It's all rotten!
starting over, what to do when rendering, and revisionism is the way
¿What you heard?
“It’s all rotten!” Remi Garfinkle reminds me — can’t spell remind without remi – of something that I had just said to her only a few minutes before but had already forgotten — our screenplays, all of them, are rotten to the core.
The problem we’ve recognized is that we’ve been relying on character development to come about as a result of plot development, which is totally twisted.
USC emphasized inciting incident, refusal of the call, rising stakes, midpoint, all is lost, third act twist, each an important milestone for the plot but not great for mapping a character’s internal journey.
Since watching a YouTube lecture where a screenwriting professor translates eight sequence plot structure into a six sequence character structure, Remi and I have decided to start our old scripts over in a quest to create character-first screenplays.
What you doin’?!
I’ve nearly finished Blender Guru’s epic donut tutorial, and so I have arrived at, perhaps, the slowest stage of the animation process – rendering, which is especially sluggish on my humble, lil 2019 Dell Inspiron 15 7000.
The 7000 certainly makes it sound powerful, but it’s not.
So this week, I was faced with a new question – what do I do during days and days of donut rendering?
I embarked on my Blender journey because animating in Unreal Engine was starting to feel like using a toothpick to clean out earwax. It does the job, but it hurts like heck.
Learning Blender though, I can see how, in some sense, 3D animation is largely just a machine’s attempt to replicate 2D animation, so in treating June as a back-to-basics season, I’ve been trying my hand at hand animation as my donuts cook in my constantly-overheating Inspiron oven.
What you seen??
CHINATOWN (1974) has been a much-needed nudge to let me know that, when crafting fiction, I should feel free to abandon all journalistic integrity.
Every time I’ve heard someone talk about this film, they say it’s the true story of how water was brought to the San Fernando Valley, but actually, it isn’t.
Chinatown takes place in the 1930s. The California Water Wars ended in 1928.
But in a fiction this well done, you look over your shoulder at the truth bleeding out the back of its head, and you feel some remorse only until a less-sentimental moviegoer stops you and says…
P.S. Watching this scene in Spanish makes it undeniable how much of a telenovela Chinatown actually is…