Setsuled's Journal

Here is a post by someone loosely linking the recent Mooninite scandal to the witch trials. I'm inclined to think he has a point, less, maybe, about Boston than about how people react to the Weird. On the other hand, this whole thing's beginning to border on the Lovecraftian.

I think I'm nearly ready to write a real script for this new project. I hope it's not that I'm just getting impatient. It's true; my brain feels liked winged worms dancing in my skull to-day. I'll see what happens. It's not like I don't have three beginnings of scripts from the last three times I felt like this.

I worked on some concept art to-day. This story's going to take place entirely on one alien world, and I actually felt like designing alien flora and fauna. Then I thought about how folklore would revolve around certain animals and their normal effect on the lives of indigenous peoples. I wanted to make some robust stuff for this, because one of my Big Ideas is to contrast it with the imposition of mythology alien to the world.

To-day I drew a landscape with three characters in the foreground, with some trees, mountains, and a fort in the background. I'm finding a lot of the look for this section of the story is being influenced by Ran and, to a lesser extent, Kagemusha. I've been thinking a lot about the concept paintings Kurosawa did before making both movies, and the ways he would use colour. It's having a big impact on my tree designs especially, though I don't think it'd be clear to anyone who didn't know.

I'm thinking of changing the name of one of the main characters. Part of me is strongly warning me not to, as I know I almost always start to hate my own ideas if I spend too much time with them. Which is another reason I'm chomping at the bit about the script lately.

Darby O'Gill and the Little People has put me in the mood for The Quiet Man to-night . . . Last night I watched two thirds of Sixteen Candles, and I may finish it to-night just because I feel vaguely duty bound, but the movie was sort of bothering me. I kept watching because of Molly Ringwald--watching her is an experience I'm finding to be something like watching a beautiful animal at the zoo. I've been trying to remedy my inexperience with 1980s John Hughes movies, so Sixteen Candles follows last week's viewing of The Breakfast Club, which was a much better, though certainly not perfect movie. It had interesting character stuff, and was only truly bad for Ally Sheedy's stupid makeover.

I'd seen Pretty in Pink a while ago, and I found it and The Breakfast Club intriguing for it's portrayal of pretty kids who don't exactly behave realistically, but behave with a certain imperceptible logic that doesn't seem to exist anywhere else. It's like a lost style, and it's sort of intriguing.