I was reading Kotaku the other day and found a link to a fan-made Mega Man movie. I was, naturally, dubious. Fan-made things, while filled with passion, are not well funded. (Grayson, a fan-made Batman movie trailer (yeah, just a trailer) is probably the highest quality fan-made product I've seen.) But still. Mega Man is a property ripe for the picking when it comes to film adaptations and I wanted to see how well the filmmakers did with its potential.
There were some things that this film did right. Some good cinematography, for example. Some darned decent CG stuff for a film with (probably) a shoe-string budget. And really, the production design was pretty impressive (again, with the caveat of the shoe-string budget). All of these things were good enough.
What wasn't good enough was the script.
Many things could have fixed this script.
1. The story needed to start in media res. As I recall, the original Mega Man story begins after Wily has already done damage to the city. Mega Man runs through levels that are populated with Wily's robots, eventually ending up at the work-sites of the robot masters. I think these writers confused the idea of a first act with exposition. The action - and, therefore, the story - doesn't begin until 30 minutes into the film. So for 30 minutes, the audience is treated to every boring detail and meaningless conversation that makes up character motives. Starting in media res would have been a much more conflict-driven way to see those motives played out, not have them explained in a monologue.
2. Dr. Light should have died at the end of Act 1. Or, at the very least, taken away from the Hero. This would propel his actions, leave him without a mentor, and would give a lot more credence to Wily's insanity and threat. As it was, Light stayed on and didn't do much besides equipping Mega Man to fight the Act 3 battles.
3. Wily, while goofy in the original games, should not have been so ridiculous... His faux accent, poorly dyed hair, and constantly sweating face did not leave any sense of threat or depth to his character. Now, a goofy looking guy actually being threatening - actually being cruel - that I can get behind. For example, his lines after kidnapping Roll are a small sample of how crazy, cruel, and evil he should have been. Mocking. Sneering. A little immature, but also willing and able to do evil, evil things. I think Kefka from Final Fantasy VI would have been a good model for this kind of villain.
4. The dialogue was painful. I didn't know people could even try to play some of these cliched lines as seriously as these actors did. Do I remember specific examples right now? No. But just imagine. Every "I'll get you next time!" and "Thank God you're alright. I didn't think you'd make it" played out over and over again in different contexts. The only way to fix this is to take a harder look at each character, their flaws, and to actually speak the lines before the actors getting in front of the camera...
Don't get me wrong. I am really impressed by the director, Eddie Lebron. He clearly has some chops in pulling together a technical team to pull a 96 minute fan adaptation of a popular video game franchise. They really did accomplish a lot. It just pains me to see the script in such shambles. Without a solid story, all of the resources go to waste.
My question is this: how do I find these filmmakers? I honestly think that Mr. Lebron's resources could have been much better used had he a better story and screenplay. I also honestly believe that I could have helped make that story and screenplay better. How can I get to these directors early enough to help them tell the story they want to tell?
Moral of the story: let Kemp read your screenplays! Please? I like doing it. I think it'll be better afterward....
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Saturday, March 27, 2010
The Death of Post-Modernism.
(This post is a long time coming. Since the National Religious Broadcaster's convention, my brain has buzzed with thoughts of modernism and post-modernism, cyncism and localism, and many other great -isms. Here are my armchair philosopher thoughts. They might be scattered or difficult to understand. A friendly comment saying so would be helpful as I refine both my writing style and my thoughts...)
Let's start with a definition of post-modernism. The term itself is shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding (it's sort of ironic, really). The Oxford English Dictionary calls it, "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions." One of Merriam-Webster's defintions is "of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culutre, identity, history, or language." The definition that I have been working from since hearing it in my undergraduate philosophy class is attributed to a French philosopher called Jean-Francois Lyotard: "incredulity toward metanarratives."
I mean, think about it. The 20th century wasn't that great in many ways. We had recently(ish) come off the enlightenment, a time when all promise lay before man. Indeed, I think most of the 20th century was spent pursuing the promises of the Enlightenment and Modernism. Radio took off, closely followed by telephones, television, cable, computers, and, by the end, the internet. People trusted the power structures of the world to deliver them out of their problems. Technology will make me lose weight, keep the peace, do the chores, feed me, entertain me, connect me to others, anything. Our lives would get easier and easier. Or, at least, that was what the metanarrative of modernism offered.
But what did it deliver? More war (perhaps) than ever before in history. A fundamental rift between people and government as leaders fell to corruption and greed. The disintegration of family life as central to human experience as divorce rates skyrocketted. Corporations rising and falling, crushing the wallets and souls of people who no longer had the self-discipline to spend less than they earned. Is it any wonder people began to be skeptical about grand visions of universal truth-claims?
I think at its heart, post-modernism is this fundamental distrust of anything. You can't trust the government's claims that through big/small government, you will be helped/free to do whatever you want. You can't trust the advertiser's claims that this product actually works. You can't trust your parents to know what is good for you. Twentieth century psychoanlytic theory even undermined the trust in self that people could fall back on. When you are a teeming cauldron of subconscious, evolutionary urges conditioned by a lifetime of experiences, how can you know that you truly believe what you believe?
This has produced a very tolerant culture. What works for me is great. What works for you is great. If those are completely opposite, that's fine. Ultimately, I'm forced to trust myself and my experience. And I expect the same of you. So that's fine. We can get along with our completely opposite worldviews because both of us accept that we can't tell anyone else that what I've experienced is more true that what you've experienced.
Deconstruction, the first tool the post-modern reaches for, can only go so far by itself. We have taken apart everything from science to government to religion to social structures, but what has it left us with? Nothing but a pile of broken pieces. We finally figured out that modernism was a lie, but we never found the truth to replace it.
I think we're starting to figure something else out, too. We're all into sustainablity, right? (Those nasty moderns in their imperialistic, dogmatic, self-centered, earth-destorying ways made us a little bit... not those things.) Post-modernism - this incredulity toward metanarrative - is unsustainable. We can't do it much longer. It's killing our spirits and we know it. So we're reaching out.
At first, it's small. It's our friends. In my generation, there was a turn towards peer tribes among adolescents. Instead of caring for and listening to our families, we allied ourselves with our friends - the people closest to our daily experience. We trust our tribes. We love our tribes. To sin against the tribe (through breaking whatever internal rules it has) is worse than Judas' betrayal of Jesus or Brutus' betrayal of Caesar. The millenials are growing up now and taking their tribes with them. Most of them are going online. Social networking, I think, is a direct result of our desire to connect with the only people in the world who we can trust. We can't trust advertisers to tell us what products work (despite the inundation of custom-made advertisements... thanks Google...). We can trust our friends. If they say a product works, then we flock to it and buy it en masse (You're welcome, Steve Jobs.).
So where is all this going? What am I rambling towards?
I think everything is going to keep going local. There are apps that tell you who is tweeting near you. Farmer's markets are rising in popularity and use. There is a general distaste for all things mass-produced in the mouths (literal and metaphorical) of millenials.
With each step outside of the self, with each snarky comment held in, with each belief firmly and lovingly stated as true, we build trust. And with that trust, I think comes hope. I have little hope in the super-structures of society that have been so poisoned with greed and self-interest, but I do have hope that local communities will rise again and people will love their neighbors a little better than they used to. Now that everything has been deconstructed, we can start constructing again.
Let's start with a definition of post-modernism. The term itself is shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding (it's sort of ironic, really). The Oxford English Dictionary calls it, "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions." One of Merriam-Webster's defintions is "of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culutre, identity, history, or language." The definition that I have been working from since hearing it in my undergraduate philosophy class is attributed to a French philosopher called Jean-Francois Lyotard: "incredulity toward metanarratives."
I mean, think about it. The 20th century wasn't that great in many ways. We had recently(ish) come off the enlightenment, a time when all promise lay before man. Indeed, I think most of the 20th century was spent pursuing the promises of the Enlightenment and Modernism. Radio took off, closely followed by telephones, television, cable, computers, and, by the end, the internet. People trusted the power structures of the world to deliver them out of their problems. Technology will make me lose weight, keep the peace, do the chores, feed me, entertain me, connect me to others, anything. Our lives would get easier and easier. Or, at least, that was what the metanarrative of modernism offered.
But what did it deliver? More war (perhaps) than ever before in history. A fundamental rift between people and government as leaders fell to corruption and greed. The disintegration of family life as central to human experience as divorce rates skyrocketted. Corporations rising and falling, crushing the wallets and souls of people who no longer had the self-discipline to spend less than they earned. Is it any wonder people began to be skeptical about grand visions of universal truth-claims?
I think at its heart, post-modernism is this fundamental distrust of anything. You can't trust the government's claims that through big/small government, you will be helped/free to do whatever you want. You can't trust the advertiser's claims that this product actually works. You can't trust your parents to know what is good for you. Twentieth century psychoanlytic theory even undermined the trust in self that people could fall back on. When you are a teeming cauldron of subconscious, evolutionary urges conditioned by a lifetime of experiences, how can you know that you truly believe what you believe?
This has produced a very tolerant culture. What works for me is great. What works for you is great. If those are completely opposite, that's fine. Ultimately, I'm forced to trust myself and my experience. And I expect the same of you. So that's fine. We can get along with our completely opposite worldviews because both of us accept that we can't tell anyone else that what I've experienced is more true that what you've experienced.
Deconstruction, the first tool the post-modern reaches for, can only go so far by itself. We have taken apart everything from science to government to religion to social structures, but what has it left us with? Nothing but a pile of broken pieces. We finally figured out that modernism was a lie, but we never found the truth to replace it.
I think we're starting to figure something else out, too. We're all into sustainablity, right? (Those nasty moderns in their imperialistic, dogmatic, self-centered, earth-destorying ways made us a little bit... not those things.) Post-modernism - this incredulity toward metanarrative - is unsustainable. We can't do it much longer. It's killing our spirits and we know it. So we're reaching out.
At first, it's small. It's our friends. In my generation, there was a turn towards peer tribes among adolescents. Instead of caring for and listening to our families, we allied ourselves with our friends - the people closest to our daily experience. We trust our tribes. We love our tribes. To sin against the tribe (through breaking whatever internal rules it has) is worse than Judas' betrayal of Jesus or Brutus' betrayal of Caesar. The millenials are growing up now and taking their tribes with them. Most of them are going online. Social networking, I think, is a direct result of our desire to connect with the only people in the world who we can trust. We can't trust advertisers to tell us what products work (despite the inundation of custom-made advertisements... thanks Google...). We can trust our friends. If they say a product works, then we flock to it and buy it en masse (You're welcome, Steve Jobs.).
So where is all this going? What am I rambling towards?
I think everything is going to keep going local. There are apps that tell you who is tweeting near you. Farmer's markets are rising in popularity and use. There is a general distaste for all things mass-produced in the mouths (literal and metaphorical) of millenials.
With each step outside of the self, with each snarky comment held in, with each belief firmly and lovingly stated as true, we build trust. And with that trust, I think comes hope. I have little hope in the super-structures of society that have been so poisoned with greed and self-interest, but I do have hope that local communities will rise again and people will love their neighbors a little better than they used to. Now that everything has been deconstructed, we can start constructing again.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Some cool links.
I hate it when I have these thoughts. And I'm really passionate about them. And I rant and rave in a draft blog post. But I never go back to make it an actual post with, you know, good english and persuasive arguments. And then I find articles online that express exactly my thoughts in a better way. Here are some:
Gamasutra - Truth in Game Design
Good stuff. So good, in fact, that I overcame my fear of commenting on strangers' websites to submit an additional thought. My concern is that for some idealistic and truth-loving designers out there, there exists the temptation to make designs transparent, to make the truths easily graspable (It's the preacher in me...). However, I suppose I once again come back to the idea of virtue in difficulty (wherever I read that).
Identification, Please
This is, quite simply put, why I don't like FPS games. There is no character through whom I can care about the world. I, as Kemp Lyons, do not care about that mess of pixels and binary in the games I play. But if I have a character to play as, I can care through him or her. Sean Sands says it in a little more scholarly, less personal way than I would have and I'm grateful for that.
There may be more. I'm not sure. But these two articles really stuck out to me today.
Gamasutra - Truth in Game Design
Good stuff. So good, in fact, that I overcame my fear of commenting on strangers' websites to submit an additional thought. My concern is that for some idealistic and truth-loving designers out there, there exists the temptation to make designs transparent, to make the truths easily graspable (It's the preacher in me...). However, I suppose I once again come back to the idea of virtue in difficulty (wherever I read that).
Identification, Please
This is, quite simply put, why I don't like FPS games. There is no character through whom I can care about the world. I, as Kemp Lyons, do not care about that mess of pixels and binary in the games I play. But if I have a character to play as, I can care through him or her. Sean Sands says it in a little more scholarly, less personal way than I would have and I'm grateful for that.
There may be more. I'm not sure. But these two articles really stuck out to me today.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Statement of Purpose.
Apparently when you apply for graduate schools, they want to hear your purposes for yourself. This is something I wrote when I didn't know what else to write. So it got a little silly... Enjoy.
When I was in third grade, I covered the backs of my notepads with drawings of Mario levels. I was fascinated by the world of Mario thanks, in no small part, to the machinations of Squaresoft’s Super Mario RPG. I have viewed all of my life as a journey toward the illustrious goal of creating and writing for video games.
I’m qualified because nobody else is qualified. Name one game that exists that I could not have made on my own with a team of monkeys. You can’t. Not a one. Because everyone in the game industry are talentless hacks. That’s right. I said it. You can only remake the shooter so many times, American games industry. (And the same goes for you, Japan. RPGs are cool, but let’s grow up, shall we?)
After a grad school education, I plan on rocking the world of games. I will design so many creative titles that you’ll think Shigeru Miyamoto himself was only a toddler doodling on his parents’ walls with permanent marker. Will Wright will look like the nerd that he is and David Jaffe will shut his big fat trap. Instead, I will be lauded as the man who saved video games.
I can make better art games. I can make better simulations. I can make better story-centric-forever-long-JRPGs. I can make better open world games. I can make genres that you haven’t even heard about because I am a creative.
Unlike the rest of this stupid industry dominated by morons who would rather stare at a computer screen than gaze into the beauty of the nature around them. Jason Rohrer’s got it right. We all need to live in little huts on the edge of the country, making games about how much we wish we could play with our daughters. Or more like Jonathon Blow. Make something that can provoke thought out of this Neanderthal pea-sized brain in my head.
When I was in third grade, I covered the backs of my notepads with drawings of Mario levels. I was fascinated by the world of Mario thanks, in no small part, to the machinations of Squaresoft’s Super Mario RPG. I have viewed all of my life as a journey toward the illustrious goal of creating and writing for video games.
I’m qualified because nobody else is qualified. Name one game that exists that I could not have made on my own with a team of monkeys. You can’t. Not a one. Because everyone in the game industry are talentless hacks. That’s right. I said it. You can only remake the shooter so many times, American games industry. (And the same goes for you, Japan. RPGs are cool, but let’s grow up, shall we?)
After a grad school education, I plan on rocking the world of games. I will design so many creative titles that you’ll think Shigeru Miyamoto himself was only a toddler doodling on his parents’ walls with permanent marker. Will Wright will look like the nerd that he is and David Jaffe will shut his big fat trap. Instead, I will be lauded as the man who saved video games.
I can make better art games. I can make better simulations. I can make better story-centric-forever-long-JRPGs. I can make better open world games. I can make genres that you haven’t even heard about because I am a creative.
Unlike the rest of this stupid industry dominated by morons who would rather stare at a computer screen than gaze into the beauty of the nature around them. Jason Rohrer’s got it right. We all need to live in little huts on the edge of the country, making games about how much we wish we could play with our daughters. Or more like Jonathon Blow. Make something that can provoke thought out of this Neanderthal pea-sized brain in my head.
Friday, December 18, 2009
On goals.
Every time I look forward to a new phase of life, I tend to write back here on the good ol' blog.
(Side note: it drives me crazy when people put the apostrophe on the wrong side of the contraction. Like 'ol. I've seen it.)
Today was my last day of work until January 11, when I will triumphantly stride back into a newly reorganized CAMS to greet the J-term-ers. So that leaves me with almost a month of free time to manage.
I've been looking ahead to this time, thinking about what I want to do with it and I needed to write it out (so why not publicly? This is the digital age, after all...).
Goals for Winter Break 09-10
1. Read the Qu'ran. I need to expand my mind like my public school friends had to do.
2. Finish applying to Grad schools. Which leads into the next goals...
3. Make a game. A short game, naturally, but something to add to the ol' portfolio. I may actually run some beta versions of the games I have on paper, too.
4. Write. Every day. Again. Some more. Blog, journal entry, poem, script, ideas, short story, anything.
5. Ideate. I need to keep stoking the fire of my imagination again. I want to lead and cast vision (How did that metaphor even start? Casting vision? Flicking the fishing rod of our eyes into the stream of the future? I dunno...)
6. Read a fiction book that isn't part of some canon of things I'm "supposed" to read. I can't even remember the last fiction book I read, let alone the last fiction book that I wasn't forcing myself through...
7. Keep thinking about things. All kinds of things: God, leadership, life, writing. Anything but getting stuck in ruts of thoughts.
8. Love people.
9. Have fun. All this goal setting scares me and exhausts me before the break has even started... Sheesh. I just bought Rock Band 2 and I need to finish The World Ends With You. Lots of fun to be had.
Anyway. That's my list. It's longer than I expected, but that's what I get for wanting to be better at a lot of things...
(Side note: it drives me crazy when people put the apostrophe on the wrong side of the contraction. Like 'ol. I've seen it.)
Today was my last day of work until January 11, when I will triumphantly stride back into a newly reorganized CAMS to greet the J-term-ers. So that leaves me with almost a month of free time to manage.
I've been looking ahead to this time, thinking about what I want to do with it and I needed to write it out (so why not publicly? This is the digital age, after all...).
Goals for Winter Break 09-10
1. Read the Qu'ran. I need to expand my mind like my public school friends had to do.
2. Finish applying to Grad schools. Which leads into the next goals...
3. Make a game. A short game, naturally, but something to add to the ol' portfolio. I may actually run some beta versions of the games I have on paper, too.
4. Write. Every day. Again. Some more. Blog, journal entry, poem, script, ideas, short story, anything.
5. Ideate. I need to keep stoking the fire of my imagination again. I want to lead and cast vision (How did that metaphor even start? Casting vision? Flicking the fishing rod of our eyes into the stream of the future? I dunno...)
6. Read a fiction book that isn't part of some canon of things I'm "supposed" to read. I can't even remember the last fiction book I read, let alone the last fiction book that I wasn't forcing myself through...
7. Keep thinking about things. All kinds of things: God, leadership, life, writing. Anything but getting stuck in ruts of thoughts.
8. Love people.
9. Have fun. All this goal setting scares me and exhausts me before the break has even started... Sheesh. I just bought Rock Band 2 and I need to finish The World Ends With You. Lots of fun to be had.
Anyway. That's my list. It's longer than I expected, but that's what I get for wanting to be better at a lot of things...
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