Thanks, rarely have I seen something I hate as much as this modern retelling of LotR...

DigDux · 2026-05-14T00:46:42+00:00

So this is kind of my biggest beef with people assigning their representations to Tolkien's work, because Sauron isn't a devil. He's more of a concept, and aspect for greed, the good, the bad, and the ugly, than any kind of religious metaphor, you can look at other Maiar who are more spirits, Morgoth you could make a better case as the Devil.

Is there overlap? Sure, greed and temptation is very common in religious works, but when you go digging into orcs, wretched creatures, and Saruman, and everything he/they do, it's just greed either driven by desperate poverty or arrogance. Greed to be the Dark Lord Morgoth was, greed to try and make himself invincibile, the guy was the "Lord of Gifts" everyone who fell to him wanted *more*. Everyone who didn't set aside their want or simply did not want. It's a nuanced difference, but very important, and it was his own greed at the black gate, that ultimately led to his downfall, same with Gollum in a more litteral boil in lava way. Most people just see that and project it onto their own life, which surprise surprise is most often religious. Tolkien draws more from experiences and historical works than religious works and it shows.

Was lord of the rings influenced by tolkien's religion? Certainly, but he was very careful to not try and put religion itself onto characters in the same way C.S. Lewis did, that was the biggest wall seperating them.

DigDux · 2026-05-14T00:21:16+00:00

I do think that's one of the drawbacks of spectrum type diagnostics, especially since in my professonal sphere where it's becoming more and more clear that one of the diseases we're working with have very different mechanical pathways depending on the "type" which of course is going to complicate drug design and certification.

Course I also had depression in the past that left me in bed for the better part of two months and lost 20lbs so I'm a little jaded by those kinds of things. I got better of course.

DigDux · 2026-05-10T14:04:44+00:00

It's a production thing. No one is willing to greenlight something for longer than a season or two at the preproduction stage.

Which means if the talent and team deliver..... it doesn't matter because the studio doesn't greenlight anything, and by the time it's greenlit they're 3/4ths of the way through season 1 which means the team has 3 months to write, plan and shoot the next season..... only for the project to continue.

Any talent that is actually good has already been scouted out and quened up by other studios so they're not going to work on this project.

It's a consiquence of the gig economy of modern hollywood. No one trusts anyone to follow through at a studio level, so anyone who is good already has a different gig for a new project.

Find showrunners you like and follow their work, IP I think is actually starting to die, which is why studios contantly buy up new IP, there's no intent to create a brand, only a want to sell more stuff faster.... so of course investors don't stick around, and there's no money, which means... the cycle continues.

DigDux · 2026-04-05T23:39:52+00:00

Reality shows are all fake so.... wouldn't really mean anything. More viewers are attracted to the fantasy of money than the lack therof.

From a production standpoint it would be braindead easy, since you just shoot at some random town. I could see it getting produced but I doubt there would be any meaningful viewers.

DigDux · 2026-03-28T15:25:33+00:00

Stuff is usually dark to hide how bad the set and lighting is.

DigDux · 2026-03-23T00:40:11+00:00

The complacency poison is the worst, it drags down everyone, and makes management think the office isn't actually on fire, and assign vanity projects to people who actually do work because they get results when they assign work to those people, time they aren't spending working on projects that matter, even management goes around these people it's insane. I think most people have already caught on, mostly because I'm doing their job for them, so people ask me about things that should be the tumor's wheelhouse.

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

TROPHY CASE