Posts Tagged ‘Script’

• And now the reverse test: Was it the Red Wire or the Blue Wire? #
• Kim seems a bit surprised to have her own unofficial fan club now she's got a hash tag too #kimknox lol http://bit.ly/11jKsm #
• Aarrggg no #thewire tonight. Something for people who like spoiling a long walk instead #
• @iancockayne so which twitterer is the tipping point? #
• The look on @iancockayne's face just then was priceless – don't mix coffee and a vitamin c pill… #
• Three Words to Describe the Weather Here: Warm, Damp and Soggy #
• I wonder if serif software get that scripted calls to "check my details" make me more likely to ditch them? Waste of my time and theirs. #

I’ve added the first new stuff to impworks since putting the reworked site. My first video tutorial, an update to Vue Python for Beginners, showing how to run a Python script in Vue 7 Infinite.

I owe the creators of Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire a big thank you. A couple of months back I wrote a script for a 30 minute radio sit com more by accident than intention. I had an idea one morning and seven hours later I had 6,700 words written set in a generic fantasy world. I’d been struggling to work out what wasn’t right with it. Having watched the first episode of Krod Mandoon I’ve now got some pretty good ideas about what not to do.

First Terry Pratchett has produced so much comedy fantasy since 1983 that you’ve got to work hard at it. Its not like Pratchett, with 55 million books sold worldwide, is some sort of secret, niche author that a good chunk of your audience won’t have read. So a wizard who can’t do spells needs something to make them special if they won’t be unfavourably compared to Rincewind. The same goes for pretty much any cliche character you decide to use.

Anachronisms in fantasy settings also need to be clever – be it a character’s with 20th century attitudes or one suggesting going for counselling. Stoppard did it far better in that little known film Shakespeare in Love (Worldwide Gross $279,500,000).

And if you’re going to have a narrator that everyone in the scene can hear you’re going to have to push the boat out a bit and take a real run at the third wall and go way past Up Pompeii or Hustle to make it be funny – its been done before.

Which left humorous names, which tend to wear thin pretty fast (except some of the ones the Python team pulled off), the silly jokes – in the style of airplane (which made me laugh to be fair) – and the below the belt jokes – which I have no objection to but I prefer them to be funny. Still its a fantasy show so dressing your attractive female lead in leather, make their character just a little promiscuous, say Xena Warrior Princess a hundred times, and hope it will save your ratings (and make sure your male star will go down well with the ladies too).

So I’m going to be taking a red pen to my script and cutting or reworking anything that’s like that and a whole line of jokes about an ass I was thinking of adding are not getting anywhere near the script either.

Maybe it didn’t help that several review I read compared KM to Red Dwarf which builds an expectation. Red Dwarf wasn’t highly polished but it was funny. KM on the other hand was very polished but, at least as far as I was concerned, wasn’t very funny. However I’ll be fair to them the one hour format and it being the first episode might mean it wasn’t their best work. I’ll watch at least another couple of episodes of Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire. At worst they’ll give me some more pointers on what not to write.

I think I need a few extra hours in the day – if I did each of the following would probably be its own post…

Having finished a fascinating book on illegal gambling in the UK in the ’50s I started reading the first volume of Michael Palins’ diaries on Saturday and there a great read…

One unfortunate combination of words set an idea for a humorous, slightly strange Murder Mystery short story idea off and I wrote the first four pages yesterday…

That stopped me finishing the longer game writing project thats so close to having a complete first draft its bugging me…

So I was going to tackle it in the evening but I got an e-mail with an offer from Cornucopia3D for GeoControl2 which I’ve been tempted by for a while. So I ended up playing with that instead…

Plus Kim’s got a new novella out, Flesh and Shadows, with a very cheesy cover but I’ll probably give it a read because despite the cover its supposed to be Science Fiction not Mills and Boon…

Oh and having decided not to take out a subscription to the new version of Pyramid magazine because now its themed of the first six issues I’d only found three I was interested in. So inevitably the latest issue is one I wanted to pick up…

Then there’s the vue video tutorial from Quadspinner I want to write a review of for my Vue News Blog…

I’m just glad that The Wire (which is good but not as good as some of its exponents would like us to believe) is on three nights a week so I know when its finished its time to get some sleep or I don’t know how I’d know to end the day.

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’

Someone must have been short on ideas when they made the advert for the Trafford Centre I just saw. First some uninspired footage of clothes. Second an innane voice over. Third a script about a formula. Forth add a bit of mathmatical notation to The Trafford Centre’s name at the end. Finally top it all off with Rhapsody in Blue trying to fight through behind the voice over. None of the elements had any cohesion with any of the other elements. If you’re going to use something like Rhapsody in Blue you’ve got to pull off something like Manhattan – and I mean the Woody Allen film not the cocktail. Certainly not a shed full of shops with little architectural merit on the edge of Manchester.

All it sold me was putting Rhapsody in Blue on to listen to and maybe watching Hell is a City later because of its unlikely, but successful, combination of ’50s Manchester and a jazz sound track…

I’m a bit late with this but it did amuse me. The Evan Davis’ blog on the BBC web site explains it. I found some of the comments amusing just because they say more about the commenters than the piece itself. A few obviously don’t get there is a difference between an advert being viral (which it could be if people do things like copying it to their blog) and guerilla (which this isn’t).

Spent some time wrapping the script I started on last night into wxPython but mostly I’ve just been sciving off tonight.

One perenial problem reported by Vue users is running short of memory. Part of the problem is that it is so easy to import objects that are loaded down with image based textures, bump maps, reflection maps etc. At the moment its a bit of a pain to hunt down all the textures, make copies and resize them based on how they are used in your scene. I was messing round with a Vue python script earlier to find all the image nodes in materials in a scene. This will form part of a new add on for Vue that I hope will be able to find all the images and then either let you move all of them to another directory to work on with your favourite graphics package or resize the copy without leaving Vue. Tomorrow I hope to have the time to put a wxPython wrapper around it to make it a bit frendlier than it is at the moment.

I’ve just uploaded Mass Convert 0.6 for both Vue 6 Infinite and Vue 7 Infinite to my web site. The major improvement to this version is that when producing Vue’s VOB files it now produces a preview render of the object or if an appropriately named file is present on your computer with the objects converted it uses those instead. More details are included in the help menu when you run the script.

As with all my other Vue python scripts I’ll update the web page with details soon.