Exactly 4 years ago, I wrote the first piece here. This is the 600th and final youdothatvoodoo blog. Nothing ever ends though, and in this case some of you will already be aware that I’ve started a new site, writebyyourside. It’ll still be me, and I’ll continue to write roughly the same mix as I’ve been presenting here. The difference? You’ll receive the pieces by signing up. And I’ll be changing the mix that I’ve established here. For one thing, I’ll be featuring occasional interviews with some of the writers, filmmakers and other creatives I’ve got to know, some of them since youdothatvoodoo started. And there’ll be a new focus on prose, which coincides with my renewed enthusiasm for short stories. One commission I really enjoyed a few months ago was for a short story, and I’m now reading more fiction again having spent a long time focusing on non-fiction other than in the form of comics.

Writebyyourside is also an exercise in adapting to the evolving situation for writers that the online world presents, and is itself still evolving as some fine-tuning takes place. I’ve bundled together nearly 200 pieces from youdothatvoodoo into two volumes, one on the craft of writing and the other with reviews written from a writer’s perspective. A third volume rounds the package out with previously unavailable scripts and treatments that are compiled with the intention of giving writers a practical idea what the industry expects. All of this has been done with the invaluable support of Edd Hillier, who is also responsible for the sound and music of the video at the new site.

Working with Edd is a good example of the way I approach the business of being a writer. For a start, it’s about recognising where your strengths are. And mine don’t include much in the way of computing skills. So, I reached out to Edd in the same way that I’ve approached producers and directors, with a view to making something happen. This comes under the heading of what many call networking, and which is second nature to those who flourish in the creative sector. It’s also, interestingly, a strategy that helps increase the quality of the work produced by all those within a network. The number and quality of ideas rises as people join forces, and that’s true whether you’re looking to make a feature film or do something online.

‘Something’ is the interesting word there, since it’s in the nature of what a lot of interesting people are doing online these days that there are no strict definitions and boundaries for what’s being brought to life. I was sent an email the other day by someone I’ve worked with in the gaming world, looking for beta testers and funding for a gaming experience that integrates a number of geographically-focused social media programmes into a realtime vampire-hunting game where people try and turn the tables on their supposed undead overlords. There’s something very interesting going on there, with participants using the same sort of suspension of disbelief that would typically be employed passively in front of a cinema screen to participate in a shared fiction.

I can only suggest that more of this will be happening in the future, as immersive media and gameplay and new uses of technology allow us to cast our imagination into the world. That’s part of the journey I’ve been on for a couple of years with artist Andy Tudor as we continue to develop a multi-platform concept including animation, games, and theme park attractions for a concept that we’re collaborating on, and which we’ve attracted the attention of a highly successful international entrepreneur with.

All of which is to say that writing is alive and kicking, and that there’s no shortage of opportunities for writers. In my case, I’m realising that I’ve got the makings of a businessman too, and it’s something I’d urge any writers reading to consider. The world is at a very interesting point right now. Rather than rely on dinosaur institutions which haven’t got your best interests at heart – whether they’re publishers, broadcasters, or studios – why not embrace the potential presented by the digital scene? As a warm blooded mammal with a brain, you’re more agile and adaptive than the lumbering beasts that have dominated the media landscape. It’s not so much about taking them on as doing your own thing, and enjoying the rewards.

Thanks to everyone who’s read, got in touch, and enjoyed. Here’s to a great 2012.

Oh, what a fussy creature I am. DC go to the trouble of launching a specialist crime imprint, part of their successful Vertigo brand, and I get all sniffy about what they’re putting out. And with good reason, to be fair. The big name launch title was a risible Hellblazer story that wouldn’t have got through the net if it didn’t have Ian Rankin’s bankable name on the cover. And though I haven’t bought all of those that have followed, I found a couple trying so hard to be movie pitches that they didn’t fully spread their wings as comics – Christos Gage’s creepy trepanning tale Area 10 was at least superior to Andy Diggle’s formulaic The Rat Catcher.

I’ve not been able to finish Brian Azzarello’s contender…I wanted to give him another go after finding 100 Bullets impenetrable, but haven’t got past the first 20 pages of Filthy Rich, finding it laborious. Even Pete Milligan, normally a favourite of mine, didn’t quite deliver the goods with The Bronx Kill, getting in his own way with the ‘cleverness’ of its protagonist being a writer. So, it’s good to report that – though Vertigo Crime is no more – at least one title gets a double thumbs up from me.

Fogtown is written by Andersen Gabrych and drawn by Brad Rader. The latter’s style doesn’t have the sheen that fans of superhero comics tend to like, but I found his occasionally naive approach supported the very human heart of a story that uses genre tropes to reach somewhere deeper, and has something to say as it does. It’s 1953, and our hero is a hardboiled PI, Frank Grissel, the only difference between him and his clients that he sometimes gets a day rate and expenses for the shit he deals with. A missing person case leads not just to an investigation of sleaze and corruption, but to Grissel confronting the truth about himself, which he does his best to avoid through drinking and self-loathing.

On the surface, Fogtown is a standard-issue crime yarn, and it works well in that regard. What elevates it is the way it weaves issues around sexuality and identity into the whole, not in a bolted-on way but so that they are fundamental to the plot. In my perception, that’s the strongest way to introduce issues into a story – make them part of the fabric of what’s going on, so as the story unfolds the audience empathises with what’s going on for the characters. Elsewhere in comics, Jason Aaron does this brilliantly with Scalped, involving me with issues of Native American politics and culture and the way they’re caught up with the politics of casinos and reservations far more than a documentary would have.

I don’t insist my entertainment comes with a side order of liberal politics. Far from it – I like to be challenged and stretched by at least some of what I read, see, listen to. The beauty of Fogtown is that at no point does it feel like modern attitudes are being imposed on characters existing nearly six decades ago. It feels every bit like a pulp novel of the time, only one that someone like William Burroughs had a hand in crafting. And in telling a story about the past, it’s also telling one about now – for all the progress there’s been regarding homosexuality in society, coming to terms with sexual identity can still be a tortuous experience for some, and no amount of rainbow banners will stop that being the case.

DC are to be congratulated for taking a risk with these black and white crime yarns. As with their science fiction imprint Helix, the results of the experiment have been mixed. Transmetropolitan was the one that people remember from Helix, but I’m contrary and prefer to remember the excellent work Walt Simonson did in his collaboration with Michael Moorcock there. And just as people will most likely speak of headline titles like Ian Rankin’s, the Vertigo Crime book I will remember most fondly is Fogtown.

There was a run of films back in the sixties that I loved when I caught them in the seventies as a child. Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Great Race were madcap adventures with casts seemingly in their thousands. An international gang of actors would be gathered for some pretext or other that provided an opportunity to showcase foreign locations that were opening up to cinema goers as the glamorous airline business made it feasible to holiday in places that the previous generation knew only through maps or memories of war.

I’ve not caught any of those films – all of which seemed to feature Terry Thomas to represent all that’s best, or at least funniest, about a certain type of British male – for a long time now. Sprawling family-friendly comedies are as rare these days as men of the Terry Thomas breed. Besides, this is a different world we live in. Americans have ventured out into it, and been kidnapped and worse. Not only that, but a good few of the foreigners are disrespectful of the Stars and Stripes. That’s the sort of thinking that leads to Hostel’s popularity, tapping into American fears that godfearing folk are sure to be tortured if they leave their home soil.

The same impetus drives the revenge thriller Taken, in which Liam Neeson’s daughter is kidnapped and ends up in the only hands more feared than those of atheists – Muslims. Sure enough, just like in Victorian penny dreadfuls the dastardly foreigners are out to have their wicked way with the teenage girl. So much for the Peace Corp. It doesn’t even help if daddy is the President, as is the case in the otherwise exemplary David Mamet thriller Spartan – those Arabs just can’t get enough of white flesh.

The lotsa stars format seems to have been embraced by the heist movie more recently, since it provides the chance for a gang to gather and each member to demonstrate their idiosyncrasies. Reservoir Dogs and Usual Suspects are two of the more grown up versions, but then the Ocean’s sequence appeared, influenced by the Rat Pack films – another sixties phenomena, in which Frank Sinatra and his buddies Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr would badda-bing baby, and there was always a knowing wink to defuse the badder-badder aspects.

All of which brings us to Tower Heist, which in its own half-assed way takes these various strands and puts them together. It’s got the ensemble cast, led by Ben Stiller, and featuring Eddie Murphy, Casey Affleck, Alan Alda and others. And it’s got that light-hearted tone, mixed with perhaps too many plot elements for it to be the smooth ride it aspires to be. The fact that three names were credited with story, only one of whom is credited with co-writing the script suggests that the business of writing the thing was not straightforward either.

What’s interesting is that, just as the sixties films mentioned had something of the Kennedy era about them, so too does Tower Heist bear the imprint of right here, right now. The villain of the piece is a corrupt financier, and his crimes are made personal by him having defrauded the staff of the luxury hotel where he lives of their pensions. Which justifies them banding together to right the wrongs they’ve been done, while at the same time putting a damper on the proceedings because of the credibility of his crime.

It’s good-natured hokum but it rarely sparks, despite some decent performances. The film is more interesting because of its relationship with the zeitgeist than anything else. And there’s more to come, with a screen version of the classic Michael Lewis book Liar’s Poker on the way, a…I was going to say ‘ruthless dissection’ of working life at Salomon Brothers, but that phrase pales next to the conduct of Salomon Brothers itself. Too, there’s a movie account of how come things have got as messy as they are, re: global economy. All solid stuff to be developing stories about, but right now perhaps not the time to be using it as the basis of lightweight comedies. Audiences feel the reality too much to laugh.

So used are we to seeing films that are in truth rather conservative, however well they use a few tricks in the filmmaking box, that seeing a fully-fledged cinematic masterpiece is an experience even more uncanny than we might suppose. Its brilliance is not only a demonstration of what can happen when a filmmaker is at the top of their game, but a reminder of just how prosaic most work that ends up on the screen actually is.

In this case, the masterpiece is We Need To Talk About Kevin, a major step up even by the high standards that director Lynne Ramsay has shown in Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar. It’s an adaptation of a book that I’ve not read, and is such a thoroughly cinematic experience that I find it hard to imagine what the prose version is like. Surely it can’t have the fluidity that the film has, its apparently effortless ability to conjure feelings and states of mind and questions about motherhood…but that’s being unfair, since Ramsay’s ability to make the screen her canvas is pretty much unsurpassed.

The most obvious point of difference is that this is a film with virtually no dialogue. And what speech there is, is quite often talking used in a way to avoid communication, where the manner of address makes it clear that the speaker has an intent at odds with the meaning of their words. Sure, you can do that on a page. But it’s a whole different thing when it’s happening in real time with gifted actors – and with Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly as Kevin’s parents, you’ve got two fine performers.

At the heart of it all is Kevin himself, who even as a baby seems to be engaged in a battle of wills with his mother. He doesn’t just cry in his pram, he shrieks with a voice that’s a barbed weapon, and in one memorable scene his mother pauses by someone operating a pneumatic drill to get respite from the piercing pain her child produces. Is this a difficulty in bonding with her first child, or is Kevin someone any mother would have problems forming a relationship with?

That question is one that would go through his mother’s mind however Kevin grew up. But there’s a more pressing reason that the mother-son bond is questioned: he grows up to slaughter his father and sister, and run amok in the high school where he’s a student. Only, put in the sequence the last few paragraphs have it, there seems to be a linear sequence to all this. The power of the film is that it gets all this and more across through resolutely non-linear means, while being easily comprehensible at all times.

Opening with hordes of young people at the Tomatina festival, where the revellers are knee-deep in tomato pulp in Spain, the viewer soon realises that a lot of the film is about seeing red. It’s there on the walls of Swinton’s house, splashed there by people who know her as the mother of a high school killer. It oozes from the ketchup sandwiches that Kevin relishes. And he scrawls it on the maps that line his mother’s room.

Sound is a key aspect in the film’s construction. Environmental noises permeate, and link from one sequence to another, creating a rhythm and with it a kind of logic that leads the viewer’s attention from Tilda as a new mother bewildered by her truculent baby, an older Kevin interacting with his young sister, being read Robin Hood by his mother when he’s ill and they’re experiencing their only moment of communion. Each is a jigsaw piece, but rather than be frustrated by an intellectual puzzle the experience is of emotional immersion, being transported by the flow of it all as the story slowly forms around the mystery of this child and the terrible crimes he commits.

Filmmaking of this calibre is rare, and this is an extraordinary film that rewards repeated viewings. Before this project, Lynne Ramsay devoted a lot of time to a version of The Lovely Bones that, on the evidence of what she’s done here, would have surpassed the trite Peter Jackson version which he was able to get made because of the clout that Lord of the Rings money gives him. Hopefully, Lynne Ramsay will be in a position to assert herself about future films without such abuse of power.

There’s a long tradition in jazz of adapting popular tunes for line-ups featuring trumpet and sax and whatnot rather than whatever instrumentation they originally had. Miles Davis did covers of the likes of Bye Bye Blackbird, giving himself and his band a chance to do a new take on a ballad of the day, or one which had become a jazz standard. Perhaps the ultimate example of this is John Coltrane and his dazzling reinvention of My Favorite Things, taking the apparently unpromising raw material of a Julie Andrews song from Sound of Music and transforming it magically.

That notion of taking what someone else has done and doing your own version of it has a long history in the arts. I can look back at some of my early work and the efforts to ape someone who knew what they were doing show through. And that’s fine. It’s a stage you go through on the way to finding your own voice, and having the confidence to use that and not attempt ventriloquism. Some creators who’ve demonstrated their chops continue to drink from the well of those who went before. One such is Alan Moore, much of whose career rests on a Coltrane-like ability to imbue what was apparently pop culture detritus with substance.

Such reinvention is what Moore did with Miracleman, itself a British knock-off of the American superhero model, which he offered back to the world in a form that transcended its source material. He repeated the trick to brilliant effect in Swamp Thing, taking a rather silly bog dweller and using the character as a vehicle for powerful and poignant horror stories where the genre elements were fused with a socio-political sensibility unusual in the medium.

Most of all, Moore did that reinvention with Watchmen which — remember — was intended to be done with a bunch of characters from defunct publishers Charlton. No need to go into the historic significance of the 12 issue series that redefined what was possible in the medium. Well, at least to those who hadn’t been keeping their eyes out for the similarly inventive but less self-conscious steps that the likes of Howard Chaykin was making with American Flagg, and Frank Miller with Dark Knight. And all of them, Moore included, were building on the work of innovators including Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, George Herriman, Steve Gerber, and many many others.

Watchmen being the one that got the most press, it’s been Moore who has got the most press since those days. Which is why we know the ups and downs of his relations with publishers and collaborators, his feelings about the state of the industry, and why you really shouldn’t make films of his work. And now, without his blessing — not that such needs to be granted, any more than Moore himself asked for permission to use out-of-copyright characters from 19th century fantastic fiction to create his League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen – DC has commissioned stories set in the same world as Watchmen.

These stories don’t exist, but the messageboards are ablaze with people decrying them, and calling for them to be stopped in their tracks. It’s all very…predictable. Moore occupies a place in the firmament that means he’s accepted unquestioningly. In some respects, he’s become the Bob Marley for smarter teens — a poster child whose wild hair and wilder ideas (and epic consumption of cannabis) mark him out as a counterculture hero.

Thing being, we won’t know what this new work will be like until it’s out there. And you don’t have to buy it if you don’t want to. I might be tempted by some of it, since Darwyn Cooke is one of the creators supposedly involved and I am a big fan of his work. But I don’t expect the quality of most of it to be up to much, any more than I suppose that whoever follows Ed Brubaker on Captain America will deliver the goods that Brubaker has consistently done.

As for the rest of it; the bluster about Watchmen’s canonical status, and Moore’s sainthood…it’s irrelevant. I’m sympathetic to Moore about some of the travails he’s experienced, while feeling that taking legal advice would be a better remedy for some of the situations he’s been through than expecting others to abide by an ethical code that is important to him but not binding for others. And however good or bad the Watchmen spin-offs turn out to be, the original will always be there. If ‘original’ has any meaning, that is, in a world where the definitive take on a work might not be first out of the gate…

You’ve heard the one about how the internet has changed everything. How digital distribution spells the deathknell of traditional business, and how fortune favours…well, either the bold in the sense of brave, meaning pioneers committed to new art forms and new means of profiting from them; or bold as brass pirates who are making work available without troubling to get any money back to the people who came up with it.

In the latter category we have Grooveshark, who…well, the clue’s in the name frankly. They make music available to anyone who’d like to listen to it. Never mind if its originators want their work accessible to all online with no say in the matter. Niceties like that don’t seem to concern Grooveshark, whose run-in with Robert Fripp, who owns the rights to all the music of King Crimson, are chronicled here. They’ve spluttered, done some handwaving around undefined technical issues, but King Crimson material continues to be available from them however often they’re requested to remove it. Whatever you make of the prog rockers, it would be churlish to deny them the right to profit from their music, and have it made available in ways that suit them and not intermediaries who make a return on it.

OK, so sharks continue to thrive in digital waters. Sad, but no surprise. On a positive note, there are promising developments in the new online ecology too. The ability of the internet to connect projects with audiences means that supporters can be identified and tapped into via crowdsourcing, getting fans to fund work upfront. One healthy example is the film Sound It Out, a documentary directed by Jeanie Findlay about the last record shop in Teesside. The film was made in 2010 thanks to support generated on the website indiegogo, and ongoing promotion coordinated by producer of marketing and distribution Sally Hodgson has kept interest in the project alive, to ensure that the film gets screened.

For supporters of such initiatives, there’s a buzz to be had from direct participation in making something happen. And there are payoffs tailored to audience tastes, so that the more you donate to get the project off the ground, the more bespoke your thank you will be, whether it’s in the form of vinyl earrings unique to the campaign, or an opportunity to screen the film in your own home and have a signed DVD and EP to go with the experience.

There’s an incredible number of people out there touting for support for their pet projects, and Alex de Campi is playing the system in an interesting way. The writer and filmmaker is looking for backers for Ashes, the sequel to her graphic novel Smoke. What makes her approach unique is that she’s offering deals including reprint and film rights direct to purchasers, cutting out a tier of intermediaries she’s seen little benefit from in the past and allowing her to forge relations directly with those who want access to her work.

If Ashes sees life, it’ll be a vindication of a fascinating way of doing business: getting readers to be patrons for the creation of work that would not otherwise exist, and connecting it with publishers and people interested in making a film version of the story. At a stroke, that puts Alex at the centre of deals that creators are all-too-often omitted from, as part of longstanding attitudes by many on the business side to those who come up with the ideas in the first place. Watch this space.

The typical attitude of the beancounters in the music business is ‘keep the talent from the money’. The consequences can be grim, with artists kept drugged by managers as they sign contracts they’re clearly in no state to understand, with repercussions lasting for decades. Leonard Cohen is one case in point, fleeced of his money and forced at the age of 70 to tour again to replenish his coffers to ensure he can retire with dignity. Stories like that will continue to happen. But the potential of projects like Sound It Out and Ashes means that creators can have a much bigger influence in the way their work gets into the world.

There are sentences that make you double-take when you encounter them. Assaults on all that you know and hold dear. One such happened recently with the news that the speed of light maybe, just maybe, has been transcended and that baffled scientists want their peers to help them understand what’s going on. That was a paradigm shifter, for sure. And then I checked out IndieWire, and read something that rocked my world even more: “Under Phil Noyce’s sure direction, Jolie delivered in Salt, even though the plot was less inspired than Wanted.”

Have you seen Wanted? Now, if the writer is alluding to it being fantastical nonsense of a high order, and assumes that the reason for such nonsense is inspiration, rather than desparation, an out of control art department, and a director doing his damnedest to build on a slender and unconvincing premise as outlined in a flaky Mark Millar comic…then that sentence makes sense. Otherwise — and I cannot stress how fervent I am about this — the claim is utterly redundant. And it becomes more so when you watch Salt.

In some respects, Salt is an old school epsionage thriller, what with it being rooted in Cold War tensions. And it may have been nothing more than that were it not for two things. One being skilful plotting on the part of writer Kurt Wimmer — the script is taut, presents its surprises skilfully, and allies action to the development of plot and character. The other is Angela Jolie.

Let me explain. The script was originally written with a male protagonist in mind. And you can easily see it working with any number of male leads flexing their pecs and narrowing their eyes as the story unfolds. Having Jolie play the lead is a stroke of some kind of low grade genius. And I’m presuming the idea was hers, since she is rare in the industry in not having the usual phalanx of nodding heads to kowtow to her every whim.

Jolie is a sharp cookie with a singular talent and intelligence, and Salt is one of her more interesting choices. Simply, it enables her to play a female action hero unencumbered by the bullshit that would inevitably have accompanied that choice were a script to be written with that in mind. Sure, she has a relationship complication, but it’s dealt with when her husband is killed in front of her, adding further fuel to her desire for revenge. And she certainly doesn’t have any kids for cutesy moments, or have cloying moments where she admires a friend’s choice to give birth.

In the absence of all that, Jolie is free to deliver a performance that’s based as most male leads are on someone going out to do what they need to do. Which in this case means an awful lot of running and hitting and coming up with smart ways of dodging the people after her using improvised weaponry and quick thinking. Not only that, but there are points when it seems feasible that she really is running with the bad guys — Angelina Jolie, a Soviet sleeper agent? What has the world come to?

Rest assured Jolie is no such thing, and the end result is a cool thriller with old school dynamics directed with muscular efficiency by Philip Noyce, and a refreshing new twist brought to it all by the presence of its lead. At a time when the lesson most people have learned from the success of the Bourne movies is to have thrillers with amnesiac protagonists, be thankful there’s one where another conclusion has been drawn, in making an unexpected choice about the gender of its hero. Amazing, isn’t it, that such an issue should be noteworthy in 2011. But that really is the case. Roll on Salt 2…

If ever there was a title designed to put off the group of 16-22 year olds who Hollywood has decided is its core audience, Waitress would be about it. No promise of aliens and battles, or a bunch of guys having comic adventures together, just a hint that maybe coffee and pie will be on the menu, and where’s the fun in that? Writer and director Adrienne Shelly knew exactly what she was doing in crafting this gorgeous gem, a film whose resounding success comes from something tragically rare in the world of film: a female perspective.

Never mind the fucked-up situation that results in cinema being an overwhelmingly masculine pursuit. Let’s instead celebrate a film that comes at things from a different angle, and is all the more interesting for that. Jenna works at a diner, and is married to a control freak husband. The one joy she has in life is making pies, the creation of which is filmed lovingly as Jenna conjures tasty confections that commemorate moods and moments — she has a pie for every occasion, a tradition that she inherited from her mother.

Sure, there’s a fairytale element to all this, with Jenna very much the Cinderella of the three women who work at the diner. The others aren’t ugly sisters, but there’s no doubting who is the kindest, and most deserving of another life. Which she gets, in a form she could do without, when Jenna discovers that she’s pregnant. This provides the impetus she needs to get the hell out of her current life, the only way she sees to do so being to win a pie making contest.

Things take a twist when Jenna meets a handsome new doctor, who soon provides her with the genuinely attentive loving that she’s never had with her needy and paranoid husband, Earl. Used to Earl pleading for sex and succumbing to his wheedling, she’s surprised in the doctor to be with someone who can hold her just for its own sake, and not as a preamble to lovemaking. Which makes her all the more willing to get engrossed in an affair with the doctor.

The fly in the ointment is that doc is married. And that leads to a wonderfully twisted scenario late on when the doctor is helping her give birth, her husband is filming the proceeedings with a camera bought from her escape fund money that he found, and the doc’s wife is one of the team of interns in the theatre. An uneasy situation even when you’re feeling on top of things. Certainly not a recipe for giving birth with ease.

This being a fundamentally happy film, all works out well in the end, in a way that might annoy some viewers but reflects the realities of Jenna’s situation. Old Joe, who owns the diner and a few other businesses, gives her the money to escape her situation and start a new life elsewhere. For a working class wife whose husband has been taking most of what she earns, like it or not, this kind of generosity is perhaps one of the few ways that she could start again.

There’s a real buzz to the film, which comes from a strong script coming from a place where the mainstream has nothing to say. That said, it’s a thoroughly accessible and enjoyable story, just the kind I’d love to see more of. Only, in the case of Adrienne Shelly, that’s not going to happen: she was murdered soon after the film wrapped. I’d only got to found out about her recently through her work with Hal Hartley, and it seems everyone found her a truly lovely as well as an immensely talented person. Her husband established The Adrienne Shelly Foundation to support filmmakers with scholarships, stipends, finishing funds and grants. Let’s hope that one result of the Foundation is work that will in some way live up the promise that this very special woman demonstrated in her brief life.

A little while back, my co-conspirator Andy Tudor and I attracted the first chunk of investment money to realise a multi-platform creative concept we’ve devised. ‘Multi-platform’ meaning we’re looking at something which could, in the long run, straddle gaming apps, social media games, an animated series, merchandise, and more. Our investor has cannily given us enough money that we can start to make progress on some of the above, but not so much that we can convince ourselves that we’ve got it made. We haven’t. We’re in the early stages of a long journey, and the job at this point is to prove what we’re capable of.

All of which makes our current situation a fascinating one. And Andy and I have no shortage of ideas of what we’d like to do. We’re also blessed in knowing a seasoned coach/consultant who works with big grown-up organisations at board level and helps them clarify where they’re going, how they’re going to get there, and what needs to be done to make it happen. That friend, Annie, spent a highly productive day with us in which we set out what we’re going to do in the next three months — primarily with the intent of impressing our backer so he’ll continue to invest in this project and have us majorly involved in its development, and not just coming up with concepts for work that others then undertake.

We’re in a privileged position. And we want to make the most of it. So Annie got us to dig into our motivations, what drove us to come up with this project in the first place, what we hope it can become, and use that impetus to ensure we follow through on a whole series of meetings with people in games and digital media and animation we need to befriend to get all of this off the ground. The buzz is palpable, and the timing good — I’m about to go to London for a weekend workshop on immersive writing, ie exactly the approach that’s necessary to create a stimulating experience for people who come across some or other aspect of what we’re up to, and encourage them to find out more.

A key part of this plan of action is the creation of a 3 minute animation to capture the core of our concept. All of which sounds very dry and dusty, as maybe a lot of this will since I can’t at this point share anything of what we’re up to. But I can share this: the inspiration for the short animation is the famed sequence in Up where the old guy’s past is revealed, in a stunning and moving montage that some people have said is a triumph of cinema. Well, if you’re going to have a benchmark, it might as well be an impressive one, and the reason I honed in on that sequence as inspiration is for its emotive power.

This will not be news to regular readers. I consider the most significant aspect of any narrative to be its emotional impact. That’s why we listen to, or watch, or share stories in whatever form. And I want people’s first glimpse of the project Andy and I have been developing for the past three years to be something which has real impact on them. It’s not enough to impress people at a technical level. Or become the envy of your peers for getting a project off the ground. For it to become what we want it to be, it needs to connect with audiences. And that’s something we need to get right from the start. Especially given that we’ve got a science fiction setting for our concept, and all too often science fiction stories are reliant on the latest CGI techniques to impress audiences. Sure, we want our baby to be all shiny — but most importantly, we want people to feel the love.

There’s much frustration among musical types about the way things are going in that world, where MP3 formats are a challenge both to the economics of the business, and sound quality. Put simply, MP3 compresses sound and the results can be unsubtle. While many in the scene are caught up in arguments about it, Bjork has found another way to deal with the situation. The new work that she’s releasing at present under the Biophilia tag in a series of apps as well as in more conventional forms is designed to capitalise on the limitations of the MP3 format and sound good within its parameters.

Well, of course. Treat the situation as a challenge and work with it. The same applies to filmmakers. How do you make an impact with a low budget feature when there’s not much in the kitty for effects and name actors? Hmm…nice though those are, what’s wrong with going back to basics and writing a good script with some striking (and inexpensive) moments?

That’s the solution that a few interesting filmmakers have hit on. Rather than emulating something where your lack of budget really will draw attention to the shortfall between intention and reality, come up with a milieu of your own where you set the rules. Hal Hartley is an excellent case in point. His second feature Trust relies on arch scripting, performances that don’t acknowledge the humour of what’s happening, and some moments guaranteed to make the viewer sit up and take notice.

Those moments? How about putting your boss’s head in a vice as you quit the place? Having an awkward conversation with a mother who suggests that her oldest daughter will be good in bed? Going to the abortion clinic when you find your boyfriend in bed with your sister after your mum got him drunk and put him there? None of those are ideas that cost money. They’re all about having an imagination, and — beyond that — a sensibility.

Sensibility is an interesting one…some people have it, some people don’t. It’s a function of worldview and style. You can see it in the work of Woody Allen or Jim Jarmusch. Less so Michael Bay or George Lucas. The joy of a sensibility is that people will come and seek your work in the hope of experiencing it some more if it appeals to them. Hmm, maybe we could use the word ‘aesthetic’, as long as you realise that it doesn’t mean it’s about making things look good. Not at all. But a distinct look is often part of a sensibility, and both can be realised with little or no budget.

Anyway, Trust is a delight, an underplayed curio that will appeal to some, but not all. And that’s another of the things with having a sensibility. Those that get it, get it. But that number will invariably be fairly small. Still, you can make that work as a career if you’re lucky: Quentin Tarantino and the Coens have got by pretty well through having an idiosyncratic worldview that’s distinct from whitebread Hollywood offerings.

Which brings us back to Bjork, kind of. There’s a distinct sensibility about her work that carries through across projects. It’s there in the choices she makes, and the people she chooses to work with. And it’s present at this point in the way she manages her career. She’s an excellent role model for anyone aspiring to a modern media career, straddling different artforms and collaborating with people known for the quality of what they do. The apps for Biophilia are interesting not just in their own right, but as a business model, with the developers and Bjork each getting half of the proceeds. Which is a much more attractive proposition than the kind of deals monopolistic distributors and broadcasters are partial to. Just a thought…