MCD

There is basically a class of gadget coming into existance now, spearheaded by the iPhone, I like to call Media Consumption Devices. We've had these to a minor extent for decades. Transistor radios begat Walkmans ( Walkmen? ) which begat iPods which begat iPhones and iPod Touches.
Media is made up of three types - audio, video, and the printed word. An iPod let's you consume audio - music, podcasts, audiobooks - and carry it all in your pocket while doing so. It also lets you watch video, but the experience isn't great. You are limited not only by screen size and aspect ratio, but by availiable storage. Amazon's Kindle is a great piece of hardware. It let's you consume books and audio, and has the advantage of a wireless connection to get anything in your library, or buy new stuff, from almost anywhere.
The iPhone/Touch gives you all this. A killer audio and video experiece and, with Amazon's Kindle App, I have the full Kindle experience even if I don't have my kindle with me. It has the possibility to become the primary platform I consume media on. It's major limitation is it's screen.
Don't get me wrong. I love the iPhone screen. It's bright, saturated colors and pixel density is beautiful. Just small. It needs to be bigger. Say 10" or so. Maybe even 15".
I, of course, speak of the mythical Apple Tablet.
Unlike most people, I don't want it to run OSX. I'm perfectly happy with it running a variation of the iPhoneOS. What I then want is for people to truly leverage what you can do with the platform, something people haven't really done with our initial attempts.
First, all our media needs to live in the cloud. If I buy something from iTunes, I should be able to access it anywhere, anytime. Whether this is by Apple streaming it to us or iTunes itself acting as host ( similar to Slingbox or orb.com ). The important concept is I should be able to access everything, anywhere, anytime.
Secondly, we need to expand the offerings availiable. Movie and TV studios should just realize online distribution is the future. Go full bore into the breach. Make your shows availiable online the same time they go over the air. iTunes quality is good enough for most stuff, but if I buy a BluRay, I expect a digital copy, and honestly, these days, that digital copy needs to be HD too.
And books have been limited by the b&w Kindle. With a full color display, picture heavy books and magazines are suddenly viable for electronic distribution. Big coffee table books become manageable. Disposable magazines like US weekly or People become less of a environmental disaster. You also open an entirely new publishing class - comic books.
Comic books also are a perfect example of how you can add value to a product without much, if any, cost to offset the percieved lack of value from not having a physical item. If I buy the latest issue of X-Men, each page looks like the printed, full color version. But with the press of a button, I could see it without word balloons. Or without color. Or the original pencil artwork.
Why would publishers want to do this?
First, you lower risk. If you publish a digital item, you don't have to worry about making too many or even worse, not having enough.
Second, you increase value to advertiser. Every ad presented can have a hot link to their website. You can add audio or video advertising. Media advertisers can allow you to immediately purchase items. Perhaps most valuable, the advertiser can know EXACTLY who is viewing their ad. Clever publishers can even target the ads to a specific gender or age class.
Also if I am able to access my media wherever I am, I am able to purchase media wherever I am. I have bought more books in the past year on my Kindle than in the previous five years. I buy TV shows I can watch on cable I already pay for, like The Daily Show, because it is more convienient.
Make it convienient, easy and reasonably priced to legally purchase and consume media and people will do so. I have seen people be converted by simply playing with a Kindle or AppleTV.
We are a generation that needs to be more nimble than ever. Your next job may be across town, across country, or across the ocean. You don't want to be saddled with hundreds of pounds of books and DVDs.
Apple, give us the hardware we need. Publishers, give us the media. We will consume it, promise.

MCD

There is a class of gadget coming into existance now, spearheaded by the iPhone, I like to call Media Consumption Devices. We've had these to a minor extent for decades. Transistor radios begat Walkmans ( Walkmen? ) which begat iPods which begat iPhones and iPod Touches.
Media is made up of three types - audio, video, and the printed word. An iPod let's you consume audio - music, podcasts, audiobooks - and carry it all in your pocket while doing so. It also lets you watch video, but the experience isn't great. You are limited not only by screen size and aspect ratio, but by availiable storage. Amazon's Kindle is a great piece of hardware. It let's you consume books and audio, and has the advantage of a wireless connection to get anything in your library, or buy new stuff, from almost anywhere.
The iPhone/Touch gives you all this. A killer audio and video experiece and, with Amazon's Kindle App, I have the full Kindle experience even if I don't have my kindle with me. It has the possibility to become the primary platform I consume media on. It's major limitation is it's screen.
Don't get me wrong. I love the iPhone screen. It's bright, saturated colors and pixel density is beautiful. Just small. It needs to be bigger. Say 10" or so. Maybe even 15".
I, of course, speak of the mythical Apple Tablet.
Unlike most people, I don't want it to run OSX. I'm perfectly happy with it running a variation of the iPhoneOS. What I then want is for people to truly leverage what you can do with the platform, something people haven't really done with our initial attempts.
First, all our media needs to live in the cloud. If I buy something from iTunes, I should be able to access it anywhere, anytime. Whether this is by Apple streaming it to us or iTunes itself acting as host ( similar to Slingbox or orb.com ). The important concept is I should be able to access everything, anywhere, anytime.
Secondly, we need to expand the offerings availiable. Movie and TV studios should just realize online distribution is the future. Go full bore into the breach. Make your shows availiable online the same time they go over the air. iTunes quality is good enough for most stuff, but if I buy a BluRay, I expect a digital copy, and honestly, these days, that digital copy needs to be HD too.
And books have been limited by the b&w Kindle. With a full color display, picture heavy books and magazines are suddenly viable for electronic distribution. Big coffee table books become manageable. Disposable magazines like US weekly or People become less of a environmental disaster. You also open an entirely new publishing class - comic books.
Comic books also are a perfect example of how you can add value to a product without much, if any, cost to offset the percieved lack of value from not having a physical item. If I buy the latest issue of X-Men, each page looks like the printed, full color version. But with the press of a button, I could see it without word balloons. Or without color. Or the original pencil artwork.
Why would publishers want to do this?
First, you lower risk. If you publish a digital item, you don't have to worry about making too many or even worse, not having enough.
Second, you increase value to advertiser. Every ad presented can have a hot link to their website. You can add audio or video advertising. Media advertisers can allow you to immediately purchase items. Perhaps most valuable, the advertiser can know EXACTLY who is viewing their ad. Clever publishers can even target the ads to a specific gender or age class.
Also if I am able to access my media wherever I am, I am able to purchase media wherever I am. I have bought more books in the past year on my Kindle than in the previous five years. I buy TV shows I can watch on cable I already pay for, like The Daily Show, because it is more convienient.
Make it convienient, easy and reasonably priced to legally purchase and consume media and people will do so. I have seen people be converted by simply playing with a Kindle or AppleTV.
We are a generation that needs to be more nimble than ever. Your next job may be across town, across country, or across the ocean. You don't want to be saddled with hundreds of pounds of books and DVDs.
Apple, give us the hardware we need. Publishers, give us the media. We will consume it, promise.

Mental Vomit - Episode 1: A Hero Falls

WARNING - THis is kind of a rambling, thesis-less piece of mental vomit about character, story and why American TV sucks.  You are warned.

I deleted my Heroes Tivo Season Pass this week.

I realized while doing so that I actually stopped liking the show about midway through last season.  And I realized the reason.  They completely ran out of story, because their characters had peaked.

There is an old adage, that I believe comes from Plato, that story is character.  It’s not plot, it’s not actions.  It’s character.  Think about the stories that have stuck a chord with you and have become iconic.

Star Wars.  Indiana Jones.  Die Hard.  Wall Street.  Titanic.  Luke.  Leia.  Darth Vader.  Indiana Jones.  John McClane.  Gordon Gecko.  Jack & Rose.

Yes, you remember specific scenes and moments from those films.  But you wanted to be John McClane, not some dude in a building held by terrorists.  You hated Gordon Gecko, not what he did, but him.  You ran through the backyard chasing, or being chased by, your brother waving cardboard tubes at each other making lightsaber sounds.

All those characters had one thing in common.  Not that they were awesome, but that they were flawed.

Luke was a no confidence whiney punk.

John McClane was a mortal action hero, who bled and hurt.

Indy was afraid of Snakes.

And Gordon Gecko as villain, his flaw?  He was cool.  He was suave and likable.

Flaws are what make a character.  And characters are story. Ergo flaws are story.

And for the first two seasons of Heroes, their characters were full of flaws.  Peter Petrelli is idealistic to a fault.  So is Hiro Nakamoto.  Neither of their support structures, specifically Nathan Petrelli and Ando, are really there.  They are reluctantly drawn into the adventure.  This lack of faith is their flaws.  Claire just wants to be normal.  Even Sylar, who at first was painted as a single minded killing machine, turned out to have a hunger that drives him, similar to a drug addiction.

The characters were compelling and interesting.  They were given interesting things to do.  First, they had to save the cheerleader.  They had to save the world.  Done and done.  And all was right with the world.  They did some smart  things at the end of Season One too.  They killed Peter, or so I thought.  They banished Hiro to Feudal Japan, and basically take away his power.  And they sorta kinda get rid of Sylar.  And they needed to do all of these things, because they were up against the Superman problem.  That is the situation the comics and all the movies find themselves in, which is Superman, basically being un-killable, is boring.  That’s why it’s always with the Kryptonite.  Take away the powers, and it’s suddenly interesting.  It just stops being interesting after the third time.  Superman is boring, Clark Kent is interesting.  And that’s what made Smallville work.  It was about Clark, not Superman.

Peter is basically god by the end of Season One, and Syler his antithesis.  Not  necessarily the devil, because that has all sorts of other things that go along with it like temptation and the like, but basically it’s ultimate good vs. ultimate bad.  In their powerfulness, their flaws became irrelevant, and therefore a story problem.

And Hiro poses just as much of a story problem.  Time Travel is a pain in the ass for telling a good story.  Few movies have done it well.  Primer, Time Crimes, and Terminator ( 1 & 2 ) handle it well.  You can never be “too late” to do anything.  Ah, damn.  Cheerleaders dead.  Let’s go back in time 20 minutes and save her.  A good example is in Harry Potter.  Rowling is always throwing in little magically things as a throwaway to make the world seem more fantastic and whimsical.  In one book, a teacher gives Hermoine a trinket to travel through time, and she tells Harry she’s been using it to take extra classes.  At that point Harry should have punched her square in the face, taken it and traveled back in time to STOP HIS PARENTS FROM BEING MURDERED.

At the end of season one, a lot of these issues were resolved.  One guy is dead, one is lost in time, and one is unknown, but he is the bad guy, so the heroes will have a nice big challenge to overcome.  All’s good.  Season two, bring on a whole new set of heroes.  RIght?  Wrong.  No, those characters were popular, the actors who portrayed them hit it off with the audience, and in TV, you gotta not just make the audience happy, you gotta keep em coming back.  Which means NOT making them angry.

And that is the problem with serialized television.  The audience wants what it knows.  The creators want to give it to them.  And the networks just want to keep them coming back to hammer them with Nissan product placements.  But you can’t create good characters with an arc if the endpoint is unknown.  A story needs a good beginning, a meaty middle, and a satisfying ending.  Season one gave me that.  Season two, tried to recreate that same energy by focussing on some other characters like HRG and taking away Peter and Hiro’s powers, but it floundered.  If it weren’t for a single episode ( “Company Man” HRG’s origin story that I consider one of the best hours of TV in the past decade ) I would say that season two was a wash.

If you are doing serialized TV, you need an exit strategy from day one.  When Babylon 5 came on, J. Michael Straczynski planned it for five years of TV.  Not four, not six.  Five.  And up until 3/4th of the way through season 4, it works well.  But then, because the series was going to be cancelled, a whole bunch of story was crammed in to those last few episodes.  And they were good.  Dense, and felt a bit rushed, but good.  THen the series got picked up for a 5th season, and it’s stories had been told.  That’s why the fifth season kind of, well, sucks.

If more TV set out like this, which is more like how the British do it, serialized TV would be better.  So this is a plea to show runners making serialized TV.  Make a plan.  Stick to it.  Don’t just come up with a good idea for a pilot.  Come up with a good Season One.  And know what, if that goes well, goes on in season two.

And if that’s all you got, walk away and make something new.

VFX Screenwriting

I recently appeared on the On The Page podcast.  Give it a listen, because I'm bloody brilliant.  Here are the script pages I mentioned on the show.

My Favorite 10 Films of 2009 ( So Far )

10. Anvil! The Story Of Anvil

This is a great story of doing what you do for the sheer enjoyment of doing it.  Yes, Anvil had a lot of influence on tons of metal bands of the eighties while never finding success themselves.  And to a lot of people, they view this movie as something of a tragedy.  I view it as telling people you just need to be content with being, not with being successful.

9. The Cove

If you are in anyway human this movie will leave you sad, angry and disappointed in your fellow man.  This is an incredibly important film to see.  What I find most interesting is how the story is ignored by Japanese media and the local law enforcement cloisters off the town.  In otherwords, they know what they are doing is wrong, yet still do it.

8. The Hangover

I didn't know what to expect going going into this.  I heard from people it was funny, but I am not really a fan of what passes for cinematic comedy these days, so I was surprised at how laugh-out-loud this movie was for me.  This is a classic comedy that will be watched and rewatched for years to come.

7. Star Trek

How do you take a beloved franchise that has 42 years of history, satisfy it's rabid fan base, and make a movie that is approachable to people who don't know or actively dislike it?  Easy.  You throw it all out and start over.  JJ Abrams wonderful little flick was a great start to the summer.  It had great action sequences, a great story, and great, classic characters re-invented by a talented cast.  What's not to love?

6. Food, Inc.

Put the burger down and go see this movie.  Then realize how hard it is to get actual food anymore.

5. Moon

Quiet, introspective and driven by an amazing performance by Sam Rockwell, Moon is great science fiction.  It asks some serious questions about business, the nature of reality, and the true, high cost of energy.  A brilliant film.

4. Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino's best since Pulp Fiction.  Tarantino is a master craftsman.  His long, dialog driven scenes give this writer an unctuous treat to wrap my brain around.  What is truly amazing is how he managed to keep his style of dialog without modern pop references or even the english language.

3. In The Loop

I didn't think any movie this year would leave me laughing more than "The Hangover", but this did.  Classic British wit, wrapped up in politics.  The biggest problem with this film is you are laughing so hard you miss the next joke.

2. Up

Usually a film lets you get situated and settled in before they hit you with an emotional suckerpunch.  Not Up.  No, Pete Doctor hits you square in the gut with a montage that shows a mastery of storytelling I envy.  And it only gets better from there.  Plus, it has a zeppelin.  That makes it extra awesome.

1. The Hurt Locker

An unbelievably tense film driven by perfectly rendered, real characters wonderfully acted.  A brilliantly directed, tense film.  Go see it.  Then go see it again.  This is amazing movie making on every level and should be supported.  I don't see this losing it's top spot.

So there it is, my top 10 films of 2009 so far.  Here are the ones I am looking forward to for the rest of the year, and some look to be contenders for the list.  Some, like 2012, just look like FX fests...

The Informant!

Capitalism: a Love Story

The Surrogates

Trucker

The Road

(Untitled)

The Fourth Kind

2012

Ninja Assassin

Up in the Air

The Lovely Bones

Avatar(*)

Sherlock Holmes

* Avatar obviously is disqualified from any of my "Best of... " Lists.