THRILLBENT IS LIVE!
How do you engage this brave new world of comics?!
Go to http://www.thrillbent.com/
Click on the title you want to read.
Turn the pages with your arrow keys. Just like pages. Left and right.*
Done.
...
Well, that was anticlimactic.
*******************************
Which is, of course, the point. No music. No motion comics. Just pages of art and words.
We're not trying to re-invent comics. We're trying to hack out the tools by which some other, younger ferocious person will re-invent comics.
Content Density (look, ma, I made up a term!) at this point will run to roughly a regular paper issue's worth of material a month. It will vary in the future, but right now this allows us to contract artists, colorists, etc at a rate with which they are familiar and comfortable.
The updates are always in multi-page bursts, giving you enough new material to feel like you got a chunk of story each time you swing by. You can read about Mark's thinking on the size of these updates here. Personally I'd chalk our adoption of this structure up to Warren Ellis' FREAKANGELS. In my personal design notes, this was one of the first "We do it like THAT!" notes.
No advertising yet, as we're still tweaking the page construction. Yes, I know that means there's no income from this thing. Until we figure out the best way to get the material out to the humans, Mark and I are supporting the burn rate ourselves. He sold his fantastic comic collection. I am using the residuals from the Catwoman movie.
Up to you who has committed the greater sin.
There are a couple ways to optimize your viewing experience, in both the pdf download of LUTHER (and future pdfs) and on the THRILLBENT site.
PDF: In our preferred iOS pdf reader of choice, GOODREADER, you just tap the edge of the screen and the slides lay over quite nicely. The changing panels, additional dialogue balloons, etc all work as they should. Most tablet pdf readers work the same way.
If you're viewing the pdf on your computer, on whatever pdf viewer you're using you want FULL SCREEN and SLIDESHOW settings. Again, page advances will be with the arrow keys. I'd note that you can also open the file with the Chrome browser, grab that FULLSCREEN setting (farthest left on the blue bar at the bottom of the page) and it plays pretty damn fine.
Our comics are, in a word, dumb.
LIVE COMICS ON THE SITE: Blow your browser out to Fullscreen. Getting rid of the bookmarks bar will also help -- basically, it'll automatically resize to whatever screen you've got open, but it'll look better the more screen real estate you give it. Then click the arrow keys. Done. It reads like a dream on your tablet in browser mode also, with tap page turns or swipes.
IN THE APP: That's not quite ready yet. But it's getting there.
Okay, that should answer any questions. Enjoy, and as always your feedback is critical.
* (You can also click on the edges of the images, but I prefer the arrow keys, as it's more like turning a page. I am obsessed with skeumorphism in new media.)
Tuesday, May 01, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Oh, Hi. I'm the Sidekick.
In case you hadn't heard, Mark Waid is thinking of doing some digital comics.
Heh.
In a small way I've been aiding Mark as he's developed these ideas for the last three years. Any long-time reader of my blog knows I'm a systems geek. I coined the phrase 4GM, comparing new media models to asymmetrical warfare. Wrote about Netflix taking over TV back in 2007 or so. I'm fascinated by the way older content distributors and providers continually confuse the distribution system with the content -- hell, the WGA has chalked up some truly epic bungles with that mindset.
The only thing that's kept me from larger experimentation with alternate medium delivery is that, ironically, I'm running a TV show. Granted, it's one of the only independently produced TV shows in the US, but it's still distributed straight into your cable-box old-school style.
So, instead, I've been kibitzing Mark during three years of shared lunches. Mark had his own reasons for getting into digital. My interest in a new comics model came out of my work on trying to figure out new TV distribution models. Looking at other mediums, I kept hearing about how digitally distributed, serialized comics on the web wouldn't work ...
... and I kept looking at Penny Arcade and PvP and my personal favorite, Something Positive, and seeing independent humans making a living. Better than a living, in some cases.
"But John," I'd hear, "those are three, maybe four panel gag comics made for niche audiences, which only support individual creators, not companies."*
Yes, they are. They are serialized narratives combining writing and pictures which allow their creators to make a living telling stories. Which just happen to be digitally delivered.
If one man can kill a bear, any man can kill a bear, so to speak. I have to admit, Mark's got a multi-pronged business and artistic approach to this new model. I'm still humping the same idea I've been obsessed with for years -- the democratization of the creative industry.**
Now, of course, indie comics take years to build up an audience. And it's grueling work, with a high risk of failure. Sure. That's called capitalism, and it's awesome, and please show me the document guaranteeing your mass-market comic won't also flame-out no matter how much promotion it gets.
But although the webcomics gave us the first plausible premise (and now you should be reading John Robb's work on open-source warfare), Mark wanted to go even further. What were the artistic merits of moving to digital as a delivery system?
Gutting the cost of entry allowed for more artistic experimentation and variety, of course. But he's been doing this for 25+ years, and he's a shitload more ambitious than I am. That's when he found Balak, and we began to trade this graphic back and forth obsessively:
about DIGITAL COMICS by ~Balak01 on deviantART
This work began to nail down some of the rules of digital comics. Mark was the one who actually quantified most of these over the course of endless emails -- I'm just good at pithy summaries.
1.) Like paper comics, the reader should control the pace of the information in digital comics.
2.) Using layers, the creator can pull focus and create additional dimensions of storytelling, including time and subjective perception.
Motion Comics, those filthy bastards, fell into the trap of mistaking medium for content. The digital screen is made for TV and movies. Therefore, comics on a digital screen should look like TV and movies. Add animation and voices!
Hence, monstrous hybrid.
If, instead, you just treat the screen as an odd-shaped page which can be instantly updated and is conveniently in almost every home and office on earth, you get a much more accurate idea of how to proceed.
Of course, none of this is revolutionary -- I'm just tracking how we hacked away at it, amateurishly and arduously, over three years. Along the way, the Kindle started hitting critical mass, and we tore that model apart. Despite there being some comic successes on the Kindle -- manga in particular transferred well -- formatting issues prevented comic artists from taking full potential of that distribution channel. Of course, now that the new Kindle Fire is moving them over to an HTML-based publishing model, things should get much easier. Pablo Defindini has done outstanding work demonstrating how comics might use responsive design on the new readers.
But the Kindle lesson, in the rise of the Kindle-only million-seller author, was a valuable one: you don't have to be famous to make a living telling stories. You just have to be famous enough, with a devoted enough following.
Then the iPad hit. Comixology did a great job of getting out front on the tablet comics market. But they were forced to figure out a way to convert pages laid out for a larger space down to that seven-odd inch screen. That led to "guided panel view" which was pretty spiffy. However, in TV and movies, we call that "pan and scan", and no one's fond of it. Because it's not how the writer and artist meant for you to experience the story.
This tied in to another discussion we were having, summarized by Mark in an email:
3.) "We live in a wide-screen world. Use it."
Most long-form story-telling comics on the web were essentially back-door physical world comics. The Blind Ferret guys (very smart humans), Warren Ellis' Freak Angels, all of them were laid out for easy reproduction in a classically formatted portrait alignment hard-copy publication. They used the screen to distribute, but they did not use the canvas of the screen. (This is all a pretentious way of complaining about scrolling down when reading each page of Freak Angels).
And sure, you want to be able to publish that hard-copy some day. But again, that weird-sized widescreen potential comics page is in almost every house and office in the Western World. There's no inherent advantage to portrait view. Shouldn't the more widely distributed canvas have the artistic advantage?
So we experimented with resolutions and orientations. Friends of mine, Geoff Thorne and Todd Harris, developed some sample art, 8 pages of a comic with chuffah dialogue, to lock down landscape presentation, art resolution, a bunch of the artist-y numbers. Web designer Gary Henderson developed our first story software models, trying to incorporate additional materials such as scripts and layouts into the primary presentation. At the same time Mark chatted with artist Jeremy Rock, who was experimenting with how to create image flow on landscape pages which then seamlessly joined into readable portrait pages for the hard-copy phase of the comic's life. While I screwed around with e-readers and grind-it-out bullshit, Mark had Jeremy re-draw one of his BOOM! stories, "Luther", experimenting with the ideas of information flow (the staggered captions, etc.) We then plugged it into the reader, and bob's your uncle, a creatively satisfying longform story made for the screen. Not the first, not the best, but a reproducible model, done as a layered pdf. (None of this was rocket science, but it was ... fiddly.)
About this time, Joe Quesada at Marvel decided to drive the company much more aggressively into digital comics, and Mark began working with those lads. Mark changed the way he developed and wrote comics to take advantage of the new style. Momentum shifted, and now you have the the great -- and I mean goddam GREAT -- Infinite Comics experiment at Marvel.
Meanwhile, I was screwing with distribution, trying to live up to one of my pet theories about media:
4.) Information should be dumb.
By dumb I mean "as platform independent as possible." Your comic should work well in a pdf reader on a tablet or laptop or desktop computer, on a website, in an app. Your workflow should allow you to easily slot your comic into as many different platforms as seamlessly as possible. As cool as that Infinite Comic Nova comic is, there's nothing in there you can't do with a bone-dumb pdf- reader. It's all about execution. A reconception of how you can tell stories graphically now that you can experiment with layers and time.
Also, there should be different ways to make a living at this -- you shouldn't have to be waiting around, gambling on prestige print collection, before you can make a living telling your story. That's the stuff we're still working at now, and will be the subject of future posts and some of Mark's future announcements.
So that's the rough version of how we got here. Mark's the one driving this, with the able Lori Matsumoto handling the technical stuff, while I'll continue to fiddle over here in the corner. We'll be referencing a lot of very smart humans who've been working on (and succeeding at) this for much longer than we've been playing at it. Some of this is going to work, some of it is going to fail miserably, but we'll show you all the spinning gears as we go.
Mark's been gracious enough to include one of my new webcomics on his site when it launches. Mine will be nowhere near as artistically mature as his work. It'll be a comic, written and formatted for widescreen, serialized for online delivery, but not as aggressive in playing with narrative flow. Frankly, I don't have the chops for what Mark's doing. But it'll be fun as hell. I hope we manage to work out enough of the kinks to help you make your comic someday, tell your story.
*New rule -- if your own model is based on selling books to an audience which numbers less than one-tench of Wil Wheaton's Twitter followers, you do not get to call anybody else "niche."
** I was a stand-up comic, the ultimate freelancer, hopping from club to club, booking my own gigs. That experience burned freelancer instinct into my DNA: how many gigs in how many weeks to make my nut? To pay the mortgage, to put a little away? I love metrics. What can be measured can be managed, etc. etc.
Heh.
In a small way I've been aiding Mark as he's developed these ideas for the last three years. Any long-time reader of my blog knows I'm a systems geek. I coined the phrase 4GM, comparing new media models to asymmetrical warfare. Wrote about Netflix taking over TV back in 2007 or so. I'm fascinated by the way older content distributors and providers continually confuse the distribution system with the content -- hell, the WGA has chalked up some truly epic bungles with that mindset.
The only thing that's kept me from larger experimentation with alternate medium delivery is that, ironically, I'm running a TV show. Granted, it's one of the only independently produced TV shows in the US, but it's still distributed straight into your cable-box old-school style.
So, instead, I've been kibitzing Mark during three years of shared lunches. Mark had his own reasons for getting into digital. My interest in a new comics model came out of my work on trying to figure out new TV distribution models. Looking at other mediums, I kept hearing about how digitally distributed, serialized comics on the web wouldn't work ...
... and I kept looking at Penny Arcade and PvP and my personal favorite, Something Positive, and seeing independent humans making a living. Better than a living, in some cases.
"But John," I'd hear, "those are three, maybe four panel gag comics made for niche audiences, which only support individual creators, not companies."*
Yes, they are. They are serialized narratives combining writing and pictures which allow their creators to make a living telling stories. Which just happen to be digitally delivered.
If one man can kill a bear, any man can kill a bear, so to speak. I have to admit, Mark's got a multi-pronged business and artistic approach to this new model. I'm still humping the same idea I've been obsessed with for years -- the democratization of the creative industry.**
Now, of course, indie comics take years to build up an audience. And it's grueling work, with a high risk of failure. Sure. That's called capitalism, and it's awesome, and please show me the document guaranteeing your mass-market comic won't also flame-out no matter how much promotion it gets.
But although the webcomics gave us the first plausible premise (and now you should be reading John Robb's work on open-source warfare), Mark wanted to go even further. What were the artistic merits of moving to digital as a delivery system?
Gutting the cost of entry allowed for more artistic experimentation and variety, of course. But he's been doing this for 25+ years, and he's a shitload more ambitious than I am. That's when he found Balak, and we began to trade this graphic back and forth obsessively:
about DIGITAL COMICS by ~Balak01 on deviantART
This work began to nail down some of the rules of digital comics. Mark was the one who actually quantified most of these over the course of endless emails -- I'm just good at pithy summaries.
1.) Like paper comics, the reader should control the pace of the information in digital comics.
2.) Using layers, the creator can pull focus and create additional dimensions of storytelling, including time and subjective perception.
Motion Comics, those filthy bastards, fell into the trap of mistaking medium for content. The digital screen is made for TV and movies. Therefore, comics on a digital screen should look like TV and movies. Add animation and voices!
Hence, monstrous hybrid.
If, instead, you just treat the screen as an odd-shaped page which can be instantly updated and is conveniently in almost every home and office on earth, you get a much more accurate idea of how to proceed.
Of course, none of this is revolutionary -- I'm just tracking how we hacked away at it, amateurishly and arduously, over three years. Along the way, the Kindle started hitting critical mass, and we tore that model apart. Despite there being some comic successes on the Kindle -- manga in particular transferred well -- formatting issues prevented comic artists from taking full potential of that distribution channel. Of course, now that the new Kindle Fire is moving them over to an HTML-based publishing model, things should get much easier. Pablo Defindini has done outstanding work demonstrating how comics might use responsive design on the new readers.
But the Kindle lesson, in the rise of the Kindle-only million-seller author, was a valuable one: you don't have to be famous to make a living telling stories. You just have to be famous enough, with a devoted enough following.
Then the iPad hit. Comixology did a great job of getting out front on the tablet comics market. But they were forced to figure out a way to convert pages laid out for a larger space down to that seven-odd inch screen. That led to "guided panel view" which was pretty spiffy. However, in TV and movies, we call that "pan and scan", and no one's fond of it. Because it's not how the writer and artist meant for you to experience the story.
This tied in to another discussion we were having, summarized by Mark in an email:
3.) "We live in a wide-screen world. Use it."
Most long-form story-telling comics on the web were essentially back-door physical world comics. The Blind Ferret guys (very smart humans), Warren Ellis' Freak Angels, all of them were laid out for easy reproduction in a classically formatted portrait alignment hard-copy publication. They used the screen to distribute, but they did not use the canvas of the screen. (This is all a pretentious way of complaining about scrolling down when reading each page of Freak Angels).
And sure, you want to be able to publish that hard-copy some day. But again, that weird-sized widescreen potential comics page is in almost every house and office in the Western World. There's no inherent advantage to portrait view. Shouldn't the more widely distributed canvas have the artistic advantage?
So we experimented with resolutions and orientations. Friends of mine, Geoff Thorne and Todd Harris, developed some sample art, 8 pages of a comic with chuffah dialogue, to lock down landscape presentation, art resolution, a bunch of the artist-y numbers. Web designer Gary Henderson developed our first story software models, trying to incorporate additional materials such as scripts and layouts into the primary presentation. At the same time Mark chatted with artist Jeremy Rock, who was experimenting with how to create image flow on landscape pages which then seamlessly joined into readable portrait pages for the hard-copy phase of the comic's life. While I screwed around with e-readers and grind-it-out bullshit, Mark had Jeremy re-draw one of his BOOM! stories, "Luther", experimenting with the ideas of information flow (the staggered captions, etc.) We then plugged it into the reader, and bob's your uncle, a creatively satisfying longform story made for the screen. Not the first, not the best, but a reproducible model, done as a layered pdf. (None of this was rocket science, but it was ... fiddly.)
About this time, Joe Quesada at Marvel decided to drive the company much more aggressively into digital comics, and Mark began working with those lads. Mark changed the way he developed and wrote comics to take advantage of the new style. Momentum shifted, and now you have the the great -- and I mean goddam GREAT -- Infinite Comics experiment at Marvel.
Meanwhile, I was screwing with distribution, trying to live up to one of my pet theories about media:
4.) Information should be dumb.
By dumb I mean "as platform independent as possible." Your comic should work well in a pdf reader on a tablet or laptop or desktop computer, on a website, in an app. Your workflow should allow you to easily slot your comic into as many different platforms as seamlessly as possible. As cool as that Infinite Comic Nova comic is, there's nothing in there you can't do with a bone-dumb pdf- reader. It's all about execution. A reconception of how you can tell stories graphically now that you can experiment with layers and time.
Also, there should be different ways to make a living at this -- you shouldn't have to be waiting around, gambling on prestige print collection, before you can make a living telling your story. That's the stuff we're still working at now, and will be the subject of future posts and some of Mark's future announcements.
So that's the rough version of how we got here. Mark's the one driving this, with the able Lori Matsumoto handling the technical stuff, while I'll continue to fiddle over here in the corner. We'll be referencing a lot of very smart humans who've been working on (and succeeding at) this for much longer than we've been playing at it. Some of this is going to work, some of it is going to fail miserably, but we'll show you all the spinning gears as we go.
Mark's been gracious enough to include one of my new webcomics on his site when it launches. Mine will be nowhere near as artistically mature as his work. It'll be a comic, written and formatted for widescreen, serialized for online delivery, but not as aggressive in playing with narrative flow. Frankly, I don't have the chops for what Mark's doing. But it'll be fun as hell. I hope we manage to work out enough of the kinks to help you make your comic someday, tell your story.
*New rule -- if your own model is based on selling books to an audience which numbers less than one-tench of Wil Wheaton's Twitter followers, you do not get to call anybody else "niche."
** I was a stand-up comic, the ultimate freelancer, hopping from club to club, booking my own gigs. That experience burned freelancer instinct into my DNA: how many gigs in how many weeks to make my nut? To pay the mortgage, to put a little away? I love metrics. What can be measured can be managed, etc. etc.
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Drone Swarm
I would once again like to remind our Robot Overlords that I have always been a supporter of Robot Marriage.
For a cheerier morning -- what GOOD things do you think you could accomplish with a Drone Swarm?
For a cheerier morning -- what GOOD things do you think you could accomplish with a Drone Swarm?
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
The Post I Wish I'd Written on SOPA
FWIW, another Hollywood content provider who understands the Internet explains very, very thoroughly why SOPA/PIPA are very, very bad pieces of legislation attempting to solve a very, very poorly defined problem.
It is worth noting that under SOPA, as written, this blog could be summarily shut down without notice or appeal. I've talked about Torrent software, and people in the Comments have linked to Fan Vids. The full story of this actually happening already -- no "hypothetical" -- under the far mor lenient DMCA is here.
Oh, and my flame bait for the day:
Any screenwriter who thinks he loses more money to piracy than to Hollywood studio accounting is a child.
(Yeah, somebody got a participation statement last week ...)
There. Go nuts.
It is worth noting that under SOPA, as written, this blog could be summarily shut down without notice or appeal. I've talked about Torrent software, and people in the Comments have linked to Fan Vids. The full story of this actually happening already -- no "hypothetical" -- under the far mor lenient DMCA is here.
Oh, and my flame bait for the day:
Any screenwriter who thinks he loses more money to piracy than to Hollywood studio accounting is a child.
(Yeah, somebody got a participation statement last week ...)
There. Go nuts.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
LEVERAGE #417 "The Radio Job" Answer Post
Jumping to this one so you can mix and match with the finale tonight.
The finale is always a bruiser. We're running tight on time and budget, we've burned a LOT of the the new research on the previous eps -- 16 of the in this year, a whole season's worth plus one. For a variety of reasons, our staff timeline is tight; our writers start about two months later than most cable shows for the same number of episodes and the same shooting date.
Also, our original plan for Latimer was just feeling ... eh. It worked, don't get me wrong (and is very, very similar to what we wound up with), but it wasn't landing. Dean had locked in "consequences" as the theme for the year. That resonated with everyone who heard it, gave them a little frisson of anticipation. But the planned payoff was a little too brainy, not enough heart.
In the end, it was a matter of sitting down and thinking "What are the consequences? What is the worst consequence of Nate's growing anger and arrogance?" That answer is simple -- he gets blindsided. Taken out at the knees with horrible consequences. And we'd done the prison thing. Which meant somebody had to die.
All this was very fluid when I had to run up to Portland for production reasons. Two days later, when I returned, the room had it. (Sidebar -- the room breaks stories. I know that I have some lovely fans on Twitter, etc. that give me way too much credit. The room breaks the stories) Chris had pitched Jimmy Ford's death to Dean, and it absolutely worked. The only issue was -- we didn't have a matching story. At which point two things happened roughly simultaneously.
1.) Knowing we needed a "Jimmy's in over his head" location, Chris put it to the room. The next morning former Filthy Assistant and at that point Scrappy Staff Writer Rebecca Kirsch (@BeckyKirsch) showed up with a fistful of information on the Patent Office (including the oh so real Invention Secrecy Act). This tied in elegantly with ...
2.) ... Dean, asking me in his office "If this was really the last season, really, who's the villain?" Without hesitation I said "Victor Dubenich." Which I think we all kind of knew anyway.
At that point we broke both halves in the room, tuning them to fit Dubenich ("Oh, hey, patent fraud! That's a clue! Oh, hey, bomb in a warehouse! That's a clue!") All to get us to that nice little moment where Nate, outside the patent building a.) realizes who's behind all this and b.) he's probably already too late.
This story folded in with something we'd been talking about addressing in the room: the end. The end of the show, the end of the characters, the end of the characters careers. In particular, what's it like to retire in Crime World? What would it like to be Jimmy Ford, forced to the sidelines? And in a meta-sense, we're all getting to the point wehre some of our friends have retirement issues with their parents. You think getting your Mom to give up her driver's license is bad? Try getting a master fixer to give up the game.
There was a bit more fine tuning when we got to the location -- the offices/cubicle farm available for the Patent Office were attached to the glass walkway building, so that needed to be written in. The final escape went through about three different pitches based around location. Once that was all settled, we dove into the casting. We knew Tom Skerrit was coming back, which was great, as he and Tim have lovely chemistry. Then we moved to Agent Powell -- and Dean pitched Michael Pare. At which point we all went "... what?"
Turns out Michael's been living in Europe, working over there. He and Dean are Moon 44 buddies (as is Leon) so Dean tossed him out as the Square-Jawest of Johnny Square-Jaw federal agents. We cast him, he came in that first day, and did one of the hardest things I've ever seen an actor do: He played that character without a drop of irony.
It would be irresistible for most actors to play Agent Powell -- who is plainly trapped in Die Hard without even realizing it -- without a wink and nod. Just a little "I know this guy is a goofball" twist in the delivery. But no, Pare played it like Agent Powell was the lead in the Incredibly Sincere CBS FBI Show that just happened to glance into the iceberg of the Leverage-verse. An absolute goddam pleasure to work with.
The only thing more enjoyable was the first time Kane did his John McClane voice. Where a throwaway bit became something truly great. (My favorite part of that, btw, is the little wince he makes after the first statement, the little "Did I overplay that?" moment.)
Unlike most finales, 417/418 didn't intermingle much on the schedules. Most of 418 shot first, then we did 417. The van phone conversation was the last sequence shot for the year, FWIW.
Right, 152 questions, I'm sure you cover most of the good stuff. Let's dive in.
@athlios: Apologies if you've answered this before, but how long was Jimmy in jail? Did he know Maggie? Sam?
He did about a five year stretch. He did know Maggie and Sam, but wasn't that close to them. Some of that was his own nature, a lot of that because Nate kept him at arms length. Don't think that's not screwing with Nate's head. Nate's mother died just after Sams birth, btw.
@firelizardkimi: I just had a thought, not specifically about this episode, but about the future of the show: If the crew is moving to Portland for next season, then does that mean we won't see any more of Bonnano or Lady Cop (whose name I never remember)? That will be so sad. I love them.
That's Val Lundrum playing Detective Grayson. And hey, cops move too. We'll see.
@Esser-Z: I saw the end coming, but man was it awesome. More of an I WAS RIGHT moment. And heeey, I recognized that music during the time travel montage. Did you have to pay for that?
If you listen closely, it's not exactly the music you think it is. Thanks, Joe LoDuca.
@Nekussa: I am looking forward to the guest stars for next week. I do hope there will be at least one that was NOT shown in the previews, as I would love to be surprised.
Heh.
@ebony71: How hilarious were the Die Hard references. Christian did Bruce Willis proud. Did he enjoy being John McClane for the day?
Answered in the excellent Leverage10 podcast in more depth, but yes, he totally dug in. Kane's a very talented comedic actor.
By the way, I say "excellent" about the podcast not because we're in it, but because it was the brainchild of one of our assistants at Electric, Paola, and hosted by another assistant, Kayla. Developed and executed on their own initiative. Go Scrappy Assistant SuperTeam!
@Ally: Oh my God. All I can say is, why must you make me wait until next week? Questions:
1. Time machine: Ledger, orange box, or Parker fantasy?
2. Why didn't Homeland Security buy Sophie's story?
3. Has Eliot been on a police force before? He seemed to have the agent pretty convinced that he was a badge.
4. If the team or the goons didn't activate the motion sensors, who did? I was just confused there.
5. Will next week's episode pick up where tonight's left off, or will there be a time gap between them?
2. Why didn't Homeland Security buy Sophie's story?
3. Has Eliot been on a police force before? He seemed to have the agent pretty convinced that he was a badge.
4. If the team or the goons didn't activate the motion sensors, who did? I was just confused there.
5. Will next week's episode pick up where tonight's left off, or will there be a time gap between them?
6. Where did Hardison get the bow tie? Or did he have it on before?
1.) We had a very amusing discussion on set that day of what sort fo time machine there would be (hence the "it's more of a portal" line from Kane). Who knows what lurks in the Suppressed Inventions Warehouse?
2.) Because they were just a little more thorough. That story was going to fall apart in hours anyway, this was just accelerating the timeline.
3.) No. Military, but has dealt with authority structures his whole life.
4.) Victor alerted the police. Nobody set off the motion sensors.
5.) Enough of a time gap for Nate to fly to a certain prison, and arrange a chat ...
6.) He found it in the warehouse.
@JoellaBlue: 1.) Are the actors individually miked? We can hear sounds like hmmm, and grunts and growls (Eliot of course), and gasps that just seem too soft for a boom mike? Or have boom mikes gotten that sensitive or do the actors have to loop in those sounds as well? 2.) When do you begin filming season five and do you know yet the start air date of season five. We need to see you steal Portland and a time machine (for Parker) and a classic car show (for Eliot) and.......
1.) Both boomed and miked. We then go back and individually fill in whatever didn't quite work. Our sound department this year, btw, has been truly excellent in some very adverse conditions. Big win for that department in Season 4.
2.) Season 5 starts airing shooting first week of March 2012, not sure about an air date (EDIT: Thanks for the catch, kids). And we're already developing one of those pitches you mentioned. Nice pyschic flash.
@cappadocious: What edition of D&D are you playing? Because 4e ain't no old school, man.
Ah, I'm going "pen and paper" old school vs. "video games" new school, rather than divisions within the pen &paper world. And although I enjoy our 4e campaign, my system of choice is Savage Worlds.
@AMHS: What happened to the people expecting the million dollars?
What happens to most people expecting free money: they are disappointed.
@AdamC: Still not sure where the company name mentioned in the van fits in.
No tie-in to the original plot. Was just a way of showing Nate still knows everything there is to know about all their old marks.
@Anonymous/Tracy: .... I got nothin'. Thanks for watching the show.
@Hugin: Chaos is the only hacker the team's confronted with that level of skill, I can see why they'd call him if they really need a second hacker. And Artie Leech is on good terms with the team, he's a perfect backup thief. But Quinn? Elliot's on good terms with both the Israeli woman from season 2 and his hitter buddy from Boy's Night Out, pulling in a bad hitter instead of either of those seems like an unnecessary risk.
"Why him" will be revealed in the opening Act of 418. There's a reason.
@Guru: I suppose the obvious question is: what was the thinking behind the decision to kill Jimmy?
Well, it was either him or Maggie, and you people would have rioted and murdered me if we killed her ... in this episode, anyway.
@Calla: 1.) Parker says that maybe Jimmy used the time machine to go to 1962. Why that year? Is that the year Nate was born? 2.) When the building blew up how close was Tim (or his stunt double) to the building? I think you've mentioned a couple of times on the DVD commentaries that your people are often positioned a little closer than they ought to be ... So, how close was Tim (or his double) to this explosion? A completely safe distance? Much further than it looked? Or about as close as you usually let them stand because it's worked out okay the last few times you've done it that way?
1.) She picked the date totally randomly.
2.) All of our stunt doubles are a safe distance away. On the DVD I usually talk about how even though we're clear, it feels like we're too close, because nobody ever really expects that pressure wave of heat to hit them. There's never any shrapnel in that wave, but it's a very alien, disconcerting feeling. Your lizard brain gets very alarmed.
@Tabby: Nineteen sixty-two? And Parker saying that the question isn't 'where', but 'when'? Please tell me that was an intentional Community/Inspector Spacetime reference.
Unintentional, but what the hell. It's now Canon that both Doctor Who and Inspector Spacetime exist in the Leverage-verse, with Parker being a bit more of an Inspector Spacetime fan and Hardison leaning on Who.
Which means Community is real in the Leverage-verse. Rock on.
@Ruby: I'm as big of a Sophie fan as the next person, but there seem to be some strong hints that she's a manipulative psycho. I was watching the episode from the first season where they all go to Russia and Parker stabs the guy with the fork. Well, in that episode, Sophie says she "doesn't leave [her] personal life to chance". Implying that she carefully orchestrates every interaction she has with everyone, whether they're friends or marks. Every time she bats her eyelashes at Nate or banters with the crew, she's grifting (or so my theory goes). Is it possible she's more sinister than she seems? Or was the finale of season one as far as you're going with that possibility? Either way, she's great.
Shit, you figured out the end to Season Five.
Just joking. But I think it's fair to say one of the reasons we beat up the Nate and Sophie relationship so much in the last four years is that it was about two people learning to let go of control -- and like any addict, that kicks in some nasty withdrawal symptoms. There are some long-term plans in play; as I've mentioned before, the last two scenes of the series finale have been written since first season. We'll see what you all think of them when the day comes.
@Anonymous: 1) The Inventions Suppression/Secrecy Act thingy - ledger or black box? (I want it to be ledger, yet I have a bad feeling it's probably not ...)
2) Who is Parker's favourite Doctor?
3) So is it canon now that, since the Three Days of the Hunter Job, Eliot has just continued to screw with Parker's head about conspiracy theories? Loved all the sibling beats between them this episode, btw - my favourite relationship.
4) Just a behind-the-scenes type question, I know you guys write each season finale as if it could be the last (really like that, btw), but knowing you've already been renewed for another season, does that influence how you write the finale? Take other finales for example - the team splitting up, or Nate going to jail - did you already know how you were going to fix them, or was it a case of "Well, crap" when you got back to the writers room? Every Leverage season opener has made my list of favorites, so I wondered how much planning went into them.
3) So is it canon now that, since the Three Days of the Hunter Job, Eliot has just continued to screw with Parker's head about conspiracy theories? Loved all the sibling beats between them this episode, btw - my favourite relationship.
4) Just a behind-the-scenes type question, I know you guys write each season finale as if it could be the last (really like that, btw), but knowing you've already been renewed for another season, does that influence how you write the finale? Take other finales for example - the team splitting up, or Nate going to jail - did you already know how you were going to fix them, or was it a case of "Well, crap" when you got back to the writers room? Every Leverage season opener has made my list of favorites, so I wondered how much planning went into them.
1.) As noted, real.
2.) Patrick Troughton.
3.) Eliot has an ... odd sense of humor. Yes, that's a running gag.
4.) Nope. It could still be the last. You never know what could happen in TV, as our friend on Eureka recently, tragically learned. Also, that attitude gives closure to the year as a whole, so each year feels like its own mini-arc.
@allyone: 1) How was the phone scene in the van filmed? Was the whole cast there? Was someone reading Jimmy's part to Tim?
2) Eliot letting Nate go into the archive room along - was that Eliot's read on that moment or does that signify that Eliot's overall trust level of Nate is increasing?
3) In your answer post to Inside Job, you wrote: "Nate would not find being a manipulative sonovabitch contradictory to loving someone enough to die for them. It'll become clearer when you meet his father ..."Does that mean that you guys had this particular ending in mind for Jimmy when you introduced him?
4.) If so, did you ever consider letting Jimmy live, so we could see him interacting with the team? My one real regret is that we never got to see Skerritt interacting with any of the rest of the awesome cast.
3) In your answer post to Inside Job, you wrote: "Nate would not find being a manipulative sonovabitch contradictory to loving someone enough to die for them. It'll become clearer when you meet his father ..."Does that mean that you guys had this particular ending in mind for Jimmy when you introduced him?
4.) If so, did you ever consider letting Jimmy live, so we could see him interacting with the team? My one real regret is that we never got to see Skerritt interacting with any of the rest of the awesome cast.
1.) Whole cast was in the van. It's what we shot last for the year, a very intense sequence. Our Line Producer Paul Bernard was reading the Jimmy lines. To a great degree, though, that's a Hutton acting moment, right there, bringing chops to what's effectively a monologue about his father.
2.) Mixed. He wasn't happy about it.
3.) We toyed with killing him in "The Three Card Monte Job", actually. We didn't have this end, but we knew he ended badly.
4.) Nope. He served his Story Purpose ably.
@Lily: there was one thing, although how to ask this without spoiling anything from the episode (although it seems like at this point, people should've seem it)... there seemed to be an assumption with the "nate's not here" phone call at the end that Nate would in fact be present. I get why the goal was for him to be there. But how was the Big Bad accounting for the rest of the team? You might be able to take out Nate Ford, but that's just going to set Eliot and Parker on your ass. (And Hardison and Sophie, but Eliot and Parker are scarier). Was there a plan for handling the rest of the team that we didn't see? Or is the Big Bad thinking of the team as just another group of thieves who don't have loyalty to each other?
The idea was that Nate would bugger off and handle this alone -- which was the right guess, by the way. He didn't count on the loyalty/tenaciousness of the team. Once that was factored in, trust me, there was plenty of muscle scattered around that warehouse. It would have played out differently if they'd seen the team approaching.
@Famous4it: I have just one question! Parker got the time-machine... What from when does she steal first?
A moment. A very, very important moment, from not that long ago.
@Anonymous: cannot imagine anyone (without a death wish) just watching a bomb timer count down to zero, so I don't understand why Jimmy did not run as fast as he could, as soon as he realised the situation, even if it seemed hopeless, to try and put distance and/or objects between himself and the bombs.
Jimmy Ford was a 70 year old man with a concussion, granted, but there was more to it than that. First -- he just got hit smack in the face with the fact that, yeah, he was too old for this game. He'd been outplayed. Second -- if he gave Nate any hope at all that he was trying to escape, he couldn't keep Nate from trying to get into the warehouse. Go out with a little dignity, you know? Choosing to face your death calmly, without panic, that's a pretty decent thing for a man to do. I think Oona in the Comments handled this pretty completely.
@VideoBeagle: 1.) I never got a clear idea of what a "Radio con" is. 2.) I enjoyed Elliot being insulted by the quality of thugs sent after him.
1.) A Radio Job is using transmission/lack of info to run a con. Its a variation of "the Wire". 2.) It's also one of my favorite character beats. No idea why, it just tickles me every time we do it. Mostly Kane's very reasonable, patient explanation.
@Carl: Did seeing what happened to Nate have any affect on Hardison and him wanting to become a team learder one day? seeing how people will always be after you.
No, that was about Nate's personality, not his position.
@Nekussa: My inner conspiracy theorist says Jimmy Ford ran out the back door at the last second and is just letting the world think he's dead. :)
Dead. Dead, dead dead.
@Amakusa42: Nate ford's crew pulls a job, and Sherlock is hired to figure out who did it. Does he figure it out? and can you beat the Grand Moff(et)?
Oooh, that is not something I'd want to tackle. I bet I could take Moffet in a straight up con script, but his meta-structure is unspeakably good. I'll land on meet, fight, team-up.
@Anonymous: Was Parker's fantasy time machine a re-purposed Steranko scanner?
Jesus, you people are good. Yes.
@Lydia: 1. How long has the "bring back Dubenich" card been on the wall?
2. How did Dubenich know that Nate would refuse to work with Latimer, thus setting in motion the plan to use Jimmy as bait to get the team in one place?
3. The scene with where Nate was taking pictures (was that Beth's camera?) of the patent building and Eliot and Hardison showed up behind him had a very 3 Card Monte feel... was that intentional?
4. How different/alike is the building's security system compared to the Steranko from the Inside Job?
5. Why didn't Eliot tape the thugs a little tighter to that pipe? It seems like he made it somewhat easy for the head guy to free himself (love how pissed off he gets about second rate thugs).
3. The scene with where Nate was taking pictures (was that Beth's camera?) of the patent building and Eliot and Hardison showed up behind him had a very 3 Card Monte feel... was that intentional?
4. How different/alike is the building's security system compared to the Steranko from the Inside Job?
5. Why didn't Eliot tape the thugs a little tighter to that pipe? It seems like he made it somewhat easy for the head guy to free himself (love how pissed off he gets about second rate thugs).
1.) Since first year. It doesn't hurt that Saul's a friend.
2.) Jimmy was Plan B, form the Plan A offer in "The Lonely Hearts Job".
3.) That's a Dean directing trademark.
4.) Not even close. A Steranko would have shut them down cold.
5.) Hey, nobody's perfect.
@EllenZ: Was there a scene cut about Lucille, or has she been warehoused in Virgina since last year's finale?
They drove her down overnight, stashed her nearby. That could have been clearer.
@kta: So did you steal the shot of Hardison holding back Sophie and Parker from Brannagh's Henry V when the Herald holds back the women? It looked balanced and blocked the same way. Not to denigrate your directing/camera work/acting...It was a fabulous shot in any case.
I don't think Dean blocked it similarly intentionally, I think it's just a matter of classic blocking echoing each other.
@Anonymous: I think I remembered at some point Rogers said that this season we would find out what the worst thing Eliot ever did in his entire life was.
I said you'd get an idea of it from "The Experimental Job". You'll never find out what it was, explicitly.
@SueN: 1.) Rogers, I do have to ask: Whose idea was the duct tape? Is there a list (or wall of index cards) of household items the writers would like to see Eliot weaponize? 2.) Also, when we see the flashback to Nate sending Jimmy back to Ireland, it's cut. In the flashback, we go directly from, "Logue. Your mother's maiden name, how sweet" and immediately to "I'm proud of you, son." So, was there a reason (other than for time) the sequence was cut? Losing all that "I'm proud of you because you're even more a manipulative bastard than I am" kind of changes the Nate-Jimmy dynamic.
1.) Jeremy Bernstein pitched that in fight in "The Cross My Heart Job" and it got cut because the set didn't accomodate the bit. The Eliot fights tend to firm up after Kane and Kevin Jackson have seen the sets. 2.) Cut for flashback time. We didn't want to break the exterior scene rhythm with too long an interior scene.
@Anonymous: how much character development do you do before the show airs? I mean, did you know that Nate's father was a kind of street thug when you were developing the pilot or did that idea develop orver time?
We know what kind of people they are, how they talk, what they did for a living, how they got into CrimeWorld what they do, etc, but we're very light on detailed backstory. I find it tends to be more constraining than not. Jimmy Ford was brought to life, after all, when Tim looked at that stool in the bar a certain way in "The Bottle Job" and we thought "... oooh, that's a story we want to tell, whatever caused that look."
@Miette: Didn't really catch why all the lights suddenly went on when Nate walked in. Why is that? Automatic? :\
They were indeed automatic.
*********************************
Okay, that's all for the first half. See you tonight for the finale. Have fun!
LEVERAGE #418 "The Last Dam Job" Question Post
As always, coulda been the last one. Questions, reactions, and speculations for Season 5 in the Comments.
Sunday, January 08, 2012
LEVERAGE #417 "The Radio Job"
Why is this question post late? Because I'm playing Dungeons & Dragons, that's how old-school I roll. NO SPOILERS ON THE EARLY SHOW COMMENTS.
Sunday, January 01, 2012
LEVERAGE #416 "The Gold Job" Question Post
Sorry about tat, got all tied up reading Sanderson's Mistborn. Go ahead and ask you questions, I'll see what I can do to amuse you.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
LEVERAGE #404 "The Van Gogh Job" Post-Game, Part 1
... or "The Little Sidebar that Grew."
Those types of shows are essentially shows about emotions. People in conflict, or breaking down. End of day -- as Wells et al have nimbly shown -- you can drop a conflicted group of humans into any high-stakes setting and reap the entertainment crop of angst. Breaking Bad is about temptation and sin -- Walter didn't have to make Meth. But the drug world is a great, high-conflict/high-risk crucible for an amazing staff of writers to use to show what happens, how a man breaks bad. Joss Whedon's shows are about identity, responsibility, family and failure -- it doesn't matter what setting he's in, it's just that sci-fi allows one to create extreme circumstances so to best draw out extreme choices and extreme consequences.
And then there are shows about systems. Specifically, systems in conflict, or breaking down. Law & Order is the platonic example, although most mainstream crime procedurals live somewhere in here. Disorder has come, sickness has come, corruption has come, and we crave the system to be set right. We are there for the riddle, the puzzle, the "click" of the solve. "Ahh, that's the solution." "Ah, clever."
I am not saying there are only two types of television -- and even these two are very crude models. But I would say that these two paradigms dominate. Even co-mingle. One could call it the Squee/Clever Continuum. All viewers and writers fall somewhere along the Continuum for what they like to watch and write. Modern mainstream shows try to walk the middle of the continuum -- enough plot to engage, with characters charming enough to invite back into your house every week. You're trying to flip back and forth just a little every episode.
Its a very fine line. You can't do emotional stories without characters and situations changing. All "character" stories are about change. Too much change, and it's not the show you started watching. You lose the people who want to see their favorite "type" of show. Too little, and the show stagnates. You lose the people who are compelled by emotional change.
This is even trickier to manage because writers and audiences rarely agree what the show is about. Hell, define "about."
-- sidebar within sidebar. If you want to know what the creators intended a show to be "about", you can usually go back and watch the last scene of the pilot. In E.R., it's Noah Wylie sitting on the sidewalk, exhausted but changed. It's going to be a show about how people survive this tumultuous, draining situation, and how it changes them. I won't spoil the last scene of the Breaking Bad pilot, but it's stunning in its prescience right down to the final line of dialogue. (Seriously, it makes me want to kiss Vince Gilligan on the mouth.) The last scene of Leverage is Nate explaining the physics of Crime World, and how he and his crew are going to fuck up The Man. This show is about those people punching rich guys in the neck. Because they have Sinned, and Deserve It.
What's really kind of interesting is to go back and watch the Lost pilot. (Remember, the end of the pilot is the end of Ep 2*.) It ends with Charlie asking "Guys ... where ARE we?" That sets up the mystery of the show. But is that really, eventually, what the show's about?
I'd argue that's what so infuriated many people about Lost by the end of it. (Full disclosure: I really dug the show, and am show-business friends with a fair chunk of the ex-writers). Was Lost "about" the people on the island (emotion), or "about" the mystery of the island (the system)? I'd guess for the writers it was about unravelling those castaways' stories every week. And sure, for a big chunk of the audience, that's what got them emotionally invested. But mysteries demand solving, and as soon as the system of the island was set up as a mystery it became part of the contract with the audience. "Oh, there are mysteries! Puzzles! I'll pay attention over here, too!" But if you don't then satisfy the puzzle-solving part of the relationship -- God help you. Audiences are hella-smart. Even if they're not conscious puzzle-solvers, the lizard brain knows it isn't getting what it wants. That frustration feeds back into the character side, and before you know it fans are frustrated with both parts of the equation, because they're feeling that ...
... ahh ... you know the best thing I ever heard, the thing I wish someone had told me when I was 20?
"Every criticism is the tragic result of an unmet need."
I think it's important when working in television to understand we are in the emotional need business. The audience has needs, wide ranging and diverse, and ultimately impossible to satisfy universally and long-term. So, in the end, all writers can do is write the show they need to write. Most of our conflict with executives comes from the fact that their job is to get us to write the show the audience needs (which is, as we just discussed, unknowable). Sometimes you get lucky and hit a primal need, and sometimes you get very clever indeed by realizing that there's an entire chunk of the audience out here that needs simple. (That's not an insult. Simple is also elegant. Just go read The Glass Teat and assume the "Agnew-ization of televison" is the preferred form of entertainment for a lot of older viewers in a morally unsettling world.) Like politics and religion, both extreme ends of the Ahh/Clever spectrum are fertile places to recruit, with eternally unchanging disciples.
Even more muddling is that the writers themselves often don't agree what the show's about. Leave aside the individual variations of the staff writers who've come and gone. Downey doesn't see the same show as I do, as Dean does. I would say Leverage is about authority, how susceptible we are too it, and how it needs to be checked no matter what. I'd say Leverage is a show about CrimeWorld that happens to have broken people forming a family in the middle of it. Dean -- and we've been friends long enough, I don't think he'd disagree with this -- Dean always pitches from the gut and would say that Leverage is a show about broken people forming a family that happens to be in Crime World.
Downey and I have the closest alignment on what Leverage is "about". Yet we manage to have one top of the lungs barn-burner every year on just that subject. There's a running joke that his least-favorite episode from S3 is one of my favorites, and my least favorite is on the top of his list for that Season. And we're the showrunners.
The kicker is the show benefits by all that tension.
All this to say: the most emotionally charged, romantic episode of Leverage S4 -- which Wells or Whedon or Shonda Rimes would have spent ages building to -- was a total goddam accident.
Which we will get to in the next post.
* FWIW, the end of the first broadcast episode of Lost is also a Charlie question. We're looking at the airline pilot, snatched away by an unseen monster, now a bloody mess in an impossibly high tree branch. Charlie asks "How does something like that happen?" Another mystery question.
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