Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

Untitled Vampire Short :: Treatment

30August2006 [directLink] [film]

Just uploaded a treatment to the ?film section. This is a story outline for a 15-minute short I’m writing this semester and plan on shooting in the first half of next year. Its broken down into scenes (by paragraph, more or less) and told in prose, meaning it sometimes doesn’t give a very good idea of dialogue nor timing. And though the whole story is there, its still very incomplete; I plan on developing the missing aspects while I write out the screenplay. At the moment it remains Untitled. The main character’s best friend (Sam) and Dr Jeunet (named, of course, for Jean-Pierre) remain ungendered. I tend to read gender-neutral characters as male, because it’s real easy for me to relate to, but here I’ve made a deliberate attempt to not use any gendered references. I’m starting to read Sam as a girl, but there’s the possibility (danger, even) of that bringing in unavoidable romantic complications (a fact I hate, and could go on about at length, but have to admit when writing a short film in which audiences have a very short amount of time to learn about a character).

The film is set in a world similar to that in The Journal of Paul Hunter, but it’s supposed to be more real. Paul Hunter is set in a rather generic near-future city; this one takes place here and now. The difference, though, is that a lot more of this film takes place in Thom’s head. Or at least, it’s told in that style - lots of flashing, Thom getting headaches &c. Just that Thom sees what’s really going on.

I wrote a short “pitching” paragraph to try summarise the film:

The film is about a man who believes that seemingly ordinary people are actually vampires who are fighting a secret war for the control of human society. He believes that his friend is in danger and that only he has the means to help his friend. He can only hope that doing so will free him from his nightmares.

There are two main goals at issue here (helping his friend and ridding himself of nightmares), and I’m not entirely sure how they’re going to work together. That’s something I’ll have to work out as I write. The basics though: he achieves both goals; the question is: would you accept the cost involved in achieving them?

A Flickr photoset :: Europe in Black & White

19August2006 [directLink] [personal]

(Skip straight to the photos: Europe in Black & White)

I’ve been meaning to do something with all the photos I took last year for some time now. Soon after getting home I had a hundred or so printed out, but they’re still sitting in the Kodak envelopes. I love black and white so I’m thinking I’d like to print out a handful and mount them to hang on the wall. Plus I have the screensaver on the iMac set to randomly select from my iPhoto library, and I keep coming back to the computer and thinking Wow! That’s a really good photo, but having no idea where or when it was taken.

So, yesterday I sat down with iPhoto, turned on the random slideshow and watched (for a long time!) each photo for a couple seconds. Whenever I saw something with composition I liked, or that I thought would look good in black and white, I hit 3; a handful were particularly good photos and I hit 4 or 5. Then I filtered for ratings of 3+, and picked out a hundred or so to switch to black and white. I had a particular aesthetic in mind though, so I ignored most photos with people in them… (Not that I take many photos with people anyway; I kept coming across photos and thinking That’d look really good without that person in it.)

Then I went through that set and switched them to black and white; noticed that for most photos, black and white looked best with some adjustment in the levels to really bring out the contrast; a straight drop in saturation just turned them boring-grey.

Finally picked out a bunch to upload to a Flickr set; there’s a monthly upload limit of 20MB so after converting to 1024x768 I could fit 73 photos. They’re now living at Flickr in my Europe in Black & White photoset

Now I just have to select half a dozen or so that I can mount on the wall…

Side note: I’m not switching my ?photos set-up to Flickr; I’ll keep putting albums here. But when I want to put 73 photos up, most of which are already in albums on this site (albeit in colour), Flickr serves admirably… When I cull the selection I’ll put a smaller set on this site instead… I’m not really a fan of having bits of my content scattered all over sites controlled by other people

Recent Consumption

12August2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• watched People I Know; started slow but interesting thriller once it got going; the racism was a bit weird though - the well-meaning ones seemed the most racist; I thought it must be an old movie but it’s from 2002; not sure what’s going on there
• re-read Stephen Lawhead’s Avalon, a contemporary political thriller about the return of King Arthur; last read it back in 1999 so was a fascinating read now: it’s full of talk about ‘forces of darkness’ and about Divine Right (of kingship), which felt really uncomfortably like Bushian newspeak, the difference being in one particular line: “our fight is not against flesh and blood” (being literally against forces of darkness); though Bush certainly likens his enemy to demons, his fight is not humanity vs demons
• bought and re-watched Hero; beautiful film; this is the way we should be making movies about western legends
• watched Hustle & Flow; well acted; very cool
• watched Shopgirl; beautifully shot and not a bad story
• watched How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
• watched Pi; was recommended it as research for my vampire short and was well worth it; looked amazing in black and white; really effective sound design
• bought and been listening to Jurassic 5’s Feedback; especially loving the beats on track 2 Radio
• also bought a bunch of DVDs for the collection; haven’t got around to re-watching them yet: Minority Report, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Black Hawk Down, Domino