promoting a different world.