We sneak in GEnie coordinates from...

 Posted on 11/2/1993 by STRACZYNSKI [Joe] to GENIE


We sneak in GEnie coordinates from time to time....

We now have just under half the episodes now filmed, and just finished
the final mix on "Midnight," so that's two totally completed. It takes a long
time after an episode is finished to do a final mix, particularly on a show
like this, since you've got to work out sound, score music, and do any
rotoscope/Viz EFX stuff. Once you do the first one, after that they fall into
place on a weekly basis (so next Monday we should have the final on "Purple,"
then the following Monday we'll finalize "Infection," and so on).

"Midnight" is very cool, by the way. Christopher Franke's music really
brings the action scenes to life. It's amazing how much that adds to a show.

Had an interesting conversation today with one of our crew. I was
talking to someone else about the writing philosophy on the show, and how it's
comparable to a tryptich...you line up the stories and you begin to see a much
broader story after a while. A series of interconnected images.

And this crew person said that I was wrong, that wasn't how the show is
being done. Now lemme tell you...we encourage people on every level to speak
frankly, at any time, to any one, but it takes considerable cojones to say
something like that to one's exec producer, that he has his own series wrong
in the description. "Oh?" says I.

He explains that what it is, is "holographic storytelling." I asked him
what the hell this meant. He said that the image of pictures side by side,
linear storytelling, wasn't right. That after he read two scripts, he went
back and reread the first one, and now he could see things in it that he
hadn't seen before. When he'd read three, again he glanced over the first,
and new things had come out.

"What it IS," he said, "is not side-by-side images, but *overlaping*
images, like old fashioned photographic plates stacked up one on top of the
other. Each has a piece of the whole picture. When you line them all up, one
behind the other, and look through all of them at once, you realize what the
picture is. It's three-dimensional storytelling."

I had to think about that one a long time, but frankly, he's right, and
I'm wrong. That *IS* what we're doing, and I've been describing it
incorrectly all this time.

Holographic storytelling...well, live and learn, I say.

jms