The Familiar Unknown

January 1st, 2010

Happy 2010!

And for the record it feels like a good one, although I can’t remember the last 2010 that came around which explains the “unknown” part of the title. The “familiar” part is that strange feeling that I’m exactly where I was progress wise this day last year…

It’s not deja vu. I started 2009 the exact same way I’m starting this year, writing a blogisode series called The Caves due for release… I’m gonna throw out February 15th (give or take a week or two) -we’ll call that semi-official for the time being… but in reality a lot has changed and much progress was made. The Caves as it is currently is completely different than the series a year ago. The year has not been a waste. While progress has been slower than I’d like, I’m very happy with the story and even if it makes no money whatsoever the extra year was well worth it.

(Tho hopefully that won’t be the case cause I’m quite in debt.)

So, I move on from here into the unknown. One of my New Years Resolutions is to try to set more accurate deadlines and more strongly consider keeping them so I intend to do that this year. Another resolution was to blog more often, so I’m going to make posts at least once or twice a week and that should keep this blog alive much more effectively than my previous posting schedule lol.

I’ll be starting this weekend with a post to introduce the premise behind The Caves and divulge a little bit about the plot. There will also be some preview(s) here on the blog with more info, synopsis, artwork, teaser images, etc. between now and the launch. Any preview though is still at least a week away. I’m keeping myself busy this week learning digital painting, and from there I’ve got about 3-4 weeks worth of story research left before I can finalize the outline and write the first episode(s), but the month will probably go by fast and you’ll have the first episode or two for your Spring Break reading.

Over the course of 2009 I also made a lot of notes and various progress on some other projects I’ve been writing to various degrees, the bulk of which fell on to The Last Patriarch (which I still intend to produce as an animated movie after I re-write the script), The Studio, a second “blogisode” series which may or may not come to fruition this year, and Ninjas of the Orient (an idea I’ve had in mind for a while about… Ninjas in the Orient… with one intention to explore the boundaries of human capability in terms of stunts, so practical effects and live action -probably a very big budget so you can set that aside for a long while lol but I’m slowly working on it)

Those have been my main focus in 2009 so any other projects I’ve worked on in the past besides that have faded a little into the back of my mind, but may or may not be totally forgotten.

On the note of things forgotten, I’ve also had some thoughts the past couple months of making a webcomic of Sherlock Dog, an idea I had when I was 8 or 12 or something about one of those really hairy dogs that can’t see anything cause of its fur as Sherlock Dog and his trusted dalmation companion Watson. The only reason I haven’t is lack of interest, coming up with good storylines is not all that inspiring I’d want to inject it with a lot of complex mystery plots but that would probably be a mistake. It’d be fairly easy to render and good practice in writing simple plotlines though.

I’ve had the idea since before Sherlock Holmes came out in theaters, though the timing shouldn’t be ignored. I was somewhat disappointed when I went to see Sherlock Holmes in theaters. There was a lot of talking -it wasn’t really the action/adventure mystery I was expecting -I have to watch it again to catch half the stuff that was said. But even the mystery storyline wasn’t all that good. It seemed like the villain was going through a lot more trouble than he needed to achieve his goals also which always makes him seem kind of silly -almost like he was setting clues out specifically for Sherlock to find.

The characters were awesome, and very well written/portrayed, and without revealing what happened, I liked the ending, but the story wasn’t up to par and the it was just kinda weird. The effects weren’t that good either, certainly nothing as awesome as the giant vacuum cleaner robot who sucked up the top of the Great pyramid in Transformers 2…

Or Star Trek of course which was by the far the most epic movie of the year. Not just for effects, the storyline was really good too and the characters were hilarious. All in all, 5 movies made my Top 100 this year (the full list can be viewed at the end of this post) Star Trek was the best, ranking in at number 18, Avatar a close second at number 23, Sherlock Holmes at number 40, Inglourious Basterds -47, and Transformers 2 made it on to the list at number 80.

So this will be a great year. I’ll be posting about The Caves soon, but in the meantime here are some blogs I follow that are worth checking out:

Project Durian -3rd Blender Open Movie “SINTEL” -The concept this time was Epic Action/Adventure and the plot that they’ve revealed so far involves a girl, a dragon, and they said it would be good lol. The blog itself is updated sometimes several times a week and is my favorite current blog. It’s gonna be an awesome short film come May.

MYST -The Motion Picture -If you haven’t heard of the bestselling computer game series of the 20th century you should play it immediately. Although, these guys are trying to make a movie based on the book series not necessarily the computer games which are arguably harder to translate to film its one of the movies I’ve been wanting to see since I was a kid and played the games. What’s cool about this blog is that they’re completely independent and are not attached to any studios (yet) They got the rights from Cyan to do the project and wrote their own original script and have been working towards a production deal ever since.

Finally, The Process Diary -”The blog and podcast showing you how it’s done by going out and doing it!” is a really cool blog. It features podcast interviews with a lot of cool webcomic and animation hobbyists and professionals that are really inspiring as well as video tutorials aimed at computer graphics techniques in Blender.

To close out this post, I’ll wish everyone a great year and finish with a few lists:

Things I’m anxiously anticipating in 2010:

  • The Final Season of LOST
  • INCEPTION -July (The movie with a plot that Christopher Nolan insists on keeping secret, and will continue to do so until his death. There might be some kind of clue in the movie itself but don’t count on a full synopsis.)
  • PRINCE OF PERSIA: Sands of Time
  • CLASH OF THE TITANS
  • BLACK SWAN -Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis as rival ballet dancers, and they have “aggressive sex”.
  • IRON MAN 2
  • Season 8 of 24, Season 2 of The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and the continuation of the best season of House yet sound pretty good to me too. And new episodes of Community and Stargate Universe should show up sometime this year too.

Things that should really have been in production last year -Stop screwing around and make them:

  • BATMAN 3
  • PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES-Starring Willa Holland as Jack’s daughter and Natalie Portman as the Queen of England hopefully. (At least they settled on a title…)
  • BOND 3
  • NATIONAL TREASURE 3

My Top 100 Favorite Movies as of Jan. 1st 2010:

1. The Dark Knight
2. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
3. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
4. Casino Royale
5. The Empire Strikes Back
6. Star Wars
7. Revenge of the Sith
8. The Lion King
9. Attack of the Clones
10. Return of the Jedi
11. Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl
12. Lady and the Tramp
13. Casablanca
14. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
15. Contact
16. Quantum of Solace
17. The Bourne Ultimatum
18. Star Trek
19. Gone With the Wind
20. His Girl Friday

21. Down With Love
22. Jurassic Park
23. Avatar
24. Princess Mononoke
25. National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets
26. Alexander: Director’s Cut
27. National Treasure
28. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
29. Wall-E
30.The Mummy

31. The Big Sleep
32. Lost in Space
33. Aladdin
34. Sabrina
35. X-Men III: The Last Stand
36. The Godfather Part II
37. Batman Begins
38. The Thin Man
39. Roman Holiday
40. Sherlock Holmes

41. The Mummy Returns
42. Thunder Birds
43. Troy
44. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
45. Spider-Man
46. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
47. Inglourious Basterds
48. Breakfast at Tiffany’s
49. Nausiaa of the Valley of the Wind
50. The Godfather Part III

51. Titanic
52. Shadow of a Doubt
53. It’s a Wonderful Life
54. The Shanghai Gesture
55. Ace in the Hole
56. The Departed
57. The Goonies
58. Star Trek: First Contact
59. Blood Diamond
60. Star Trek: Nemesis

61. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
62. Howl’s Moving Castle
63. Star Trek: Insurrection
64. 300
65. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
66. Cruel Intentions
67. Pearl Harbor
68. The Godfather
69. To Have and Have Not
70. Peter Pan

71. The Incredibles
72. Iron Man
73. Heat
74. Nancy Drew
75. Bolt
76. Schindler’s List
77. Heaven Can Wait
78. Up
79. 3:10 to Yuma
80.  Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

81. Transformers
82. Mission: Impossible
83. X2: X-Men United
84. Spider-Man 3
85. The Prestige
86. Gladiator
87. Basic Instinct
88. Closer
89. Double Indemnity
90. Mission: Impossible 2

91. Spider-Man 2
92. Finding Nemo
93. March of the Penguins
94. The Bourne Supremacy
95. All the President’s Men
96. Forrest Gump
97. X-Men
98. The Sum of All Fears
99. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
100. Singin’ in the Rain

101. 101 Dalmations (obviously)

This list is subject to fluctuation and is by no means set in stone. While the top 5 are generally pretty hard to break, the other parts of the list often move around from time to time as my interests change. Movies I’ve just seen tend to move up or down a bit too until they eventually settle in somewhere. Any movie that made this list I highly recommend watching though, especially anything in the top 30 those are “Must-See”s.

As an end note, the title of this post, “The Familiar Unknown”, is a phrase I came upon during my research for The Caves and thought it was cool, so I’ve adapted it into a sort of tagline for the series ->”Take a step into the Familiar Unknown.”

And you can do just that, when I introduce you to The Caves this weekend.

Until then,
-Mik out.

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Production Status -October 2009

October 20th, 2009

So the site is up and running now. Still a little rough around the edges but bear with me, I’m planning on a re-design to make it look pretty sometime before the end of the year.

I’m going to try to keep up with a regular posting schedule. A couple posts a week I was thinking to get things rolling -there’ll be more when I’m working on stuff that’s easier to show off like animations and images. (It’s kinda hard to show notes for a script… also somewhat risky for an online blog that anyone can see -People are less likely to steal an entire story, but individual ideas aren’t copyrightable so it’s not that safe to publish them on a blog before I’ve even finished writing the script.)

Anyways, I thought I’d start off with a production update, and would make this possibly a once-a-month thing or once every two months… we’ll see how it goes… ;)

I suppose I should start by explaining a little bit about Patriarch first… (I can already tell this is going to be a long post, I tend to do that, feel free to yell at me over length any time you feel like it)

The Last Patriarch is a feature-length film idea I came up with many years ago. It’s been through a lot of script revisions (5 drafts), a self-published Novel, and various work has been done in the form of concepts and Blender models by myself and others (at one point for a short time there was a team of about 6 of us).

In 2008 I decided to step back and take a new approach. Before jumping in to get other people involved I realized I needed to have a really good script/story and also an idea of what the movie should look like. For an animated film there’s innumerable different styles and techniques available, many that haven’t even ever been used before. It’s a HUGE field to study and the possibilities are pretty much limitless nowadays (though photo-realists would disagree with that last statement haha)

So in addition to a good solid script I also needed a “Style Guide” -some visual representation to show people (potential collaborators/investors/etc.) what it’s supposed to look like in its completed form. And also how the animation will flow… (i.e. is it gonna be cartoony and jumpy or more sophisticated and subtler motions)

-For the record I’m going much more towards the subtler side, although its not going to be totally photo-real… I have a really unique idea for how its going to look in my head, so my job now is to get it out of my head and on to paper… which is the same task I have with the script.

So that’s where I stood in 2008…

For the past year and a half or so I’ve put all of that on hold to try and focus on my personal income and financial situation… because I knew that even if I had a good script and direction and a full team of artists to collaborate with, directing a feature film is just not possible while also working at a part-time job, there just wouldn’t be enough time.

So I’ve been working on a “Blogisode” series called THE CAVES. The idea was that it’d be like a weekly episodic series people can read for free online and it’d be ad powered. However, the basic concept I had for that series grew into something way beyond the sort of weekly thing I could just update in a day and make quick money off of. The story premise I have is so compelling and way beyond anything I intended that I had to give it my full attention and focus. I knew I had hit on something really unique and that deserved a year of my life to devote to it, plus years to come.

Over the course of the time I had been focused on The Caves I had also taken a ton of notes for the Patriarch script, so back in September I went to put those into the script thinking it’d be a quick revision and then the final draft would be complete but I immediately realized how far my writing skills had improved. So there’s no way I’d be able to spend a year or more of my life directing a movie based on the script as it was then… A major re-write was needed

But I am desperately in need of income and The Caves is already a good story so now it’s October of 2009. My primary goal right now is to get The Caves online (hopefully within the next few weeks), and then do the re-write for the 6th draft of Patriarch and complete the Style Guide afterwards.

I’m planning to get all of that done by the end of November -but of course that’s dependent on how quickly the script re-write takes and how extensive it is to re-write. I already have a lot of good ideas that are along the right lines so I don’t have any doubts I’ll be able to bring it up to par with my current standards, but it may take a little extra time.

In the meantime, I’m really looking forward to the launch of my Blogisode series. I’m trying to learn Digital Painting so that I can add illustrations to enhance the episodes as much as possible, but we’ll see how that goes. Every day there’s a mountain of notes, research, concepts, and ideas in front of me, but this is a series that I think will have a really broad reach and impact a lot of people so I’m really excited about it.

I’ll be making more posts to talk about the upcoming Blogisodes over the next few weeks and updates on the new direction I’m taking the Patriarch plot. So stay tuned!

(Under 1000 words -Next time I promise there’ll be some pictures, I’m working on some concept art while practicing digital painting.)

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