Saul’s Pupils causes offense at festival

Last Friday evening, Andrew and I were invited to participate in a Halloween Festitval at the seaside town of Ballycastle. The first evening consisted of a large-screen showing of our 2002 film, Saul’s Pupils, followed by a Q&A session. About 1000 leaflets had been distributed, promoting the event. We discovered that the printing company had made a serious blunder on the leaflet. Instead of writing “18+”, they wrote “12+”. Now, anyone who has seen Saul’s Pupils will know that it’s not exactly what you’d call family friendly; it contains a lots of unnecessary cussing and lots of gore.

We had about twenty-five bums on seats, and several of them didn’t look a day over thirteen. Oh dear. Anyway, what could we do but get on with showing the film? Everything went well until about halfway through, when a woman in her forties suddenly got up and left. Ten minutes after that, a row of three girls in their late teens got up (right after the scene where Trent disposes of a body by cutting it up into smaller pieces). I was standing around at the back of the hall at the time, and one of the girls approached me on her way to the exit, saying, “This is definitely not for 12-year-olds.” I shrugged and said, “It wasn’t my decision.” Thankfully, the rest of the audience stayed put (including the youngsters, who appeared unfazed by the violence), and we received a hearty round of applause, and a few cheers, as the credits rolled.

I don’t feel particularly bad about the walk-out. Part of me is amazed, because it’s the sort of thing you expect from a big-budget movie like The Exorcist, not a shoe-string outfit like Midnight Pictures. The funny thing is, during the original premiere of Saul’s Pupils, there were about one hundred and fifty persons present, and nobody walked out. I guess Friday’s experience illustrates how important is it to tell your audience what to expect. “Contains graphic violence and bad language” is a pretty important piece of information to include on any advertising.

This has got me thinking about the issue of good and bad taste. As a Christian, you would expect me to take a fairly conservate view, but the truth is I struggle to make my mind up. Usually, I want to avoid anything gratuitous, because it’s hard for me to defend it, and these days I don’t think I’d want to make a film quite like Saul’s Pupils. However, I also think it’s important to show death as death (if it’s part of the story). Watering it down minimises how devastating it is. The violence of the likes of The A-Team - where bullets fly and nobody ever gets killed - is more questionable than the back of somebody’s head being blown off by a shotgun blast. Showing the latter to under 18s is regarded as questionable (even though it’s the truth), but nobody ever questions the dangerous subtext of The A-Team, which is aimed at children: “Shooting real guns never kills anybody.” The truth is, western civilisation has certain hang-ups. I find it interesting to watch films from other countries (especially Japan), because different cultures have different hang-ups … and different permissions. We’re sitting here in the west thinking that we have to be oh-so careful about this and that, when all we’re really sitting in is a culture trap. The most offensive scene in Saul’s Pupils, where a body gets dismembered, is pretty hard on the senses. And sure, it could have been cut, and maybe it should have been cut. But it actually has something to say: “Look, everybody. If you murder someone, this is what you have to go through to get rid of the evidence. It ain’t nice to watch, and it ain’t nice for the murderer, either.” Another point of possible offense in our film is that it’s women who get targeted for murder, not men. We could be accused of being mysogynistic, but Andy and I actually had an important discussion about this: if you were a man and you were planning to kill somebody - it doesn’t matter who - would you target a man or a woman? You’d choose a woman, because the kill would be easier (statistically, at least). And that’s the truth.

Then there’s that part of me that sometimes does want to include graphic violence, in special cases where the gag is just too good to pass up. In a (possibly) forthcoming film, Shadow of the Dead, we’ve got a scene where a zombie gets its head blown off with a shotgun in a totally original and shocking and hilarious context. Is this explosion of brain matter really necessary for the story? Nope. But it is a hoot? You betcha. I have to ask myself, is it right to turn grisly death into a source of humour? Is it a reflection of how messed up we are, that we laugh at it? Should I be trying to rise above this instinct? But then, in the interests of consistency, consider the school movie, Cat Trap (which you can download on the sidebar), a film that would never offend anyone. It finishes with a schoolboy being dragged off-camera by a panther and eaten. It might be non-gratuitous, but the event is the same kind. And clearly, it’s designed to make the viewer laugh. Why should the same idea - laughing at a grisly death - be offensive in one context and not another. When you break it right down, it’s simply a matter of western civilization having a hang-up about gore.

You know, when all’s said and done, I think the best advice to myself is “Lighten up, Sloan.” There’s nothing morally upright about been squeamish to gore. In fact, if surgeons had that trait, a lot of people in their care would die. With Don’t Look in the Attic, Midnight Pictures has moved away from gory material for the time being. But if we ever make Shadow of the Dead, it’ll be impossible to stay away from it. Can you imagine a zombie film without gore? Flesh-eaters without the flesh-eating - that would be very odd.

Of course, I’ve seen movies that are simply about gore and nothing else. Good story-telling is sacrificed, and a collection of brutal set-pieces are strung together and called a movie. I have no respect for this kind of film. I guess my take on the whole thing is that I want to tell entertaining stories that surprise the viewer/reader. And if those stories happen to have brutal elements, so be it. The only way to please everybody would be to rip the heart and soul out of everything you come up with.

I should say that I am not guilty of the honour of writing Saul’s Pupils. That was one sick and twisted individual called Glenn Poole.

Turn your actors into ghosts

You know the special effect I’m talking about: somebody walks across the room, and you can see right through them. It’s an easier effect to produce than you might realise. All you need is a tripod and some video editing software that allows you to layer two video tracks on top of each other whilst controlling the opacity level of each (i.e. how much you can see through the image). If that’s a bit of a mouthful for you, let me explain.

First, set the tripod up nice and steady. Tighten all the adjusters so that it won’t move during, or after, recording (this is very important). Now, have your actor walk across the room in front of the camera. When you’ve finished the shot, film exactly the same shot without the actor.

For editing, I use a great little budget video editor called Serif Movie Plus. After you’ve captured the two shots into your computer, position them each on separate tracks so that they will both play at the same time. Of course, no magic will happen yet; the computer can only play one video at once … until you adjust the opacity level of the shot with the actor so that the shot becomes partially see-through. What do you think will happen to all the bits and pieces of scenery in your shot? Absolutely nothing, becuase the shot behind this shot contains exactly the same scenery. But what will happen to the actor? You will see the scenery through him.

You can also experiment with cross-fading the two shots together, which will produce an effect just like the TARDIS taking off or landing.

Two other things are important for an effect like this to work. (1) The camera is not allowed to move, so you’ll have to live with a static shot; no pans or zooms. (2) Nothing (except the actor) is allowed to move. You may have trouble filming outdoors if there are plants and bushes blowing in the wind, or moving traffic. In the little video I’m about to show you, notice how carefully the ghost gets up from her seat.

Here it is, a little test movie made by the school filmmaking club …

[ Play Movie ]

Gaming vs. writing

When you hear about the negative effects of gaming, it’s usually an attempt to make a marriage out of violent games and violent behaviour. You don’t as often hear about the problem of gaming as an addiction. And it’s oh so easy to become an addict, as I am discovering. I’ve been spending long hours most evenings glued to the Xbox. And (no prizes for guessing this) I am getting absolutely no writing work done. Part of me knew this would happen.

These days, games are usually multi-level affairs with story arcs that take about forty hours to complete. And the graphics are so rich that gaming becomes partly a cinematic experience. Pleasure is derived from progress through the levels. This is in stark constrast to the games of yesteryear (and we’re talking the early 1980s here) where pleasure was derived from staying alive for as long as possible and getting a new high score. In those games (e.g. Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Asteroids), the entire game experience was given to you in one playing session. The pleasure was not in progressing to new levels of eye-candy, it was in developing a skill at the game. Every time you played, it was one complete gaming experience that you could walk away from without feeling that you had left unfinished business behind. The pleasure was a complete thing, if you see what I’m getting at. Now, it sounds like I’m knocking modern gaming. No, I’m, just trying to clarify the difference in my own mind and to illustrate why modern gaming is so addictive. Old gaming was like playing a game of poker or chess with a mate, and something in me just misses that same kind of experience with arcade gaming. I’ve even toyed with the idea of building one of those MAME arcade machine cabinets for the hallway.

Currently, I’m playing a first-person shooter game called Condemned, and this one is a good illustration of what I’m saying. Although there is a certain amount of skill in engaging enemies, the layout of every level is almost completely linear. There is very little scope for wandering in the wrong direction or getting lost or having to use clues in order to find your way. The game has a nice feature where you use an assortment of gadgets to collect forensic evidence. But rather than having to use your eyes to look for this evidence, the game actually tells you when it’s nearby. Aside from combat, the game holds the player’s hand the whole way through the story. I confess that even though I can see this is a bad thing, I still love playing the game. I guess it’s the experience of creeping through dark corridors with nothing but a flashlight, wondering when the next baddie is going to jump out.

But something’s got to change. I have got to get back into writing. I’ve already reneged on my promise to get Chion out during September. I need to finish editing the book and publish it. Does this mean I didn’t win the James White Award? Yes, it does. No big deal. I was in with a shot, but only one person wins. Actually, I found out that I didn’t make the top five, either (sob).

There is another, much smaller, contest that I’m going to enter this month. I’m a big fan of John Christopher’s Tripods novels (and the TV series). The League of Freemen, which is the official fan club for the series, is running a short story contest entitled “Captain Curtis, The Untold Story.” Curtis was a relatively minor character in the first season (although a memorable one), and the contestants’ task is the expand on him. I’ve had my thinking Cap on (groan) for a few weeks, and I’ve now figured out the story I want to tell. The prize is an extremely rare poster that I’ve wanted to get hold of for years. So, I’m going to knuckle down and try to get the whole story written this evening. Might as well put Chion off again, eh? Well, at least I’m going to be writing.

Top 5 things the Xbox 360 can do but won’t

Here’s a list of the top five things I want my Xbox 360 to do, but it refuses to do them. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but these day’s it’s a pretty sad time for technology; we live in an age where products are capable of doing much more than they are allowed to do. Manufacturers are so concerned with piracy that they handicap their products.

For instance, the XBox 360 is capable of, but won’t …

1. Rip DVD movies onto the hard drive. (Sounds like I’m asking for a pirate’s paradise, but where’s the harm when the ripped file can’t be moved off the HD and distributed elsewhere? And isn’t it a little hypocritical to allow the ripping of music CDs but not DVDs?)

2. Play video files from an inserted CD-ROM or pen-drive (the console is capable of playing video, sure, but only from two sources: Xbox Live downloads and streaming from a PC. So why not from an inserted disc/pen? And why include a USB port in the console’s design, then strip it of its usefulness?)

3. Copy video files from PC to Xbox hard drive over ethernet. (We’ve already established that the console will play videos, even if it’s restricted to Microsoft’s own WMV format. Another nice feature is that the console is ethernet-enabled, and will connect to your PC for streaming video. Is it such a big step to allow those video files to be copied to the console’s HD rather than streamed? Apparently so.)

4. Stream video files from a standard Windows XP PC to the Xbox. (Did I say the Xbox would stream video? Oops. I forgot to mention that you must have Windows XP Media Centre Edition installed on your computer. There is no support for streaming video from Windows XP Home or Professional editions.)

5. Copy MP3s to the hard drive from a CD-ROM or pen-drive. (Wonder of wonders, the Xbox actually does allow you to rip something to the hard drive: ordinary audio CDs, which it converts to WMA format. But be careful, it won’t copy a CD-ROM full of MP3/WMA files, legally purchased or otherwise.)

Here’s the thing. I’m guessing these restrictive design desicions are made mostly to prevent piracy. But in the case of a fairly legal user like myself, all they do is frustrate me. I’m not looking to hoard a massive collection of video files. Heck, there’s not a lot of scope for storing much on the Xbox’s 20Gb hard drive anyway. What I am looking for is convenience.

Thus far, I have spent time ripping my existing CD collection to the Xbox. It would have been a lot quicker if I could have migrated everything from the MP3s I made out of those CDs long ago.

I rent a lot of DVDs online. In order to speed up the snail-mail postal process, I often rip those DVDs and convert them to Xvid so that I can watch them while another disc is on the way. Sometimes I get behind, and have a little collection to watch, which is nice. I hasten to add, this is not piracy. When I rented the disc, I paid for the right to watch it once, and without fail, I delete everything after watching. Currently I have to burn those files onto CD-RWs and watch them on my Xvid-compatible DVD player. I’d love the convenience of putting them on the XBox and doing away with disc-burning. The last thing I want is to run a lengthy ethernet cable into the study and have the PC in there pointlessly switched on all evening streaming vids, while I’m in the living room. Oh, and another thing I don’t want is to fork out £100 for Window XP Media Centre Edition, just because Microsoft wants to make more money out of me.

It sounds like I hate the Xbox, doesn’t it? I don’t. It’s a great games machine, and I don’t regret buying it. But it sucks as a media centre. When the original Xbox came out, hackers took it to pieces and developed the Xbox Media Centre (XBMC: you’ll find it for sale on eBay). I’ve never seen it going, but the capabilities were great. Microsoft should have hired the guys who developed it, then released it as an officially endorsed product, but instead they just tried to quash the whole thing. And when the 360 came out, it only had a fraction of the capabilities of the XBMC.

Companies these days don’t like homebrew products. There’s a corporate mentality that says, “You must not tamper with the product you bought.” Excuse me, but I bought it. I own it. If I install new firmware, replace a microchip, or take a sledge hammer to it, that’s my business.

DRM (Digital Rights Management) is the other other big curse of modern technology. Did you know that when you buy music online (from most stores, not all), you don’t actually own it, you just just own certain rights? Try to move that file to another computer and the new computer will have real trouble playing it. This is why I will always buy CDs and I will never buy anything from iTunes. This is why I will continue to rent actual DVDs rather than downloading videos. Because discs are DRM-free. Did you know that Amazon recently launched a video download service that nobody wanted, because of all the restrictions put on the files? If I remember correctly, you couldn’t even copy the videos onto portable media players. And none of it was Amazon’s fault; it was the corporate greed of poorly educated studio executives who didn’t understand the online business model and made unreasonable demands.

It took a long time for the entertainment industry to back the idea of selling music online, and it’s like we’re back to square one with videos. Corporate greed holds back progress. The funny thing is that all this money poured into anti-piracy achieves absolutely nothing. The pirates are busy hanging out on Usenet and BitTorrent. And because of the way those services work, all it takes is one person somewhere in the world to have one copy of a brand new movie, and before you know it, the file is being shared by hundreds, then thousands.

DRM is totally irrelevant to pirates and succeeds only in treating customers like criminals. Being anti-DRM is not about being anti-copyright or pro-piracy. It’s about trying to get back end-user convenience. (By the way, yesterday was the offical “Day Against DRM,” so that’s why you’re reading this from me.)

Yes, it’s a sad day for technology, but thankfully not everything’s so bleak. Nintendo have unexpectedly embraced (or at least turned a blind eye to) homebrew development on their DS handheld console. And a healthy homemade software scene has developed. Archos make some great media players that are capable of playing Xvid files. In my living room, I have a great little budget DVD player by H&B that will play Xvid files from a CD-ROM. It even has a VGA output port for attaching a computer monitor, which is fairly unique. And the player can be region-hacked by pressing a few buttons. It only cost me £40.

Okay, I’ve ranted long enough and gone way off-topic. To the dedicated people who spend long hours hacking technology to give us a much better experience, thank you! Now, hurry up and hack the 360 to bits.