…it brings on many changes

Very excited about this evening:

I started working with The Brownlee Brothers on Slingers just as they were putting the finishing touches to their movie.

I’ve been dying to see it for ages and tonight’s the night…

Like a big pizza pie…

Home.

First day back in the saddle. New York was a lot of fun - finally got to met some folk I’ve known only online for a couple of years. Lots of photos to throw at Flickr and some stuff to blog about, but for now it’s enough to be back in my office and writing again.

Lots to catch up on - we’re almost ready to start shooting the Slingers sizzle, the pilot has a new second act and the other shows are starting to take shape… I mentioned we have Steve Barron on board as director now, right? But more about all that later.

I’m moving this blog to another hosting service and will amp up my output here once I’m settled in again. Also moving to my new iPhone 3GS and ditching my old mobile number. If you need the new number drop me an email or DM me on Twitter.

Right… back to it.

“No human being would stack books like this”

Mad. Busy.

Working on an extensive redraft of the pilot script for Slingers. Could be seen as an odd move as the current version has been so well received, but I think we can give it a little more oomph. Been knee deep in great movies and TV shows recently  (none of them particularly new which is sort of telling) and quite a few meetings. Felt we were treading water for a while there, but things continue to head in the right direction and have picked up speed again.

Also getting my New York head on for the trip in a week or so. Staying here, but not sure where we’ll be shelved yet.

Speaking of New York and great (older) movies…

Hell. Yes.

Now back to crossing the streams in Final Draft.

Sleepydog wakes up

The new Sleepydog website and blog launched today. I’ve been working with Sleepydog for maybe a year now. First with the social media stuff and more recently with the TV stuff. I consider myself lucky to be part of a team who has had so much success in creating so much cool content. Best of all, whether its working on Amplified, joining in at CreativeCoffeeClub or figuring out the perfect crime for our new show there’s never been a day I haven’t enjoyed.

I only work on a couple of the projects that come out of the office - in lots of ways it reminds me of the Googleplex setup, just without the creepy Stepford Wives atmosphere - but there’s always a lot more going on than I know about. Well worth adding the new site to your RSS reader to keep up - these guys tend to move fast.

Oh and I’ll be blogging over there too.

Also a good place to see some Slingers concept art:

Our heroic Mech Five, Junior, does his best to protect Marti
from a next generation Mech in episode 1.10 “Six“

Off to Dublin

Short hop to Ireland to talk to one of the guys behind The Tudors.

Seems the little buzz we created at Cannes and LA has spread to Dublin. Slingers, although made for American TV initially, will be a Canadian/Irish co-production so this is really good news that we get to go out there early and learn a few things.

A lot of things probably.

Pretty pictures and more news when I get back. In the meantime, go watch Star Trek.

Set Visit 1979

Speaking of those two:

Didn’t get better than that did it?

I have a few of these kinds of things squirreled away for my talk in June. Not sure how long I have yet, but I will be talking about how Twitter (and the platforms that work so well with it) allow you to pull a few barriers down without the aid of Palitoy.

And speaking of set visits, following my day with Centurion, I just got invited to meet Hideo Nakata on the set of his new movie. More about that later…

One serious flaw

I had an interesting discussion this afternoon about gender in science fiction in relation to one of the new characters in Slingers. What it boiled down to was an issue of the male default role - it’s brought into sharp relief as soon as you start dealing with robots (of all things). The majority of them are perceived as male even if they are not conventionally named as such or even have obvious male anatomy.

For example, both C3PO and RTD2 are male. It seems obvious with 3PO, but R2’s sex is projected on him by those around him. It usually takes a female outfit, name or a set of metal breasts to provide the audience a cue that a robot should be perceived as anything but male. Of course, this is all nonsense because they should be genderless. And yet we live in a time were female robots are being designed and built. It’s lead to a lot of discussion in the last month. Interesting stuff which no doubt I’ll come back to.

Taking a break from writing this afternoon I dipped into some old issues of 2000AD from 1979 and stumbled across this suggestion from the editor:

Haven’t seen any subsequent reader response yet, but two progs along I did spot this letter:

Awesome. I take it that Judge Anderson was just about to leave the drawing board. I couldn’t resist the temptation to skip forward to 1984 and see my favourite Joe Dredd and Casandra Anderson story, City of The Damned, kick off:

There’s a good reason I have Steve Dillon’s work on my arm. To me it was here that 2000AD really grabbed my attention and never really let go.

I wouldn’t be writing a TV show if it wasn’t for this comic. In particular, Slingers came from a direct response to the decline of the 2000AD. The story was originally called Rat Packers and owed a lot more to Robo Hunter and Rogue Trooper in those early drafts than the concept it’s now evolved into.

I’m also glad to say it has a whole bunch of strong female characters and that show #2, De-Tech, has a female lead. I may well have to rename her Casandra…

There’s another issue here about the gender trap of course. Some of my favourite later 2000AD writers and artists started out as readers and went on to influence yet another generation of readers. None of them are women.

I do remember Jan Shepard getting a mention in David Bishop’s Thrill-Power Overload. She was one of the original art editors on the comic. Her assistant at the time, Kevin O’Neill, went on to co-create  Nemesis the Warlock, Marshall Law and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.

What became of his boss  after she left for Starlord I have no idea…

“…but the ace, I think, is pretty high”.

Things are progressing nicely with Slingers. I’ve been beefing up the show’s tech bible. A piddling little thing when we took it to LA, it’s now grown into the backbone of the future we created. Initially the fun and challenge was creating believable people, drop them into fantastic scenarios and hope there was a spark. Now we’re in pre production, these people have a past and the history of their culture is coming together nicely.

Don’t panic. It’s still more Ocean’s 11 than Dune.

It’s a nice feeling when you see something you dropped onto a page begin to come alive and it’s been a trip watching the Brownlees at work on this. Their work is now filling my hard drives and decorating my office. And boards like the one gracing my desktop at the moment continue to edge me on into directions I wouldn’t have thought of.

More writing, more meetings and a fair bit of drinking ahead.

Oh and I just this minute started writing our second show - working title: De-Tech.

Been a great week so far…

“We have no story, no script, no idea…”

One of the odder things I’ve been involved in recently was a Q&A session with JJ Abrams, Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto about the new Star Trek movie. It all took place in Playstation Home:

It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it

PPC Interactive and @danlight in particular love having a bash at stuff like this. I found it surprisingly similar to the last thing I did with Reuters (perhaps the first time Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, will be compared with Captain Kirk). We used a mix of platforms again, and in retrospect I’m not sure that CoverItLive, UStream and Twitter were the best way to interact with something like Home, but it was a fun learning experience for me.

Funnily enough I was playing with some new software today that should make these kinds of events a lot easier to produce and up the interactive element. Will post about that later when it’s ready to launch.

Tech stuff aside though, this was all about the people and while it took a little while for the journalists to acclimatise and find their virtual legs, the director and actors were happy with what was going on and got it immediately - those around them perhaps less so (which is fairly typical) - but I think there is something here to build on.

Looking forward to see how far we’ve come by the time Star Trek II is upon us…

Life in the old girl yet

Baggage out of the way - when it come to a fist fight I’m going to hold William Shatner’s jacket and hope JJ Abrams loses his footing every time. I’m a huge fan of the original Captain Kirk and Shatner’s career as a whole - right up to auctioning his kidney stone, YouTube and beyond. It was going to take a lot for me to swallow this reboot. I watched the trailers with increasing annoyance - Kirk seemed to be nothing more than a frat boy, bedding his crew and getting into brawls while a lot of CGI exploded around him. Meh. Then today I got soaked on the way to see the damn thing and my mood was pretty bleak.

About two hours later I’m suddenly looking forward to seeing the new Star Trek movie again, but this time with a large Friday night audience so we can cheer on the good bits. Of which there are many.

The film is still a good three weeks away from general release so I’m not going into any kind of detail regarding the plot or what this all means for the franchise, but there are a few things I can talk about.

Chris Pine is a revelation. He fills Kirk’s boots well and (without going full tilt as Ewan McGregor did with his Obi-Wan) still manages to inject just enough familiar James T into proceedings to nail the cockiness of the character without impersonating Shatner. It’s a horrible task to be given, but he more than rises to the challenge.

The new Spock is pitch perfect and while it’s these two who push the movie along I’ve got to hand it to Karl Urban for becoming almost non recognisable as Bones. I’ve always dug him as an actor (please go see Out of the Blue if you haven’t already) but this is his role. His performance just hints at the beginnings of the Kirk/Spock/Bones love triangle while bringing just enough contempt for his surroundings that it’s easy to recall the bearded McCoy’s return to the Enterprise back in The Motion Picture.

The rest of the main crew suffer to some degree in the same way they always have - there’s just not enough available screen time to develop them in the same way that can be done over a series. Instead we make do with some very broad strokes. They all come off well, but it’s a real shame that Uhura once again becomes trapped just answering the phone (when she’s not playing girlfriend). This is where the movie is in danger of looking out of touch with not a single strong female role in sight. Something that needs fixing.

There’s a hard lump of exposition to swallow about 3/4 of the way through, but its no worse than similar scenes in most high budget action flicks. Elsewhere the film continues the grand Star Trek tradition of having a pretty naff villain but that’s OK too. It’s a relief they don’t try and flesh him out more at the expense of the more familiar crew. As it is Chekov is relegated to nothing more than a comedy accent. Sulu at least gets to kick some ass. Simon Pegg pretty much plays Simon Pegg which is forgivable and adds some welcome laughter.

The special effects are flawless and the action scenes exceptional, but even more emphasis seems to have gone on the sound design - the move from a cacophony of screams, ripped and torn metal to the empty silence of space is brilliantly done and really ups the stakes following the now familiar space sequences of Firefly and Battlestar Galactica.

While the new crew are still finding their feet (or dying spectacularly) Abrams wisely leaves all the hero shots for the most familiar point of reference that fans and non fans alike have - the Enterprise herself. Every single shot of the ship is handled with respect leading up to her final entrance - the one that I’m guessing will receive a round of applause from most packed theatre audiences when it opens.

It’s here in particular that it becomes obvious that Abrams is a fan. What he’s accomplished is nothing short of releasing the idea of Star Trek from the trappings of the franchise - something that superhero movies from X Men through Spiderman to Batman have failed to do (Lucas being an idiot took his new trilogy even deeper into the mess he’s allowed to grow around a couple of half decent sci fi flicks). It’s quite a feat and if anything raises expectations even higher for the inevitable sequel.

With that there are myriad ways to fuck it up - but that same thing was said all the way way to this point with the new outing of Star Trek. From now on I’ll be giving the guy the benefit of the doubt.