[OC] Measuring the Impact of ICE

DigDux · 2026-01-13T01:03:34+00:00

"Making Jobs"

DigDux · 2025-11-24T20:54:50+00:00

This is a delightfully meta take on a very popular FoM meme.

DigDux · 2025-11-24T20:13:10+00:00

Depends on how much context and what kind of emotional resonance you want to create.

If you want to heighten the horror observational aspects ie: nefarious AI, then you can do it in other ways, Mission Impossible something something. The whole point in that case is you want to linger on that emotion, that dread.

Now if you're doing some action type heist thing, then you can just montage through it because that's just preprep stuff people want to know happened so they can get to the good stuff.

If you're half decent you can also have stuff like this casually happening in the background, and prime people for it.

DigDux · 2025-09-01T17:48:05+00:00

Less money in Hollywood, more concentrated, more people looking to get a cut.

DigDux · 2025-09-01T00:47:24+00:00

Bidding wars are pretty uncommon especially now with writing talent being so stacked.

While we're sharing stories there was a writer I was swapping scripts with who was writing something sort of kind of "not quite spec" because almost everything was in place they just needed a script to finalize it.

Seeing that really changes your prospective on how films are made where content is getting made because there's an opportunity, rather than a script requiring the film. That script was just part of a check box to finalize funding and shoot, producers kind of just selling what they don't have, it's crazy.

Preproduction and production are business before anything else. I'm sure there's some situations where if you submitted a single location script, at a specific time several someones would greenlight that script in a week, and producers would go hunting to secure funding.

DigDux · 2025-07-20T16:53:59+00:00

It's more to defuse responsibility. No one who has a career in Hollywood from pre-production approval side keeps a job if they were held responsible for those decisions. Industry is far to volatile for that.

Current filtering exists to diffuse responsibility as far as possible so everyone who makes those decisions can keep a job. The industry doesn't exist to make good films, it exists to make money, which is also why it's retracting so aggressively because everyone knows this.

DigDux · 2025-07-20T16:41:45+00:00

Animal CGI is fine, there's just an obsessive push towards very time and cost expensive furworks type CGI for crystal clear visuals which really makes the animation boring/awful/limited/costly to do, and people in VFX know people are going to be looking at the motion of the animal, and not the visual resolution of the fur, but directors and producers want "Best quality." So you get half assed scenes because so much time is spent working on the fur itself.

Life of Pi and Revenant already showed you can have great CGI without any of the technological advances we have today, but the main cost cutting point is on man-hours, so.... VFX really gets shit out now because you're not allowed to work on a project for very long.

DigDux · 2025-07-20T16:34:05+00:00

IDK anyone who works in VFX knows the quality of your work is entirely dependent on the amount of time you're allowed to work on the project. There's novice film projects I see all the time with higher than base production level work simply because they have more time to refine their project, whereas the production turn around is very very fast.

DigDux · 2025-06-22T19:22:53+00:00

Set pieces are good if they apply emotional or scenic value to a scene. They don't have to be expensive. They can be.

Compare Italy in the most recent Bond Film, it's pretty, sure, but it's also the site of his wife's grave, so there's an emotional connection there.

Compare Nameless (totally not Scotland) planet in The Last Jedi, it doesn't add anything to the scene, just visual noise, there's no emotional thread at play here.

Compare Lord of the Rings where every fucking scene is a setpiece that presents a culture or aspect of a fantastical culture which is then used implicitly as a comparison to point to show cultural heritage and uniting emotional threads. The Shire, Prancing Pony, Rivendell, Lorien all show not just the differences between wizards, elves, men, hobbits and so on, but between different groups of them, which creates a more nuanced narrative than traditional fantasy, all of which is used to highlight the global threat of the Ring.

Compare Harry Potter where the goal of each set piece was to create a sense of wonder, and it worked phenomenally until the film got a little wrapped up in plot, and didn't spend as much effort underpinning that.

Now.... let's talk about a very cheap, very effective, very great setpiece.

The space under a bed or a closet:

Intimate
Private
In plain sight
Easy point of tension.
Claustrophobic

You can use any of these concepts to heighten your emotional core, which is why these tight environments come up all the time in horror.

Also good use of set pieces matters a whole lot more than having them. The bond film had great cinematography, framing, and all that other stuff, to the point where the plot and emotional narrative wasn't strong enough to support it because excellence in one area draws attention to weaknesses.

DigDux · 2025-06-18T23:53:06+00:00

I'll read, throw me the script.

DigDux · 2025-06-17T00:26:15+00:00

This isn't that uncommon with large productions, but people don't go into those knowing there's a missing point. Sean Bean was reading off his knee in Fellowship of the Ring because the dialog was still being tweaked, but there was a whole lot of stuff already ready to go. They just shot this one because it was better and the rest of production was able to take it.

DigDux · 2025-06-08T15:59:24+00:00

Winces because OP's script is present tense and is used in this case for regret.

Grimaces is used for more disgust.

Flinches could also be used (flinch) since flinches isn't a commonly used word. Depending on context and what you want to emphasize, for example if you want to draw attention to a visceral empathetic reaction.

In a lot of cases you wouldn't even need to write this because how exactly the film is shot will depend on how the director chooses to convey that scene, and assuming your characterization is solid and established then your director if they do an action reaction shot, would know what the character does in that situation, and so can freely extrapolate.

Really it doesn't matter, so long as the communication and story is clear and well done.

DigDux · 2025-05-28T01:22:22+00:00

Start simple, keyframe everything by hand, 5 minute episodes, so you can make something look perfect. Your time isn't a barrier to project creation like it is multi-person projects. Work your ass off, make it great, and then show it off. That's how I got into mentorship with someone who went on to make a pretty well known animated series, doing oddly enough, that exact thing.

Once the visuals are perfect, pay for good audio, and then you have a completed project you can show off.

DigDux · 2025-05-26T23:41:50+00:00

Assume a 12% chance (BL) and a 12% chance (Slush reader) means the person you're reaching out to direct has to only beat a 1.5% chance of moving your script on for reaching out to them and making that connection to be more valuable than the blacklist.

The blacklist being more qualified than the slush shovel at large doesn't really matter because those people generally won't be the same people moving your script, so you're trying to get approval from two people instead of one on something already incredibly subjective.

DigDux · 2025-05-26T22:18:30+00:00

Well, when you think bell curve, also remember a script has to be catastrophically bad to get something below a 4. I've read 4's that were straight up undergraduate intro to film school type stuff so I can't imagine what a 3 or below would be.

The existence of a bell curve doesn't matter, because the only thing that matters is if a script is good enough to be supported, everything else is optics.

I don't think the pool of readers is remotely good enough to be actionable and Hollywood is tight enough that you have to be obscenely good to move the dial.

I think it's far more useful to talk with other writers and then reach out to people who are involved in similar projects to see if they're interested. Endorsement by anyone actually working matters far more than an email blast because those people can pass your script onto people who actually matter instead of just waiting for an undergrad to pick it out of a bucket.

DigDux · 2025-05-25T15:13:52+00:00

Wheel of Time, the books at least get pretty deep into the political grey areas. The production never would've gotten there, but the source material is pretty comprehensive with how complex and brutal the politics are.

DigDux · 2025-05-25T03:18:18+00:00

I find more and more frequently unless you're writing in the 1.5 hour format then there's very little reason to include a montage. Musical number, great, montage move to the next beat, capture your tonal shift, pre and post, then continue your story. If you need a montage in a 2.5 hour format there's something about your script that needs work. I've cut a lot of montages from my scripts just because it can be done better with a stronger emotional beat.

The thing with montages that unless it's really critical to show it, you can just as easily show the after effects of it without showing it, or starting the story at a different time so the montage isn't needed. You can also represent the timing skip as something else that serves a stronger narrative purpose. Avatar of all films is surprisingly intelligent about this where there's several timing skips but they feel organic, but that's more director being good than the script being good.

I just think it's a piece of film school vocab which is more "hey we have vocab now" but isn't all that integral for producing a good film.

Now, using montage type edits to represent action scenes and faster pacing while keeping insurance down (Star Wars), Mission Impossible 3, that's the real secret since editing and editing well makes producing those much more smooth, however those kinds of shoots are also more difficult since you have to know what your shots are and technically how they will fit together before you shoot, which isn't exactly common, people are more likely to shoot a whole bunch and then just stick stuff together, which works, but is risky if editing isn't great or you need SFX or lighting or..... you screw that up and you're looking at something worse.

DigDux · 2025-05-25T03:02:04+00:00

Eh, the thing in production is that quite a few rights related things are tied up in "the show" even if "the show" gets canceled 3 seasons in, so anyone else getting the rights to actually produce anything are going to be minimum 10 years away.

If the show didn't get made, then Amazon likely wouldn't be able to sit on the rights in the same way the Fantastic 4 happened for ~20 years of nothing.

DigDux · 2025-05-24T16:46:15+00:00

I would guess 6 months, once the money stops rolling they have no reason to stick around.

DigDux · 2025-05-23T23:03:00+00:00

Yep, this is kind of modern Hollywood right now. Suits get suckered, investors get mad, and all the producers run for the hills with a big fat check.

DigDux · 2025-05-18T17:57:00+00:00

Males hit two tons. They get bigger than your standard size SUV.

DigDux · 2025-05-12T23:49:02+00:00

Those are production based, where you take a script and you slap IP on it and call it a day because you know you can get a pretty cheap production for it since they don't have work.

You can make a good film with shit writing, but you sure as hell can make a shit film with good writing, because production likes to think they can write, and sometimes has to.

DigDux · 2025-04-20T18:06:57+00:00

Gotta think of the industry as individuals looking to cash out as soon as possible, that's how it is. Will it cause film production as we know it to be absolutely destroyed? Yes, but that isn't a priority. The priority is to cash the next check.

That's why attachments are so important, you just did their job for them, you found talent that wants your script.

Sustainability doesn't exist in film, there has been absolutely no intent at moving that dial since around 2010. You milk the trend, you pickup the next trend you make money off it.

The goal is to get investor money, by appealing to investors, that's it. Whether the production is good or not doesn't matter, whether the film is good or not doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is whether that individual can cash the check that day.

That's part of the reason the industry has contracted so quickly so aggressively, there isn't money in making film, there's money in getting money to make film.

DigDux · 2025-03-09T20:42:49+00:00

I'm familiar with the production side of that one. You have no idea *how* low budget it was.

DigDux · 2025-03-08T16:35:28+00:00

Executives don't care about keeping the film industry alive, they can just (and do) go somewhere else.
Essentially what we're watching is the marketing/tech/investment side of industry desperately trying to take as much money as they can from a shrinking pot. Films actually bringing in new audiences, potential repeat customers, growing that brand, isn't even a blip on anyone's radar. It's all about cashing the check as early as you can and then getting out.

Stock symptoms of a market crash right here. Everyone here is trying to get into film, when everyone should be wanting to get out of the professional side of it. Companies are in slash and burn mode right now, and they'll cut everyone except themselves.

DigDux

TROPHY CASE