California...California...

I'm so late at coming to write this little travelogue thingie but better late than never, I suppose.

I haven't been on a proper vacation in ages and my aunt so graciously gave this to me as a graduation present. Honestly I'd never traveled in an airplane by myself before (I've traveled with teams for school--one for a science fair and one for an Honors convention because yes, I am that much of a nerd) but the flight was fine. My aunt met me in Florida and we got to the airport on time, but we were hungry and went to get some pizza. We were eating and heard our gate calling passengers. We figured that since we had a high number they weren't calling us yet. Turns out they were calling 'sections' and not seats, and we'd missed our section by a long shot. All of a sudden it's "Last call for passengers" and we're still munching away. A few frantic seconds of gathering up pizza boxes and a mad dash takes us to a rather long line in the hot and sticky tunnel in front of the plane. We eat the rest of the pizza while waiting there. :D

The trip to Atlanta was so short that the stewardesses were STILL handing out drinks when we were in the landing procedure already. The lady was just as frantic as we were with the pizzas taking orders but of course they had to stop a few minutes later. The pilots had skillz and had knocked off a good chunk of the trip, it was only like 45 mins anyway.

The ride to Orange County was nice, we had these tv screens with games in front of us. Pretty much everyone in the plane was using them at one time or another, and I saw all of the games being cycled through, throughout the 4 hours. My arm was hurting eventually cause I played nearly the whole time and you had to poke at it hard for it to pick up your touch and your arm is all raised...My favorite games were solitare and this one "Fish Insanity" game where you had to feed fish, raise more and they'd poop out gold which you had to collect.

Anyway we got there at like 11 PM, I was already exhausted cause me being me, had barely any sleep from the night before, and we're 3 hours ahead of our time anyway...I still was excited though even driving back from the airport, just seeing California for the first time in a long time--just being there, was awesome. I couldn't see much cause it was late but still...exciting. I couldn't wait to explore.

The next day we went to Downtown Disney and watched Kung Fu Panda, which was awesome. Skidoosh. They had really nice stores there, besides the Disney store of course in which I bought a cute little Star Wars figure of Stitch as Emperor Palpatine and also the Keys to the cell that the dog holds from Pirates of the Caribbean. My aunt finally bought me an Indiana Jones hat. MY DREAM HAS COME TRUE. Seriously, I have been wanting that hat forever. I pretty much wore it everywhere we went in Cali from then on. Lol! We had lunch at a Japanese restaurant and I ate mochi ice cream for the first time. Strawberry. Oh...so delicious. Also later on we drove into LA, and I was surprised at how honest-to-goodness smoggy it is. I always thought everyone was exaggerating, but it's really thick! It looks more like a sort of smoky haze...I'm like--there's mountains, I think there's mountains... What also surprised me was how many palm trees there were! The pretty tall kind, not the short stout ones we have in Florida. The skyline of LA is purdy...

The next day was the Fourth of July and we went to a barbeque potluck, and after that we went to Hollywood! Finally! We rounded the bend of the highway and Capitol Records comes into view, and then we stopped to get gas nearby. I could just tell we were in a nice neighborhood, the houses were all pretty and the landscape was hilly--I miss hills, where I live it's so flat--and I was also surprised at the SHEER AMOUNT OF MOVIE BILLBOARDS. Considering 50% of those were from the Dark Knight, I was pleased. Very pleased.

It reminded me of the strip at Las Vegas when we drove into Hollywood Blvd...and I was shocked at how SMALL everything was. I thought Grauman's was a lot bigger cause they always have premieres and stuff...it was crowded and the streets were packed. We found a parking space nearby and walked there. It was cool walking on the Walk of Fame...every other step we were like "Oh! Walt Disney! Oh! Someone else famous that I can't quite place their name!" We missed the Batman and Robin characters hanging out there...I saw two Spidermans though one on each side of the street...

So yeah, it was more than a little cool to actually BE there. I kept thinking of Cat's Don't Dance! I don't know if it's just the cement shrinking but a lot of stars seem to have smaller hands and feet than I would have thought.

It was cool though. Lucas and Spielberg were together, Harrison Ford right next to them--I took a picture of me there, too lol. I also got one with Johnny Depp.

I HAVE TOUCHED THE SAME SPOT HE HAS. O____O











To Be Continued...

On ideas...

I'm glad I have lots of ideas, I think it's a very good thing. I heard that when you pitch a script you better have something else up your sleeve or they're not going to take you seriously.

But there is the time factor...

Ideas vs. the time it takes to develop them into proper stories and scripts!

I remember what it was like when I didn't have any ideas, and all I was relegated to was staring and trying my hardest to produce something and all it came out to be was a mishmash of whatever movie I happened to be watching or whatever fandom I happened to be into. It wasn't cool, and my creativity dried up like a dead well.

Then I learned how to do loglines.

That helped A LOT. The exercise itself is a great way to just get stuff out there that's been taking up space in your brain.

What is a logline?

It's your movie in a sentence that tells what it's about.

For example, Lord of the Rings's logline could be: "A young hobbit must defeat evil by traveling through the world with his companions on an epic journey to destroy a sentient ring."

Blah, that's terrible. You get the idea. XD

Basically it's a short blurb of what your movie/novel/story is about. Like what the announcer would say at the beginning of your movie trailer. "In a world gone mad, one man, will take on...the world..." and some such drivel.

In class we were told to come up with 12 or so ideas, some as random and crazy as you can possibly make them, and some very good ones that you want to develop. Our teacher said it'd be the hardest when you got down to the last one. For me, eh, not so much, I came up with some random stuff but most of them I think I would be still interested in making. Not all of them, but hopefully enough to at least keep some ideas on the backburner in case the creative well gets stuck in a drought again.

Dreams are a wonderful place for ideas!

Half of my newest loglines came from my dreams. Such utterly random dreams they were, but they had very interesting premises and some parts of them could make a great logline for a movie!

I'm not gonna put any of my more delicious loglines on here, after all, this is the interwebs and I see youse pirates staring at me out there. O_____O

Here are some funny random loglines...who knows, maybe when all the creative ideas are gone someone will use these...what a sad world that will be. >___>

A time traveling lemur becomes a superhero and must save the world from an evil race of alien frogs.

A spy goes spying and discovers a plot that could end his spying.

A volcano erupts in the middle of Antarctica and melts a lot of ice, but not too much, and the water level of the oceans rises 1 inch.

A man has a very ordinary day at work in the office in which nothing particularly interesting happens to him, ever.

A new discovery in a faraway land holds the key to humanity's survival and except they locked the key inside and need to call a locksmith...

A ninja takes on a pirate in a battle of epic proportions.

A spoon is discovered to be evil and sentient and a young elf must take it deep into the fiery pits of the fast food industry to--oh wait...

Genres and subjects I really like to write

The stuff I like to write is the stuff I like to watch and read. Like our scriptwriting teacher said, you ought to write the thing that you wouldn't mind watching.

Apparently I really like watching pirates, hardboiled Noir detectives, superheroes, sci fi anything and fantasy quests. I'm a sucker for good old-fashioned fantasy quests. I know that it's beyond cliche at this point with all the movies (Harry Potter, Eragon, LOTR) and by the time anything of mine makes it to print (hopefully even make it that far) or to the screen it might be at the tip of the cliche iceberg. Which means, what can I do to make it different?

I've got an inkling on that with the superhero take, I've got a script that I'm halfway working on and will probably end up completely revising. I know quite a bit about the superhero take on things from being a complete and utter comic book geek which helps a lot.

I've also got a unique take on my pirate script (which is officially registered with the WGA-East, and it managed to get me into the MFA program at my school, I feel so accomplished, lol) and I hope that it's unique enough to be...well, unique.

Noir? It's gonna be cliche and that's what I like about it. I've seen what seems like a million stories start out with "It was a cold, gritty rainy day in the city, rain that seemed to suck the warmth right out of you. I'd just come back from getting information from Steve the Swindler. He won't be walking straight for at least a week. I went back to my office, threw my fedora on my chair, and froze. Behind me, was a dame waitin' for me in the shadows." But I don't mind, oddly enough. Maybe it's an integral part of the detective within Noir.

I'm okay with Sci-Fi, there's still a busload of things one can do to twist the conventions around and make it more interesting than just a battle in space that has noise that shouldn't be there. Sci-Fi can be light, it can be a smaller story about a family like in Signs rather than a huge epic Star-Wars-esque battle. (Honestly I'd take the epic battle though.)

But fantasy, ah, there we have a problem.

Perhaps it's just my problem, but I feel that everything has been done to death. Princess Bride, I think, is a great example of making an old story new again. It's very clever and even though it's something we've almost seen completely before it manages to be fresh.

That's why I'm doing my fantasy story in a very different way, hopefully it's different enough to be...different, but it's still got the quest elements, the old mentor, and the plucky young hero. I'm not changing the story to make this part different, because that's a huge element of it. After all, the hero's journey is, well, a hero's journey! It's gonna end up having some bits of that, if it's a hero's journey. Maybe I'm just worried for no reason, but the 2nd act quest seems a little too cliche for my tastes and I'm figuring out a way to make it more interesting Or even if I want to make it different. After all, if you're looking for someone or something, you're going to run into trouble along the way. There are going to be people that help you and people that take from you.

A particular scene that I think I might erase or change completely is when the heroes get away too easily. But I don't know how else to do this, cause they have to get away for the story's sake. I have a super-powerful bad organization and luckily they put just enough guards for our heroes to take. Luckily! I just don't want it to be so obvious that the reader can go, 'oh yeah, that's just a plot device, there's no way they'd naturally be able to escape.'


I suppose we'll see.

Testing the waters...

I've tried this before but I'm gonna try it again since I'm really getting into writing as a profession now. Might as well have some place to write about randomness other than the obligatory facebook, which doesn't really have a blog, I'm sorry to say.

I'm currently deciding whether to turn this into a movie review blog, which I've been wanting to do for ages because I'm really big on reviewing movies, or make this a random-daily-life-plus-writing-stuff blog. Or both. I can't decide yet. Someone decide for me. Yes, you there, in the back.

Anyway, let's see how this goes and how long this lasts me on the fickle interwebs.

Signed,
Captain Indy