Cramming as much in as possible at the moment. Apologies if I owe you email, conversation and beer. Blogging will also get erratic as projects start rubbing up against each other. Turns out that dodging thunderbolts from a non existent god is time consuming if nothing else.

I have the first draft of a horror movie to complete and then should be back in LA. Before that trip I also wanna carve out a little time to talk about the last couple of US visits and some of the great stuff that friends are up to.

Also some research dumping – if an image of a sexy robot in rollerboots fighting giant squid lands up here then the odds are that it won’t be attached to the project you think it is. But I’ll talk about everything that I can.

The Schrödinger’s Dogs stuff will be fleshed out here, on Twitter and over on the Sleepydog website. When we have enough material to justify it we’ll move the whole shebang to a dedicated url of some kind.

The stuff I can’t write about I’ll be saving for drunken bar discussion.

Single malt please.

Blogging from iPad – excuse any typos/smugness

So this could get interesting.

First an update. Everything is going great. Let me break that down and get into the details… oh… I can’t.

The problem (and I admit it’s a great problem to have) is that the closer Slingers gets to being made a lot of things have to slide into position. Every time one of these boxes gets ticked or a lever gets pulled the right way then our instinct is to jump on Twitter and spill. But because so many things are dependent on so many other things we can’t do that. And damn, it’s frustrating.

So we had a conversation about this and came up with an idea. What if we chose another show on the Sleepydog slate and opened up the development process as completely as we possibly could and just see what happens…

So that’s what we’re going to do.

Right now we’re working on a number of shows that are cued up behind Slingers and what we’d like to do with one of them is run a little online experiment and see if being this open this early will derail the process or not. The show we’ve picked to trial this on is a concept that I really like. It’s certainly not a lame duck that we’re leaving out here to sacrifice. I believe it’s an idea that could become a show that would hold its own against anything else on air right now, but I’m also keen to see how throwing open the development process effects it going forward.

Exciting stuff.

Lots more to dig into the hows and whys behind this and that’s just one of the reasons to do it. To create conversation about all aspects of the process.

But for now let’s just revist a question I asked on Twitter late last night:

Answers after the break…

SKY Movies HD kindly invited me along to the World Premiere of IRON MAN 2, but before the red and gold carpet could be rolled out Eyjafjallajökull erupted and the whole shebang was relocated to LA. Makes sense. There Tommy Lee Jones is way better equipped to deal with rogue volcanic activity than UK airspace. So it was a pleasant  surprise when my invite arrived for the UK Gala Premiere for the same evening. Technically we got to see the movie ahead of the actual ‘Premiere’ but with a whole lot less Americans.

Unfortunately there wasn’t enough free drink to disguise that the movie is lacking in just about every aspect. The first one set a very high bar, but let’s break it down:

The Good

Sam Rockwell. I’ve already written about Rockwell’s Oscar worthy performance in MOON so yeah, I’m a fan. Here he gets to play a douche bag – the anti-Tony Stark if you like – and he has way too much fun doing it. The script ensures his character is always second fiddle to whoever he’s sharing screen time with, but the rest of the cast don’t have a chance. He’s the one thing that I’d really like to see back in a third movie. Hell, if there’s one thing this franchise needs it’s a decent villain. Rockwell could be it.

Scarlett Johansson.Yeah I know. No brainer. Takes a while for her to kick ass, but when she does it’s the highlight of the movie. In fact that single sequence is far better than anything that Iron Man gets to do. Which takes me nicely to…

The Bad

Iron Man. The hero of the movie makes three appearances in two hours. The ‘case’ suit is cool, but as with all the action scenes there’s never a moment of real jeopardy for Shellhead. I suppose you could argue that Tony Stark is Iron Man so let’s move on.

Tony Stark. The hubris of the first movie is replaced with self-pity. Big mistake. Stark the charismatic asshole from the first movie is replaced with just an asshole.

Pepper Potts. Sadly the inclusion of Johansson’s foil to Gwyneth Paltrow leaves Pepper with nothing to do but answer a few phones and get rescued. What a waste.

The bad guy. There isn’t one. There are a few pains in the metal ass for Stark to deal with, but none of them, even combined, make for a decent threat.

The Avengers. Way too much screen time is given up to pave the way for what is still a non-existent franchise. Pacing and plotting suffer a lot because of the inclusion of Fury, S.H.I.E.L.D and the goddamn Avengers initiative. All these scenes feel like DVD extras. Although there is a nice ‘shield’ gag in the mix.

The Ugly

CGI. There’s one shot at the racetrack that wouldn’t look out of place in one of the fan made videos doing the rounds on YouTube. The final (and woefully anticlimactic) action sequence is just metal banging metal with some explosions. It’s not TRANSFORMERS bad, but it is yawn inducing. Enough.

The first movie had so much charm that its few faults didn’t matter. The second has so little charm that the movie itself doesn’t matter. It’s a tick box on the way to an Avengers franchise. But if this and the Hulk movies have shown anything its how difficult it is to get it right with one hero on screen. How they think they’re gonna cram a team of these idiots into a movie, along with supporting cast and bad guys is beyond me. Sadly it’s probably beyond them too.

I hope THOR and CAPTAIN AMERICA learn a lesson here and shove that Avengers crap on a separate disc for the BluRay. What are the odds?

So this made me sit up a little straighter:

Not because I have a lot of cables under my desk (I do), but because I wrote a scene last week that is almost – almost – this brought to life.

It’s only a first draft so she may not survive, but it was nice to see her up and about briefly. Even if she was cheating on me in someone else’s brain.

Note: Precious is of course a wonderful movie and doesn’t require days of your life over 36 discs. It’s great. Go see it. No Sean Bean though.

The BBC are building a mythology engine. What a great name. Kinda surprised they didn’t call it the iDigger or some such shit:

The R&D Prototyping team has recently built an internal prototype for BBC Vision called the Mythology Engine. It’s a proof-of-concept for a website that represents BBC drama on the web letting you explore our dramas, catch up on story-lines, discover new characters and share what you find.

One to watch this. The iPlayer sounded exciting for a while and then the BBC fumbled the birth/abortion and we ended up with bucketware (they keep emptying it for us).

Doctor Who is the obvious choice for a prototype – if anything it’s too rich a vein to tap. I can see it getting picked apart ruthlessly when they open it to the public, but it’ll be interesting to see how the bells and whistles here stack up against the mostly text driven wikipedia entries. And what happens when they start digging into shows that are less well documented and (hopefully) have a pop at expanding this framework to news. Of course, for this to get really interesting it needs to be bolted on to the actual content itself at the point we consume it.

My real interest here though is fictional archeology. Something I’ve been thinking about since I first started talking iPhone apps with Sleepydog and began working out the backstory of Slingers (I can give you a timeline for the show that runs from 2020 to 2267, but the bit you’re concerned with kicks off in 2263). In fact we now have a couple of physical artifacts from that future’s history:

But I can’t talk about that just now.

All the cool stuff I have currently loaded onto my iPad are surface applications. They allow me to experience media in a handy, shiny format, but they don’t let me dig too deep. If you ever read Warren’s Fell on its original run you’ll have seen he stuffed the thing with back material (preliminary sketches and information on the real world incidents that inspired some of the comic’s content). Now imagine that on an iPad. The Marvel style interface is very cool, but what I’d like to see is a secondary series of gestures that allow me to peel back the panels. I want to see the original art work, the pencil drawings etc, but also the history of the story.

Enhanced editions of novels are doing a wonderful job here too. But so far whether it’s a novel or a TV show the glop attached to the content are secondary to the content itself.

Keep an eye on Blacklight to watch this kind of transmedia evolve. I sat down with them in LA earlier in the year and they have some very cool stuff in the pipeline. And then there’s Jesse Alexander’s Day One.

Though Day One’s prime time adventures are simple and compelling, its mythology is vast and designed to be experienced across multiple media platforms. A new kind of transmedia epic.

We’re getting to the point now where if you watch this kind of stuff on the right device you’ll be able to do the lean back experience as before, but leaning into the device should give you vertigo.

Of course, we still have to get the story telling part right, but thinking about this stuff up front actually helps build a much richer writing experience and you can avoid the kind of post-it note crap that has me reaching for the bottle, mumbling about fucking ‘star whales‘.

Got back to London around a week ago. Lots to talk about.

Jess didn’t kill me. Close thing though.

Introduced Stu to the Twinkie. He’s single, girls.

I’m also a week into life with my iPad. Beautiful little thing. Distracted me a lot this week, but now I’m blogging from it. Play time’s over.

Let’s go to work.