Archive for November, 2005
When I heard that the Spielberg was going to remake the War of the Worlds, and heard some early commentators claim (mistakenly, in retrospect) that he was going to remain faithful to the original spirit of the book by H. G. Wells, I was excited. After all, this is the main who put such care and effort into recreating a different time (both physically and psychologically) for Schindler’s List, and Wells’ allegory of humanity’s Empire-building aspirations is as powerful a lesson today as it was over a century ago. Rather than consider Schindler’s List (in which Spielberg had an emotional investment) as a reference, however, perhaps I should have remembered Hook.
Herbert George Wells was like the Shakespeare of science fiction. Not the first, but the earliest person of influence, one whose works have blazed the path for the genre to come. Besides The War of the Worlds, we have The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Time Machine, The First Men on the Moon, The Days of the Comet, and several other major works of fiction that still stand up today as powerful commentaries on how technology can affect our lives. In The War of the Worlds, he tackled the imperial attitude of British colonialism and expansion, usually to the detriment of native civilisations, and the chilling effects of a “higher” culture’s inherent ignorance of other races and creeds. (And, after all, isn’t this somewhat parallel to events happening in Iraq today?)
This issue is central to the book: the English, secure in their sense of superiority and complacent in their providence, cannot believe that the slow and sluggish Martians pose any threat to them. Think about how British invaders might have looked to natives of Africa and India… scrawny, pale, overdressed soldiers marching slowly shoulder-to-shoulder with bright red coats, a line of walking targets. But, oh, when the fire-power and organistion was brought to bare, things changed. And so the Martians destroyed the infinite complacency of the Londoners who thought themselves invulnerable, who were astonished by the coordinated attack of the three-legged machines with their deadly devices.
Instead of pursuing this allegory, Speilberg instead focuses on Joe Everyman (played by Tom Cruise), an ineffective father surprised by the emergence from beneath the street of alien machines, and whose struggle throughout the movie is to get his children to Boston where their mother now lives. This sets up the special effects extravaganza that is the only reason to watch the film. Humanity succumbs, but not in a moral lesson, but rather to a long series of computer-generated explosions, death rays, disintegrating bodies, and metal tentacles.
Spielberg can do adventure, and do it with aplomb. But this roller-coaster carries none of the wit or keen observations of films like E.T. or the Indiana Jones series. I was actually bored by stretches of this film because I just couldn’t learn to care for the characters.
For better versions, I’d certainly recommend the 1938 Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater broadcast that supposedly caused panic across the nation (which was truer to the original premise of the book, albeit with a complete change in format), and the 1952 film version, which at least was a lot more fun, despite the primitive special effects as compared to today. However, the book still holds up well today. A nice version with Edward Gorey drawings can be found at Amazon, and you can always download the book at Project Gutenberg if you don’t mind reading it on a computer or printing it out.
See War-of-the-Worlds.org for an overview of the many versions of this story, and The History of Mr Wells at the Fortean Times for a great article about his life and influence.
November 23rd, 2005
Anyone who has worked in video/film or larger multimedia projects knows that the tasks of scriptwriting and pre-production are not as easy as they first appear. Now, it’s not just the rigid structure of the script itself which is the only issue — if it were, the simple macros for Word, OpenOffice.org Writer and other word processors would suffice — but it’s also the need to track characters, share the script with others, write production notes, do breakdowns of scenes, characters, props, CGI, special effects, locations, and so on. And if you opt for a professional scriptwriting applications like Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter, you’ll have to forfeit several hundred dollars US for applications that are often buggy, or at least outmoded by modern UI standards. So if you’re a budding screenwriter or a multimedia scripter on a limited budget, what are your options?
A few hours away from me, in the unassuming little provincial capital of Newfoundland named St. John’s (pop. about 120K), there toils a little crew pumping out some high-class software. Their flagship product, a screenwriting and pre-production application called Celtx, is something I’ve kept one eye on for a long while. (Coincidentally, I wasn’t even aware that this was a local project at first.) An Open Source application based on the Mozilla –yes, as in Firefox– code, it’s come a long way in the past year or so. When last I peeked at it, it was a very early version that proved rather slow, bug-ridden, and the cause of much aggravation when doing any degree of writing. But how it’s changed! Now, it’s a little shining star carrying with it hope for all those who have been burned by the unstable and costly Final Draft (or one’s inability to afford it in the first place).
Celtx is a comprehensive software package designed for people who work in the Film, TV, Theatre and New Media industries. It combines full-feature scriptwriting with media rich pre-production support and enables online collaboration. (celtx - Overview)
I’m seen a number of Mozilla-based applications in the past, but this one puts them all to shame. Not only doesn’t it “feel” like a browser in any way, but the functionality is, by far and away, one of the most comprehensive scriptwriting experiences I’ve ever encountered. Besides including a server synchronisation that permits others to see the script, its pre-production breakdown and database system allows you to insert text, graphics, video and audio which are all linked to the salient parts of your script. For example, when you mention a particular location, for example a park, you can have the script link directly into its database where you can keep a picture of the park and some key points to remember about it. Almost anything can be linked into this database, including props, makeup, F/X, production notes, electrics, and so on. In essence, it’s a one-stop shop to take you from writing the script all the way into pre-production — perfect for multimedia use and independent filmmakers.
And since it’s Open Source, it’s free of charge. If you’re a scriptwriter of any type, or dream of writing the great American/Canadian/etc. screenplay, be sure to check out Celtx.
November 21st, 2005
Today you’ll find a guest post of mine on Dave Gray’s Communication Nation about the “back-to-paper movement”:
Dave has mentioned the back-to-paper revolution here, and he’s right. Strangely enough, it’s mainly a revolt of tech lovers against their favourite toys, junkies eschewing their drug of choice. It’s painful, it’s heart-wrenching, it flies in the face of our own self-identities, and it makes all our high-tech podium-thumping and evangelising suddenly look hollow.
Communication Nation: Why techies are leading the back-to-paper movement
November 19th, 2005
Readers of this blog will note a certain minor obsession of mine with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary creation Sherlock Holmes. Stanford University is now publishing paper and PDF facsimiles of the original stories of Sherlock Holmes exactly as they appeared in Strand Magazine, over a century ago, complete with the wonderful illustrations of Sidney Paget. You can subscribe to either version for free.
Over 12 weeks from January through April 2006, Stanford will be republishing, free of charge, two early Holmes stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Speckled Band”; the nine-part novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles; and the famous “last” encounter between Holmes and Moriarty, “The Final Problem.” If you would like to receive paper facsimiles of the original magazine releases, you may sign up on our website. If you would prefer to download the facsimile as a pdf from the website, each installment will be available on successive Fridays.
Discovering Sherlock Holmes - A Community Reading Project From Stanford University
If you can’t wait, you can certainly download these stories from many different places on the Net (they are now in the public domain), including 221B Baker Street and Project Gutenberg–see Sherlockian.net for plenty more– but this is something very special. It might even make a nice little Christmas gift for the mystery fans you know.
November 17th, 2005
Recently, my comrade-in-arms at DIYPlanner.com, eric Farris, was completing his port of the various contacts forms for the letter and A4 sizes of the D*I*Y Planner. There was a problem, however. Normally, I take the various templates, designed in Adobe Illustrator, and copy and paste each one into Adobe InDesign so I can produce the PDF booklets. This time, though, my InDesign refused to launch for some reason.
The other option was to produce his templates as individual PDF files (exported from Illustrator), but I have several problems with this: 1) it makes it very difficult to flip through the forms; 2) printing multiple forms in one print run is impossible; and 3) the combined file size of all the individual files is many, many times greater than one master PDF file.
So eric decided to jump into Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger’s new Automator. For those folks here who aren’t Mac geeks, Automator is a tool whereby you choose applications and a series of actions to automate certain tasks. Although it certainly looked intriguing, I’ve haven’t tripped across anything since getting Tiger that needed this sort of thing. eric suspected that it would be perfect for combining multiple PDFs, and he was right.
It’s basically four clicks: get the Finder Items; sort them in ascending order; combine PDF pages by appending,; and open the Finder Items in Acrobat, where one can “Save As…”. Save the Automator workflow in ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder, and when you select some PDFS in the Finder, you can run this Automator script on them. Beautiful. eric points out that a relevant MacOSXHints.com hint is here: 10.4: Use Automator to combine PDFs.
This means, of course, that I won’t have to slog all his AI templates through InDesign, thus saving me a tonne of work.
(In case you’re interested, Adobe InDesign eventually started working again for no known reason about a week later. Hmph.)
November 16th, 2005
My apologies if you noticed the previous post changing several times. I’m experimenting with Flock’s blogging tool, and while it does have some incredibly useful tools, it appears that “Save as Draft” set the article to publish instead. Odd. It didn’t do that before. This is why it’s an early release, I suppose.
Update : Hmm. This published too, even when it was set as a draft. Methinks I had better go back to the old-fashioned way of doing things. I generally like to juggle a dozen or so drafts at a time, half of which are never published, so this isn’t really conducive to the way I work.
Update 2 : Ah, it’s fixed in the latest hourly build of Flock.
November 10th, 2005
Even since I was let loose at the age of seven in a school library with a “paranormal” section, I’ve been captivated by Fortean phenomenon, those strange events, places and creatures that can’t easily be explained by our current body of scientific knowledge. This includes UFOs, the Sasquatch (or Bigfoot or Yeti), frogs falling from the sky in hailstones, the Bermuda Triangle, magnetic children who attract spoons, ancient astronauts, the Loch Ness Monster, well-documented ghosts, and so on. I attribute this interest to a scientific mind trapped inside a wild imagination… each incident is like a intriguing and challenging puzzle to be solved (far more interesting, at any rate, than those “one car leaves from Toronto going east at 60 km/h, and another…” style problems) .
But despite the strange things reported at sites like the Fortean Times –a quality magazine, by the way, striking a good balance of skepticism and weirdness– I’ve noticed that a lot of the stranger things have fallen off the map in recent years. At first, I just related it to a certain boredom in such matters among the public, the same tediousness of topic that doomed series like the X-Files. After all, the Net should allow people interested in such things to connect and grow, right? Well, that’s partially right, and it did happen that way about a decade ago. But a new piece over at TCS: Tech Central Station - Internet Killed the Alien Star helps to put things into perspective.
The Internet processes all truth and falsehood in just this fashion. Wild rumors and dubious pieces of evidence are quick to circulate, but quickly debunked. The Internet gives liars and rumor mongers a colossal space in which to bamboozle dolts of every stripe — but it also provides a forum for wise men from all across the world to speak the truth. Over the long run, the truth tends to win.
Great food for thought, especially given the number of bloggers today who comment upon –and attempt to debunk– anything that hits the news. Are we learning to be more critical?
On the other hand, one can bring up the notion of Intelligent Design as science, or a bamboozled public when it comes to giving up one’s fundamental rights, even to the extent of allowing torture….
November 10th, 2005