retrograde motion.

Brief summation: the series I've been working on, Pioneer One, was released online a few weeks ago through VODO.  It was just the pilot, but it's been a huge success, with more promising developments for the future.  We have people actually waiting and excited for the next episodes.  It was downloaded a million times.  Literally.  The response was overwhelming and unexpected.  My parents have gone away for a week, so I've holed myself up in their house to write the next scripts so we can start up production again in September.

The writing process does strange things to me.  It's an even stranger process now knowing that people have expectations of me.  It's a double-edged sword.  It's nice to know you're writing for an audience, but if you're not careful, the fear of being found out as no good, or, even worse, mediocre, can rear its ugly little snout.  As many have said time and time again, the only thing to do is to keep writing for yourself.  Make peace with the fact that not everybody is going to like it.  That's the only way to write something actually worth a damn, I think.

So yes, I've written two scripts in two weeks, which seems pretty good, but it was tough going.  I spent several days pacing and watching TV and making runs to Dunkin Donuts for coffee, always having "later" to write.  My months-long exercise regimen went completely out the window, went from having near-quit to smoking half a pack a day, and have reawakened a whole lot of old idiosyncratic routines.  It's not a pretty sight.

But, you know what?  It's kind of great.  Much as I lament the mental and physical anguish, I remind myself that this is exactly what I want to be doing.  Though that's easy to say now that I've finished the most recent script and am in that in-between period where the next one is still all promise and clever ideas instead of an over-wrought mess without an ending.

Sunday drive.

I'd like to say something about how when I was a kid the whole family packed up in the maroon '85 Camry and drove aimlessly til we found a spot for a picnic lunch or something, but that never happened, and I'm okay with that.

My current day job delivery auto parts has familiarized me with much of Queens, and sometimes I like to go and explore the places I drive by. I'm developing an affection for Long Island City. I'd long been meaning to check out this coffee and tea place called Sweetleaf, and this morning I went to sample their fare. Their website proudly says "Best Coffee in the World" -- a quote attributed to NPR. It's good coffee, and while I don't have the most discerning palette for the java, I'm nothing to sneeze at either. It's too bad they don't have more seating.  Didn't stay long, but I'm glad I made the trip.

On the way back we drove through a part of LIC that I like a lot, which I think is called Hunters Point.  I can see myself living around there.  There's a strange feeling in the area like there's something going on even though the streets seem pretty empty most of the time.  It's strange but I like that.  And, in a strange way, Astoria is starting to feel a little too crowded for me.  Not that I don't love it, but I think I could be elsewhere.  Just thinking outloud.

Anyway it was in Hunters Point where we stopped at Bricktown Bagel for...bagels.  There was this cute girl with curly hair sitting in the window, writing furiously in her moleskine, ignoring the two screaming kids running around unsupervised by their thirtysomething parents.  My travel companion's summation:

"She's probably all creative and shit...likes to give long blow jobs..."

Sounded about right, which probably says something awful about me.

We turned in when we got tired.

I'm back. I don't know where I was, but I'm back now. Let's just pretend that didn't happen, k?

There is one downside to services like blogger. It's almost too easy to make a blog. And make a blog for every specific subject you think you might want to write about. So you end up with 3 or 4 blogs and keep up with none of them. It devalues the blog to have so many. I recall there being some blog that posted blogs with only one post. Let me fire up the googles...

Ah, yes, One Post Wonder. Strangely mesmerizing. It's some kind of art piece, really.

But yes, since my last post I have been focusing mainly on promoting my movie, The Lionshare. (Check out the blog there to fill in the gap in my internet presence.) The big thing is it got distributed by VODO, which is a platform for distributing movies online freely, and viewers can make a voluntary donation if they so choose. Anyway, it got the movie a ton of attention and was nothing but a good thing. So that was great.

I think there was some impetus for this posting, but I can't recall. It'll come to me later.

subtitles, captions, and something about semiotics

My aunt, uncle, and two of my cousins are deaf on my mom's side of the family. In preparing the DVD of The Lionshare, I realized it would become necessary to create a subtitle track so that they would be able to watch it.

A quick google search revealed to me all the ins and outs of subtitling in DVD Studio Pro. I decided to play around a bit and see how it might work out. It was then that I realized that there are a million issues at play here.

Firstly, the obvious (or maybe not-so-obvious) stuff. As someone who has seen plenty of foreign films subtitled I thought I knew the basics. Text should appear in a sans-serif typeface with a black outline to stand out against the picture. When characters speak the text should appear relative to their location on screen. It occurred to me that maybe there are some kind of standardized rules for use of italics, dashes to denote different character dialog, etc. I decided to look it up. Not only do I want to do a good job for the benefit of my extended family, but now I was interested.

In the US and Canada there is a distinction between subtitles and closed captions. Closed captions assume the viewer is hard of hearing. Subtitles assume the viewer can hear but does not understand the language of the program. So closed captions would not bother translating, say, the text of a sign. Subtitles would, because the sign (presumably) is in another language. Closed captions make note of sound effects and music cues; subtitles do not, because there's no language barrier there. Interesting stuff.

Another technical difference between closed captions and subtitles is, traditionally, closed captions refer specifically to a sub-signal of text broadcast concurrently with programming. You used to need a special box to decode the signal for captions, but today all TVs have it built in. Also, the 'closed' part of closed captions refers to the option to opt-in or out of the captioning. IE, it's a closed system. So, technically, that means the subtitle track on a DVD is also 'closed'.

For my purposes, I am going to combine characteristics of both for my subtitles. I am going to include text for sound effects and music, because I assume that if you turn on the english subtitles for an english language program, it means you are deaf or hard of hearing. Come to think of it, that's probably the norm. But I don't really know.

I was looking for some kind of guide for caption/subtitle etiquette. In other words, is there a standard usage for italics? If there is, my deaf family would be familiar with that, and I don't want to confuse them. Turns out there really doesn't seem to be a definitive approach. One guy says you should only use italics for off-screen dialog, such as narration, and nothing else. But I'm pretty sure I've seen it used to indicate the speech of a second character. I was also confused about the use of dashes to denote different character speech in the same shot. There doesn't seem to be a ruling on this. There seem to be some strong opinions about what is 'right' and 'wrong', but it seems like no matter what I do, it'll break somebody's rules.

But here's where things get really interesting. In transcribing my own movie, I have the opportunity to recontextualize it. I can subtly alter the language of the dialog. I can place more emphasis on certain points or phrases. This is almost unconscious. I can choose to indicate certain sounds and not others. This is not as straightforward as you might think. Because of the loose style of the movie, there is a lot of overlapping dialog, colloquialisms, grunting/muttering, etc. Stuff that doesn't really have consequence. But shouldn't I include it not matter what? I mean, it's there, and I want my deaf family to have as close to the same experience as hearing people do as possible. But there are instances when I feel including certain 'non-dialog-dialog' in the captioning would give it weight it wasn't meant to have. It's just there because it sounds natural, but when it appears in text, it's given more importance and changes the meaning. So it's not so clear-cut.

Strange things come up, like whether to spell 'cum' like the porn sites do it or like 'come' that seems to me like some strangely sanitized explicitness. Is it equally as shocking to read 'come' as it is 'cum'? But do I want it to be shocking? There's a lot of control in that subtle difference.

Plus there's the issue of sound quality overall. Because this was a production with extremely limited resources, some of the sound recording isn't the best. Some dialog has a different quality than in other scenes. Some lines aren't as loud or clean as I'd like. But for my deaf family this is a non-issue. The lines will appear as clearly as everything else. Sound, which is what separates the men from the boys in film production, is a non-issue for them. It will not weigh into their reading of the film at all.

Basically, there's a lot more at play here when you start getting down to it. I'm sure deaf people are caption-saavy, and they know how to interpret the different conventions in use in captions and subtitles. So I'll just do my best and trust that their smarts will make up for my deficiencies as a transcriber.

Tables are Inconsequential

I am having a hell of time trying to make a new website for my movie, The Lionshare. I want it to be simple. The way I taught myself how to design a layout for a website, all those years ago, was through HTML tables. This is verboten. Tables were not meant for layouts. In fact, tables killed the web.

I understand what they're saying, mostly. CSS is far more efficient for web layouts, in terms of amount of code (though I don't see why that argument holds so much weight in the age of broadband internet). CSS is meant for layout, and the possibilities are great. Tables are meant to display tabulated data, and website layouts using tables are, in actuality, using a very roundabout way to do what it's trying to do and are very limited in doing so.

My problem is this is not how I learned to regard tables. I learned to layout my websites with tables. In fact, I found it quite freeing, back in 1999 through 2003. I get the concept of CSS, but I'm having difficulty retraining my mind to think of design in terms of CSS.

I want a really simple website for right now. I really do. The problem is I feel pressure from the net elite to make my website the 'right' way. But in trying to CSS it I get bogged down and frustrated. I want to concentrate on content.

Maybe I should just take the advice I heard last night: an inconsequential difference is no difference at all. For my purposes, tables vs. CSS is inconsequential.

phraseology: dead reckoning

If this were a magazine or some kind of legit periodical I would probably call this the start of a new 'column' or 'feature'. I write a lot and I enjoy hearing new and interesting phrases. I kind of collect them, I suppose. For titles of stories or to pepper in conversation or whatever. Never know when you might need a new phrase. I also like finding out their origin, because if I understand it, I'll remember it and know how to use it.

So from time to time I think I'll post new phrases I encounter and find interesting. For my purposes, I'll refer to memes and terms as phrases. In addition, I have a thing for neologisms, which Wikipedia defines as

a newly coined word that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language

Anyway, my latest phrase discovery, if you haven't already guessed from the title of this post, is

dead reckoning

Kind of rolls of the tongue and curls up in your ear, doesn't it? It sounds biblical. It sounds, well, serious like death is serious. Might make a good episode title of some future show. Might not. According to Wikipedia, 'dead reckoning' is

the process of estimating one's current position based upon a previously determined position, or fix, and advancing that position based upon known or estimated speeds over elapsed time, and course.

Basically, navigating that relies on knowing where and how far you've gone since the last time you knew where you were. Not based on, say, the stars in the sky or somesuch. There are two accounts of where this comes from. One is that it is short for 'deduced reckoning', which is pretty straightforward. The other is that stellar navigation is considered 'live', so not relying on the stars would be 'dead'.

It's also the name of a Humphrey Bogart film, two separate bands, and the original title for Land of the Dead.

technology fail

I'm having a rare (lately, at least) moment where I'm actually trying to write something. I write almost exclusively in screenplay format. I use a legitmate version of Final Draft, with a legit serial number. IE, one that I paid for. The catch is, because I bought an academic license, I can only have the software 'activated' on one computer at a time. I am using my 10+ year old Powerbook G4. It's only good for word processing and browsing the nets. I cannot open Final Draft because it's not accepting my serial number. You need to deactivate it on another computer before you can activate it to use on another. I did that. It's still not working.

Fucking. Stupid.

This is the kind of stupid bullshit that punishes legitimate users from using products that they paid for in the way that they want to use them. I am pissed.