The Profreading Never Ends

Yes, I'm aware of the typo in the heading of this blog.

Doing these short stories for the anthology collection, "Off the Rails and Other Tales", I've found that not only is there never enough rewriting, but there never seems to be enough proofreading.  I've used outside help for editing and proofreading and even after I've given the stories a good once over (something I rarely do in my blog.  Sorry), they've found plenty of misspellings, grammar issues and typos to fix.  When I get the stories back I give them a once over again and occasionally still find things we both missed.  Twice!

So, when the book comes out, please realize, that we did put a lot of effort into making it read smoothly, or at least, as intended and any typos you may find snuck in under several passes of the radar.

One of the stories, "Front Window, An Alien Vengeance Short Story", is written in a format that throws a lot of people.  It's very short and I thought an appropriate piece to experiment with a bit.  I figure if you're going to self publish, you should do things a little differently.  It's sort of like making independent movies.  Part of the point of being independent is doing things a major company would be afraid to risk doing.

That last sentence didn't sound right.  Where are my proofreaders?

Night Crawl - Excerpt

Another of the short stories we'll be including in the upcoming book, "Off the Rails and Other Tales" is "Night Crawl".  It's a short about 3 young people, in their early to mid 20s, trying to find a safe place to wait out a disaster that has befallen Earth.  The world has suddenly become overrun with gigantic carnivorous insects.  Walt, Rachael and Harry have reasoned that moving North, toward a colder climate, might be safer than staying down South in Florida, since the bugs seem to shy away from freezing climates.  During their journey they become separated and in this segment Harry is trying to make it to the safety of a cabin before nightfall.  The bugs are photophobic and mostly swarm at night.

From "Night Crawl":


   It was just about dusk when Harry reached the cabin. He looked up at the darkening sky and realized that with all the tree cover the cabin was in that it had been out of the bright sunlight for quite awhile. The ground would already be starting to cool, signaling to the creatures that night was falling. Harry looked up and saw the small wooden cabin on top of the hill. There was an old pickup truck parked on flat tires next to it. He wondered if it still ran. Maybe he could make it back in time after all. If he could get air into those tires and get that old heap started…
   Suddenly, the leaves that covered the ground a few yards away from him rustled. Instinctively Harry reached for the shotgun that usually resided over his shoulder. It was no longer there. He watched the pile of leaves intently and they rustled again. Then a bulge grew beneath the dirt to the left of them. For a moment the ground all around him seemed to writhe. He looked to the cabin, took a deep breath and charged for the front door.
   As if thrown by a catapult a large black beetle leapt from beneath the leaves. Harry could feel dirt hitting his face and the back of his neck. He would have sworn the beast let out a war cry and he didn’t dare look back as he heard its six sharp feet pound into the dirt behind him. Harry jumped up the stairs to the front porch of the cabin and prayed that the door wasn’t locked. He turned the knob as his momentum pushed the door open. And then, in an instant he slammed the wooden door closed behind himself and thrust the full weight of his body against it. His 215 pound frame shook as the beetle struck the door a moment later. The door shook a couple of more times as the creature threw its body against it and then gave up. Harry reached into a corner and picked up the one-by-four that Walt’s Dad had used as a lock and slid it into the slats to bar the door.
+++

Obviously on the budgets we usually work with this story would be ambitious to say the least, but a slightly larger independent company could really do great things with it.  We keep the main characters limited, the locations fairly simple and the potential for big scenes is there.
As a reader there a few very suspenful sequences to read and one or two I don't suggest reading just before sitting down to eat.

Keep checking back for updates.  And please, spread the word(s).

So, this is an old movie, but....

I did this short a few years ago, partially because we had finally gotten an HD Camera and I wanted to do something relatively simple to test it out.  Since then we used that camera on half a dozen features and now shoot on something much more sophisticated.  I also wanted to give my friend, Joel D. Wynkoop, a role he could sink his teeth into a bit more.  Joel had done quite a bit of acting for me before this, but the movies were always a bit tongue in cheek and he and I played the humor a bit over the top and self aware.  I knew he could do more dramatic stuff and had done it with other people.  I figured it was time I wrote a more serious role for him.

What brought this movie back to the surface for me is the short story I listed a paragraph from below.  The werewolf, the isolation, the father-child dynamic all come into play in "Shelter", although they play out very differently.

So, enjoy, for your viewing pleasure, "Shelter", starring Joel D. Wynkoop and Nicola Fiore.

Excerpt from : "Banker's Hours"

As promised, here is a short excerpt from one of the short stories that I'm considering putting in my book.  It wasn't originally part of the plan, but I wrote it a week or so ago for a contest online and it does fit the "could be a movie" thread of the book, which is really what connects all of the stories.  They are related mostly through the fact that they are written by me, but also because I'd like to see each of them be put to the screen some day.  Most of the stories deal with isolation and danger and "Banker's Hours" has the added coolness of a powerful monster who I will introduce to you in the excerpt.  It will ruin one surprise of the overall story, but not a big one, so read at your own peril.

                                                                     FROM: "BANKER'S HOURS"

                                                                               by Jason L. Liquori

                                                                           (c) Jan 29, 2012

   “Open the vault!” Tony insisted.
   “I can’t,” Brad said. “I need my keycard!”
   “Well where is it?” Jack screamed.
   Brad pointed to floor near his writhing son. The keycard was lying in a puddle of foamy drool. Jack grunted and charged to grab the precious card. As he crouched down Taylor looked up at him and roared. His eyes were bright yellow and hair was bursting forth from his neck and arms.    
   “What the Hell is wrong with this kid?” Jack shouted as he reached for the card.
   Before there was an answer Taylor swung his arm and sent Jack flying across the room. The large man crashed through some grey cubicle walls and sunk unconscious behind a desk.
   “It’s too late!” Brad shouted as he pulled a jail cell-like door closed between the alcove and the lobby.
  

“What the Hell are you doing?!” Tony said, pointing both barrels of the shotgun at the terrified banker.
   “Can’t you see what he is? It’s too late to get him into the vault! I just hope the bank can hold him.”
   Ron and Tony watched in terror as Taylor stood straight and tall. His now naked body quivered as his legs and arms extended and his neck stretched and contorted. Long claws burst from his hands and feet and fur grew on his body at an incredible rate. The boy’s face elongated and blood poured from his mouth as his teeth tumbled from his gums, pushed out by long, sharp fangs. In moments a tremendous Wolf, standing like a man, was looming in the center of the dark lobby where Taylor once stood. The creature was so large that his head nearly touched the low ceilings of the bank.
   Ron let out a weak gasp as he sunk behind the counter and hoped that the creature would forget that he was there.

                                         ***
   Sorry about the lack of formatting.  Some of it was lost from ".doc" file to here.
   I think this particular story would be great for a mid-range budget film crew.  It keeps locations to a minimum, is easy to flesh out a bit and relies on a small cast and one monster to get the job done.  You'll be able to read this particular story in its entirety online.  I'll post the link in the comments when it goes "live".

What? Are You Writing a Book?

As a matter of fact, yes I am.  Sort of.  Well, I have.  I'm just waiting on the edits.  If you're wondering who the publisher will be, look no further.  I'm going to take a stab at self publishing a collection of short stories and one "novella".

This is how it happened.  About 2 years ago I started having some eye trouble.  It didn't keep me from shooting movies or shorts, but it did make it difficult and not very pleasant.  I still got some movies out, but I wasn't enjoying the process as much as I had in the past and I began to fall behind a bit.

At the same time, all of the downtime and "rest" was causing some new ideas to surface.  More than I could have gotten on film on my good days, no less during this time (My eye is much better now, by the way.  Thanks for worrying.)  So, I needed a way to get some of these ideas down.  Organized and prepared to become full blown movies when time and budget allowed.  As those who know me will tell you, once characters start to live in my head I need to let them out or they begin to scream for a life.  For many of these stories I hadn't gotten that far yet, but the situations themselves were insisting on being played out.  The scenarios would plague me until I could the words typed out on a screen and out of my head.

I decided I'd put together a book of short stories that could later serve as treatments for films.  Since these versions weren't to be actual shooting scripts I could let the thoughts of budget fly out the window and write things as I really wanted them to be.  I still kept the character rosters lean and the locations limited, if not simple, because that's just how I write. 

Right now two people are editing separate stories for me and in a month or so I hope to unleash the collection of 4 or 5 stories upon the world.  I think it will be a new look at my storytelling for some and seem very familiar to others. 

In the coming weeks I will be printing excerpts here for you to read and to give people a taste of what is to come.

Stop Motion Time Savers

Sorry, gang, it's been awhile.

I fell behind on getting episodes of  Season 2 of "The Simplest Things" out because I had written two episodes with dinosaurs.  I can't make CG dinos myself and even if I could, they wouldn't fit the campy, retro comedic tone of the show.  So, I wanted to do stop motion.  I finally decided I was never going to get the block of time I needed to do the stop motion the way I wanted, so I'd have to come up with something new.

What I decided to do was this:
Shoot the T-Rex frames in front of a blue screen (can't use green because the model I was using was green)  I had done the Triceratops in front of blue on a miniature set and left the blue in as sky.  He only walked a few steps, so that was no problem.  For the T-Rex, he is running after our alien Pratt and the miniature simply wasn't large enough to give him much room to run.  I had to come up with something else.

I decided to have the dino "run in place" and move the background in post.  So, I found a background with no obvious indicators of the modern world,. blew it up to 6x its size and slowly shrunk it behind the frames of our dinosaur running.  Our live action character also ran in place in front of a green screen and was keyed in on top of everything else, so the two seem to run at the same speed.

Another time saver I used, that will look obvious once you know about it was looping the frames.   I did my best to animate only a half dozen or so frames full circle so that in a second or two the dinosaur would shake his head or throw his legs back and forth.  He is running after all. 

These techniques all saved some time, but in the end 14 seconds of running still took about 2 hours to get to the small screen.

Free Video Games.

Thinking about adding some video games to my site.  When I was a kid if you had told me that there would be an endless supply of free games to play at my disposal I would have thought you were describing heaven.  I felt like I could play Space Invaders all day and night.  I was glad to save all those quarters and have my parents spend $40 ONCE for a cartridge back when 40 bucks was a whole lotta' dough.

Now there are free games EVERYWHERE and I think they may have a home with my horror movies and such if I pick the right games.  I thought I'd test the embed code for one here and then move on from there.

So, readers, what do you think?  Is fighting the undead something viewers of our flicks would want?  If this game fun?  The commercial at the beginning is to support the site that supplied the code.  Not sure I'm a fan of the autostart.