So Much for Pathos

So Much For Pathos -- a cropped banner version of the illustration
The other day I finally bothered to buy an optical mouse again. The old one had gone wonky and had been replaced, for a few months, with a ball one. While installing it I suddenly realised that the little graphics tablet attached to my work computer — hidden beneath a pile of well-intentioned clutter — was indeed working. Samir had fixed whatever byzantine driver issues were afflicting it, and in typical Samir fashion had now forgotten quite how he did it and when it had happened (btw, have you checked out his spiffy new blog and site?). With another hour to go before The Simpsons, I decided to give it and the new mouse a whirl.

Firing up the GIMP I loaded up a random picture from my vast collection of junk and played around with various unfamiliar filters and script-fu widgets. One I did have some familiarity with but hadn’t used in years is called iWarp, and is sort of like the liquify tool in Photoshop, or like that old turn-of-the-century tech show favourite, Kai’s Power Goo. It allows you to grow, shrink, warp and shift around various parts of the image, and it’s therefore very useful in creating anime-style characters. That’s what I did to the celebrity picture that formed the base of this. The result looks almost nothing like the original.

From there I took it into Inkscape and used the bitmap tracer to turn it into vector art, then fiddled around with the colours, added in details and shapes to make it more graphic and less like a traced picture. Finally, a background and a random caption (from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, of course). The oversized text in the background is done with a stylus using Inkscape’s calligraphy tool. The word balloon is a standard union boolean of an ellipse and a triangle.

Overall, only twenty minutes of work, which by my standards is a blink of an eye (you all know how many months I can spend abandoning… um, finishing work).

I should do these quickies more often. Hope you like it (and I hope you actually clicked on the image to see the whole, wallpaper-sized thing 😛

V

Two Views of the MOE


Script Frenzy: Week One

It’s been a week since Script Frenzy started, so I figured it was about time for an update. Off to a slow start, but quite optimistic. Read the full article for stuff about the script, screenplay formats, first draft tips, and why sometimes a large choice is a bad thing.

1. Establishing Shots

Like most people, I heard about Script Frenzy through an email from the NaNoWriMo people (it’s run by the same guys) and wasn’t sure if I would sign up, given my generally unsuccessful results with NaNos previous. I’ve just never managed to finish one or get involved in the community, although I will admit that both endeavours are highly enjoyable.

In the end, the word count swayed me. 20,000 words is a lot less than NaNoWriMo’s 50K goal. At 2,000 words a day — a good writing day — it was reachable in ten days. With my fluctuating writing speed (between 100 words a day and 5,000) it was something I might actually be able to reach by the 30th. The prospect of writing something that wasn’t prose — which all of my writing so far has been — was also an enticement.

I had tried to write a script once before, a half-hour comedy that was in Hindi of all things (typed in English. No, it’s never gone anywhere or shown to anyone, so please don’t adjust your sets). I was pleased with it, but just like short stories aren’t the same kind of writing experience as novels (as several NaNoWriMos have taught me), so 22 minute sitcoms aren’t the same as movies.

Most people have read all the big names when it comes to learning screenwriting — I hear the name ‘Syd Field’ a lot — but I’d only ever read one book by Tom Lazarus (writer of Stigmata). It’s a decent introduction to the world of screenwriting, and is probably more insightful into the process of making a script that fits into the Hollywood world rather than just craft. I hadn’t read it in years, and thumbed through both it and the sitcom script I’d written to refresh my memory for the task ahead.

First, of course, I had to decide what to write.

2. The Problem with Choice

There’s a belief among some people that all writers only have one story to tell, and that all their stories are variations on that one story. We’ve also learned from several Hollywood stories and E! programs that most screenwriters have that one story burning a hole in their heads, that one tale that they’ve been trying to write or are trying to sell, and when sold paves their gold-bricked road to stardom.

I have the opposite problem. I have far too many stories.

While it’s still open for debate on whether or not, in the general sense, they’re all just variations on one story, I have over the years amassed quite the collection of little tales to tell. Let’s start at the beginning; in this case, seven years ago at the dawn of the new millennium, when I first had the kooky idea that I could, at some point, become a proper Writer. I started keeping a little notepad and a pen in my pocket all the time, and whenever I’d think up a story or an interesting thing crossed my mind I’d scribble it down in as few words as possible.

As time went by the notes became a little more elaborate, with their own little codes. Sometimes I’d think of a story and it would seem to me that the story would be best told as a novel, so I’d write down the date, put the code ‘NOV’ next to it and write down the idea. Some became ideas for video games (GAME) and some became comic books (OGN, or ‘original graphic novel’, a term used in that industry). A lot of them started to get the mark ‘MOV’.

Ah, the MOVs. When you start writing you too have heard the myths about the guy with the single great script, the writer with one story, and so you think, “Well, I’ll just be needing one 100 page notebook for my ideas, right? Wrong. Ideas are very easy. You can have half a dozen good ideas for movies and novels in a day, sometimes. If, like me, you don’t ever actually spend the time to write those ideas up as scripts — but you do spend a lot of time laying awake in bed — then chances are those little ideas you jotted down in a moving bus a week ago come back to haunt you, to entertain you, until it’s 4 am and you’ve just played out an entire movie in your head.

I just looked through my files and counted: I kid you not, I have over a hunded and fifty things marked ‘MOV’.

Sure, so some of them, around a dozen or two, are a lot more developed that the others. These are the ones I’ve spent the night playing in my head. I’ve run through them and added in plot points and cleaned them up here and there, so really those are the ones I was most ready to write.

Or was I?

3. The Devil You Know

It was the 1st of June, 2007. I was sitting in a restaurant having lunch with my father and brother. “I have no idea what to write,” I said.

“What do you want to write?” my brother asked.

“Everything!”

I fished out my notebook. My fifth, begun in January; a small 2006 organiser/pocket diary that is useless as a datebook, and I don’t like to waste paper. There were already 30 pages filled. I thumbed through it and picked out the ones marked MOV — a baker’s dozen of recent ideas — and read them aloud to my captive audience. There was a short film about talking breasts (I wonder if people would like that as a feature?). There were a couple of action things that are more style pieces than actual stories. One of them just said ‘Harry Potter. In a Car. Imagine!!’ — I still have no idea what that’s about, or in what half-asleep state I wrote it.

A couple were promising. There was a road movie involving a middle-aged man. The premise was juicy but I didn’t quite know what to do once I hit the halfway mark. As it stood, it was only the bits that would go into a teaser trailer, not a movie. Another one seemed like a fun romp but would require me to write about gangsters. I don’t really like gangsters enough to try and wrestle with them in my first screenplay.

My brother told me I should go with the road movie; it’s set in the real world, simple, and should therefore be easier to get into than some kind of science-fiction/fantasy mammoth. I agreed, but I was not sold yet because of the half-a-plot issue.

Later in the day we met up with my friend Jamie, and while shuffling through Ace Hardware — picking up strange tools and oddly-named bottles with the sole purpose of making lewd jokes about them — I ended up pitching a few of the ideas. I got into a long narration of a story I thought up in 2003. It’s the worst kind of fantasy epic, the trilogy. Worse, it’s a romance, but I figured that if a male in his late teens who plays rock and metal could warm to it, then it might be worth writing. He liked it and pointed out the obvious flaws in the plot, how parts of it just weren’t cool enough, and I agreed with him too.

I was playing it safe even considering that story, of course. This is the screen story that I’ve played the most times in my head, so I pretty-much know all of it start to finish. Also it’s gargantuan, which means I would probably reach 20K long before I would reach the end of the first part, let alone the whole thing.

Therein lay my main problem with it: I want to finish something. I don’t want to hit 20,000 and just put it away half done. I want to write the words ‘THE END. FADE OUT’ by the end of June, and so I was going to have to find something better.

Something better showed up on the 4th of June, an old fantasy idea I’d fleshed out as an outline a year or so before. It’s not as epic as the trilogy, not even as fantastic — there are no large battles involving thousands of CGI horsies and monsters charging at each other — so it would be less of a task than the other one* to write.

(* Actually that trilogy didn’t have any large battles either, but the scale was huge, so you get the idea.)

On the 4th I started writing it and have, so far, reached around the 7 minute mark in screen time, just introducing the world and a few of the main players. Only 2000 words so far, but I haven’t written the juicy bits yet — words flow more freely when you’re writing juicy bits. It’s a very character-driven fantasy, and old-style tale with a modern, mature take. Think Beauty and the Beast with a bunch of twists.

Of course, writing the damn thing was not without its issues.

4. Screenplay Formats and Why I Hate Them

First off, I know that it works, and that in a project where a document will go on to be interpreted by dozens of people including directors, actors, editors, composers, production designers, visual effects people — hell, probably even the caterer — you need a script that’s straightforward and in the format they’re used to so that everyone can — pardon the pun — be on the same page.

My problem with it is that when you’re starting out, when you haven’t yet written the story down and it’s this nebulous cloud of information hovering over your head, spending half your time writing INT-this and (quickly)-that, putting every character’s name in CAPS and every sound effect too, making sure the tabs are right, all gets to be a chore.

The first draft is not a time for you to be worrying about things like that. I could write a million outlines and character notes, but the fact remains that eventually some kind of document must be written that becomes the first draft of the actual screen story, and when that is being written you should be worried about as little as possible, and write as much as you can.

The other problem I have with the traditional screenplay format is that I’m not confident that I can come back to it in, for instance, three months time, and see in it the same things I did when I wrote it. Screenplays are supposed to be as lean as possible; don’t talk about precise hand movements the actors should make, don’t put in camera moves, don’t go on and on about the sets. I, for one, need those things to tell myself the story. I need to put them down just so that they’re out of my head and somewhere else.

That’s why I started off late, on the 4th. I just ditched traditional screenplay format for a freer, more prose-like style. “That’s not a real screenplay, it’s a story,” you’ll say, and you’d be technically right on both points if you want to slavishly and religiously adhere to the ‘industry standard’ definition of a screenplay.

You’d also be wrong, because it’s actually a First Draft.

5. The First and Final Draft

Someone wise once said that the first draft of everything is always shit. You know, they’re right. I have never, so far, ever written the second draft of anything. I am that worst kind of person, the Proud Writer.

The Proud Writer expects everything he writes to be good. The Proud Writer uses the backspace key more than any other, re-typing every sentence he punches in several times until it’s just right. If he’s not getting the right words, then it must be a fault of the cosmos or that he’s ‘just not feeling it’ right now, and he’ll get up from his seat and go away to check his email or watch On The Lot.

The Proud Writer believes with certainty that once the words ‘The End’ are written on something it can never be changed. The Proud Writer is mortally afraid that if he doesn’t get it all perfectly right the first time, it will forever be wrong, wrong, wrong and everyone will somehow know and laugh at him when his back’s turned.

Please kill the Proud Writer within you as soon as you can.

The First Draft is not your story. It’s malleable. It’s soft and squishy and you can keep coming back to it time and again and work it until it’s hard and smooth. Nobody is going to read your First Draft except you. The draft contains ingredients that should go into your story, and it will be missing some and contain stuff that doesn’t belong there, but even if you know that something doesn’t belong there, leave it in.

If you’re tired and not feeling it, continue. The words will be crappy, lazy and boring, but continue. Keep writing. If you’re worried that you’re ruining a perfectly good story by doing this, then let me assure you that you aren’t — after all, this isn’t your story, it’s only the first draft — and continue writing. You will reach a juicy bit and things will get better.

When you do reach that juicy bit and feel the urge to spend some time on it, polishing it up or maybe going back to the older boring bits and working with that — don’t. Do not do that, just continue writing.

I know that you care about your stories — we all do — but as my brother so wisely put it the other day, “There’s a time for caring and a time for writing, and the first draft is a time for writing.”

V

Four Plates

A cheap and cheerful white IKEA bowl, on an end-table with inlay work from Kahdi Bhandar in India

Rocket Salad with Kidney Beans and Olives in a Honey, Whole-Grain Mustard and Balsamic Vinegar dressing

Fusilli in a Tomato Sauce with Fresh Basil and Parsley

Firttata with Salad and Wholewheat Pitta bread

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

There are a few of laughs peculiar to the cinema. There’s the stifled, back-of-the-throat rumble. There’s the quick “ha!” and the long giggle. There’s even genuine rolling-in-the-aisles, uncontrolled mess of laughter that filmmakers actually have to anticipate and incorporate pauses into the movies for. This is one the true joys of coming to a cinema, the ability to have your silly laugh literally drowned out by everyone else’s silly laugh.

Then there are the fake ones. You can spot these very easily because they always come a half second after the genuine laughs – or worse, a half second before – and are always too long and theatrical. It’s painfully obvious that this person is trying to show to everyone else that they get it,‘it’ being some kind of joke; usually an unfunny one that wasn’t worth laughing about in the first place.

You can tell a lot by cinema crowds by the way they laugh at the ads before the movie starts. If people laugh at really funny ads and you hear a few delayed theatrical ones, then chances are you’re in good, intelligent company. If, however, the banal car ad that’s already a year old generates long, loud haw-haws precisely one second after the sound has died down, then you’re in trouble. You’ve just walked into a movie with normal people.

The man/kid/thing in the seat next to me immediately took one look at the PIXAR logo on the screen and let out a laugh that went precisely, ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-hahaha’ in a flat, monotonous fashion. Then the screen said, ‘Presents’ and there he went again, in exactly the same manner. This happened a few more times during the Ratatouille trailer, at either random intervals or a half second after everyone else had finished laughing.

I was thankful that as At World’s End started up, he was busy chomping down on that pungent smelling thing he had smuggled in, but was left with mixed feelings. While the sooner he ate the sooner the smell would go away, it would also mean a return to his laughing at everything.

Lucky for us the movie starts on a pretty somber note, with lots of people being hanged. Unfortunately this bit where a kid is too short for the gallows came up between my neighbour’s mouthfuls and he let rip another factory-specification laugh. It’s as if he was trained or something.

Things weren’t going well. At World’s End was more of the same stuff I hadn’t liked in Dead Man’s Chest There was a whole bunch of Keira Knightley trying to act. There was a bit of Orlando Bloom forgetting he can. The jokes were a bit on the stupid and obvious side. Everything was gloomy and green, but at least Geoffrey Rush and Chow Yun Fat were around, and provided much of the spark of the first thirty minutes.

I heaved a great sigh of relief the second Johnny Depp’s nose came on screen. What followed over the next few minutes is perhaps the most surreal sequence ever to appear in a pirate movie, and it’s absolutely beautiful. So strange and so unfathomable, the normal people in the audience – my neighbour included – were for a good while silent as Captain Jack Sparrow was reintroduced to us. I was one of those people who wondered what on earth had happened to the character in the last movie, and so I was the happiest little pirate indeed to realise that back was the witty, smart and intelligent Jack Sparrow of Curse of the Black Pearl.

Over the next two-and-a-half hours I was nothing short of entertained. I went with every plot twist and double cross and over-done special effect, because there were good characters doing good movie stuff to watch. It didn’t matter and even became something of an entertainment whenever my neighbour – utterly lost by this point – would cling to anything that seemed vaguely like it was going to lead to comedy and start one of his patented ha-has.

I could tell that this film has definitely been retooled since Dead Man’s Chest came out. A couple of the major plot points only show up in this one, and surely if they were meant to be there all along some degree of foreshadowing would have happened in the second film (I speak of course, of what happens with Tia Dalma). This retooling is a necessary and welcome step, and in my opinion they’ve ‘saved’ this trilogy. Someone finally realised that we all watch this movie not for a bunch of bland, do-gooder young folk with noble and tragic stories, but for the pirates — The Pirates!

And so we have much more of Jack Sparrow and Mr. Gibbs, and much more of Barbosa. While in the first film he was a memorable but pretty straightforward villain, in At World’s End he’s revealed to be just as flamboyant, just as charismatic – and most importantly, just as crazy – as Sparrow. Even the Keith Richards cameo starts out a bit cloying but ultimately hits you with a hammer of a punchline. I’m very glad that Johnny Depp has said yes to Pirates 4 and beyond, and sincerely hope that Geoffrey Rush is also a part of those movies, because I would be sorely disappointed otherwise.

The film certainly shares more of a vibe with the second than the first, in that it is also a helter-skelter, million-plots-at-a-time story full of twists and turns. Thanfully this time those plots are put together better and are constantly moving the story forward. Also, there aren’t any long and silly action set-pieces (while the extended cartwheel swordfight from the second was entertaining on its own, it didn’t quite fit with the rest of the film). The action, in fact, is frequently thrilling and well laid out, the climax especially.

Hooray then, for Pirates of the Caribbean. While At World’s End is not as astoundingly excellent as Curse of the Black Pearl, it is quite a good movie and great way to wrap up what is hopefully the first of many trilogies to come.

A Temporary Madness

So I’ve gone and ruined my June by signing up for Script Frenzy, a month-long dash from the people who brought you NaNoWriMo. The difference here is that the wordcount is significantly less (20,000) but of course this time it’s not padded, prolix prose we’re all attempting, it’s cut and cleaned movie/stage scripts.

I have no idea why I sign up for these. Perhaps the hallowed memories of ferverishly spending the better part of three days typing non-stop back in Two-Thousand-freaking-One have given me an itch that must be scratched every tme Chris Baty drops me an email (quite what I did to resist it in 2004 I’ll never know). Perhaps it’s so that, should the world come to an end the month after next, well, at least I can say I finished one project I took up.

Either way, I’m in, and I have no idea what I’m going to write. There are tons — quite literally dozens and possibly over a hundred — little notes in my books marked with the code ‘MOV’ that can be turned into scripts. I could also just go in blind as I have done with NaNoWriMo in the past. I’m weighing whether or not I should just pick the biggest, most epicest story I’ve ever come up with. Something else tells me I should aim low — this is my first script — and I should choose somethings small and intimate.

20K seems like a much more accessible goal, but the fact remains that a script and a novel are very different beasts. The one time I’ve attempted to write a script (for a 27 minute sitcom format show) it’s taken a good three days (or around one full day’s worth of hours) to end up with a first draft of around 4,000 words, that too with a partner. Of course, a feature is not constrained by having to squeeze everything into seven minute segments. I really don’t give two hoots about three act structure and Hollywood script norms, so I don’t need to worry too much about it (since nobody’s really going to see the product of this June’s endeavour).

I know I sound like a broken record. This is pretty-much the same post I’ve made every October for the last five years. It seems that I’ve been “getting back into writing” (6 years) longer than I was actively writing in the first place (3 years).

There is, of course, the site, which I also consider writing. It’s imporant for me to be able to not just write fiction. On the other hand the only way I can hypnotise myself into being able to write non-fiction — even in a journal post like this — is to somehow imagine it as fiction. You won’t believe the amount of stuff that gets cut out because it’s me trying to get rid of a talking head. You don’t need to know when I lean back and gesture with the first three fingers of my right hand, because it’s a freaking blog post. I still don’t know why I even stopped calling this a blog… something to do with a technical difference in the backend of the site, I think, plus my sudden need to think of myself as a Writer again.

Two months ago a friend of mine, Jamie, asked — well, demanded — that I write a story that is actually, you know, complete. Being the hot stuff that I am I said, “Sure, I’ll have it done in a week, tell me what you want.” So he did.

I’m currently writing a Savant story — first time in years (no, I’m not counting all the aborted NaNovels) — and it’s got underwater cities and action and cool stuff (as per Jamie’s request). I’m around a 1/3rd of the way through, I think. He has exams starting in around a week’s time, and I have finally started to like what I’m writing, so it’s somewhere around the 8K mark with a possible completion date of this weekend. There are lots and lots of holes in it, but I’m enjoying it now and then.

Over dinner with some friends today the topic of drawing glass objects came up, and how it worked out best when you switched off your mind and just did it. Suddenly you switched back on and a half hour had passed, with you going, “Did I just draw that?”

Believe it or not, it’s the same way with writing. It should be that writing especially would require a person to be aware, pushing that left brain around to form words and sentences that make sense, but it isn’t. I can tell you from firsthand experience that every time I have written something I’m happy with — something good — I have never recalled the process or the time spent.

Switch Off. Switch On. Two thousand words of pure magic in 10pt Verdana, and a satisying ache in the wire of your spine.

Can’t beat that feeling.

And that is why I’m looking forward to June.

The Top 5 Films You Never Thought Someone Would Produce (But Thank God They Did)


What would you define as a good movie?

Award Winning? Critically Acclaimed? It has your favourite star in it? All your friends like it?

For me, it’s a movie that entertains me, plain and simple. Now, entertainment is a broad term that can be very subjectively defined. For instance, I never let professional critics’ opinions sway me from watching ‘bad’ movies — in fact, more often than not I find these bad movies to be highly entertaining, and yes, even good.

There’s a special type of ‘bad’ movie I love, that doesn’t follow any rules or logic and usually makes it to people’s ‘Top 5 Worst Movies’ list. These are movies that are so off-the-wall, so zany and silly that they put off most people, but I’m forever glad that someone had the good sense (or a lapse of it) to put some money behind them and get them made. These are the kinds of movies that, even on paper, don’t sound like a good proporistion.

These are also some of my favourite movies, and here’s my top 5 list. If you’ve never heard of them, or have heard of them but in a negative way before, I hope this list will do a little to change your mind and get you to see them:

1. Caveman!



Ringo Starr, Dennis Quaid and Barbara Bach as cavemen — sorry, cavepersons. If that sentence alone wasn’t enough to convince you to go out and find this movie right now, then may I urge fans of special effects (especially of the Ray Harryhausen kind) to give it a watch purely for the great stop-motion animation, or the laugh-out-loud hilarity?

This Python-esque send-up of One Million Years B.C. (set, of course, in One Zillion B.C.) scores over that movie because of its sheer chutzpah. While I will admit that the Raquel Welch movie does more immediately spring to mind when thinking of caveman romps (well, that’s purely because it has Raquel Welch in it!), Caveman! is as if not more memorable, and if you’ve seen the former you owe it to yourself to watch the latter.

Because any movie that features both the invention of music and the discovery of fried eggs just deserves to be a classic.

2. Danger Diabolik



Mario Bava may have inspired many great filmmakers with his horror and weird movies, but this will always be my favourite. From its psychedelic title sequence (and even more drug-fueled title song) to its zany lead character, Diabolik is the kind of movie that runs on cool and cool alone.

Forget the plot (hint: there isn’t one), forget the acting, and instead surrender yourself to the amazing sets, the fast car chases, the byzantine capers and the women — Oh! the women — who could only have existed in the 1960s.

Watch this movie and you too will, for a moment, wish you were a man in a tight black catsuit zooming around the countryside in an E-Type Jaguar. Any movie that can put you in that frame of mind is surely evil in all the right ways!

3. Party 7



Katsuhito Ishii’s follow up to his hit Sharkskin Man and Peach-Hip Girl is an odd film that takes place almost entirely in one hotel room. While the sprawling Japanese countryside from his first film is gone, the long, strange and rhythmic dialogue is still there, the characters’ quirkiness magnified even more by the confines perhaps, and the film builds to a cracker of an ending. It’s not as sublime as his follow up, The Taste of Tea nor is it as affectionate as Sharksin Man…, but I’ve rarely seen someone pull of such relentless strangeness with such aplomb.

Also, it features a costumed hero named Captain Banana and his sidekick, the yellow-jumpsuited Captain The Yellow (“Captain Yellow?” “The, The! Captain The Yellow!”).

Good stuff.

4. Babarella



Long before Jane Fonda was a ‘serious’ actress, she made this, the best film of her career. A free-wheeling, free love space adventure with enough weird special effects, shagadelic sets, white-winged underwear models and strangely named characters (the band Duran Duran took their name from one of the characters in this film) to fill five movies, Barbarella stands the test of time admirably.

One part Flash Gordon plus one part Flesh Gordon and ten parts madness equals tons of pure, unadultarated fun.

5. Zardoz



If you want to watch this with your girlfriend and she’s old enough to remember there being James Bonds before Daniel Craig, you can probably convince her by saying that this movie features Sean Connery running around in what basically amounts to boots, gun belts and a thong. Handlebar mustache notwithstanding, Zardoz is a fantastically weird examination of secluded future society.

By director John Boorman’s own admission they were probably trying to juggle one too many themes, but I can’t fault this film for ambition or ingenuity (all the special effects were done on-set and in-camera). It may look and feel strange, but that is what good Science Fiction is all about.

Also, Sean Connery in a thong.

Ladies?

~~~

(Darren Rowse at Problogger.net has been running a Top 5 competition, more a forum for exchanging and finding blogs. This is my contribution to the effort)

Spider-Man 3 Review

…I can’t believe I just gave my money to these people.

Music & Lyrics Review

Like I mentioned in the previous post, I had gone to the mall to watch Music & Lyrics. We usually don’t go to the mall on weekends as getting a parking space even in the enormous Mall of the Emirates parking lot on Friday can be a problem. However, it was not yet evening and with nothing else to do, we decided to chance it. The parking lot was quickly filling up, but we did manage to get a space.

I actually like the mall best on a weekend; for a guy who grew up in a city of 20 million people — and now resides in a country that has a population much less than that — have no fear of crowds, and almost miss them. The bustle of people of all shapes, sizes and nationalities is something I love. The noise of thousands of people and hundreds of conversations bubbling up through the four stories of the central atrium is also an experience that is not often found in this city of cars and their horns.

Weaving through the layers of crowd we made it to the far end of the mall with the cinema, and bought tickets a half hour early, giving us some more time to roam around, empty our tanks, and wait in the endless concession stand line for an overpriced and cinema-branded bottle of water (Seriously, I think the reason they show a half hour of trailers before a movie is because the lines at the snack bar take, on average, that long to work through). Despite being the first weekend of release, the screening was moderately full. It wasn’t the biggest screen in the house — that was, no doubt, still playing 300 (which I haven’t seen).

Sitting around waiting for the lights to dim I realised that it had been months since I’d seen anything in this particular theatre. For all of last year every single screening had begun with a Coca-Cola ad featuring Lebanese pop star Nancy Ajram. The ad was mediocre enough the first time, but seeing it dozens of times over the next year had begun to grate on me. I wondered if they still showed it, and at that moment the lights dimmed and up started a Coke ad.

Thankfully they had moved on from Ms. Ajram and replaced her with a mostly computer-generated ad showing the fantastical inner workings of a Coke machine. It’s and international campaign I’d seen on TV before. You’ve probably seen it too, and while I’m generally impressed with the technical aspects of it, the composition of the shots was terrible, so was the editing, and while the design of the fantasy universe was cute it was by no means memorable. I leaned over and said to my brother, “This is both the best and the worst Coke ad I’ve ever seen,” and he couldn’t help but nod in agreement.

The prospect of seeing this ad for the whole of this year — and possible beyond — was not a pleasant one. Nancy, come back!

They showed, among other things, a trailer for a Curtis Hanson movie starring Eric Bana (it’s good to see that despite Troy and Hulk‘s relatively disappointing numbers people still haven’t given up on him), and a short trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End that I had been avoiding on the internet. The trailer seems nice in that it didn’t focus too much on the special effects, and instead was almost entirely dialogue. What little scenery was shown looked disappointingly monotone and fake (a problem I had with the second Pirates film), but who knows, they might be able to pull it off. I wonder how many islands were ruined for this one?

I knew very little about Music & Lyrics going in, other than that it was a romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, and that it had something to do with pop music. Really, that’s about all you need to know about a romantic comedy movie. I like Hugh Grant movies. I’m a sucker for Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and especially Love, Actually, so I was pretty much sold on the whole thing to begin with. Still, must be objective, must be objective.

The film is solid, if a little short. It’s funny (poking fun at the 80s might seem easy, but the writers do it in continually interesting ways), it’s romantic, Hugh Grant delivers (as usual), and I’ve finally seen a Drew Barrymore movie I actually, really, like (okay, so Never Been Kissed was not bad either, but let’s not speak of those Charlie’s Angels movies she helped produce). Side characters are relegated to stereotypes for the most part, but they aren’t caricatured as much as one might expect in an American movie: the bumbling, lonely divorcee agent and the giggly fangirl sister aren’t overplayed. The young popstar played by Haley Bennet is sufficiently vapid; I’m just not sure if this is great acting or just the way she is.

I did say that it was a little short, and by that I mean that it doesn’t feel as large or ‘epic’ as Four Weddings or even Notting Hill. In fact as the credits roll we are shown some scenes that — judging by the characters’ costumes — took place during the midsection of the film, which I certainly wouldn’t have minded seeing there.

It’s still a good film and is well worth the watch, so maybe I’m just a Hindi film nut who expects a three hour running time to be par for the course. Also the pop songs in the film are exactly the kind of stuff that you can’t get out of your head — I’ve had the main one (“Pop! Goes My Heart” which in the movie comes complete with cheesy A-Ha-inspired music video) buzzing around in my brain for the past few weeks!

That’s Music & Lyrics in a nutshell: a bit on the light side, but far more memorable than the average pop song.

Excuse me, for now I need to go hunt down the lyrics to “Pop! Goes My Heart”…

Mall of the Emirates Atrium

The Mall of the Emirates is supposedly the third largest mall in the world. The parking building is certainly the biggest I’ve ever seen, and the shops are huge, but I still wouldn’t mind a larger one to roam around (In a couple of years we’re supposed to get at least a couple of contenders for biggest mall in the whole wide world). My favourite part is the huge atrium in the centre. This picture is just a small part of it, and was taken in the early evening one Friday wth the new Kodak c875, before we took in a screening of Music & Lyrics.

How I Chose My New Compact Camera

In case you didn’t already notice, I barely took any pictures in 2006. There were a bunch of reasons, most of which squarely came down to a combination of mild depression and acute laziness, but there were a few technical factors inhibiting my photography.

Plain and simple, our camera wasn’t working too well, and still isn’t. Since 2003 Samir and I have been using an Olympus C-4000z, a 4 megapixel, 3x optical zoom that is the size and shape of the average potato and takes 10 seconds or so to start up and take a picture with.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic camera and I wouldn’t trade it for a dozen Canons. The image quality is phenomenal and while I’ve read a dozen reviews talking about how the images are too contrasty (and I partly agree), there’s a certain look to Olympus digital camera results that I just like.

Now, of course, we come to the problems. The first one is that the batteries are wonky. We use two sets of four AA NiMh batteries for the thing, different brands and ratings, but over the years they’ve become depleted to the point where they barely hold any charge, and anything they do hold leaks away within a few hours. I’m not sure if it’s the old simple battery charger we were using or some kind of fault of the camera, so I’m reluctant to plonk down on a new set until I know for sure. Despite this we’ve come to understand the quirks of the unwell batteries and can squeeze two full cards worth of photos into a session through judicious use of the screen and zoom.

This brings me to the second problem, which is that two 128MB SmartMedia cards (which aren’t available here anymore) don’t hold that many full-quality pictures. Sure, 140 pics is still a lot more than a film camera, but on an average day out even that number can be limiting. I like to use the freedom that digital cameras give me to take many pictures of the same thing — sometimes dozens — then choose the best one later. The image limit takes me back to the days of 36 shot films with the developing and printing expenses. I like to plan my shots, but I don’t like to obsess over choosing one over the other at the shoot itself.

The third and most frustrating problem is that the navigation buttons on the camera don’t work anymore. We’ve been talking about giving the thing in for repairs for months, but usually some kind of weekend trip or other photo-op comes along to tempt us and our camera away. It also is neither the fastest nor the most compact piece of equipment to carry around on a day-to-day basis.

All of these factors, plus the increasing strain of two passionate photographers with just one camera between them (the last trip to India was frustrating enough with the battery issues) made one thing clear:

We needed to get a new camera!

Back in 2003, when we decided to plonk down good money for our first digicam, Samir did the hunting. I hadn’t actively handled a camera since the mid nineties when we each had 10$, plastic lens focus-free 35mms. I learned pretty-much everything I know on that old lavender-coloured thing and still have tons of old photos (some of them are even taken from the even-cheaper and older 110 film camera I had when I was six). None of the shots are as experimental as the ones I take now but they were a lot of fun to take (development and film costs etc. meant that photos were precious, but we still took a roll a month, much more than most people, and certainly most 10-year-olds).

Samir had researched and fished around for all subsequent cameras, and was the primary user of them too (I was busy, addicted to my PlayStation): the all-singing, all-dancing Samsung 35mm, the Ricoh compact and the strange and beautiful Praktica MTL5 with a Zenit lens, our first and so far only SLR. We love to research stuff. It’s a wonder we get any work done…

…Oh yeah, right, we don’t.

He spent the better part of his free time in August 2003 looking for just the right camera, and finally we decided on the C-4000z and went out to look for it. Just wandering around the shops and looking for stuff in our price range was and is not a fruitful endeavour, which I’ll expand on later.

Getting used to a digital camera after using a film camera all my life was frustrating, at first. I wasn’t prepared for the enormous amount of lag between pressing the button and the taking of the shot. Where previously I’d just run my thumb over the dial quickly to advance the film — a two second operation if I was nimble, and a one second job using the Praktica’s trigger-like film advance — the digicam would take a more glacial approach and spend 5 seconds showing me the picture, then writing it to the card, and prepping for the next one.

This is why I got into macro photography: I could use the screen to focus exactly on the part I wanted, frame things without having to worry about a discrepancy between viewfinder and lens, and hey, I could take my time — my subject wasn’t going anywhere!

As time progressed and I learnt the ins and outs of the camera, I did get a better hang of taking outdoors and relatively fast-moving shots, but a quick scan of digital camera sites over the past few years revealed that resolutions had improved; more is now squeezed into a truly pocketable form factor; higher ISO settings (faster ‘film’) and anti-shake technologies are now available in consumer-level compacts so taking night shots is easier; and my main quibble — the lag between shutter release press and actual shot — is vastly reduced.

While most people would move up and buy a bigger camera for their second purchase, a digital SLR usually, I chose to go for a compact because I needed something small, quick and versatile for everyday use. I don’t want to end up lugging a massive SLR to the mall.

Having a good compact camera for everyday use is an important thing for a hobbyist and professional photographer. Contrary to popular belief we don’t all like to roam around with bulging equipment, and the smaller the camera the less likely it is to warrant attention from security guards in public places (this is especially important if, like me, you are an unshaven brown man). It isn’t a replacement for a large pro or ‘prosumer’ camera, but it is a necessity if you want to take pictures while living your everday life.

The Consequences of Compact

Most compact cameras are overpriced crap. A hundred years from now when we have Quantum Processor Virtual Reality Smellovision cameras, the compact ones will also probably be overpriced crap.

Photography, the use of light to form an image on a medium, has so far been based on the lens (and for the forseeable future, it will be). The rule of thumb is that the more light you can put through the lens and onto the medium, the clearer the image will be. This is why SLRs are so big: the lenses are huge. We can infer, then, that the tiny lens in your old compact camera is not letting all that much light in, so it doesn’t have as much to deal with.

I’m not even factoring in things like zoom lenses and their mechanisms, electronics, film and film advancement mechanics, meters and flash bulbs and batteries and all the other stuff that needs to be engineered to fit into a size that is about as big as two decks of playing cards. Getting all those things tiny enough and working properly means that often image quality is sacrificed; things aren’t fine-tuned as well because they just can’t be at that size and budget; and after all, 99% of those cameras are going to go out and take crappy pictures of people who are either drunk, sunburnt or some at some stage inbetween.

Are they really going to notice that high-contrast areas of the picture have purple lines around them, that their Rudolph-red nose at the centre has a millimetre level of pinching and distortion? Probably not, and they usually have enough money to spend on cameras to cover all the costs of squeezing those parts into that sleek, compact body (which they will lose after said drunken picture is taken, anyway).

Like I said, most consumer cameras are overpriced crap.

Photography, thankfully, has long been a popular hobby, and there are magazines and websites and awards given by those magazines and websites to cameras that aren’t crap. People like seeing the words ‘Award-Winning’ on the box of something, and so they might spend 20-30% more on an award-winning product than just whatever the guy at the photo shop pimps them.

Most people also know at least one person who’s ‘into photography’ so they’re the ones these people will go to for advice when choosing a good camera — a compact one — and this friend will go along with them to the photo shop like a concerned parent and grill the minimum-wage guy behind the counter on things like ISO levels and macro modes, none of which the eventual owner of the camera may use, but if you’re going to pay good money for something it might as well not be complete crap.

The odd thing is, digital cameras work in a way that actually makes it easier for a compact camera to not be crap. Unlike film cameras where physics demands that the lens has to be big enough to make a full-sized picture on that type of film (so 120mm cameras are large, and the old 110 films needed smaller lenses), in a digital camera the image is captured on a very tiny CCD. If you made a CCD the size of a 35mm film it would cost a bundle and be of a resolution that only museums and pornographers might have any interest in, so manufacturers now don’t need to be limited by the size of the film medium. Lenses, therefore, get smaller. Even a regular digital camera’s lens is smaller than a 35mm camera’s, and compacts are smaller still.

The thing I told you about bigger lenses putting more light through still holds true though. Digital SLRs, despite the smaller size of a CCD, still have full-size lenses, and while this does result in things like image noise, they do produce better results than compacts. Olympus have come up with a smaller SLR format to better suit CCD sizes, the Four Thirds Format, which apparently is all shiny and cool with 14 megapixel SLRs that are no bigger than my current regular digital camera.

Unfortunately, since cameras like these are still bigger than compacts and the engineers have more freedom to make them good, they all cost a whole lot of money. I don’t want to end up lugging a $5,000 camera to the mall.

In the quest to make a camera that has a high megapixel count and supermodel slimness, camera manufacturers also remove a whole bunch of features that anybody who is ‘into photography’ like myself wouldn’t dream of living without. Viewfinders go out the window. ‘Professional’ user modes such as Aperture and Shutter priority modes are omitted. I once saw a (film) compact from Kodak where you couldn’t turn the flash off — ever. It cost five times as much as I paid for the old plastic-lens one ten years ago! Nobody really notices this kind of stuff, because the majority of compacts are bought by people who think the ability to put flowery vignette frames around pictures of their cats is a must-have feature.

If you are a regular consumer and you walk up to your photo guy saying your camera doesn’t take good photos, he’s just going to try and sell you the newest, shiniest thing that has its own set of ‘helpful’ automatic modes, or if you look rich enough he’ll try to sell you an SLR. There are an alarming number of people I see walking around malls toting Canon D5s and taking pictures that are as shit if not more than most compacts. Must be something to do with the big, big lenses, I think.

The Quest For Digital Excellence

It started, as it usually does, when we were called in to consult on the purchase of a compact camera for a friend. I had been keeping aside some money for a compact, but nothing that was really affordable (sub $200) seemed very good, and nothing very good was affordable. I was still willing to spend up to $300 for a good compact, and while looking around the shops for the friend’s camera I was also keeping an eye on things that looked good for me.

The friend ended up with a Kyocera 5 megapixel, not a bad camera and certainly for the $150 price it was a good buy, but lacking in all those essential prosumer features such as manual settings and high ISO. I looked at a bunch of stuff in the $300 dollar range and noticed the same thing Samir and I had encountered four years ago during our last camera scout:

Dubai prices are ridiculous. It didn’t matter how old a camera was or how primitive, price seemed to be determined by how high the megapixel count was and what the brand was (Nikons and Canons being the highest price). We turned then, to our old friend the internet, and there it was only confirmed: cameras in the market here were ridiculously overpriced. Still, we needed one, so we set about doing some research based on what, to me, is the major factor in choosing a digital camera: Image Quality.

Lucky us who live in the 21st century, for while in the film era people would have to buy magazines and listen to reviews, with digital you can just go to a camera review site and download full-resolution, unaltered sample pictures taken by the camera you’re interested in. Over the next couple of weeks two sites in particular were almost ingested by us: Steves’s Digicams and DP Review.

Steve’s has a nice list of ‘Best Cameras’ and their reviews are very in-depth. Like most American sites I’ve read, however, they seem to favour Canons and Nikons a lot. They also take some really average-looking sample photos, usually of the same things. This is a good thing, because it shows you how a camera will behave in the hands of a completely unartistic photographer — showing you the typical unartistic results one can expect from the camera — and the same subjects duplicated across dozens of cameras means you can compare and contrast two models almost directly.

DP Review seems to be more European, and the sample images they take are downright gorgeous. Really, I don’t think those guys can take a bad picture with any camera. I do think (but I’m not sure) that their photos are altered; something about the perfect contrast and saturation on the samples doesn’t quite gel with my experience of any digital camera’s standard output. DP Review is the place to go to see the best results one can expect from the camera.

You’d think that all this wealth of information would be confusing, and it is, but once you spend enough time doing it you tend to notice things both in Steve’s average photos and DPR’s exquisite ones. Subtle details and quirks of camera start to show up, and based on these you can steer towards the ones you like more.

One of the first ones I looked at was the Pentax Optio M20, one of the ‘best cameras’ on Steve’s but despite their recommendation I didn’t like the sample pictures one bit. It also didn’t have any kind of manual settings or image stabilisation. That was out.

I didn’t like Canons or Samsungs either. I can see why a lot of people — especially reviewers — would recommend them, but it is a personal choice. They have a very even, ‘digital’ look to them, perfectly fine if you’re a texture artist or enjoy spending a lot of time in an image manipulation program, but I’m more interested in something with its own character — a ‘camera’ rather than a ‘recording device’ if you know what I mean.

One camera that did have character though, was the Leica M8. Despite the fact that its image sensor is so sensitive it turns ultra-violet light into hues in the image, I’d still buy one because it’s a Leica and it doesn’t just take pictures, it takes Leica Pictures.

Unfortunately it costs $4795. Yes, that’s nearly five thousand dollars. Still, if I had the money…

But wait! Leica does provide lenses for Panasonic’s Lumix cameras, and there were a whole bunch of those in the market, such as the FX07, which Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing recently declared (in typical Doctorow fashion) “The Perfect Compact Camera”(!) but Leica-shmeica: it’s overpriced, and doesn’t have any manual controls whatsoever.

It also has a Lithium Ion battery pack, which is not a bad thing, but I prefer cameras that accept stanard AA batteries. While I always carry a spare set of charged NiMhs with the camera, it is a comfort knowing that the camera is that much more usable on long trips because in a pinch you can walk into any convenience store and pick up a pair of batteries that will last you a few shots at least. Again, it’s a personal thing, but a camera is a very personal purchase.

The Fuji Finepix F30 caught my eye because of the fantastic performance at ridiculous ISO settings like 3200, but that was a little too expensive.

I turned, next, to Sony’s Cybershots. I remember six months ago another friend had bought a P200, and at the time I was quite impressed with what it was for the price. A little hunting showed that the P range were the ultra-compact, non-viewfinder, LiOn battery pack ones, and the W range was similar but had regular batteries. The image quality, while not as unique as the Olympus I had used so far, was still impressive, with little purple fringing (a purple line on high-contrast areas). The fact that the exact models I was looking for were no longer available in the market but that choice on the back burner. Also I wasn’t completely in love with the image quality; it looked ‘too digital’ for my taste.

It’s All About Image

Dozens of cameras went by and were rejected because of price, lack of features, noisy photos or just plain gut reaction. A lot of them had very aggressive noise reduction, an in-camera, non-adjustable feature that smoothens out skin tones and highly detailed areas so that they look better. Every digital camera big and small does this, but in most I found that it was unsatisfactory, turning skin into pasty smears and hair into clumpy messes. Not something most people would notice if viewing their images in a “fit to screen” mode, but it does show up when looking at it in the actual resolution. For anyone who wishes to manipulate their images later in Photoshop or The GIMP, the more detail the better — there are much better noise filters available in computer software, and you have more control over it..

Frustrated, I looked once more at Olympus compacts. Some of them had very bad video recording capabilities or the lenses weren’t very good. One that I almost decided on — the Mju/Stylus 750 — had a horrible fuzzines on the outer edges of the pictures, the consequences of trying to squeeze a 5x optical zoom into an ultraslim case. Also Olympuses use xD picture card media, which is supposedly slower than SD and also more expensive.

Somewhere late in the game, I decided to just stop looking at the cameras with an analytical eye, and just go to DP review and look for something that had pictures that wowed me. The Nikons have a fantastic film-like look, and if they weren’t horribly overpriced here (the S10 which I was considering was over $400 because it had a 10x zoom), I might own one today. The surprise contender, however, was the Kodak c875.

So far I hadn’t considered Kodak because one look at the back of their cameras and the prominent “share” button had told me that they were very regular consumer oriented. I was wary of being unable to just dump the photos from the camera, without using some kind of proprietary software. I’m the kind who doesn’t ever use Windows Picture and Fax viewer (the program most pictures open in by default) because when you rotate the image it directly, permanently changes the file. It’s always best to just keep the thing as it came out of the camera because in compacts you’re dealing with JPEG compressed images, and the more you mess with them and re-save them the more likely you are to get a loss of quality in the finer details.

Nevertheless, the photos were very impressive. Also it was an 8 megapixel camera with a 5x optical zoom and an adequate amount of manual controls. While it didn’t have an optical viewfinder, the macro wasn’t all that great (10cm minimum distance, versus 2cm on my Olympus), and it wasn’t as slim and pocketable as the others, something about it just seemed right.

I looked around town and either found it overpriced or not available at all. It seems that the high megapixel and zoom put it in league with higher-end cameras. Currently the average compact is a 7 megapixel 3x zoom so anything above it is automatically priced higher no matter what its price in the international market.

Keeping those international prices in mind I even hunted around the internet, but there it turned out that with all the shipping fees it would work out to as much as I would pay here, and at least if I bought it here I’d get local service and warranties. It was getting to a point where I had to choose between the lesser of two overpriced shops, and that is when I went to the supermarket.

Supermarkets are strange places. If you have a local one you go to often you tend to overlook all the bits you aren’t usually interested in; the dry cleaner; the little knick-knack store; the Kodak photo shop. Samir is a lot more observant than I, however, which is why, at the checkout counter one day, he noted that in addition to taking passport-size photos and printing film, the little hole in the wall also sold digital cameras. Turns out they had the c875 for a lot less than the other stores, and around the same price as it would have cost me to order it off the net. Plus, it came with a battery charger, four batteries and a 512MB SD card.

You don’t usually find a better deal at an official dealer in these parts, mostly because large hypermarkets buy in bulk numbers and can afford to have a slimmer proft margin. Small stores you can bargain in, but this usually brings them down to the listed price in a hypermarket. But here it was, a great deal on a good camera next to the checkout at a supermarket.

And that is how I got my new camera.

Cthululu!

Just before I went on vacation last January, I realised that there were still a couple of potatoes left in the house. They had already been around for a while and had started to sprout eyes. I decided on a whim to just leave them out and see what grew. When I came backthey were still there, shriveled, and the eyes had grown into weird clusters of purple and green tendrils. I could have probably taken pictures of them right then and there, but decided to wait.

Now, four whole months later, I took some pictures of them with the new camera. These are two of the best ones, and clicking on the second one leads to a 1024×768 version.

“That’s it,” I said to myself,they’ve served their purpose, and I was all set to dump them in the trash can, but… well, I’m a bit of a softie, and even though I don’t like pets I had developed an odd fascination with the two potatoes, shifting them around to see which way the tendrils would turn to catch the sun, and just how long they might go fuelled by sunlight and their own body-mass.

I’ve decided to keep them, and as long as they don’t spoil I will do so indefinitely; maybe even look up a way to grow them some more.

I know they’re not the conventional idea of house plants, but they are cute in their own Cthulu-esque way.

Any ideas for names?

PS ‘Cthululu’ is a Duck Tales reference.