Professional bad guys are always scary.
Archive for May, 2021
Emerging tech issues: 3D-printed guns! Perhaps not a problem in the USA, as normal guns so widely available. Elsewhere, like in South Africa, guns harder to acquire, but 3D-printers even less common. This may change.
Cape Town has some incredible vistas, so why not incorporate them to add value to the film? This fantastic location is our iconic Lion’s Head, with Table Mountain behind. (Too many foreign films, shot in Cape Town, try their best to hide the mountains…)
(On a side note, some might notice that hopefully my drawing improved slightly during the course of illustrating out the screenplay – with bigger scene frames, sharper lines etc.
Drawing is a skill that requires regular exercise though, for me anyway. Been a year since I picked up a pencil. Damn.)
The Machines are listening! I think what perhaps gives the screenplay a chilling edge, (and what makes it a good film financing investment proposition) is that every day the storyline is actually becoming more & more plausible…
An earlier version of the screenplay (there were many…) had this as a fight, Kloppers vs Scot. To shorten the film, I instead saved the fight for the end only. But again, if this was Mission Impossible, fights would here, there & everywhere.
In filmmaking, there are always many options! And this is a WIP, so the options remain. Nothing is off the table, until the edit is locked.
Let’s say this 150-page storyboarded-screenplay is for a 100-minute film.
So that’s 1.5 pages/minute, or 40sec/page.
The motorbike frame is 1/3 page – is 13 seconds in the movie.
(If this was a Mission Impossible film, any motorbike scene would be several minutes of high action…)
So a scene like this could be stretched, or made shorter.
It’s important to break up talking scenes, that demand higher concentration, with ‘relaxing’ visual action.
A bigger point is on one way to ‘time’ a scene before shooting, with ‘page-space-used’ as the guide.
(sorry for the late posting of Friday’s page – had some technical issues on Friday)
And now the exciting action sequences begin. (I tell ya’, this original screenplay has it all…)
Yes, in retrospect, Larry’s passing comes quite suddenly – his weak health & vulnerability surely needs to be accentuated earlier? – BUT this is precisely the immense value of storyboards ((& having the director self-storyboard his entire screenplay) – because it provides opportunity to spot shortcomings.
The storyboarded novel IS a working document, saving time/money, driving efficiency of production, sharing a vision and amending it on the fly. Etc.
Building the tension again.
‘The machine can’t just take itself away, can it?’ …um…
‘I don’t think you’d find sh*t in a sewer, bud’
Bad guys always get the best lines!
The Oracle Machine - Graphic Novel & Movie Project 