:)

I'm going insane again

As I write this I'm fixing some last-minute shit with the spaceship. My computer is currently crashing while trying to combine about 36,000 vertices into one object because I messed up the materials at some point. I don't even know anymore I'm just tired.

This all happened because I wanted to add a little thruster trail behind the thingamabob and realized the solar panels were transparent. I don't know what happened or why but I solved it to the best of my ability, which is saying very little.

If this fixes it I'm going to re-add the trail; if that ruins it again then I will say [F-WORD] the trail and leave it out. And then I will begin to sob profusely. I hate this project.

I want to graduate. Now.

I fixed it. The solar panel texture is stretched out for some reason but I don't give a shit about that. I have many, many words that describe how I feel about Blender, but I will keep them to myself. On the bright side it only takes four seconds to render a frame for the spaceship, meaning I won't have to pay some render farm for that. Hooray.

I'm gonna get all the rendering done tonight so that I can just finish editing tomorrow; hopefully before I film my CCR tomorrow night.

It's possible that I don't blog about any of the editing process. If I do, hooray! If not, I probably took a well-deserved nap.

uhhhhh what else

I don't [F-WORD]ing know. I'm sick of school. I'm sick of this project. I'm sick of sick.

back at it like a crack addict

The Devil works hard. I don't.

I've been Blender-ing my ass off recently. First thing I did was fix the animation for the black hole; when I DM'ed the creator he mentioned adding a copy rotation modifier to the accretion disc, which was something I did when following the tutorial. At least, I thought I did. Turns out I didn't see the Apply button so it never actually went into affect. Whatever, though. It's fixed now.

After I finished that, I tried using this tutorial to add a realistic star background to the animation. I didn't think it'd be possible, though, because the black hole itself uses a shitload of math to bend the light within Blender.

Unfortunately my guess was correct; since the stars are all different light sources, the ones around the perimeter of the black hole bend weirdly. It's not super easy to see in the photo, but if you look closely it's noticeable. If anything I'll add a background in post if it's not too much of a hassle, but otherwise I'm fine with there being no stars in the background.

That's a long-winded way of saying I'm not doing a starry background, because it will be a hassle; I hate rotoscoping.

This is not a [CENSORED]

Moving on to the next piece of my Blender tasks, I started the spacecraft. On the left is a very early stage in the development, the engine terminal.

The tutorial is easy enough to follow, my only concern is whether or not I'll be able to film the black hole together with the ship. It would save me a decent amount of money if I can.

The only reason I can think of as to why it wouldn't work is that the black hole is basically just a painting inside the bounds of a sphere and a square in Blender.

In other words, if the spaceship is coming towards the black hole in one shot, it would be clipping through the shapes that the black hole exists inside of, which would either not work at all, or would give me a very limited range that I could have the ship move through.

It looks a little phallic...

Hi Blog

I like reading through other peoples' blogs a lot. It's fun.

Or at least it was fun until I saw how many of these dickheads are already done. 

UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

i want better for you, maurice

The Political and Economic State of the World Right Now

I have not edited jack SHIT these past two days. In my defense, I'm burnt out from literally everything and I need a break. Also in my defense, editing does not take that long. I can knock out a line edit and soundscape in one night, and it's not that hard to add VFX, seeing as I'm literally just following tutorials.

Coloring might take a while if I choose to take my time with it, but also I'm lazy and want to finish this shit already.

The hardest part is going to be the spaceship. I watched the tutorial fully, and while it's possible to follow along, it relies on you to eyeball the modeling, whereas the black hole was just copying the numbers I saw on-screen.

Speaking of the black hole, I DM'ed the original creator, Alaskan FX, to ask how he animated it.

I have no damn clue what this means but. Okay. Better than nothing

It's Tuesday

I'm in New Orleans. Hooray. I also haven't done any editing. Yippee.

It's not my fault; I've been working like a dog for the past... I don't even know how long it's been. I needed a break to play Minecraft and shit.

But starting tomorrow I'm back on the grind.. I hope. I'm gonna be doing some tourism but other than that I'm gonna be grinding. If I'm not too tired I'll try and get a line edit done tonight.

Oh. I also wrote my CCR script on the flight. Trust me when I say there's a lot more than just this, in fact I might've done too much, so I might trim that in the coming days.

I don't want to show the whole script because it's not done yet, and also I don't like putting my stuff on here believe it or not. Last thing before I go into a po' boy-induced food coma, I'm gonna try and keep the "reality" scenes to 1:30 or 1:45 so that I have room for a max. of 30 seconds of the animated footage. Bye.

eh.

thank you kyrie irving

Today was filming day. It went alright.

I think I've made it very clear by now how much I dislike filming. This shoot was definitely one of my better ones, though that's not to say it went perfectly.

I asked Santi and Mateo to come at 3PM, and we'd hopefully wrap at 6PM. The filming location was my mom's house, but I'm at my dad's until my birthday, so I sped on over to my mom's practically as soon as I got up.

That gave me a couple of hours to prepare both the equipment and the set.

I decided last-second to add a bunch of sticky notes with "book notes" to the desk to increase the sense of freneticism. By last-second I mean I decided yesterday and procrastinated actually adding them. Oops?

Another thing I decided to do yesterday was print out a picture of some white dude winning an award, then cover his face with sticky notes to imply that it was Noah who won the award. Little sprinkle of worldbuilding for ya there.

The quality of the videos were alright. I'm not the best cinematographer, but I'm also not the worst. Whenever I imagine what I would consider something to be "proud" of with this project, I never really think of the visuals. I'm a writer by choice and an editor by necessity. So long as I like the story I don't personally care about anything else.

That's just a long way of saying I'll just deal with not liking it.

I need a NASA supercomputer...

At the speed my laptop can render one frame the black hole, I'd need to spend about 20 consecutive days just for 10 seconds of footage.

That's before adding any compositing effects and a space background, though. Not to mention the spaceship.

So yeah, the plan's to try and animate multiple still images in After Effects or something to make it look good and just deal with the blow to visual effect.

...or maybe not

That's what an idiot would say. A stupid, dumb idiot who doesn't know what render farms are.

When I tell you it was either stupid luck or divine intervention that I found out about these things...

It was a beautiful Friday morning when I woke up, and, like most teenagers on Spring Break do, decided to lay in bed scrolling through my phone. I was perusing the YouTube home page when I saw an interesting little video. It seemed like a cool concept so I decided to actually sit down and watch it; thank God I did.

At about 3:55 in the video, the YouTuber says "If you can't wait that long, you send your animation to a cloud rendering service."

It was literally only 5 seconds and a casual remark, but somewhere in my primitive little monkey brain it clicked that I should Google what a cloud rendering service was.

God inventing cloud rendering services (I think)

Basically, if your computer sucks balls at rendering, there's companies that have an armada of supercomputers or whatever the [F-WORD] that can render it for you for a small fee.

HALLELUJAH!!!!!

Let me tell you, my heart started POUNDING (metaphorically) so hard it caused EARTHQUAKES (metaphorically).

I was a teensy bit skeptical that I'd get a virus or get my SSN stolen or something trying to use one of these, but it wasn't too much of a hassle to figure out. A lot of companies also give you a "free trial", where you get a certain amount of "Render credits" after making your account. Render credits are just money; you put however much into your account and you can use that to render however many frames it can buy. 

After a bit of research I decided to try out Fox Render Farm; my main concern, excluding getting a virus, was the cost, but after doing a quick test run it came out to about $0.07 a frame.

I first tested it out with 10 frames, and after that I rendered 5 seconds (120 frames).

When I looked at the final render I realized, "Oh yeah. I have no clue how to animate this correctly." Watching the video, it's glaringly obvious to see the issue, but for me it's hard to pinpoint how to fix the issue, seeing as I've used Blender only a handful of times before. There seems to be some values that are moving too much and some value that isn't moving at all; I don't know what the [F-WORD] the problem is but I've got to figure it out tomorrow.

I have about $15 left of the $25 trial balance they gave me. After that I'm probably gonna try to use GarageFarm's $25 trial, and after that I'll just pay out of pocket. I usually spend money on my video projects--I bought a boomerang for a recent skit I did--so I'm not opposed to paying for cloud rendering.

I have four things left to do regarding Blender. 1) Fix the animation. 2) Add stars. 3) Model the spaceship. 4) Layer the clips.

I might DM the original creator of the video to ask what values he keyframed to animate it. Hopefully he remembers; it's been 11 months.

The Coming (cumming) Days

Editing is both enjoyable and not enjoyable for me. I have some kind of PTSD for chromakeying after spending about 30 hours in one week last year frame-by-frame masking a one-minute video because my lighting was so bad the greenscreen didn't key out.

I'm not editing tonight. Tomorrow I'm gonna finish up Blender. Basically, most (all) of my editing will be done during my trip to New Orleans, which I know my dad is gonna absolutely love. It only takes a few hours for a line edit, and from there it's mainly just building the soundscape and adding graphics (+ coloring).

I'm also gonna have to film my CCR in New Orleans. [F-WORD] [F-WORD] [F-WORD] [F-WORD].

Like I said before, the theme will be Weefle, Beefle, Shnoop! because that's probably my favorite project/character I've ever made. Mateo mentioned during filming today that he also wanted to make his CCR Weefle, Beefle, Shnoop!-themed, which I'm fine with because he edited that whole thing; it's as much his right to use it as it is mine. I just hope we don't get the same AICE Examiner...

Back to editing, I'm not sure how much of that I'm really going to talk about in the upcoming posts; I'm sure I'll have a lot to say, but I also need to cram in a shit-ton of research for my CCR because I couldn't be arsed to do it before.

There's about 9 days left for both this project and the CCR. I'm hoping for something I'm proud of.

(Also to whoever my AICE Examiner ends up being, just know my birthday is the day after this opening is due. Just keep that in mind as you grade this. Think about how hard this must be for me... just a poor little guy from South Florida...)

AND TO WHOEVER MATEO'S EXAMINER IS, JUST KNOW THIS IS THE KIND OF FREAK YOU'RE DEALING WITH!!!!!

peace and lurv y'all. Pride out.

Armageddon

STOPPPPPPPPPP

So yesterday I went to pick up equipment from BECON. I say this with all the love and respect in my heart for Jim Guarasci, but if The Purge was real and all crime was legal for a day I'd be raiding their camera supplies.

I don't know the exact model names for everything I got, but; RGB COB Light, Softbox, RGB Cam Light, 2 light stands, omnidirectional mount for light, headphones, Sennheiser boom mic, XLR cable, XLR adapter, boom pole, slider, Sony A7III, 28-70mm zoom lens, F1.8 50mm lens, ND filter, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.

It's a lot of equipment, but thankfully I've had experience using all these different types of equipment, though I generally haven't used any of these specific items. I have two days until the shoot, so I'm going to just mess around with everything until I fully understand it all.

I asked two people to help me out for the shoot. I wanted to shoot it solo at first, because I get some weird feeling when other people see anything behind-the-scenes of anything I do. But I'd also get incredibly stressed and have a mental breakdown if I tried to do this myself (which has happened many times before).

So yeah, two people. I wanted them to be people that I've worked with before, and therefore have already seen how stressed I am on-set, so I asked the two nincompoops pictured below, Mateo and Santi.

(Left to Right): Me, Mateo, Santi

They're both really good at pretty much every role on set, and I trust them to get the job done. To my teacher, I have one warning for you. Santi is planning on taking AS-level next year. 

Run.

Script

I wanted to change the script a bit. It felt like it wouldn't be long enough, and the first draft is never perfect anyways. If you see an updated version attached to this blog post, then I finished it and edited this to include it. If not, I either forgot to come back and update it or I'm doing it tomorrow.

But another reason I wanted to change the script is because of Final Draft's Big Break Screenwriting Contest.

I've had Final Draft for years and have been wanting to make something for this contest for about two years now. However, you need to be 18 in order to submit. By the time submissions are due, I'll have met that requirement, so I want to finally have something to submit.

I think INCANDESCENCE has potential. I've never written a full-length film (my highest page count is like 5) but I want to try. And if I feel like it's too daunting, they just opened a short film category, with a maximum of 20 pages, so maybe I can go for that.

Who knows. It's both really scary and really exciting to think about; the prize is obviously a huge incentive for me, but I also just want to see if I have it in me to produce a large-scale story. I feel like this is a test for whether or not I have it in me to be a writer.

Megiddo

uhhhhh

So I was going to make another post about this, but having two in one day makes it seem like I'm just trying to meet a quota. Let the record show, I may not be the best student, but I'll be damned if I half-ass something I care about.

I tested all the equipment and it works perfectly, thank goodness. This is a photo I took of the camera. You can also see the backup mic, slider, headphone cord, and some other stuff.

The mic in the picture is not, by ANY means, bad; it's just that the other one is so good. The XLR converter lets you hear to both audio inputs side-by-side, and it was surreal to hear the difference in quality.

As of this moment I haven't tinkered with the lighting equipment, but maybe in a later part of the blog I will have.

They really need to change the "Colorist" job title

While I was rendering another angle of the black hole I decided to watch some more videos on cinematography/lighting. I first watched this video by Film Riot, but Film Riot's videos are always iffy. They do an alright job at covering techniques but half the time it just feels like they're advertising their or their sponsors' products.

So after that I watched another video by YCImaging, which is so good for so many reasons. It's only 4.5 minutes, and covers so much. The first thing I took away from it was the term 'bokeh', which refers to the level of blur on the out-of-focus aspect of a shot with shallow depth-of-field. YC also explains that depth can be achieved even with smaller f-stops, and also pointed out that focus is harder to maintain at wider f-stops.

I don't know how accurate that is, so I plan to test it out with the two lenses Jim gave me tomorrow. I've had many shoots where I [F-WORD]ed up on the focus, so something like that might really help in the long run. 

Another thing YC discussed was motivated lighting. I've heard and read about it countless times, but I never actually remember to motivate the lighting in my projects. This time will be different. I have two light sources; the window and the laptop.

The last subject in the video is negative fill. I've heard of it maybe only once or twice, and he didn't do the best job of explaining it, but I'll give it a try tomorrow during the test runs.

The last video I watched was by Color Grading Central, and it was amazeballs. It broke color grading down into seven steps and showed how to achieve each step on Premiere, Final Cut, and DaVinci. I'm gonna go back to it during the final edit.

The fourth step to his process was teals and oranges. It's a very common color combo in films, and I even mentioned using it in my last post. The most traditional application of it is orange subject and teal background, as seen above; but I think I want to invert that.

The opening takes place at night, and in film moonlight is typically portrayed as blue. I mean, take a look at this still of the movie Moonlight where they use a teal background to portray night.

The reason I want to invert the color scheme is because the black hole is orange. I want it to kind of "bleed through" and start effecting how Noah perceives the real world, shown by the orange haze that begins to envelop Noah as The Voices keep whispering to him.

To imply that he's still grounded in reality I want the teal moonlight to illuminate his body while the orange gradually consumes everything else. Hopefully it turns out fine.

Something I've also noticed is that, with the orange/teal combo, actors are costumed in neutral tones; whites, blacks, browns, etc. So I'll have to rethink the costume. Probably just a white tank top and a more neutral pajamas. If I need to do something more boring, then I'll rely more on set design to display Noah's eclectic personality.

Also, in case you couldn't tell by the title, I've been reading Good Omens. Fun book.

I LOVE HUMIDITY

I think the worst part about my last posts being terrible isn't that it dropped my grade; it's that my blog looks ugly as hell now. I'm gonna have to go back in and edit these things to make it pretty again.

Interstellar

During the plane ride to Long Beach I watched Interstellar with Zach. The reason I look like a complete psychopath in this photo is because I was bawling my eyes out at the ending because I’m a real man. 

I had never seen the movie before, but the black hole in it, Gargantua, was the inspiration behind the black hole tutorial I used, so in a way it inspired my film opening.

I think my favorite part of it was the looming threat of relativity. Every moment was an eternity, and it was so gut-wrenching as a viewer to see all the time lost.

In terms of the opening I don’t think there’s much to draw from it (excluding the visual aspect), but if I were to outline the overall story I would want the characters of Noah’s book to experience that, and as he continues writing it bleeds through; Noah starts to feel more and more like time is running out for him to finish, for him to find love, etc.

me-want-scéne

Today during school I reached out to Jim from BECON to secure equipment. I plan on filming Saturday so that I have time to finish getting that damned typewriter. 

The cheapest ones on Amazon are like $50 and I’ve been asking my older relatives if they have one to no avail. I’m also looking into prop rental companies, but they’re all in Miami. My mom is very much opposed to driving to Miami, but maybe my dad isn’t?

I don’t know. That’s a tomorrow problem. Speaking of tomorrow problems, though, I have to send out a bunch of facking Purchase Orders for my club’s State competition. 

I can’t wait to be replaced.

world’s worst fit check

Quick update pertaining to the last paragraphs (I didn't want to actually put the update in those paragraphs (I am lazy (and losing my [F-WORD]ing mind))), I think I am just going to scrap the typewriter. The main reason for it was for the sound of paper tearing being a good transition out of the sci-fi sequences, and that it would be good for portraying Noah as out-of-touch.

After examining it more, though, and keeping practicality in mind, I think I'm going to swap it to a laptop, and instead focus on costume and set design. My first thought was to have the set be very barren, but I'm now thinking the opposite. Cluttered desk, knickknacks everywhere, color galore.

I want his outfit to be kind of random. It needs to separate from the dark background, so it'll be sort of bright, but the main thing is the randomness.

My current thought is these two with a white tank top under. It's an ugly ass outfit, but there is some cohesion with the blues. And there's randomness. Definitely randomness...

In terms of set design, I've got the shitload of knickknacks on lock. I'm practically ripping that part of the character from myself, so I don't need to worry about finding anything.

What I do need to worry about is finding stuff to cover the walls. I've been looking at videos that discuss capturing that "cinematic" look, and this one brought my attention to Gawx Art, whose videos are actual works of art.

Anyways, there's two main things that the first video discussed; lighting and design. The section about design made me think about the production design for my shot. I need to find some props to put in the background to make my shots more visually interesting. 

For the lighting I want to try out the orange/teal color combo that practically every dramatic action movie uses.

shameless self-advertising

I mentioned STN in the last three blogs, but I never posted the actual videos. 

One last thing; I want to re-write the film opening. I just don't like the rhythm of it.

it’s joever

Get my ass back home

STN is over. I got 4th for my PSA and my team got 1st for Short Film. But the real win was the friends we made along the way.

I have nothing to say. In the coming days I will be able to actually dedicate time towards this project; for now I want to burn a cigarette onto my brain. I have had to accept reality and give up on getting a good grade this quarter.

I want to go home.

these bitches dont give me ANY FACKING TIME

I hate STN

My favorite part of competing at STN is the nonstop schedule, AKA having no time for schoolwork, AKA failing my last semester.

The most I’ve done so far for my film openingis watch Interstellar on the plane with Zach. Movie was alright. Not like I bawled my [F-WORD]ing eyes out or anything.

I’m sure I’ll want to discuss it more in a future post but I have been up like 20 hours and want to be sedated/euthanized.

Another fun little tidbit about my blog opening is that I don’t have the typewriter. So I gotta try and figure that shit out. At this point I’m too wiped to do anything like search for a typewriter or secure equipment.

cope.

This is an HD render of the black hole. Pros: It looks pretty. Cons: It took about an hour to render this single frame. 

I think I'll do one of two things; either render a half-second clip (24 FPS) for each angle of the black hole I want to use and loop it, or instead just take single-frame renders and animate a glow effect.

The first one is obviously preferable, my only concern is how well I can loop it. If it looks like the light's moving too fast I might be like ughhhhh and choose option two, but we'll see. My current idea is to layer the clip over itself at different points in time and overlay them. In theory, it'll cover up the loop; might not look good, though.

CCRs (Crusty, Crazy Rabbits)

After sitting through a lecture about the CCRs, I came to the conclusion that I have done jack shit in terms of research. My target audience? Who [F-WORD]ing knows. I have an idea for the video, though. I’m probably gonna have it be an interview for Weefle, Beefle, Shnoop!

This will be a short blog; I compete very soon. ‘Til next time. 

t-minus 1,922,440 seconds until I'm done (at the time of writing this title)

Image of the Day

God bless Michelle Yeoh

It's been a busy week. I definitely bombed my blog schedule, and in approximately 203,526,000,000,000 nanoseconds (at the time of Googling how many seconds until I leave) I'll be on a plane to compete at STN. Whoopty-[F-WORD]ing doo.

Due to the hectic nature of the rest of this week for me, my blog posts will be far more brief, mainly just updating you (my beautiful, wonderful readers) on any progress I've made.

First off, I finished the storyboard. You can view every image in their glorious splendor here.

But more importantly, I finished rendering the black hole.

TA-DA

Ain't she a 'beaut?

Shits and gigs aside, I did actually complete it. I'm not exactly sure what went wrong the last time I made it; my running theory is that I was in the wrong view mode. But this time I watched the tutorial like a hawk, making sure I did every step exactly as he did.

The "texture" of the light looks a lot grainier than the tutorial's, though, which is unfortunate but tolerable. Take it as my proof that I actually followed the tutorial step-by-step instead of downloading some file from the Internet. Let the record also show though that I 100% would've done that if I knew it wouldn't get my project invalidated for plagiarism or some shit like that.

The only thing I have left to figure out regarding Blender is how to render an animation. One of my roommates at STN knows Blender pretty well, though, so I'll just wait until Thursday or Friday night to ask him for help. Hopefully I get around to making the spaceship before then.

In terms of filming, I'm fairly confident about being able to secure equipment. I just have to look for a typewriter; I can just use a laptop instead, but it doesn't have that vicious tear sound. I want to practically rip people's attention away from the Blender scenes. Also, Noah is very detached from reality and other people, hence why I think using an outdated piece of equipment is very symbolic of his character.

Also, this past Wednesday I went out and watched Dune II, which reminded me about the cool vibrating armor they had in the first movie. I want to have the world kinda vibrate when the voice start surrounding Noah, so I thought I could just apply that armor effect to that scene. It took some time to find a decent tutorial, but I eventually did. I feel a lot more confident in After Effects than something like Blender, because I have a solid understand of the fundamentals of After Effects.

The last effect I need to find a tutorial for is the "window". I was thinking something like Dr. Strange's mirror dimension VFX, but I can't seem to find any decent videos on that. I'll figure something out, and worst-case scenario I just mask out the ceiling, feather the mask, then add a texture to the black hole to make it look decent.

hey guys

I am busy. I am tired. I am doing my best to stay afloat in my other classes, and unfortunately that means I will have to tank a few blog posts.

I have not made tremendous progress since Sunday, but I have made some. Two(-ish) pages of the storyboard are done, I have started on an outline of the overarching story, though that's more of a personal project, and I have found tutorials for all but one of the effects I want to do.

I understand that I have less than a month left, but I need to knock other shit out of the way before I can zero in on this project. 

Peace out and whatnot.

We're chilling

This image encapsulates my new perspective on this project.

Eat your heart out, Maurice

I've been looking at a lot of stuff to help me make this project actually feasible. For example, I found a Blender tutorial for a black hole.

This is a screenshot from fairly early on in the process. One thing I love about Blender is that it is absolutely incredible and mind-numbingly confusing.

I don't even bother trying to understand what the hell this guy is talking about, I just sit my ass down and listen.

Major props to him for comprehending this shit.

I want to add, just as a silly little side note, that I have a genuine disdain for space in every capacity. It scared the living [F-WORD] out of me as a kid, and at this point I've learned to tolerate it but I like to pretend that space isn't real. To reiterate, I am not saying I am a Flat Earther or whatever, I just hate space. 

My best friend wants to be an astrophysicist.

He's not allowed near my kids.

Anyhow, this is a screenshot from a lot later in the process. I know it looks a lot better, but there's actually some issue in the node sequence for the accretion disk's float curve. 

I don't actually know what any of that means, I'm just saying it so that I sound smart.

I re-did all the nodes earlier, but it still didn't work, so I think I'm just gonna delete the object and completely restart that segment of the video. Hopefully it works; if it doesn't I'm just gonna go through the rest of the tutorial and see if I can find some work-around. I'm also gonna rename it from 'disk' to 'disc' because spelling that with a 'k' feels wrong.

Update: It did not work. I am going to start over. I hate Blender.

You win this round, Brits.

Thank you Ryan Gosling

I've switched my idea completely, which means I've switched my genre completely. This is a story about a sci-fi/fantasy writer trying to find their creative spark, trying to translate the worlds they see in their mind into reality. They struggle to balance the expectations placed upon them after the success of their first book with the elements of their personal life, including platonic, familial, and romantic relationships. 

Over the course of the film, reality bleeds with fiction as they rely more and more on writing as a coping mechanism, yet still they cannot seem to find satisfaction in their work. I don't exactly know where I'd go with the ending, and quite honestly I think I'd leave it open-ended, so I'm not too focused on that.

I figured that the two movies I would most want to look to for inspiration are First Man and Interstellar.

Note: Interstellar will be watched/dissected next week.

They are both within the same genre as my piece, but I'm not really looking to understand genre conventions; truth be told, I find that intentionally formatting my film opening to fit the standards of sci-fi to be constraining. 

Before I decided to even watch First Man, though, I had read its screenplay. My biggest issue with screenwriting is that I read an egregious amount of books growing up, so my writing style is more prosaic than what is considered acceptable for a screenplay.

I really liked the script; the biggest thing I noticed was that it wasn't just a one-to-one telling of what happened on the screen. It was both captivating and had the writer's voice throughout. The excerpt below really captures the essence of that voice.

Watching the movie itself, I really enjoyed their use of sub-plots to develop characters. Obviously the movie is about Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 13, but it was really interesting to see how death affected nearly everything Armstrong did; the death of his daughter, the death of his friends, the deaths of co-workers that we don't even get to see. It also plays into his home life; he grows more distant from his wife and kids as the years go by. I'm not sure how much is entirely accurate to the real Neil's life, but it adds a lot of depth to the character.

Script Excerpt

As I said, the sub-plots are very well-done; sometimes in media a sub-plot becomes a distraction from the overarching story, but in this case it serves to uplift it.

I have yet to watch Interstellar at this point in writing (Friday), but I want to talk about another film by the same director, Oppenheimer. Back in January I started reading the movie's script, because I wanted to get better at understanding the formatting and style of screenplays. I chose that one in particular because, after I saw this interview, I learned that Oppenheimer, the character's, scenes were written in first person, which was apparently unheard of for a script.

One thing that they didn't mention about the script was that it also uses italics to differentiate between Strauss' perspective and Oppenheimer's.

Visually, the movie uses color to make this distinction, but I thought it was very interesting how Nolan separated the two characters in the writing itself.

I'm not sure if it's something I'll use in this script, but I feel content knowing that people do appreciate writers breaking out of traditional, monotonous formatting.

That said, this is Christopher Nolan, so I'm not sure if a writer with little reputation in film would be able to do something like that and have their film produced.

I first saw the film in theaters, and it was amazing. I'm now re-watching it with my Dad over the coming days, but I'm not sure if there's many techniques or any inspiration I particularly want to pull from it. Oppenheimer is so vast in the amount of information it covers, so a lot of times the editing feels very quick in order to cram everything in. It feels naturally paced, but once I made that connection I couldn't unsee it.

Practicality

At the time of writing this, I've yet to re-attempt the black hole; I need a mental break from Blender. I really hope that it works, because it's extremely high quality and, despite my technical issues, very comprehensive and easy to follow along. If I can't make it work then I'll have to pivot a little bit, but I'm definitely sticking with the overall story. The only thing that'll change is the story they try to tell; I'm not as into the idea, but they could be trying to write a romance novel, or generally anything more technically feasible.

I also haven't had a crack at the space station yet, and I'm not sure that, if I do end up successfully making both the black hole and the space station, I'll be able to put the two in the same Blender file so that I can just record within Blender. Worst-case scenario I record them separately at the same angle but different distances to emulate the size difference, then just make the background of the space station green so I can just chromakey it over the black hole footage.

Weekend Update: I am too busy and too tired to re-attempt that shit this weekend. That's a problem for future me. 

Screenplay

Happy Sunday. We made it. I've spent the past few hours typing out my script. I've tried writing scripts before, so I have some understanding of the difficulty, but never anything like this.

Most of the time I write skits or segments for TV assignments, for example, this. I do try to capture a specific image, but it usually just devolves into unhinged insanity.

But I wanted to take this very seriously. I wanted to translate my imagination into words to the best of my ability, and understand the different methods of doing so in a script. As I mentioned earlier, I drew inspiration from both Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and Josh Singer's First Man screenplays.

Reading through them, I figured that there are about five things you can use to draw attention within your script. Capitalization, italics, bold, underlines, and size.

The first four should be intuitive, but by 'size', I mean the size of each block of text.

Both authors used all of these, but in different ways. Nolan practically ruled out italics as a tool of emphasis by using it to represent perspective. He relies mainly on the other four to drive emphasis. Singer uses it for mainly two things, though. Both to create emphasis and to represent his own voice within the script.

I want to point out, I really like the First Man screenplay, but at times it's just so much. 

If you showed a small Victorian child this many font styles in such a short span of time they would spontaneously combust.

I tried not to do that, but I'll admit, it does kind of come across that way. I used capitalization to emphasize details I thought were generally more important than the rest of the sentence. However, there were times when I didn't capitalize something important; this was done because I thought it threw off the pacing too much. 

On that note, bold and size were primarily used for emphasis/pacing; I won't be able to read this to most people with the intonations I had in mind as I wrote, so the best thing to do is to try and capture those with boldness and sizing. You may have also noticed me doing this in my blog posts. :)

If you've read even a bit of the Oppenheimer script you can probably see just how much inspiration I drew directly from it, but I think my script's fine for a first draft. I may tweak it here or there, and maybe even add something more in case it's a little under two minutes, but it's not bad.

Last thing; it is by no means traditional, but I put the title at the very end of the screenplay. Truth be told, I do not need to pass this AICE Exam, and I am really just doing this for self-fulfillment. If not meeting industry standards gets me less points, womp womp.

Ta-da (this is a link to the script btw incase the "Ta-da" wasn't clear). About halfway through the first page it says "An ORANGE surrounds them", but it was supposed to say "An ORANGE GLOW surrounds them". I'm too tired to change that though.

If he doesn't win Best Actor I will ignite the atmosphere.

I have now re-finished Oppenheimer. I don't want to talk about it too much, just because this blog post is already lengthy, but it's definitely one of the best movies I've ever seen.

As I wrote earlier, I don't think there's much I want to draw from this film as a creator. However, as an actor, there is so much.

Cillian Murphy's performance is genuinely incredible. In the interview I attached earlier, everyone heaps constant praise on him, and it's so easy to see why. There's so much depth he brings to the role, and what I particularly wanted to talk about was his non-verbal performance.

Christopher Nolan said that when he saw the piercing blue eyes of J. Robert Oppenheimer staring out of the cover of American Prometheus, he thought of Cillian. Cillian's eyes do so much work in conveying Oppenheimer's mental state.

Also his body movements. There's so many scenes where his stillness works in tandem with his piercing gaze, and it just portrays sheer intelligence. It's incredible to see what dedication can reward you with, and I hope that I can develop a similar skillset, even as someone who just likes acting for fun.

Conclusion

Nuts.