Writing for the mind’s movie screen

Do you know about Script­Shadow? It’s one of my favorite blogs lately: a smart, snarky, insid­ery screen­play review. It focuses (as best I can dis­cern) on screen­plays that have been bought by a stu­dio but not pro­duced yet. There are some excep­tions, but that seems to be the core of it—and as such, it’s actu­ally an odd pre­view of the next 2–5 years of releases.

Any­way, I men­tion it now because it’s sci-fi week, and you can read the review of the script for the Ender’s Game adap­ta­tion that will prob­a­bly still never be pro­duced. You can also down­load the script in its entirety!

Read­ing screen­plays, like read­ing plays, is actu­ally pretty fun in its own right. They’re always tight and terse: very con­sum­able. And I find the descrip­tive lan­guage of screen­plays sort of charm­ing. That is, not the dia­logue, but the parts that go

EXT. NEW JERSEY COUNTRYSIDE - MORNING

The train hurls straight at us.

NEW ANGLE — Skim­ming along­side as the train twists and turns, suck­ing up track — feet, yards, miles of it.

Beneath it, the curv­ing rails, which the rush­ing train barely seems to touch. They vibrate with an eerie, dul­cimer HUM.

It’s never par­tic­u­larly good prose—but it’s not sup­posed to be, right? It’s sup­posed to be descrip­tive and con­ver­sa­tional. These are words that will never be seen or heard by the pub­lic! Their audi­ence is all agents and pro­duc­ers and, ulti­mately, a direc­tor and pro­duc­tion staff. They’re the dark mat­ter of storytelling.

That sec­tion above is from the first page of Source Code, one of the most pop­u­lar scripts on Script­Shadow, and one that I enjoyed reading.

I often find myself read­ing scripts before bed. Maybe that tells you some­thing about their sen­si­bil­ity and heft. Actu­ally, I think it has a lot to do with their look: a scat­ter­ing of lines, lots and lots of white space. They’re light and airy. The words flow fast. The film strip plays. Ahh.

 

Joy, interest, empathy’

The attrac­tion here, as before, is less the sub­ject and more Sam Anderson’s artic­u­la­tion of it. I mean, okay, the sub­ject is a site where you con­nect via web­cam to ran­dom strangers, which is not unin­ter­est­ing. But I feel like there are 99 ver­sions of this arti­cle that are bor­ing or pre­dictable or “ZOMG inter­net,” and one that is patient and sub­tle and great, and this is that ver­sion. (Via Joanne.)

 

Show me the internet

In a fit of cura­tion and inge­nu­ity, Noah Brier whips up a gallery of visu­al­iza­tions of the inter­net. And no, it wouldn’t be com­plete with­out The Net, circa 1995. Wow.

Noah points to this piece over at The Baf­fler which poses the same question—what does the inter­net look like?—and ends with this bit of disenchantment:

The prob­lem isn’t really that we don’t know what the Inter­net looks like. It’s that what it looks like is so hor­ri­bly ugly: not a glis­ten­ing Toot­sie Roll pop, not an open free­way, not a shim­mer­ing clear pool of chlo­ri­nated water nor a siren-littered sea, not even a chis­eled movie star, but giant, hulk­ing fac­to­ries dot­ting the land­scape of the Pacific North­west and the East­ern Seaboard, cov­er­ing old land­fills, sprawl­ing, like dozens of Cost­cos smashed together, stacked with metal and diesel gen­er­a­tors and pow­er­ful cool­ing sys­tems, crossed by power lines that deliver 2 per­cent of the world’s energy to the so-called cloud, where your tax returns and credit card state­ments cross paths with Medicare files and cor­po­rate bud­gets and your old love let­ters and the pho­tos of Jen­nifer Aniston’s newest boyfriend.

So, I totally disagree.

I think the inter­net is the screens. With­out the screens, who cares? With­out the screens, it’s just a bunch of derivative-trading-bots talk­ing to each other. The screens make it interesting—they’re the magic por­tals, the magic mir­rors. My visu­al­iza­tion of the inter­net ignores the server-farms and the net­work spaghetti. Instead it’s a mosaic of all those screens, some on phones and some on laps and some on walls, but more and more of them over time, all get­ting big­ger and brighter.

Yeah, actu­ally, I think my inter­net might be the Trans­par­ent City.

 

The new senators

Annie Lowrey sug­gests some new ways to slice and dice the Senate:

Imag­ine a cham­ber in which sen­a­tors were elected by dif­fer­ent income brack­ets — with two sen­a­tors rep­re­sent­ing the poor­est 2 per­cent of the elec­torate, two sen­a­tors rep­re­sent­ing the rich­est 2 per­cent and so on.

Based on Cen­sus Bureau data, five sen­a­tors would rep­re­sent Amer­i­cans earn­ing between $100,000 and $1 mil­lion indi­vid­u­ally per year, with a sin­gle sen­a­tor work­ing on behalf of the mil­lion­aires (tech­ni­cally, it would be two-tenths of a sen­a­tor). Eight sen­a­tors would rep­re­sent Amer­i­cans with no income. Six­teen would rep­re­sent Amer­i­cans who make less than $10,000 a year, an amount well below the fed­eral poverty line for fam­i­lies. The bulk of the sen­a­tors would work on behalf of the mid­dle class, with 34 rep­re­sent­ing Amer­i­cans mak­ing $30,000 to $80,000 per year.

Imag­ine try­ing to con­vince some­one — Michael Bloomberg, per­haps? — to be the lonely sen­a­tor rep­re­sent­ing the rich­est per­centile. And what if the sen­a­tors were appor­tioned accord­ing to jobs fig­ures? This year, the unem­ployed would have gained two seats. Think of the deals that would be made to attract that bloc!

I like this line of think­ing because it denat­u­ral­izes our sys­tem of government—makes you real­ize how arbi­trary it is in the first place. It also makes you real­ize how much things have changed. Two hun­dred years ago, it seemed nat­ural to assume that your pri­mary alle­giance was geo­graphic. The United States was still a patch­work in that way. Today: is your pri­mary alle­giance, in fact, deter­mined by income? If not: by what?

I mean, my pri­mary alle­giance is prob­a­bly deter­mined mostly by RSS feed, but I real­ize that’s not going to get much traction.

(This, by the way, is the kind of dis­cus­sion that side-steps my pol­icy ennui entirely. Call it meta-policy.)

 

Every house is haunted

20100205_joe

As estab­lished, I’m a Grant Mor­ri­son fan, but appar­ently I’m a bit out-of-the-loop because I didn’t know about his new project Joe the Bar­bar­ian. There’s a great pre­view and write-up over at Super Colos­sal. The series chron­i­cles a teenager’s trav­els through his own house:

[…] the next seven issues […] will doc­u­ment par­al­lel jour­neys through the house. One where we fol­low Joe descend­ing through the house from the attic to the base­ment (where I am assum­ing his med­ica­tion is?) and the other where he fol­lows a Narnian/Wizard of Oz like adven­ture pop­u­lated by his toys and the con­tents of the house.

And I love this bit of con­text from Morrison:

So like I said, it’s really quite grounded, because it’s all about this jour­ney down from the attic to the base­ment of the house. And I think we can all relate to that, because man of us will have had those moments when we were sick or fever­ish and had to ven­ture down to the kitchen to get some­thing that would make us bet­ter. And we all know how dif­fi­cult it can be to cross famil­iar ground if you’re weak or injured or deliri­ous. The ter­rain of an ordi­nary home can eas­ily become larger than life and apoc­a­lyp­ti­cally meaningful.

What a great hook to hang a story on! There are shades of Toy Story and The Indian in the Cup­board here, or even Home Alone. It’s that same denaturalization.

Click through and check out the last panel. It alone makes me want—maybe even need—to check this series out.

 

Textbook remix

This is super cool, both in con­tent and process: Python for Infor­mat­ics is a new text­book that Chuck Sev­er­ance, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan, com­piled in eleven days. It’s based on an exist­ing Python text­book that was released under a Cre­ative Com­mons license; Sev­er­ance culled, sharp­ened, and extended it.

And if you were one of Severance’s stu­dents in Ann Arbor, you could get a phys­i­cal copy printed on the uni­ver­sity library’s Espresso book machine.

I find every part of this sce­nario really excit­ing. It’s like the pieces are all start­ing to click into place.

(Via Publishing2.)

 

Quantum biology

Oh wow. Pho­to­syn­the­sis depends on quan­tum effects for its amaz­ing efficiency:

The quan­tum wiz­ardry appears to occur in each of a pho­to­syn­thetic cell’s mil­lions of antenna pro­teins. These route energy from elec­trons spin­ning in photon-sensitive mol­e­cules to nearby reaction-center pro­teins, which con­vert it to cell-driving charges.

Almost no energy is lost in between. That’s because it exists in mul­ti­ple places at once, and always finds the short­est path.

Two things:

  • The lead researcher “pre­dicts the emer­gence of an entire field of quan­tum biol­ogy.” YES.
  • The obser­va­tions in this work were made with fem­tosec­ond lasers. Back in col­lege, I worked in a fem­tosec­ond laser lab for a semes­ter. These things are so insanely high-tech, and really one of the absolutely essen­tial tools in mod­ern chem­istry. Think of a fem­tosec­ond laser as a cam­era with the fastest shut­ter speed ever. Events that would oth­er­wise be bright smears are cap­tured frame-by-frame, a quadrillionth of a sec­ond (!) at a time.

I find myself gaz­ing at the vines on the cement wall out­side the cafe here—now blow­ing in the wind and rain—with new­found awe. Quan­tum biology!

 

Found Functions

20100202_functions

It’s one thing to have a neat idea like this; it’s another to exe­cute it so per­fectly. The quiet images, the chalky lines… all just so. Click through for the whole series.

I think I’m going to go take walk on Clement Street now and hunt for parabolas.

(Via Nat Tork­ing­ton.)

 

A very significant object

I’ve got a Sig­nif­i­cant Objects story-let up today! Check it out here; get some more con­text here. There’s a very strong indi­ca­tion that it has some­thing to do with the mys­te­ri­ous dis­ap­pear­ance of Annabel Scheme… can you spot the clue?

As with all Sig­nif­i­cant Object sto­ries, you can actu­ally bid on the object, now laden with the pleas­ant weight of nar­ra­tive. All pro­ceeds go to 826 National.

 

Where’s the spawn point?

Places that look like lev­els from first-person shooters:

Other nom­i­na­tions?