Gerry

I'll take a look at that.

It's a very tight shot. The "roman candles" will be shooting up offscreen and then the snow starts sifting in from offscreen as well, so what the candles shoot out is not necessarily what will float back into the scene. Lots of opportunities for cheating on this one. and we don't need to see actual "snowflake" shapes. EDIT: Looking at your "money drop" sim. Not sure if I can use that but dang it still looks great!

Yeah, that's the idea. It will be a small scene with three candles and a little arrangement of holiday stuff, ribbons, ornaments, holly leaves etc. the three candles then start shooting off like roman candles, and what they're shooting out is snow, which then settles back on the arrangement. It doesn't have to behave like perfect physics, just appear to accumulate nicely. I'm looking into solutions with After Effects as well but if I can do it all in AM that would be swell. Also, doing it in the latest v17.

I want to do a small scene where snow falls and lands on the objects in the scene. How would you go about this?

that looks like it has a lot of possibilities, but in the examples they were showing, the effect is sort of minimal. I would have liked something that really showed a dramatic effect.

Ernest, I always enjoyed "Subject 99" and was avid for more episodes. I don't have any advice except, do what you enjoy! Your episodes always had a sort of insular or dreamlike quality that I'm sure came from being a one-man production, but which also lent it an intrigue I enjoyed. I don't know if you can create that same feel with either graphic novel or live action, but I think that's one of the things the animation had going for it. One man's two cents! I wish I knew how to focus on just one project to the exclusion of others and really make it shine; if I could I'd tell you how!

Mark, are you familiar with Withoutabox? It's a film festival website where you can learn EVERYTHING about every freakin film festival in the US. Sign up, start an account (or not, not sure if you can search the listings without joining) and you might be surprised how many festivals there are that you'd fit right into.

This is good but where is he at with it I wonder?

congratulations, Mark, and I'm not surprised! Good luck with more like this!

I'm changing careers.

Hey Rodney, I like these starts and designs. There's a "Lucky Luke" feel to the Myst'ry Rider, not a bad way to start!

Yep, fun character! Looking forward to seeing it develop!

That is interesting! Wish I knew what it meant!

Good one as usual, Robert!

Looks great, Mark!

All very interesting. I'll be taking a project management course in the fall, maybe I can contribute to this discussion then!

It's true, my wife and I laugh about his actual writing credits. He's apparently a dreadful writer, but a highly influential teacher, doing this seminar all over the world for like 30 years. Disney and others send their whole writing staffs. But I'll also say that the attrition of the audience over four days was noticeable, so he's obviously not for everyone. For me it was a way in to my story, but in practice I can already see some limitations. But I do want to carry on because I think at the end I will have a well structured story, and it's just a step toward developing a method of my own.

Well, McKee's method helped me plot out and write an outline in pretty quick order, something I'd been struggling with for months, with no idea how to begin. I've got a five-act outline for a pretty good story and though I'm still trying to maintain the structure via his method, it's not quite so cut-and-dried when you're writing from scratch. But I'm going to press on, since for the most part it's still working for me. And even when a step doesn't fall right into place, I put in a placeholder and come back to it. I'm also taking a tip from Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird" and giving myself permission to write a "shitty first draft", a step she believes is absolutely necessary in order to get started at all. So that's what I'm doing. McKee also mentioned in passing an interesting point about writing a treatment. He described the "old" method of writing a treatment, then he got sidetracked (of I wasn't listening) and I never did hear how it's done today. But I like the old method as he described it, and though it's a ton of work I can see how it enables the writing of the actual screenplay. A treatment done the "old" way is to write out a detailed description of the entire story, scene by scene, going into great detail about each scene, where it takes place, who's in it, what's discussed, what's at stake, but NO DIALOG. Purely description. A treatment like this usually runs much longer than the finished screenplay, but once it's laid out like that, you now have a detailed roadmap for the final step, writing dialog. It's way more work than I've ever done before, and I don't know if I'll make it even halfway, but it sounds like a good method in theory.

That's nice progress Simon. All I would say is to see if you can get his turn a little smoother, so he's not coming to a complete stop, then turning, then sitting. The stop is a little robotic. (Unless he's a robot! I don't think that's come up yet!)

I've been looking over my notes from the McKee seminar and this list is a good (though not complete!) overview of the basis of story structure the way he teaches it: a Beat (McKee's term for a simple exchange of dialog) = a change of behavior; Beats build scenes; Scenes build sequences; Scenes create minor change; The last scene of a sequence creates moderate change; Sequences build acts; The climax of each act is a major change or reversal for the protagonist; The climax of the last act is the story climax, which can be defined as "irreversible change".

Just one more comment, an aprochryphal story supposedly about Hemingway in a contest to write the shortest story possible. He wrote one in six words, and it makes me tear up everytime I think of it. His entry: "For sale: baby shoes. Never used."

Rodney, the three act structure became standardized because, with each act climax representing a major reveresal for the protagonist, three came to be seen as the minimum number of reversals for the audience to feel they've been told a "complete" story. I always thought that was a hard and fast rule, but McKee states, pretty pesuasively, that if you need more acts, just keep adding them until your story is finished! The main example he points out is the first "Indiana Jones" movie, which has seven acts!

Simon, those are some good observational tips re: watching people walk by! Also wanted to add, though you may know this already, you can click through all the cameras in your scene with the numpad 1 key. A big time saver.

Haven't done trees myself. Sorry!

All you can do is keep trying!