Remembering Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen, a true breakthrough special effects artist died on May 7^th in London, England. Ray Harryhausen produced trailblazing special effects for the 1950s and 60s science fiction classics It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), Mysterious Island (1960) and his arguably best work, Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

Cheezy science fiction movies? Classics that defined a genre, more likely. The 1950s were the Golden Age of science fiction movies and , even though they  mostly low budget productions, Harryhausen films stood out like cats eyes in a field of plain marbles. Every Harryhausen film has a unique look and feel to it- fresh, energetic, and creative. There’s an economy and clarity in his scenes that I have not seen anywhere else.

How did Harryhausen evolve into who he was? From what I’ve read there were two overriding influences on his creative life- King Kong and his parents. Harryhausen saw King Kong with his mother and aunt in Hollywood when he was thirteen and was fascinated how inanimate objects like Kong and the dinosaurs were able to move and look so lifelike (opposed to fins glued on live lizards). This set his life on its creative path. The other big influence were his parents.

Quoting from the Ray Harryhausen website biography section, he said, “My obsession with fantasy has been lifelong, growing during my formative years and being taken to new heights by novels, paintings and of course films, and I was always encouraged by my parents. They nurtured this unusual passion in me by taking me to films and theatre, and later enthused about my experiments with marionettes, models and animation, eventually helping me with productions. They never tried to discourage me in any way from my obsession, and could just as easily have said, ‘Get out there and be a doctor or a lawyer or follow some other profession that is bring you in money’. Fortunately, they didn’t.”

Great parental guidance, I believe. Life is short and Ray Harryhausen followed his passion, excelled and never looked back. Talk about a life well lived.

The official Ray Harryhausen website is here:

 http://www.rayharryhausen.com/index.php

Write Your Novel Like You’re Making a Movie Part 7

Post Production

Once a film is shot the producers, director and editor are left with a stack of memory cards or cans of film. Your cans of film are your first and hopefully second draft of your novel. Now it’s time to stitch everything together as perfectly as possible. This means crafting your scenes so they flow logically and seamlessly into each other. It means placing your plot points and yes/no reversals in their proper strategic places. It means having your ending go off like a fireworks show.

You are really playing the role of the film editor. Your work in this phase should be easier than the previous production and pre-production tasks. All of the heavy lifting is done. Your hard work is now paying off resulting in a polished, well executed and professional manuscript (and cover). From the blocking and lighting process your scenes have a unique feel to them that other writers may try to emulate but will only be able to approximate. You have not only defined the tone, color and tempo of your novel but now have a recognizable style. Your emerging style, or voice, is now distinct from other writers.

Do not over-edit your manuscript. There’s a difference between polished and slick. Polished is professional, slick is contrived. So where do you stop? This is where a checklist comes in handy. Here’s a basic one I use:

• Do your scenes flow evenly and logically from one to another?
• Does your manuscript adhere to the three-act structure?
• Are the first act plot points located in the right spots and in the right order?
• Does your second act contain true yes/no reversals opposed to being sloppy filler to get to the third act?
• Does your third act knock it out of the park?
• Is your book cover professional and competitive with other covers in your genre?

If you can honestly answer yes to the checklist questions then you have written a pretty good book that people will want to read. Now it’s time to get it into readers hands. For more on that, check out the April 15, 2012 blog post eBooks: Five Bucks Max for a analysis of traditional publishing vs. self-publishing.

This is the final post in the Write Your Novel Like You’re Making a Movie series. As you can tell, we like movies, long and short, pro and amateur, big budget extravaganzas and micro-budget shorts. We will be extending an invitation to filmmakers in May to shoot scenes or book trailers from the John Silver books and are working out the details now.

Write Your Novel Like You’re Making a Movie Part 6

Production

The detailed outline is complete including the major plot points and yes/no reversals, the locations scouted (either literally or virtually), a storyboard is created and and your book cover is complete or near completion. The pre-production work is done and now it’s time to sit down and write your novel. If you’re like me, it’s been driving you crazy not to just sit down and write, but all the pre-planning will pay off in the final product.

Scenes are written from your outline and the more detailed the outline, the more vivid your scenes. There are some film production procedures and roles you can follow that will make your scenes resonate. These are tools that you can utilize to develop your style and, if you want to look at it this way (without sounding to corporate), your brand as a writer. 

There are four cinematic entities I try to exploit, blocking, cinematography, lighting and shooting style.  What is blocking? Blocking is where the director, along with the cinematographer and lighting director, set up a scene and walk the actors through it. It’s like a dress rehearsal to see what works, and what doesn’t. Approach your scenes this way by writing a sketch. Block them out. The scene’s motion, flow, ambience, effect and tone are refined this way. The blocking process gets the scene “just right” before it’s shot. You can do the same with your scenes before you commit to them. If something doesn’t feel right to the director (or you, the author) tinker with the scene via the blocking process until it is “just right”. This may entail writing your scene from different POVs and angles.

As an author, what is the overall tone and feel of your novel? Is it dark and film noirish? This influences how the light and shadows are used (the lighting director) and the overall look of the film (the cinematographer). It affects camera angle, depth of field (what’s in focus and what’s not) and the overall impression the director wants to make on the audience. Same with your book. 

Is your book an action thriller? Then it might have full spectrum colorization with a lot of hand held camera scenes that imply realism and action. You are the director guiding the cinematography, light and shooting style, only you are doing it with words.  

  Block your scenes from different angles (POVs), lighting and shooting styles. Use whatever works for you and again, feels “just right”. It takes extra time, but your scenes will flow with an unexpected resonance and will integrate well with the overall tone of your book.

Next, post-production.

 

Write Your Novel Like You’re Making a Movie Part 5

Pre-production Storyboarding

Storyboarding is a graphical representation of a scene from a camera’s viewpoint. Why bother with a storyboard? Creating a storyboard will quickly illustrate what’s essential and interesting in your scene and what’s extraneous or boring. If you’re writing a scene that seems to drag and is highly narrative, bust out a quick storyboard with dialog and see what to cut. Just like in the world of filmmaking, a lot of your scenes will (and should) wind up on the (virtual) cutting room floor.

When I was writing the opening scenes of The Day Detroit Went Dark I was into the manuscript about fifteen pages when I thought it started to drag. I went back to the outline and re-examined the first few sequences. It was apparent there wasn’t enough action. I drew a storyboard of the first chapter, cutting out the non-action fluff, then wrote the scenes from that. I wound up with about ninety percent action and ten percent glue to bind the scenes together. Bottom line? Storyboards work.

Write Your Novel Like You’re Making a Movie Part 3

Pre-production

Now that the high concept, logline, genre and trusted reader acid tests are performed, it’s time to enter the pre-production phase. The first thing to do is to create a schedule. As in any business, time is money. As a writer, every day you spend on a project is a day lost on another. Be aggressive and set deadlines.

In movie making there are a lot of pre-production roles to play, all requiring different talents and specialties. Guess what- as an author you have to fill most of these roles yourself. First and foremost, you are the producer and director and responsible for everything on the creative side. You will also be the location manager, art director and maybe the storyboard artist.

Now is the time to start outlining your novel in detail. There are several ways to do this. One way is utilizing the old journalism paradigm- who, what, why, when and where.

Who – is your main character?

What – is their predicament and goal?

Why – is someone trying to stop the main character from attaining the goal?

When – does the story happen, past, present or future?

Where – does the story take place?

Answering these questions will help clarify your plot and character development.

Make sure you fit everything into the three act structure, just like in a screenplay. If you aren’t intimately familiar with the three act structure, Act I plot points, Act II yes/no reversals and big action and resolution in Act III, consider picking up a copy of Contour by Mariner Software. Contour is a screenplay outlining tool. It’s rigorous to the extreme but if you stick with it you will know the three act structure inside and out. It’s relatively inexpensive and worth buying.

 

Once your outline is fleshed out the next role you will play is the location manager. In the movie world the location manager scouts locations along with discovering potential interiors and exteriors for shooting scenes, among many other duties. Where is your novel located? Detroit? New York City? Paris? A small midwestern town? It’s important that you, the location manager, visit the locales and absorb every little detail you can.

 

What if you live in Cleveland and your novel is set in Los Angeles and there is no way you can justify a trip to the west coast? Visit it virtually. My second novel, Reckoning in Escobara, is located in and around Juarez, Mexico. I spent hours walking the streets and back alleys of Juarez using Google Earth. One reader asked me how much time I spent in Juarez and recognized a lot of areas that only residents knew about. Taking your role as location manager seriously and it will pay off in your novel.

 

Next, more pre-production…

Write Your Novel Like You’re Making a Movie

Have an idea for writing a novel but don’t know where to start? Writing a novel is a lot like making a movie, only not as rigid. Movie making consists of four basic elements: development, pre-production, production and post-production. Notice three out of the four elements contain the word production? At each phase, something is being created and assembled. Produced. The development phase should really be called pre-production development.

Development

The first step in your writing journey is the notion of high concept. One aspect of the  high concept approach explores “what if” scenarios. High Concept 1: What if a person, working week in week out at a job serving the public woke up one morning and discovered they were the last person alive on earth? Would they welcome it or hate it?

High Concept 2: What if someone who has an overwhelming fear of the ocean falls in the Pacific and instantly grows gills? Would he or she adapt to their new world or die? These are high concept ideas and you should be able to bang these out all day. Sure, most of them will be mediocre to bad, but the law of averages says that if you create enough of them, chances are you’ll produce a gem. There’s that word again, “produce”.

The high concept is the very real first step in the film development process. The same goes for novels. If this seems foreign or difficult for you to do, I recommend the eBook Your Idea Machine by screenwriter William C. Martel. You will find guidance on “what if” scenarios and many more idea generating techniques. I have all of his screenwriting blue books and have leaned tons from them, even though I don’t write screenplays.

Once you’ve locked in your high concept, it’s time to start working on a logline. Your logline should be only one sentence long, and in rare cases, two. Loglines are a lot harder to produce than you think, but you have something solid to work from: your high concept. For High Concept 1 a logline could be “A barker wakes one morning to find the carnival gone and soon discovers he’s the last person alive on earth.” We could call this novel “The Carnival Barker”.  For High Concept 2 a logline could read “A tipsy woman deathly afraid of water falls off a pier into the Pacific and instantly grows gills and attracts predators.” We could call this book Aquaphobia.

Armed with your high concept and logline you’re ready to make an elevator pitch to producers or editors. More on development in the next installment.

NIGHT TRAIN TO CHICAGO

It bugged me that I missed the train passing through the Royal Oak station earlier in the week when I was taking photos. We went back today at 6:00pm and waited for the night train to Chicago. The sun set at a little after 5:00pm so it was completely dark by the time the train arrived.

 

The train stopped for less than five minutes, so there wasn’t a lot of time to set up and get many shots.

The thought of riding the sleek train to Chicago on a cold starry night is appealing…

 

 

World War Z

The trailer for the Brad Pitt produced World War Z came out last week. I’ve watched it about four times, and I think it’s cool. The movie’s been plagued by production and script problems, even going so far to hire a new screenwriter halfway through production. This delayed the movie from being released in November 2012 to June 2013. That’s a big deal and a ton of money. I like the trailer, really like Mireille Enos and I think Brad Pitt is a cool guy. Here’s a link to the trailer, if you haven’t seen it:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816711/

So what’s the big problem? Common opinion says it’s not accurately reflecting the book. I did a little research why there were production issues and here’s what I found on some blogs:

1. The script is not close to the novel:

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/world-war-z-trailer-illustrates-all-thats-wrong-in-hollywood-rfure.ph

2. The script is not close to the novel:

http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/11/10/why_world_war_z_scares_me_and_not_in_the_good_way

3.  And finally, the script is not close to the novel:

http://screenrant.com/world-war-z-movie-book-differences-discussion-kofi-127543/

All that being said, the book is told in retrospect from different points of view, somewhat similar to Robopocolypse. How do you film something like that and deliver any sense of story continuity in two hours? It’s more suited to a good HBO mini-series. Steven Spielberg is directing Robopocolypse. It will be really interesting to see how both films are handled.

 

MORE HDR PHOTOS, RAW AND WHITE BALANCE

We went out early this morning right after the sun came up to the Royal Oak train station. Here are a few HDR shots.

This is a derelict loading docket in the deep south end of Royal Oak. I drove by it earlier in the week and thought it would make a good shot.

As usual I took three exposures for each scene, one shot two stops underexposed, another normal exposure, and another two stops overexposed. I recorded the shots in RAW mode. RAW image files, unlike TIFF or JPEGS, captures all of the data from a camera’s image sensor. It also allows for accurate image post-processing and correction. Things like white balance, saturation, contrast and sharpness are easily corrected, where you have to fiddle around with JPEGS to correct them, if at all.

I’m glad I shot the scenes in RAW mode, since I forgot to set the white balance correctly. Last night I was playing with the white balance settings and left it set on tungsten. That’s good for shooting indoors by incandescent light, but terrible for shooting outdoors in the morning. When we got back home I downloaded the photos and every shot was blue-tinged. We spent a couple of hours shooting and the light was good, so we couldn’t go back and reshoot. This was easy to fix. In the editor (Canon Digital Photo Professional) I just changed the white balance to ‘cloudy’ and the colors returned to what I saw in the viewfinder. If I hadn’t shot the scenes in RAW, I would have been in big trouble.

The Good:

– RAW mode captures the image on a camera sensor with very little processing.

• Correcting an exposure is a lot easier in RAW mode.

The Bad:

• RAW files are at least 2 to 6 times larger than JPEGs.
• Can’t take as many pictures.
• Takes up tons of disk space on your computer.

I use an external hard drive to store RAW files. Also, with each shoot I create an accompanying Word document detailing the location, exposure values and tone mapping settings so I can accurately duplicate scenes that come out well.

So what is white balance? It’s how your camera interprets white. Think of it as kind of a zero point for color. If the zero is set correctly, the colors will be correct. If not, the colors will be offset or skewed, like my blue-tinged exposures were. Most digital cameras have a white balance adjustment. My main camera is a Canon T2i (or 550D outside the U.S.), but even my little 125 dollar Nikon Coolpix has a white balance adjustment. Try using it- it’s easy and you will notice a big difference in your digital photographs.

BASIC HDR PHOTOGRAPHY

I’ve been wanting to do HDR photography since I saw my first HDR picture. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range Imaging. It’s a method of heightening image intensity, and it’s not that tough to do.

Here’s the first HDR photo I’ve ever taken. It’s of our living room.

The living room pic took about a minute to produce on free software.

You will need four things to create basic HDR photos.

1. A digital camera that can bracket exposures.
2. A tripod.
3. A decent computer (preferably a Mac).
4. HDR processing software.

The first step is to set up your digital camera for automatic exposure compensation. This is commonly known as bracketing exposures. This means that you take one picture  at correct exposure, one overexposed and another underexposed. You will need to take at least three shots at different exposures to create an HDR image. Why three shots? They come close to capturing the full range of light of your subject. If you have a dark foreground, then the sky may be washed out. If you compensate for the bright sky, then your foreground will be dark, and so on. HDR processing will blend the three shots together to produce a wider, fuller spectrum, therefore intensifying your image.

I have a Canon t2i that automatically brackets three exposures. I usually set the range at two stops, that is two stops overexposed and two stops under exposed. I press the shutter release three times to capture the set of images.

You don’t have to have an expensive digital camera to bracket exposures. I also have a little Nikon Coolpix 3100 that can easily bracket exposures, although it’s a manual process.

When you find a scene you want to photograph, use a tripod and a cable release if you have one. One of the problems with HDR photography is incorrect image overlap. Pressing the shutter release can bump and shake your tripod, messing up your set of images. Even worse if you hand-hold your camera.

Before taking your photos you should set your camera to aperture priority mode. This maintains consistent exposure and depth of field. It isn’t a show stopper if your camera doesn’t support aperture priority mode, but it does make a difference in the final image.

So now that your pictures are taken it’s time to load them onto your computer and process them. So what’s a good program to use without spending an arm and a leg? I recommend luminance-hdr. It works really well, is easy to understand and is FREE. luminace-hdr is built on open source software and takes about three minutes to download and install. It’s available for Mac and Windows operating systems.

Once inside luminace-hdr a creation wizard walks you through the steps to create and process an HDR image. You load in your three images then click Next. Remember to check the autoalign box. This makes sure your three images line up correctly.

As the wizard moves along you’re presented with a list of predefined profiles that condition your image.  After this completes comes the fun part where you Tonemap your  new composite image. luminance-hdr provides nine different operators that you can fiddle and experiment with. And you will, for hours.

HDR photography, which was so mysterious to me now makes sense. It’s easy to go overboard using the effects because they’re fun. Like any other tool, photographers  learn to finesse HDR images by using less rather than more, and that’s what I want to learn how to do. All it takes is practice.

Here’s a few images I took and processed today.

Wagner Park, Royal Oak, Michigan:

Wagner Park, Royal Oak, Michigan

Back Yard Chairs:

Wagner Park, Royal Oak, Michigan