The Continuing Adventures of Dr Dzoe

As I mentioned, I’ve started working on some video projects.  In preparing for this, I’ve read a lot of books lately about all aspects of making movies.  Here’s a special edition of What I’ve Been Reading that covers those books.  I haven’t finished all of them yet, didn’t read all of each of them, but here they are anyway.

– The blog of Film Crit Hulk.  Okay, this is cheating, as it’s not technically speaking a book.  But Film Crit Hulk has to be about the best film critic online.  And the stuff he writes is huge – long essays that are in effect short books. ften these are on different aspects of making movies, things like cinematography.  His two-part series on scriptwriting is superb.  And it’s all written in a style that you’ll either find amusing or annoying – he writes in the persona of the Incredible Hulk from comics.  I found it amusing.  Highly recommended.  Google Film Crit Hulk to find him.

– “The Lean Forward Moment: Create Compelling Stories for Film, TV, and the Web” by Normal Hollyn.  This studies the making of movies, focusing largely on directing but also covering some cinematography, looking at how a scene focuses on a pivotal moment, what the author calls the lean forward moment.  Enjoyable, but not earth-shaking.

– “Recording and Producing Audio for Media” by Stanley Alten.  A fairly dry but informative book on all the details of audio.  I learned a lot about a subject that I did not know.  Never did finish this one.

– “The Visual Story” by Bruce Block.  This looks at the various visual elements that go into a scene.  It breaks it down into seven different elements including things like color, movement, line, and shape, and shows examples of how these elements can be used to create desired moods in movies.  Very good stuff.

– “Cinematography” by Blain Brown.  I loved this book.  It’s a detailed description of the elements of cinematography, including detailed discussions of the technologies involved.  I learned things here about photography that I didn’t know.  A bit dry at times, but amazingly informative.

– “In the Blink of an Eye” by Walter Murch.  This is about film editing.  Wonderful philosophical stuff, a great theory of editing, lots of interesting stuff.  A quick read as well.  Highly recommended.

– “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” by Peter Biskind.  This one’s a history of the New Hollywood movement of the late 60’s and 70’s, a movement that brought us such masterpieces as The Godfather and Raging Bull.  There’s no lessons about making movies here, but marvelous stories about the people who do it.

– “Down and Dirty Pictures” by Peter Biskind.  A follow-up on the above, this one covers the rise and fall of the independent movie movement of the 90’s.  Not as much fun as the other one, but entertaining enough.

– “Adventures in the Screen Trade” and “The Big Picture” by William Goldman.  William Goldman’s an incredibly accomplished screenwriter whose works range from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Princess Bride.  In these books he gives a gossipy discussion of how Hollywood makes its movies, including detailed stories of the films he’s made.  Again, not much help for the actual making of movies, but quite entertaining.  The first of the two was much better than the second.

– “Directing Actors” by Judith Weston.  A very nice book about how one should give direction to actors to get the best results from them.  I’ve learned a lot from this.

– “Film Directing Shot By Shot” by Steven Katz.  All about laying out shots in a movie.  Really useful – in addition to discussing general elements of shots, it takes you through various situations (e.g., scenes between two characters) and discusses all the ways they can be shot and how the shots can be combined.  Recommended.

– “Making Movies” by Sidney Lumet.  Lumet directed a whole bunch of Hollywood pictures in a bunch of different genres.  In this book, he takes you through all the steps he goes through in directing, from selecting a project to what he does to help market the movie.  Really quite excellent on directing.

– “Acting in Film” by Michael Caine.  This is based on transcripts from a bunch of conversations Caine had about acting.  Good stuff, emphasizing a lot of the differences between acting for stage and film.

– “The Art of Dramatic Writing” by Lajos Egri.  More about playwriting, but applicable to screenwriting as well.  A nice solid approach to making sure that there’s drama in your dramas.

– “Screenwriting 101” by Film Crit Hulk.  As noted above, Film Crit Hulk is an analyst of films who writes in the persona of the Incredible Hulk.  In this book, available only as an e-book, he has put together a bunch of stuff from his blog, all about constructing stories and films.  I found it excellent.

– “Master Shots vols 1-3,” “Master Shots” the various iBooks versions, by Christopher Kenworthy.  I absolutely loved these.  Each of vols 1-3 look at 100 shots from various movies and discuss the effect they have and how to make the shot.  Then the e-books are even better – each one takes 25 of the shots from the other books, includes the information from the paper books, and then Kenworthy re-made the shots with actors.  The iBooks versions includes the video of the shot, then includes a version of the video with Kenworthy providing voice-over commentary discussing it.  All in all, consider this a set of cookbooks of useful shots.  But even better, after going through these, you start to understand what makes for good shots.  These books gave me a better understanding of setting up shots than anything else I’ve come across.  Special bonus: I sent Kenworthy a question about this (his email is on his website) and he sent back a nice friendly note that answered my question.  So special bonus.

There’s probably more, and I’ll add to this list as I read more.  But that’s a good start.

My latest obsession these past few months has been making movies.

It really started when I took the summer of 2011 off from work, in what I called my pretirement summer.  Among the things that I did that summer was to get heavily into photography.  I learned a lot, bought a lot of camera equipment, and took a lot of pictures.

Flash forward to six months back.  I got a part in a local community theater production of “Twelfth Night.”  I had a terrific time and I think we put on a good show.

Some of the people I met through the play were participating in the Washington DC 48 Hour Film Project.  This is a short film competition in which you have 48 hours to make a 4-7 minute movie.  At the beginning of a weekend, you get a random genre.  You are given a character name, a line that must appear, and a prop that must be used.  Then you’re off, and you have to deliver the finished movie 48 hours later. It’s an endurance test, but a whole lot of fun.

I got into it to act, but given that I had some fancy cameras that could also do video, I ended up taking some footage as well.  This in spite of the fact that I knew next to nothing about taking video.

Here’s a link to the film that we made, a short horror movie called “Influenced”:

http://vimeo.com/65947813

Honestly, it wasn’t great.  There’s very little sense of visual story-telling.  The technical stuff is far from perfect, the script could use a few more rounds of polishing, and the acting shows a lack of sleep.  All not surprising, given that we had very little experience in making movies and very little time.

But the relative ease of the task with equipment that I already largely owned was a revelation.  You really can make a movie these days with the kind of cameras that I own, and the other equipment that is needed is well within the grasp of a hobbyist.

I got to talking with another person working on our film, and she was similarly amazed at how possible it was.  So we decided to put together a group to try it ourselves, only this time without the 48 hour deadline.

And so my film obsession was born.  More shortly on what I’ve done since, and what’s in the works.

Sheesh, it’s been almost a year since I’ve updated the reading list.  Let’s see what I can do…

Ebooks on iPad:

- The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver.  If you paid much attention to the election, you’ve heard of Silver.  This is an interesting book about making predictions based on statistics.  Good stuff.

- Snow Crash and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.  I love Stephenson’s work.  I had read Snow Crash before, one of the great cyberpunk novels.  This was my first time reading The Diamond Age, which is all about nano-technology.  Both good reading.

- The Big Short by Michael Lewis.  A non-fiction that covers a bunch of guys who managed to make fortunes from predicting the collapse of the subprime mortgage market.  Also a rather scary window into the world of high finance.

- The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond.  Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, is one of my favorite non-fiction authors.  This one covers the way traditional peoples live (traditional meaning that they live in societies that have not yet reached the level of a fully organized nation-state), what we can learn from them, and how our societies have evolved since that phase.  Interesting stuff, but I enjoyed his other books more.

- Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold.  One of my favorite fiction authors.  This one is the latest in her Vokosigan series.  A fun book, but not as good as others in the series.

- The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.  A fun little literary mystery with fantasy elements, set in a world where reality and novels overlap in interesting ways.

- The Commitment and American Savage by Dan Savage.  Savage is one of my guilty pleasures.  He started as a sex advice columnist, and still has that gig, but also writes on a number of political topics, most of which are related to sex in one way or another.  The Commitment is about gay marriage (Savage is gay and, now, married), American Savage a collection of essays on various topics.  Savage is an entertaining author, but there’s certainly strong sexual content in both of these.

- John Quincy Adams by Harlow Giles Unger.  An excellent biography of one of the giants of early America.  Also, this is far different from any other biography of a former president that I’ve read.  Most such bios spend most of their words on the presidency (except for those where the president has been a general in one of our wars: in those cases, the wartime may take up most of the book).  In this one, by contrast, Adams’s presidency is dealt with in one short chapter, and instead the book focuses on the wide variety of other things that Adams did for us, from when he became a US diplomat at the age of 14 until his death, which took place in the Capitol.  This was a lifetime of service indeed.  A fascinating figure, and a great book.

- NOS4A2 by Joe Hill.  I actually like Hill’s books better than that of his famous father, Stephen King.  I enjoyed this one, which was horror with some fantasy elements.  A big book, but a fun read.

On paper:

- Light, Science, and Magic by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver, and Paul Fuqua.  I actually read a lot of books that don’t make it here, books that I read to learn more about the various hobbies and passions that I’ve picked up over the years.  In the last two years, that’s been related to photography, movie-making, and various programming tasks.  As I said, I won’t go into those in details, but this one really stands out.  For my way of learning (I prefer to go from theory to practice), this has been the best book on photography I’ve ever read.  It explains how light behaves, then goes from that to detailed discussions of how to light and photograph different types of subjects.  Absolutely terrific, and strongly recommended if you want to get serious about photography.

Audiobooks

- Agent Zigzag by Ben MacIntyre.  The true story of a master thief who became one of the most effective British spies during WWII.  Very interesting stuff.

- Alas Babylon by Pat Frank.  A classic post-nuclear-war story, written in 1960.  The racial attitudes are a bit dated (not terribly so – Frank was based on this a liberal on racial matters, but a 1960 liberal on race is still backwards by today’s standards), but otherwise a good read.

– Bel Canto by Ann Pratchett.  A group of Latin American revolutionaries capture the audience at an opera recital.  Fascinating character interactions ensue.  A terrific book, and one that is not well-served by this brief description.

- Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.  One of my favorite books ever.  I’ve read it before, never listened to the audio book.  If you haven’t read it, do so: it’s both hilarious and heart-breakingly tragic.  The audiobook was well worth the time too.

– The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.  All about the great Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893, and a serial killer who ran a death-hotel nearby.  Wonderful stuff about the brilliant minds who built the exposition and the monster who killed many young women who came to Chicago at the time.

- State of Wonder by Ann Pratchett.  A great take on Heart of Darkness has a doctor from a drug company going into the jungle to find a researcher who is not reporting back.

- Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis.  A maddening story about a religious huckster.  American classic, and worth the time.

- The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.  Science fiction set in a post-global-warming world where the icecaps are melted and biotech rules the day.  Quite enjoyable.

Phew.  Gotta keep up with these better.

For our last stop, we drove through South Carolina to North Carolina where we stopped for the night at Raleigh, visiting our last special guest star, Kate.

I surprised her by showing up at her door in full-cowboy:

We visited the Raleigh Museum of Science, which sponsored Kate’s recent paleo dig and where we got to peak at the lab where they are preparing the samples.  Then a couple of meals, a bit of shopping, and a grand time was had by all.

Then after one night in Raleigh, we hit the road for one last leg, got home, and the Great Confederate Road Trip was over.

Here’s the scorecard:

– 11 states traveled through: Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida (briefly), Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia.

– Seven different hotel rooms in seven different cities: Nashville, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, New Orleans, Atlanta, Raleigh.

– Around 4000 miles driven.  (I’m sitting here in the Lexus dealership waiting for maintenance to be done on my car – I’ve past 5000 miles on this car in record time.)

– 14 days total.

– We criss-crossed Virginia: we started on the Bay and drove west to the Tennessee border on the way out, came from the southern border to Northern Virginia on the way back.

– Two truly great meals (in Austin and New Orleans), lots of other good meals, lots of bad road food eaten.

– Four special guest stars (Lucy Kirkman, Andy Dzikiewicz, Jen Bon, Kate Dzikiewicz).

– An uncountable number of dead bugs splattered across the front of my car.

– Plenty of fun and good memories.

But all in all, I’m ready to be home for a while…

From New Orleans, our road trip took us across several of the Confederate states.  Louisiana to Mississippi to Alabama to Florida to Alabama to Georgia.

Wait – did you say Florida?  That’s not on the route.

Well, yes.  But I really wanted to be complete, to hit every Confederate state.  And we were going within five miles of the Florida border, so it was a quick detour, cross the state line, turn around and go back to the highway, and voila, we’ve hit every Confederate state.

Julie thought it was daft.  Ah well, not the first time I’ve done something she thought was daft.

Then, after a day’s driving, we hit Atlanta.  And had much fun, including our next road trip special guest star, Jen Bon.

Jen has been daughter Kate’s best friend since pretty much kindergarten.  She’s now in grad school for chemistry at Emory outside Atlanta, so we took the opportunity to take her out for sushi.  And a delightful meal it was – Jen’s good people.

For our full day in Atlanta, we did the following:

– Took the CNN tour, where I got a chance to play newscaster.

– Saw the Atlanta Cyclorama, a painting the size of a football field of the Battle of Atlanta.  Here’s a small piece of it, complete with tour guide to give a sense of scale:

– Visited Stone Mountain, gigantic carving of the heroes of the Confederacy.  (Atlanta is the city of Big Art.)

– Visited the High Museum of Art, a marvelously designed art museum with lots of good stuff.  (Julie called this her favorite of the many art museums we visited on this trip.)

– While we visited the High Museum, we found that it was in an arts center that included several theaters.  We took the opportunity to see “What I Learned in Paris,” a new play being put on there.  The play was a romantic comedy set against the election of Maynard Jackson, the first African American mayor of Atlanta.  The play had a real Shaw feel to it, being about an arrogant smart guy who is outdone by the life force of a dynamic woman.  Any resemblance to your author is entirely coincidental.  Great stuff.

– Enjoyed the view of the Atlanta skyline from our hotel room.

All in all, Atlanta was much fun.

Wednesday night, Julie and I were getting on the elevator on the way to our room.  A group of women who had clearly just been on an Anne Rice tour said, “Wait a moment, how do we know you aren’t a vampire?”

“Ah,” I said, in my best Transylvanian accent, “Vat do you tink you could do if I vere?”

They laughed, and then the elevator got to my floor.  As Julie and I stepped out, I said, still in full-Drac: “But you ladies are lucky.  I have already chosen my meal for the evening,” and as they watched through the closing elevator door, I bit Julie on the neck.

We finally got out of Texas.  We’re now homeward bound.  But because just heading home isn’t enough fun, we’ve got more stops to go.

When I first planned this trip and mapped out how to drive to San Antonio, my various mapping programs offered two main routes.  The first was go west from Virginia, then south to Texas.  The second was go south from Virginia, then west to Texas.  We decided to take both routes in succession, doing the loop counter-clockwise.

That southern loop happens to pass through New Orleans.  So we stopped on Tuesday at New Orleans and spent the day there Wednesday.

So what did we do?

– Went for a walk on Bourbon Street upon arrival Tuesday evening.  Tons of bars, tons of strip joints, tons of live music, tons of tourists enjoying all of the above.  Not really our scene, but fun to see nevertheless.

– Spent Wednesday morning at the New Orleans Museum of Art.  A surprisingly nice collection – we enjoyed it quite a bit.

– Had beignets at Cafe Du Monde.  These are fried dough covered with powdered sugar.  Yum!

– Took a bus tour of New Orleans.  Enjoyable, though it included harrowing descriptions of Katrina, a bit too recent to be fun.  I did enjoy seeing a bunch of places from the show Treme, of which I am a fan.

On the tour, we stopped at one of the New Orleans cemeteries, where they use above-the-ground tombs like this.

Seeing one that was unoccupied, I decided to try it on for size.

– Did a little shopping on Royal Street.  Bought hats.

– Visited St Louis’s Cathedral, supposedly the oldest continuing operating cathedral in America.

– Took a mule-drawn tour through New Orleans.  Our guide was superb – he’d tell some outlandish story about a culinary concoction invented at some restaurant that we were passing and turn back to us and shout: “Are you hungry yet?”  Then he’d pull up by some shop or bar and the proprietor would come out, tell us what a great guy the guide is, and make some snide and very funny comment about him.  Here he is with Julie.

– Had an absolutely superb meal at Nola.  Highly recommended.  Would be the best meal by far of this trip if the dinner at Bohanan’s in San Antonio hadn’t also been so amazing.  The two were the best meals I’ve had in some time, though.

– Wandered Bourbon Street again.  Stopped by a jazz bar and listened to a set that included a bunch of my father’s old dixieland favorites.

All in all, a terrific day in the Big Easy.  Julie and I agree that New Orleans would be worth another trip sometime, well worth spending more than just one day.

It must be Austin!

We left San Antonio on Sunday, stopped at Buc Ee’s, an amazing roadside stop that may be the beef jerky capital of the world, and hit Austin.  First stop: the South Congress shopping area, where I cowboyed up, getting a pair of boots and associated accessories.  Julie and I also stopped at an open-air bar where there was some of that famous Austin live music playing, leading to one of those wonderful golden moments when you really can’t think of anywhere on earth you’d rather be, or anything else you’d rather be doing.

We then spent the whole day on Monday looking around Austin.  It started with a massage for me, then a little more shopping.  Then we went to Zilker Park, where they have an excellent botanical garden:

They also have a delightful fresh-water spring-fed pool, a huge place where Andy and I swam off the sweat from the walk through the garden:

We then caught a quick tour of the Texas Capitol.  (I’ve lived in Northern Virginia for most of my life and still haven’t visited the US Capitol, but have now visited the Texas one.  Go figure.)

After that, it was dinner.  And then, the famous Austin bat bridge!

You see, they have this bridge in Austin where, a few years back, they added expansion joints.  It turned out that those joints were just the right size to attract a huge colony of bats.  So for many months out of the year, approximately 1.5 million bats live in the Congress Street Bridge, hiding in the joints during the day from predators, coming out in a vast swarm every evening.

We took a bat cruise, which allowed us to enjoy both the bats and the beautiful skyline from Lady Bird Lake, which in some trick that I haven’t figured out, is somehow also the Colorado River.  Here’s some shots of both skyline and bats:

Then Tuesday, we dropped off Andy at the airport and hit the road again.  Where to?  Tune in next time…

It’s been a few days since I updated, due to problems with network.  That’s now corrected, so it’s time for an update.

After Dallas, Julie and I drove to San Antonio.  San Antonio held the reason for the road trip – a convention of encaustic artists.  That’s Julie’s medium of choice, so she wanted to go.  They also had an art show related to the conference, and Julie got a painting in, so we had to attend the opening.

At San Antonio, we were joined by our next road trip special guest star.

Andy decided to fly on down and join us to get a little flavor of Texas.  So we picked him up at the San Antonio airport and then, while Julie went to her encaustic convention, Andy and I saw the city.

So what did we see?

Well, there’s this old mission in San Antonio.  They had this big fight there, and a lot of people were killed.  It played an important role in Texas history.  But what was the name… hmmm… I can’t seem to…

Remember… The…

Naw, I guess I forgot.

We also spent a fair amount of time at the San Antonio Riverwalk.  San Antonio has a small river that runs through it, and they have a set of sidewalks, about ten feet below street level, that run beside the river.  At places there’s shops and restaurants, and it’s like a magic little water city that lives just below the streets above, streets that are far less magical than the river walk and, in some places, a bit rundown.  It’s a marvelous place to wander and to have a drink or a meal.

We also visited a giant tower overlooking the city (only so-so – San Antonio doesn’t have much of a skyline to justify the scenic overlook).

Then on Friday, Julie was in her conference and Andy and I drove out to the Natural Bridge caverns.  Which turned out to be a rather excellent cave:

But there’s also a great ropes course and zipline that we did – that’s Andy getting ready to walk a tightrope about fifty feet off the ground:

There was also a nearby jungle safari, where you drive through a large open area full of animals.  Which, given that one of the major reasons for this roadtrip was the fact that I just bought myself a convertible, we did with the top down.

It was a truly Texas day, in a place where the buffalo roam, the deer and the antelope play, and the sky was not cloudy all day.  Yes, I did sing to the animals – why do you ask?

I took lots of pictures, and often had the curious experience of looking through the camera snapping shots, then lowering the camera to find that the subject had gotten a whole lot closer than I realized.  Like, a foot away.

A bit disconcerting, that.

That evening, we joined Julie at the opening of her art show.  Where we were once again joined by our niece Lucy, who drove down from Dallas to attend the opening, lend support, and join us for dinner by the Riverwalk where we were serenaded by wandering mariachi bands.  Here’s a bunch of shots from that evening.

Is Andy contemplating the meaning of life, or just bored with all that art talk?

The next day, Julie was in her conference, and Andy was taking a day to wander San Antonio by himself.  So I visited some of the missions that were built three centuries ago, missions that formed the heart of San Antonio.  I found myself surprisingly moved.  While I’m not religious, this was a place where simple men went to do their best to bring God and civilization to a strange people in a land far from their homes.  I’m sure the men were not all perfect – the last few years have brought harsh evidence of just how bad a priest can be – but I believe that their efforts sanctified the places where they worked.

Here’s a modern day Franciscan monk: I bought Julie a necklace from him.

(I suspect that the placement of the light above his head is not accidental, and that he knows just where to stand when a tourist asks to take his picture.)

Then it was one last San Antonio dinner, and off to Austin and another blog post.

(And oh, if you ever find yourself in San Antonio, do yourself a favor and have dinner at Bohanan’s.  A truly amazing steakhouse – Julie and Andy agreed that it was the best steak they ever tasted, and I’m not inclined to argue the point.)