01 May 2010 |
Blog -
Photo Blog
Written by John Shea
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 I don't know what these are. Plants are not my thing. All I know is that it grows in the front garden and there is a bug on one of them. I didn't have much time for a photo today and they looked nice.
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What? Stop looking at me like that.
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 It took at least fifty shots to get this perfect. End result is one good photo and a pair of really muddy pants.
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Have you ever fought with a rusted bolt? It's one of the most aggravating parts of fixing something. You get everything disassembled except one bolt. And it will not budge. Usually it feels like that single bolt could hold the entire planet together in the face of a monstrous asteroid slamming into the Earth. Eventually the bolt gives way under attack from a variety of methods and a big sigh of relief emerges. That's how I feel right now. I have been stalled on my current script. It's not writer's block. The writing never stopped. But it sure did suck. The stuck bolt in this case was the main character. For me, writing really flows when I know characters so well that seem to come alive in my brain and take off in their own directions. At that point it feels like riding a dog sled. You hold on for dear life and do your best to make sure the team heads in the general right direction. You can always come back and smack them into shape on the rewrite if they didn't quite behave themselves. Anyway, the main character in this script has bedeviled me from the start. I knew the structure of the story I wanted to tell but she remained an enigma to me. I was writing someone so tightly wound that she wouldn't open up and show her true nature to me. She was projecting a front and hiding behind it. And suddenly it occurred to me that I was staring right at the core of this character and was faked out by it. You've probably already figured out what I didn't. The nature of this character is that she fiercely protects her true self by projecting a front and hiding behind it. When that epiphany struck, the bolt popped free. I've never written a script where I threw out so much stuff before. Endless scenes have been written and discarded simply because they were filler. I was dancing around trying to find the center, writing trivial bits and hoping they showed me something useful. All of it crap. Now that I've come to understand my main character, the scenes come winging out with confidence. And I let out a big sigh of relief.
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 And here we go.
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Here is a great sci-fi short film that was shot for a mere $5000. It's an entertaining movie and very well made, but what I like most about it is the way it was made. Big budget movies solve most problems with money. Low budget films can't do that so they use creativity and extreme levels of hard work to compensate. This movie was shot cleverly to make the most of the main actor in the movie. The special effects, while impressive for the budget, are not the point and are used pretty sparingly as spice to help tell the story. They aren't the point of the film. That's not only better for the budget but also for the story. The effects exist only to help tell the story, not to supplant it.
THE RAVEN - 720 HD from THE RAVEN FILM on Vimeo.
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 I shot this photo sort of from the hip. More than anything I was experimenting with the flash. Generally I hate the look of on-camera flash but that doesn't mean I can't find a way to do it better, so I tinker and experiment. Aim? Not so much. But the resulting picture made me laugh, so here it is. Sometimes accidents work out better than planning.
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So I carry the camera everywhere. And that says something, considering how bulky a DSLR camera is, even one as small and light as my Canon T2i. And I tinker, playing with settings, lights and angles, hoping to find something new and interesting. That's how I end up with a photo like today's entry. It's the fruit bowl in the middle of my dining room table. From above, pretty boring. From below? Well you get something interesting there. At least I think so.
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 Ever wondered what happens when you leave a pizza in the oven for over four hours? This is the answer. Jet black, all the way through. Stiff as a board but incredibly brittle. And for the record, those pepperoni don't taste like pepperoni anymore. They just taste like burnt.
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