8.07.08
Yo,
Yesterday was a very mixed day for me. One the one hand, I spent the entirety of the day at a production meeting for my last short film with my film company, FPS Productions. It finished a short casting call, which gave the usual mix of good and bad actors for us, myself especially as Casting Director, to look for people we could use. One the other hand, I had the joyous experience of seeing what set the forums alight both yesterday and today, the newest screenshots released for Quantic Dream's game-in-development: Heavy Rain. They look beautiful, to be sure, but its the amount of detail (eye veins mapped in real time, for instance) that has set keyboards ablaze with gigantic font and expletives of amazement. I had another "I told you so" moment, as my arrogant ass is prone to do, as my anticipation for this game ever since seeing the technology demo the team showed at E3 2006 was valided (if not heightened) by these images. Actual gameplay will hopefully prove the authenticity of these shots as being in game, but if its only half the quality of QD's previous resume [Indigo Prophecy, Omikron: the Nomad Soul], then Q1 2009 can't come around soon enough. Let's just hope Sony comes to their senses and pushes this as a system seller, which it could very well be, giving it the marketing push it so richly deserves.
For all of those that haven't seen them, here is the quickly-becoming-infamous screenshots:
Auditions: The Shitfest Begins
1pm - 12am
I missed the previous script meeting this Monday, so I walk in yesterday to our production meeting completely unprepared for the absolutely horrible direction the script for our latest film has taken. I wasn't expecting much of my script to factor into the final shooting version, as it was too long for our proposed running time, but only a single line from it was added to the entirely new script that was written before I got there, and the line itself was cut and put to a different character. What was supposedly my drawing point for this film, my characters, two of them specifically, were both changed to a direction almost completely opposite mine, making me question why I bothered to waste a day writing my version in the first fucking place. The entire script was taken in a new direction, our plot revised to a bastardized version that the original idea curator wanted but had no ability to properly write out. The lines are none nonsensical and choppy, and the plot is ham-handed at best. I would have preferred we go over our time limit than shoot this crap. I sat through a read of this shlock and tried my best to add a bit of flavor to the now brain-dead characters but I was shot down at nearly every offering, until I simply gave up. It was a terribly disappointing experience, and I'm still in a bit of a funk about it.
After I grit my teeth until my gums bled, we were able to break for dinner and I saw the Heavy Rain screenshots as I mentioned before. I returned to some pizza and Pepsi before we migrated to a larger conference room for the three hours of auditions. It started off slow with some mediocre performances that we quickly wrote off. I can't talk much about it for confidentiality reasons, but I can say that at the end of the night we came away with about 10 people we could actually use. Its hard for such a short film, to cast this many actors, especially our largest female role, Elliot, due to all of the good auditions following in for a single role in a 15 minute movie. We had one audition-ee who was partially deaf, and it was excruciatingly difficult to hear him stumble through the lines and not stopping him because there was no way we could actually use him for the shoot. We also hurt was the constant stream of women flowing in with the traditional technique of deep-cut tops and table leaning. It was moments like this that made me remember why I'm not gay.
The salt in the wound of yesterday was that, because of an odd re-writing schedule, the script now had absolutely no semblance to the sides the audition-ees were reading. It was my writing as well, so it pained me to hear something I knew was better than the script only being used at the beginning of the production. My only hope is that our casted actors don't turn away when they find out that what they read is nowhere in the script at all (it's happened before.) The auditions went up until 11pm or so, and we spent half an hour playing the elimination game with the day's catch, keeping about 20% of everyone who came in and adding it to our consideration file along with our previous audition day's catch, to be finally decided after our last audition this Saturday. I was driven home and arrived at about 12am, still really sore about losing the entirety of my script to something noticeably less eloquent and useful. Perhaps I'll post it up on GT if anyone wants to see it. I'm going to call my director tonight and ask him to take my name off the writing credits, as I really want nothing to do with the script at this point. I'm sticking around as both Casting and Assistant Director sheerly for my love of my director, and possibly furthering my filmwork resume.
- I believe being heterosexuality is a choice, and its not something we're born with - The proper soundtrack can make anything badass. For example: I had my MP3 player on the bus, and there was a mother descretely breast feeding her child a few seats down. My MP3 player started playing Rob Zombie's Dragula, and the act suddenly became pretty intense.....weird.... - Those who can't, teach. Those who can't imagine, have social lives - If I could have one thing for games suddenly become available to me in real life, it would be the ability to save - Nostalgia makes fools out of all of us. It changes memories and feelings. Its makes what was horrible suddenly the best thing ever...until you revisit it. For example, Nickelodeon's show Cat Dog...not that funny anymore - Can a hermaphrodite ever be a drag king/queen? - Laptop still doesn't like playing games, freezes up after 15-30 of use, not indicative of game performance, as it does it for ANY game on CD. Anyone know what I can do at this point?
- As always, check out my best friend for-longer-than-forever, Bennett the Sage's, pad here on TWTG, or be checking out his funny stuff on
Youtube or alongside myself on
Gamepartisan - Hughsnews is a video blog of an Aussie dude named Hugh and all that he cares about. You can find his funny shite
here. A lot of it may be hit and miss, but you can find his best stuff
here,
here,
here, and
here.
- I love College Humor. Here's a short animated bit they did on how Bowser makes it so damn easy for Mario by
cockblocking his minions.
short film
