When an idea turns bad.

My friends always cringe a bit when I fire out I have an idea. I’m the kind of person who wants his ideas to roam free, test evolution, see if they thrive in my friendly confines, or else get hunted down and killed for their weaknesses. The problem with what I do is sometimes I put them out there too soon, before the ideas can really walk on their own. They are then sitting ducks for doubt and misunderstanding. They might have been fine if I let them mature a bit more in my imagination before releasing them into the wild.

I was worried that’s what happened to an idea I had for a series of shorts that I want to shoot someday. I wanted to look how someone’s position could be changed by just making them a little bit different than anyone else. That change would seem cool on the surface, but underneath there is a major downside to it. I then wanted to see how that person copes with it in a daily life. You could say this is a lot like Spiderman in that respect, but the person wouldn’t have nearly that much power. Anyhow, people I threw the idea at liked it a lot and I went to put it down in an outline. I outlined roughly three episodes and then showed that around and guess what, it flopped, same character, same idea, but total blah. Even when I read it I thought it was all wrong. I put it away and chalked up to another death in the real world.

I pulled it back out yesterday, and while it still flops, the idea of the main character still excites me. It was something that made others happy as well. I think I know what happened. The situation the character was put in utterly failed. It was too cute, too perfect. I think my character needs to live in a less perfect world, something more realistic. Maybe that’s part of what’s wrong with some stories/movies. They live in too perfect of places. Yes there is plot, but our main character is perfectly suited for the plot, they just don’t know it yet. Maybe someone should write a plot where the hero is suited at all for it, but manages to just get it done. That would be someone I could identify with. Of course, maybe that’s why I like the movie Hero (Dustin Hoffman) so much.

Why can't it be the actor's fault?

I’m currently trying to generate interest in shooting another movie. A group of friends and I participated in the National Film Challenge last October. This is a contest where you write, shoot, and edit a five to seven minute movie in basically a weekend. This sounds easy, because come on, it’s only seven minutes max. How difficult can that be? In reality it’s pretty demanding. For my part I put in over forty hours in three days working on it, we still almost didn’t meet the deadline. It was a blast to see our finished product. When I finally get my butt in gear I’ll get it posted on Youtube and then link it here.

I now want to shoot a short or two before the next challenge so we can work on our skills. We’ve brainstormed a couple of ideas, but as usual no one wants to get in front of the camera. I’ve been thinking about this. Why is that? Most people say they are worried about embarrassing themselves, but I wonder if it isn’t because it ruins the illusion we create of ourselves. You’re you all the time. You know yourself better than anybody else, but the you you know, isn’t quite right either. You know your emotional and mental landscape. You were the one who planted the trees, put in the koi fish pond, and created that rose garden of emotions and trivia locked up in your mind. What we don’t have a grasp on is what we are outside, how the rest of the world sees us. That’s what sends us running away from a camera.

In the challenge everyone was in the film since I promised them they didn’t need to watch the finished product if they didn’t want to. What was amazing is that it worked. We had 100% participation in front of the camera. What was even more amazing is that everyone wanted to see it afterward. Now this should bring up a question. Why can’t you find people to act now? It’s probably my script. Ah back to the drawing board.

Introduction

Hello everyone! I want to welcome you to my attempt at a blog. I wanted a place where I could brainstorm with my friends and people I don’t know about ideas big and small. I love to think “outside the box”. Okay, my friends would say I burnt the box down and moved next door to a Ziploc bag, but that’s beside the point. This thing might morph into something totally different, but we will all see when it gets there.

I want to start this off with some sort of introduction. I am in my late thirties, a father of three, a husband of one (no thanks to my wife), and small godlike being to three cats. I assume I am godlike since I am the giver of food and the remover of crap. Maybe that makes me their personal servant, but to me I would like to think the former. I have my PhD in physics (my specialty is electrochemistry) and I currently work as an engineer at a Fortune 1000 company. What I really want to do is get paid to be creative. To that end I am pursuing a few different ideas/interests to see if I can get there before I retire. The three are:

1) Open my own design firm.
2) Create an MMO (for those that are not geeks that is a massively multiplayer online game)
3) Become a screenwriter or even better screenwriter/director

Come on back and see how I try to accomplish all this. Learn from my mistakes, and then when you make it big you can hire me. (You always need a backup plan.)