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The Two Types of TV Stories

EriK Bork distinguishes between two types of TV tomes: the workplace procedural and the personal story.

I used to lament the fact that so many network series focus on cops, lawyers, and/or doctors. I tried pitching and developing multiple series about other kinds of workplaces. I felt, like many aspiring television writers do, that there are many different kinds of job challenges that could make for compelling television.

But in my years of doing it professionally – selling some ideas, but having many others be batted down by executives, producers, or my own agents – I’ve learned some things. And one of the chief lessons is that “work responsibilities” generally can only drive stories and series concepts for certain kinds of occupations.

The kind of jobs that can do this generally have two specific qualities. The first is that they are heroic: they involve doing something for others. The stakes of a typical story are not just friends and family, but society at large. The show’s regulars are involved in protecting, helping and/or fighting for humanity, beyond their personal sphere.

The second quality is that the nature of their work consists of entertaining-to-watch scenes of compelling interpersonal confrontations, with high emotions and high stakes for all.

ScriptMag | Read the Full Article

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How I Became a Password Cracker

Nate Anderson reveals the relative ease of password hacking today by exploring some of the techniques used to gain access.

At the beginning of a sunny Monday morning earlier this month, I had never cracked a password. By the end of the day, I had cracked 8,000. Even though I knew password cracking was easy, I didn’t know it was ridiculously easy—well, ridiculously easy once I overcame the urge to bash my laptop with a sledgehammer and finally figured out what I was doing.

My journey into the Dark-ish Side began during a chat with our security editor, Dan Goodin, who remarked in an offhand fashion that cracking passwords was approaching entry-level “script kiddie stuff.” This got me thinking, because—though I understand password cracking conceptually—I can’t hack my way out of the proverbial paper bag. I’m the very definition of a “script kiddie,” someone who needs the simplified and automated tools created by others to mount attacks that he couldn’t manage if left to his own devices. Sure, in a moment of poor decision-making in college, I once logged into port 25 of our school’s unguarded e-mail server and faked a prank message to another student—but that was the extent of my black hat activities. If cracking passwords were truly a script kiddie activity, I was perfectly placed to test that assertion.

Ars Technica | Read the Full Article

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Hyper-Realistic CGI Is Killing Photographers, Thrilling Product Designers

Half of the image below is real, the other half is CG.

Joseph Flaherty takes a look at KeyShot, a CGI program that lens an extra bit of realism to 3D models.

Computer-generated images are moving out of theaters and onto store shelves and catalog pages, thanks to software that makes it nearly impossible to distinguish the real from the photorealistic.

Encroaching upon what was once the domain of sci-fi filmmakers, product designers have started employing CGI and utilizing a program called KeyShot to give their digital models lighting effects that makes them appear to be actual items photographed in a studio or out in the wild.

You’ve likely seen KeyShot’s output, although you may not have realized it. That ultra-perfect computer image, with dead-on lighting that highlights all its critical features? The sweatsuit with the fabric that clings together where the seams stretch? The uber-clean Jeep deep in the hills on a gravely trail? All done in KeyShot, a program that enhances CAD creations to the point that they become indistinguishable from the real thing.

Wired | Read the Full Article

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A Conversation with Salvatore Totino: Cinematographer on “Any Given Sunday” and “Cinderella Man”

From Craft Truck: When your first feature is a $70 million, action-loaded sports film, there are reasons why. Salvatore Totino was hand-picked by Oliver Stone to lens “Any Given Sunday” and it’s been no secret since that Sal is one of the greatest talents in the business. Always allowing each piece to have a look of it’s own, Sal creates beautiful, rich imagery, whether on studio pictures or indies. An exceptional personality and working attitude, combined with tremendous lighting instincts has led Sal to where he is today…

New Episodes of Craft Truck are available every Thursday.

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Clint Eastwood: the Actor that Redefined Westerns and Action Films

Scott Smith biographies Clint Eastwood, the actor that carried the torch from Western stars like John Wayne and brought a new sense of masculinity to western and action films.

The Old Western was taking a beating in the 1960s. American New Wave directors like Sam Peckinpahand Arthur Penn attempted to revisit the genre and demystify the allure that stalwarts John Ford and John Wayne had spent years solidifying. Overseas, a new actor was interpreting the gunslinger as the nameless hero of Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti” westerns. Clint Eastwood would rise though a career of cowboy roles to carry Wayne’s torch to a new generation of film lovers. His performances in more than fifty films have left a permanent mark on action roles, and today’s macho screen idols are indebted to him for much of their style and delivery.

Eastwood shared billing with a talking mule in Francis in the Navy (1955), and his first significant role came in Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Originally titled The Magnificent Stranger, and based on Akira Kurosawa’sYojimbo (1961), it was the debut of the fearless loner that Eastwood would portray in other Leone westerns shot throughout Spain, Germany and Italy.For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) were solid hits in Europe and eventually reached cult status in America. Eastwood, fresh off the trail as Rowdy Yates in television’s popular seriesRawhide, seemed a perfect choice for the postmodern films, playing a moralistic cowboy out of place in a snakepit of nasty caricatures.

Back in the States, Eastwood made Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) andThe Beguiled (1971), establishing himself as the heir to the cowboy throne vacated by the ailing John Wayne. Ironically, these films were directed by Don Siegel, who helped Wayne make a graceful exit in The Shootist (1976).

Fandor | Read the Full Article

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The Ten Best Simpsons Songs, As Picked by the Show’s Writers

The Simpsons’ Showrunner Al Jean gives the background of the 10 favorite Songs as picked by the writers of the perennial animated sitcom

10. “Capital City” from season two’s “Dancin’ Homer.” In this song by Jeff Martin, Tony Bennett extols the virtues of Springfield’s state capital, which includes the crosstown bridge, the Penny Loafer, and 4th Street and D. The song helped Tony Bennett reach a younger audience, but did nothing to help The Simpsons reach an older audience. [Co-creator] Sam Simon reached out to Bennett. There was an internal debate over whether or not to have a guest star playing himself. We hadn’t done that before. The real world won.

FlavorWire | Read the Article

via Go Into The Story

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An Open Letter to New Photographers (and Directors)

Here are a few tips for the photographer coming from the other side of the lens.

Dear (new-ish) Photographer,

My name is Model. I would love it if when you shoot me you take these things into consideration to achieve the greatest effect for us both.

- Male or female, give some playful banter. It makes me so happy when I am in the company of someone who knows how to laugh. If you can laugh at yourself then it’ll make me laugh too and we’ll both feel more relaxed.

 

- Don’t laugh at me. Don’t give me negative vibes by pulling funny faces, giggling at an awkward angle or allowing me to think I am anything other than the sensational creature my confidence needs to believe I am.

 

- If you have never shot a model before, perhaps consider paying an experienced one so you can relax and enjoy the day without the pressure of getting those shots for the team working TF. Get the shots for you, nobody else needs to see them. Let the model do the work.

 

- If you have a makeup artist present, she will be worth her weight in gold. Not only will she transform the ugly caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly (not only physically, but most of all mentally), but she will also provide friendly advice on things you might miss – a sneaky bra strap and stray hairs that you’ll have to edit out later. Plus she’ll give you more than the one look I was born with, because lets face it, I can’t do my makeup to a perfect standard, if I could, I’d be a makeup artist.

Peta Pixel | Read the Full Article

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15 Directors Unceremoniously Fired Or Replaced On A Movie

What are some of the famous Director switch offs in history? Indiewire takes a tour of 15 instances where they changed horses midstream.

 

Getting fired, quitting a job hastily, “mutually agreeing” to exit…no matter how it’s phrased, being removed from any project is never fun as almost anyone who has ever worked a day in their life can attest. The recent debacle with “Jane Got A Gun” — director Lynne Ramsay was a no show for work on the first day of filmingapparently having clashed with the producers — is an unfortunate peg with which to take a look back at filmmakers who were fired, replaced or walked off a film, but history is full of interesting tales of films gone awry thanks to the regrettable loss of a film’s director.

 

Studio conservatism, wild filmmakers, battling producers, actors and directors not seeing eye to eye, “creative differences,” etc. — there’s myriad reasons why a director may fall out, fall off, abandon ship or get pink slipped off a movie. It’s life, people are extremely passionate, and it happens.

Let it be said, and just to be clear, we are not suggesting Ramsay got fired or that she is at fault here. The director herself has yet to speak on the events of the past week, while the reported story seems to change daily as to what actually went down, depending on the sources. But those in the midst of the situation may be mildly comforted to learn that this isn’t the first time this has happened (nor is it the last). Here’s 15 such examples.

“Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas” (1998)
Original director: Alex Cox
Replacement: Terry Gilliam
What happened: Yes, Terry Gilliam, ironically a director with his fair share of storied problems on films thanks to his unwaveringly quirky vision usually clashing with the powers that be, did direct this adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson‘s seminal gonzo-journo roadtrip nightmare. But he actually came onboard very late in the game because Alex Cox, the filmmaker behind “Repo Man” and “Sid & Nancy,” apparently did not see eye to eye with the film’s producers and eventually was fired. It didn’t hurt that he had managed to alienate Johnny Depp and Hunter S. Thompson, who hated Cox’s screenplay and ideas about animated sequences. “Alex had some dream that he could make Thompson’s work better,” Depp said in an interview. “He was wrong. He had this idea about animation in the film.” Thompson can be seen ripping into Cox’s script (and some of the animated ideas) inWayne Ewing‘s 2003 documentary “Breakfast With Hunter” (ironically, Gilliam’s version has animation in it as well). Cox surprisingly never brought it up in many interviews afterwards though he briefly talks around it in this 2001 interview – but considering where his work went afterwards (“Repo Chick” is just a painful nadir), it’s difficult to argue that the dismissal didn’t damage his career. An draft of Cox’s version of the script can be read here. “It was a piece of crap,” Gilliam said of that script at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998. Gilliam and writer Tony Grisoni banged out a new script in 10 days.

IndieWire | Read the Full Article

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