Monthly Archives: August 2007

A Competitive Analysis

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Final Draft is to writing screenplays what Microsoft Office is to business communications. They have quite a bit in common, those two programs; not in their features per se but that their features go far beyond just putting words to screen. In fact, Final Draft is really bad for putting words to screen.

In fairness, there are some features that really speed up the process of writing a screenplay. There are keyboard shortcuts to easily format things in the industry-standard way, and typeahead for names and previously-used scene names. Because it formats the document as you go, it knows when you are typing a character name or a scene intro, so it is able to help you along. Once you get used to that part, you can save a lot of keystrokes.

But holy crap what a dog of a text editor. To start with, it’s ugly. You have to go out of your way to make text that ugly on a Mac, and they have. The thing is fraught with display problems, and often a click on one line will yield a blinking cursor somewhere else. Then there are the times the screen is completely whacked out.

There are no excuses from the Final Draft boys on this; Jers Novel Writer also has discrete sections with predefined styling for each type of section, and it has none of those problems. It was written by a guy in a bathrobe. Of course, much of the problem with Final Draft is likely because they want to use as much of the same code as possible in the Windows and Mac versions, meaning they can’t really leverage the almost-magical text-rendering features on the Mac, and I suspect they also can’t use the best of Windows either.

[NOTE TO STEVE JOBS: Cocoa for Windows! Come on! You don’t think the Final Draft people wouldn’t be all over that in a heartbeat? Hell, they’d probably license my code. Imagine this pitch. Geek: “We want to use Cocoa.” Suit: “Why?” Geek: “It’s an amazingly innovative framework that will reduce development time and run wicked fast both on Macs and Windows with no extra effort on our part.” Got that Steve? Cocoa for Windows. It’s your Next Step toward world domination. (Insider pun accidental but embraced.)]

Of course, Final Draft has no margin notes and no database. Jer’s Novel Writer doesn’t have a notecard view of all the scenes that you can flip through and rearrange (a feature I can appreciate though I have yet to use). The closest thing to that is the automatic outline in JersNW, which I really, really, miss when working in Final Draft. fuego has pointed out in the past that the notes features of JNW would be really useful during production as well.

Final Draft is, I think, a well-named product. It has all kinds of stuff to help during production (things like pink pages – insertions and removals don’t affect surrounding page numbering, so all the people who have information that refers to a script page don’t have to go back and update everything when a scene is deleted. You can print out the page changes (each time you do you use a new color, thus ‘pink pages’), and people can update. A meeting can start with, “OK, everyone have the ochre pages?” and you know that everyone’s up to date. There’s no way I’m putting that into Jer’s Novel Writer.) That’s all cool. Final Draft is a very useful program once you have the final draft.

Another thing that Final Draft is very good at, something that almost redeems it, is that when you paste in text that is formatted with some reasonable level of consistency, the program is quite remarkably good at interpreting the text and formatting it. Hopefully the guy who wrote that code has a BMW to go with his ulcer. Now I’m working on Dark War, using Jer’s Novel Writer, laboriously typing out people’s names every time and making sure the right parts are all caps. Still far better than writing a first draft in Final Draft. At some point, when I have to share the work, I’ll past the whole mo-fo into Final Draft.

Maybe the Final Draft guys will someday remember that they are selling software for writing a screenplay, not just managing one. Maybe it’s time for Jer’s Screenplay Writer.

Thanks!

The Story Begins

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The Story Begins

The sun rises
reflecting in confused
criss-crossing beams
off what little glass remains
in the windows of the city
lighting shady canyons
between silent skyscrapers

Below, motion!
A figure (human?) breaks the surface
Water sparkles in the dawn
It gags, retching seawater
or something like it
Burning lungs take a violent, gasping breath
their first in a hundred years
Sweet air!

The pale creature (human?)
clings, spent, to a makeshift dock
slowly remembering air and light
It does not see
— not yet —
the brooding hulks of the Titans
broken, dead, empty (haunted?)
It does not know
that beneath its feet
lie Cadillacs and Cavaliers, rusting
and a Yellow Cab is home
for a school of silvery fish

By the dock there is a boat
small, sturdy (aluminum?)
oars neatly shipped
a rope coiled at the bow
fishing pole and tackle, undisturbed
the newcomer finds this strange.

2

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Girlfriend in a Coma

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Girlfriend in a Coma, by Douglas Coupland, is a strange story, haunting and thought-provoking, that somehow fell short in the end. It is the story of a group of friends stumbling through life, each searching for something but none sure exactly what.

Although, that’s not quite true; of the seven friends, only five are stumbling. Karen is in a coma and has been for many years. Jared is dead. Karen has seen something she’s not supposed to have seen: the end of the world. Jared knows more than he is telling.

Years pass. Richard is pretty much absent from life, waiting for Karen’s return. The other four friends are adrift as the world accelerates around them. One night twenty years later Richard manages to spend an evening thinking about someone other than Karen. The next morning he is alone and knows with absolute certainty the moment she awakes. At first, not even Karen knows that her awakening is the final trumpet that marks the apocalypse.

One of the parts of the book that resonated best with me was how people were eager to show her the advances of the last twenty years, and her reaction to them. Cell phones, the Internet, and so forth. She comments that everyone seems so proud that things have become so much more efficient, as if that were the goal that humanity had set out for itself. She senses that what little soul was left in humanity when she went into the coma is lost.

I coined a phrase for that a while back, while mulling world politics at a Killing Joke concert. Jazz Coleman was discussing the fall of the American Empire. “Sure,” I thought to myself. “America will someday collapse (not nearly as soon as Mr. Coleman thinks), and it will collapse bigger, better, faster, and louder than any empire has ever collapsed before. It’s the American way.”

BiggerBetterFasterLouder. It’s a fairly easy trend to spot. But is BiggerBetterFasterLouder by definition also emptier? Ultimately, what’s wrong with BiggerBetterFasterLouder? I think there’s an answer to that, but there’s such an entrenched assumption that BBFL is bad that it’s difficult to discuss why. Our pursuit of BBFL has us racking up massive deficits — financial, environmental, and human — and that has to mean something, but is that an indictment on BBFL, or our shortsighted way of pursuing it? Is it possible to imagine a society that pursues BiggerBetterFasterLouder in a far-sighted, responsible way? Maybe, but I suspect not a society composed of humans. That’s more about humans than BBFL, though.

It’s not a spoiler for me to tell you that the world ends in the course of the story; Jared tells you so right there in chapter one. Since he’s dead, he’s a pretty credible witness. What would you do if you were one of less than ten people left on the planet? Would you focus on survival, on forgetting the world, or would you wonder why me? Probably all of those, from time to time. What happens later when the teacher comes back to collect the test and you’ve just been doodling in the margins?

All good questions. I wrote in the opening sentence that the story fell short in the end. It’s an intangible thing; by the numbers it’s just the sort of story I like — character driven, thought-provoking, an ending that decisively concludes an episode but leaves a lot of open questions — but the numbers only go so far. If i had to put my finger on one thing, it’s that there are a couple of people who experience staggeringly painful situations at the end, and I just didn’t feel it. When you’re writing about humanity’s loss of an emotional foundation, that’s no time to hold back.

Still and all, though, it was a good read. I went through it pretty fast, and there was never any doubt that I was going to finish the book. Lots of mystery, and a nice look at Modern Life through twenty-year-long binoculars. (Thirty-year-long binoculars, now.) You could do a lot worse.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Thanks!

My Favorite Web Comics

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It used to be, back in the day, that when I got the newspaper in the morning, the first thing I would read was the comics. Occasionally one would even be funny. My days of newspaper subscriptions are long past, but lately I’ve been starting my day the same way I used to, thanks to the Internet.

The list of comics I check each morning is fairly long — many of them only update once a week, so to get a good bit of comic-reading done each morning requires a large sample. There are a few, however, that give me a special thrill of anticipation when I see a new comic is up. Here, then, is a list of my faves, in no particular order. Check them out!

Girl Genius — A very popular Web comic that takes place in a steam-punk sort of world were there are a few people known as “sparks” — people with a level of mechanical genius that borders on magic. The spark has the unfortunate side effect of driving people mad. Yep, the world is being torn apart by mad scientists. Agatha Clay has a bit of the spark in her, but there seems to be a lot more going on as well. This comic has some darn good storytelling, beautiful artwork, and is overall a slick and professional publication. It’s worth starting from the beginning.

Order of the Stick — From an artistic standpoint, this is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Girl Genuis; the characters are all stick figures. The action takes place in a medieval sword and sorcery world, and the humor is heavily weighted with Dungeons and Dragons references. The characters, for instance, find nothing odd with the idea of making a saving throw during a battle. That’s how combat works, right? If you’re even somewhat familiar with the game (I have only a passing knowledge of it) you will find this comic very funny.

Scary-Go-Round — A very silly modern fantasy. I like it for the completely nutty events, the terrifically odd twists of phrase, and the general Englishness of it. For the last few episodes it’s been filler, so go back a ways if you want to get the real feel of it.

Alien Loves Predator — Although no new episodes have come out in long enough that I think we can declare the comic dead, it’s still worth reading through the archives. It is inspired, I assume, by the movie Alien vs. Predator; this story has the two sharing an apartment in New York. Hijinks ensue. Artistically, this is a great example of a relatively new comic trend; the art is done by photographing action figures.

Dr. McNinja — Off-the-wall ninja humor. I’m not that impressed with the art, but you have to tip your hat to a writer who has a hero who’s a doctor and a ninja, has a gorilla for a receptionist, occasionally rides a velociraptor, and has for a sidekick a boy who grew a big mustache through sheer force of will. His showdown with Ronald McDonald over the McNinja burger was awesome. Recently he just stopped zombies from overrunning the town, although regrettably one was the zombie of Benjamin Franklin’s clone.

Kagerou — Wow. Start with a protagonist with multiple personality disorder who finds himself in a strange fantasy world and go from there. Entire chapters of the story take place inside his head. Who knows? Maybe the whole story is happening in there. This story is packed with interesting characters and is very well-drawn in addition to being well-written.

There are a few more drama-oriented comics I read, but, like American TV series, these seem inevitably to bog down in all the characters being unhappy about who’s dating whom. When characters start to accuse each other of being tedious, maybe it’s time for the writer to figure out that readers are forming the same opinion. Also, with more complicated stories or extended action sequences, updating only once a week doesn’t cut it. A sword fight should take less than a month to conclude. A few comics I’ve shelved until enough new episodes are up that I can read them with some hope of continuity. Some of those have been on the shelf a long time; I suspect I am finished with them.

So those are the ones that popped into my head unbidden. There are some other comics I read that are pretty good, but that list should keep you out of trouble for a little while.

Honorable Mentions:

  • No Rest for the Wicked – you do NOT want to piss off Little Red Riding Hood
  • Choping Block – not for everyone. A gruesome one-joke comic that makes me laugh.
  • Sideways – beautiful woodblock style of art and intersting story. I’m not sure how much of what’s going on I’m supposed to understand.

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