Archive for the 'panda girls' Category
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
Western Plague Lands
I’ve been sick as a bugger for the last 3 days.
My brother made some off-hand comment about his throat being scratchy, and the next day I woke up with Typhus. or Polio. I can’t figure out which…
I’ve been tasked with the job of coming up with a Lexicon for the Panda Girls treatment. A document specifying particulars words that will bear high significance in our world. I compared it, on the Axe and Crom comic site, to words like “Switch”, “Plugged In” “Agents” (some of these are two words….sue me).
It can feel like an exercise at times; writing these words for Axe and the movie. But all too often I realize, midway through something, that it wasn’t just Axe sending me to the Bronx for a sugar cookie: He had something specific in mind, and the outcome will be important. This is a good lesson to take away: Sometimes, you’re wrong.
Jesus…sometimes I’m RIGHT. The rest of the time I’m just shitting things up.
I’m going to drink a bunch of Neo-Citron now, and pass out for nine hours.
Later Bitches,
C
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
Commission: Out of
I’ve been in the black for the last little while.
With Axe creating a new Panda Girls structure, I’ve been trying to make a new treatment of it happen in record time. Truth be told, I’ve been sandbagging the last year, it’s bullshit that it takes me so long to get our work done. A big reason for that has been a lack of love in my work.
I’ve always loved writing, but when it became a job, I got bent outa shape too easy. I lost some of my faith in just having fun while bashing out words, and more importantly, I lost my zeal for just giving ‘er shit. Stream of consciousness writing isn’t always the best, because inherently it relies on your latent intelligence to get you over some of the logical gaps in whatever subject you’re working on. If you haven’t noodled out some of those gaps, you’re going to crash when you hit them.
But we’ve been thinking about Panda Girls for 2 years, working, talking, structuring, writing, re-writing, crying like assholes. So it was time to quit being cautious.
When Axe got the new structure done, only one thing came to mind.
“In the immortal words of the Doors: The time for hesitation is through.”
Fucking A.
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
In front of the camera
I haven’t done a Vlog (video blog) in a while.
Like…6 months. In fact I think THIS is the last one. There’s been a lot of shit flying around since then, and it’s also frustrating that I’m still where I was then. The treatment of the film. Ugh.
Axe and I have to fight a lot to not become depressed with our progress on the movie. The fact is that we’re not classically trained in screenwriting or script development…anything. We taught ourselves. So there tend to be a lot of pitfalls that somebody has already managed to fall into when they were back at Juilliard or whatever hell they attended.
As such we tend to run into walls, and then backtrack, all the while time keeps on ticking. Well…yesterday we realized we’d finally run over a huge hump. Axe recently did a new draft of our structure, and he took some long strides. His new structure pulled together some character arcs in a really tight package, and gave answers to a lot of our logic questions. They aren’t perfect answers, but they’re a good footing to launch from. And then I stepped up.
And crushed the bitch. After a little while with the new structure, I essentially pulled the rest of the story together, and last night when I explained it to Axe, he did some backflips. The rest of this week, our Production Hours will concentrate on Treating the new structure, and by the end of next week, it should be completed.
We’re close.
Thursday, March 6th, 2008
State of the Union
So what the hell is going on right now? Well…
I’m currently working on another Treatment for the Panda Girls movie. The first one I wrote was almost half a year ago, when I thought I knew our film, and discovered that I knew how to spell “indecorous”… and not much else.
The first draft of the Treatment read like half a Gordon Korman novel, and half a list of food ingredients. It wasn’t well put together, and often I was being WAY too flowery with the prose. Really, there shouldn’t be much prose at all. I obsess over it by looking at the Chinatown Treatment, and trying to get my point across with equal brevity. I am not always successful.
Going into this draft of the Treatment however, will be a different game. Over the last few months Axe and I have spent countless meetings working on the structure of the film. It’s been tough to put aside our feelings for certain scenes, and sequences, and look at it with an eye for pure structure. I don’t do this by nature, although Axe is pretty good at it. The bottom line is, we’re still fresh faced in the movie game. We have to manage our expectations, and realize we aren’t going to be pro’s just because we read a lot of books. But I digress.
The new Treatment! Yay! So, new structure, new confidence. It’s been a crucible, but we’ve arrived on solid ground finally. Now we can work on a Treatment that will yield scenes we actually want to film, instead of scenes we just want on the page in order to feel like we’ve accomplished something.
I’ll let you know when it’s all said and done, and we’ll post it up on www.panda-girls.com
Mahalo,
Crom