For the film shoot last week I needed furniture to represent ten different scenic locations, all shot on greenscreen. Besides dealing with the usual greenscreen parameter of avoiding reflective surfaces I also had a fairly tight budget. This meant that some of the rental furniture I picked up wasn’t in stellar condition. You’ll notice that this table, which has a very nice form, has gaping cracks which were repaired with gorilla glue, leaving nasty white scars all over it.

This particular rental house doesn’t mind if I give their furniture “a little love” so the white scars were acceptable. Most rental houses don’t want you to do anything to their props. Rightly so.

While we were renting out the Little Shop of Horrors puppets, the number of times they came back with horrendous “repairs” or “enhancements” that took a lot of labor to undo.

Just a note: When renting props, unless you have specific permission in writing from the prop house, don’t do anything to the props that you can’t completely undo. And make sure you undo it before returning the prop.

For this, since the practical antique value of the piece is gone, I was able to take the easy route. I mixed up two tones of paint to match the wood tone. Using a stiff bristle brush, I worked it into the gorilla glue, taking some care to match the grain of the wood.

Once I finished that, I gave it a once over with furniture polish and voila. A table that looks rustic, but not trashed.

Comments? -- Link.

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The Tel Aviv Dossier by Lavie Tidhar and Nir Yaniv

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2009/07/truck-stop-by-jack-kilborn-ja-konrath.html

I hope you all had a wonderful Fourth of July. Rob and I celebrated by going for a walk in Riverside Park. The weather was nearly perfect. We chose not to fight the crowds to see the fireworks and now, at 1:20 am we are still able to listen to them as various neighbors continue to blow things up.

No, no. Don’t mind us. We were awake anyway.

Comments? -- Link.

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-not-to-write-story.html

One of the things that bothers me sometimes when looking at world-building is the way people don’t think about where objects come from. What is the industry that fuels the region? Where does all that paper come from in Battlestar Galactica?

So this essay on the origins of a pencil tickles me no end, and not just because it’s written in first person. What I like about it is that it points out all the different jobs that you don’t even think about which are required to make a pencil.

Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye—there’s some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.

Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.

So next time you’re doing world creation, think about where all those objects are coming from. Even if you don’t put that detail down on the page, it can add a richness to your fiction.

Mirrored from SFWA | Comment

Then behold! I am on a new server. The real question is: Do my posts show up in RSS again, or am I still relegated to headline only.

Comments? -- Link.

Eric, the main character of Ken Loach’s “Looking for Eric”, is in a rut: he’s on his own for raising his two stepsons, a truant and a delinquent; he lost the love of his live twenty years ago; and, just recovered from a serious car accident, is unable to muster enough dynamism to properly do his job. His life is increasingly slipping away from him–until one night, his idol Eric Cantona appears to him and tries to get him to change…

OK, when I first saw the trailer for this, the idea seemed pretty ridiculous. I mean, how can you even think Cantona would make a decent guardian angel? Plus, the only other Ken Loach movie I saw in its entirety was Land and Freedom, set during the Spanish civil war: I was forced to sit through several viewings of it in Spanish class and was not very much amused or enthralled.

However, this one works. Loach’s always been very good at depicting the lives of working-class men, and here he paints a quiet, tender picture of the fraternity of postmen (and football fans in their spare time). It could have been a very grim movie, since it deals with lots of violence and harsh facts of life–but instead, it’s a gently absurdist fable about taking charge of one’s life. Loach doesn’t shy away from the grimness of Eric’s life, but the darkness acts as counterpart to plenty of laugh-out loud moments (the scenes between Cantona and Steve Evets, who plays Eric, are brilliant tongue-in-cheek fun). The finale was made of awesome Monty Python silliness.

I actually walked out of this one smiling, and that is no mean feat.

Cross-posted from Aliette de Bodard

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