Dark Knight Returns

The comic book by Frank Miller.

I see now where this comic book came from. It's the story of an aging Batman who has gotten out of public affairs. He feels like he's too old to do anything and can't compete physically with the new breed of crime.

But eventually he's pushed to it, and he comes out, and he kicks some ass. I can see what Frank Miller(the writer/artist of DKR) was feeling when he imagined this concept.

I feel old. I'm 41, which simultaneously doesn't look that old to me yet looks older than I ever thought I'd get.

I watch UFC and see these young kids out there slugging away, and I wonder, "Could I beat any of them now?"

Because I look back at the good old days and I fought a LOT. There's something called a glass jaw, and that's where a fighter gets known for taking one punch and lights out.

Let me tell you, I did not have a glass jaw. I have been punched in the face, kicked in the head, strangled...and I never ever blacked out.

Hitting me just made me angry. I had so much anger burning in me that it was hard to extinguish, I guess.

I think I told you the story about the guy who hit me in the face as hard as he could, and I slumped a little, and I smiled. This was at a high school party, and let me tell you, this got me some respect from the masses. People came up to me weeks later saying, "I heard Paul punched you in the face and you smiled, man!"

See, the usual response to getting punched in the face is not to smile. Smiling at that is, in high school terms, not right.

I would probably have lost that respect if they knew what I was thinking after I got punched. I would immediately picture myself as Captain Kirk in Star Trek in one of those bar fights, or Wolverine in a comic book. What would they do? They'd smile, and fight.

But there are no mind-readers in high school, so I got some props.

That brings me to wonder about if I got in a fight today. Would that all change? If I got punched, would I start doubting myself? Would I think, "I'm too old to fight any more" or would the beautiful, beautiful anger come back?

I dunno. Just what I was thinking about.

Movement

On one of the script fronts. I have begun work on it again. It was at page 30, am now at page 33.

The weird thing is that it's a character in the script who is forcing me to work. He's saying things and doing things that make me want to go write them down lest I forget them.

It's something that happens sometimes when writing is going well. A character really jumps out and takes over.

Only problem in this case is that he was a minor character that now threatens to overwhelm the lead. This has happened to me before. Some of my leads tend to be straight-laced characters who have a funny/sarcastic buddy, and the buddy naturally has more charisma and better lines.

So I have to beef up the main character when this guy is done taking over the script.

Right now, though, I'll just see where he takes it. He's got me working, so it can't be that bad.

PS: TV is bad. Really bad. I think I seriously need to start turning it off when I'm working.

I Got A Problem

Do you see those fucking Twilight Zone seasons? They are temporarily selling on Blu Ray for like $38 for season 1, like $43 for Season 2, and like $40 for Season 3.

I don't own the TZ on DVD(besides 2 discs that have my absolute favorite episodes)...and I LOVE me some Twilight Zone.

And these things are CHOCK full of extras. It would take weeks of watching to get through them all, maybe even months.

I don't have that kind of time. I wish I did, but I just don't.

And besides that...the problem is this: One of my little joys in life is stumbling on one of those Sci-Fi marathons they do once or twice a year(there's always one on New Year's Eve), and somehow--even though I have spent countless hours watching them over years of my life--I always manage to catch one I have never seen before.

So if I buy the seasons, and watch them all, that little joy is gone...

A hard choice. What to do, what to do...

Slackin'

All over the place. Here. GOH. Pretty much everywhere.

You can blame video games. Battlefield 3 came out a few weeks ago, and I spent a lot of time playing that.

Thursday night came Skyrim, the next Elder Scrolls game. I've played the last 2, probably put in a combined 200 hours of gameplay in those.

The line to get Skyrim at midnight on Thursday was near 400 people. Clearly I never should have dropped out of computer science and game programming. (I used to program games on my Atari 800XL when I was 14-21 years old)

But tomorrow I'm back at the looping game. Getting Richard's done. Trying to get Beau in but he's being pretty unresponsive.

I think this movie has certifiably kicked my ass. I'm just tired of it. I should be putting together a trailer, and I've messed around with it, but every time I start putting pieces together I just get bored and sick of it.

I need to stop having to do70-90% of the preproduction work, much of the production work, and then 100% of the post-production work. It's just too much.

The World Is Aflame...

...with talk of what's better, the new Canon C300 or the Red Scarlett. I don't care, but at first glance it certainly appears to be the Red. Whatever.

(an aside: this guy has found serious frame-drop flaws in the Red Epic, but I wonder if it has anything to do with shooting 25fps--he's in the UK, and that's standard there...but also, I enjoy hearing about his FCP having to spend forever exporting to ProRes because it can't edit 5K footage, but guess what can? It rhymes with Adobe Premiere)

That set another guy to make a bold claim that the Canon T2i can't shoot a movie, certainly not a movie worthy of distribution. Sounds like he's bitter about something, because movies have been shot with the 7D, and the T2i is basically the 7D in a cheaper body...

But who cares? Whatever.

Composer just got back from his Tokyo/London/etc trip and jumped RIGHT into GOH. I figured he'd want a day or two to rest up, but nope, he emailed me right away to tell me the timecode is off on the new copy I sent him.

I think I forgot to reset it to 29.97 drop-frame. Technically we shot in 24fps, but when it's exported for dvd it's 29.97. So when you drop the timecode filter on the clips it automatically goes to what the clips were shot at.

Man, this is pretty interesting stuff, right?

Let's talk about Halloween. Saturday night the wife and I went to a club and pretended we were younger than we are. Lot of drinking, some dancing. Laughing at costumes.



My costume(pic attached) is COMPLETELY unacceptable for bar use. It makes you hot, it's nearly impossible to drink(and even hard to HOLD a drink)...gotta remember that.

The wife didn't have a good costume, so she went as slutty schoolgirl. I really like it when she can't find a good costume.

Hey, I forgot I shot this! You know how you know it's Halloween? Slutty dancing girls! Courtesy of my iphone:
Slutty Dancing Girls

On actual Halloween night we took the kid out and around, then came back to give out candy. Once again there are people driving around and dropping their kids off in the neighborhood even though they're not from around here.

Annoying and a little pathetic. Not as pathetic as the 18 year olds walking around to get free candy. I mean, candy's not that expensive, is it?

I did make sure to raid the candy bags so we didn't give out any Snickers. Those don't get given out at my house.

Anyway, back to the GOH...crickets should be dead soon. Last of the looping, then go do all the foley...then wait for the score. I should have a clip from the movie to post in the next month or so, with score...