A Bite-Sized Story: Pavement

I was angry when I wrote this.

I guess I'm still angry now.


Pavement

                The heat. The heat is unbearable. Air thick and heavy with apathy, a tangible mood that saps at the will. We shuffle through the day with smiles as plastic as our clients’, living a series of scripts. We are the NPCs of their video game, with nothing but a conversation tree. We display their options, they just point and click. Somehow, we are still not the main character.

                Every one of them is a deviation of the same theme, some permutation of ‘coffee and cake’. No ‘please’, never a ‘please’. We take the burden of society, we uphold the Truman Show that is all of their lives. We are the crew and technical team. We are the scaffolding.

                Someone always has to be the scaffolding.

                There used to be pride here. Pride in being scaffolding, pride in being necessary. They used to look at the buildings they supported and say that they were a part of it, even if their names weren’t on the door. Now we, their successors, their descendants, we can’t believe in the buildings. What pride is left here?

                Then they got to become the buildings, and they tell us we will do the same someday. We won’t. We are the ones who allow their plastic lies, and they expect us to believe them? Do they forget these things so easily? How selfish, how lazy to place the burden of reality on us, we who are already so burdened. We who are pinned by loans and laws and failing systems because they felt striving for idealism should be our job. They decided that for us, back before we even existed. We sat patiently in the future, helpless.

                We see ourselves nowhere in 5 years. There is no dream of the future, there is not even the small improvement in each day. There is this day, and there it is again, and there it is again. A good writer would call it disillusionment. I call it misery. This is not a magnum opus. This is not made for a stone tablet. This is just the truth. From the bottom of the barrel, from 6 feet underwater, this is what we see. Only us on the pavement can look up and see the whole skyscraper.

                I am not a cog in a machine, I am not reduced to a replaceable part. I am a person, like every other person here on the pavement, and I wish I could be just a cog. I circle blocks, step by step, wading through that thick, thick air. I know that one day, I will take my last step and I will have never left the pavement.

                I am a sad man, and I cannot find nobility in emotion.

                Fix our world, you scum.

The Good

I've had a lot of bad things to say about how this year has gone. At this point I've all but written it off as a disappointment. I have two projects left, one of which is the major end of year project, and I'm putting everything I have into them in spite of how the year has gone. Still though, I'm unimpressed with a lot of things that have happened at that school.

This post isn't about those things.

The film school I'm going to has a great reputation for making industry-ready graduates, not film buffs. I'd say I'm almost in that boat now. I know my way around a film set and gained some valuable experience in the studio doing things like floor managing. With those two things together, I'd say I could walk on to a film set and do a job. If nothing else, that's what I went to that school to learn how to do.

I've also learned a lot about writing. It's been slow, and unintentional, and far less clearly taught than on other writing-related courses I've been on. But I've still learned. I went in having written some stage plays, which were mediocre, and a few thousand words of fiction (the jury's out on whether it's good or not). I wrote my first film script this year, learning all the ins and outs of how one is structured and what software I could use. That's valuable knowledge, even if it's probably freely available on the internet. Those scripts went into feedback cycles, which were varying degrees of helpful. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but between that first script and the most recent one, there's been a huuuuge improvement. At no point have I gone 'I need to do more of this/less of this', but in any case I've improved.

Let's go more in-depth. That first script was for a 48-hour film festival-style challenge. It essentially wasn't a script. We had so little time that we wrote no dialogue whatsoever. We basically outlined a series of gags, put them in order and blocked and shot them on the day. It came out pretty well for a first script, especially since the piece was the longest we'd done so far by a margin of about 5 minutes (the piece was 6 minutes long).

The next script was for a coffee commercial. It was ok, and the concept was great from a sales point-of-view. It fell apart in the performance. That isn't to say it was the actor's fault, he just did exactly what I asked of him. What went wrong is I didn't realise how the performance would come out on-screen. Thanks to that, I've gained a better sense of how to direct actors and how to get the most readable performance on-screen.

Then we did a short drama piece. That went much better. The performances were great, the shots were good, the pace was decent. All up, it was clear I'd improved. I still wasn't particularly great, but a step up is a step up. Still, there was a lot wrong with the piece. It could have been paced better, it was very dialogue-intensive (more on that in a moment) and there was little variety in the shots. The performances carried the piece (which had been my intention), but that's not something I can get away with on every shoot. Don't just make one part good, make all of them good.

So here's the big one for me, the one I'm on the cusp of cracking. All my scripts had been dialogue-heavy (including the one I didn't get to shoot). Dialogue-heavy isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I was avoiding relying on action and visuals to tell the story because I was unfamiliar with it. I write novels, that's what I'm used to. Films are a visual medium, and if I'm not utilising the visual aspect then what's the point of making a film? I should just write it as a novel.

Our next shoot is again a short drama piece, with the key difference being we're running it like a full-scale production. It's not just crews of 5 or so people, it's the whole school crewing the shoots. The script I've written isn't just a story, it's a film. It's taken me a while to learn the difference.

So what comes next? Well I won't make promises, but I have a pilot script for a webseries in the works. We'll see where that goes...

On Shoutcasting

So this year I've Shoutcasted 6 events, 5 of which have been live, and I have 2 more coming up over the next months (1 of which is again live). Among these have been tournaments held at Armageddon expo, the Univeristy of Auckland and online for Riot's OCE Uni Championship. I've also branched out into Hearthstone, casting my first live event for that just a few weeks back.

And that's just this year.

Sure it's not a lot. There's people doing more than me in terms of volume. Hell, there's people casting online events every single week. The difference is I do just about every live event in the country, and the online events I cast are high-calibre. I hate feeling like I'm tooting my own horn, and for all I know I might just sound like I'm talking myself up, but I would like to think I'm one of the better shoutcasters in the country right now.

The reason I've made this blog post though is because there's a question I get asked with more and more frequency. 'How did you get into shoutcasting?'

Today I want to try and answer that question.


Thing is, there's actually two questions being asked within that one. The first is 'how did you get into shoutcasting?' and the second is 'how can I get into shoutcasting?'

The way I got into shoutcasting is pretty simple. I started.

A few years ago, I got involved with the DWAI Gaming community, becoming it's Oceanic Director shortly thereafter. In this position, I was tasked with establishing a community presence in Oceania for DWAI Gaming. Whether or not I was successful is a different discussion. Part of launching this community involved running events, which needed to be held to the same standard as our North American events. This meant they needed to be streamed, casted and well-run. When I first put the promotion out for our first OCE event, I had someone called Matt Ross post a comment asking who was going to be shoutcasting. I said that I was planning on doing it myself, but if he was free then I'd love the help.

He was free.

So together we casted that event. Then the one the week after. And then a week later again.

So it went on.

Matt Ross had more experience than me, and working with someone regularly made it easy to bring my own standards higher each week. The more we got to know each other's style, the smoother our casts became. We were also extremely honest with one another, and after each match (sometimes between games within a match) we'd have a chat about how the whole thing went, what went wrong and what we need to improve on. If it was crap, we'd say so. Then, we'd take the advice on board and work on it for the next match.

Our quality improved massively in that time.

The rest gets a little muddier, but really it came down to putting myself forward and having a few people in-the-know who felt I did good work and would vouch for me as a caster when events were being planned.

My first live event happened because of Matt Ross too. He was running a University competition in his hometown of Dunedin, and his play-by-play caster pulled out on him about a week or two before the event. He came to me asking if I could fly down and cast it with him. I agreed. Flights came out of my own pocket, but it was well worth it. We casted for two very long days, and had an absolute blast. The audience was small, and I was wearing jeans and a polo, but the whole thing was a massive step up from the online events we'd casted. The next time he ran that event, he offered me the casting gig first. And yes, I accepted.

Once again, Matt Ross had more experience than me, which meant he also knew more people than me. Along the road I also met one Daniel Klinac, who was again very much in-the-know. Somehow between the good words put in by these two I ended up being put on the team that casted at DigiNationz that year in Vector Arena.

From there it snowballed. I'd made a name for myself with the right people, and had a reputation for saying 'yes' to live events. Next thing I was being asked to cast at Armageddon expo for 2015. Again, flights came out of my own pocket.

But that's starting to change now, and in truth it's only been about 6 months since I started doing high-calibre live events.

So how did I get to where I am? Well like I said, I always said 'yes' to live shoutcasting opportunities, and I always did the best work I could no matter what I was casting. Nothing is beneath me.

I still have a long way to go, and could be a lot better than I am, but it's something I can very nearly say I do professionally. That's a big thing for me.


As to how you can get into shoutcasting things like I do, here's what you need to do:

1) Do good work.
2) Take any gig.
3) Show up.

It's a small community here in New Zealand, and if you do those three things you'll get noticed before long. Once you have that reputation, the work comes to you.

As for me, I hope to turn this into something that can earn me money one day. The eSports industry is constantly getting bigger, and the fanbase grows with it. Two years ago League of Legends was the only thing seen in New Zealand. Now we have events for LoL, DotA, CS:GO, Hearthstone and many more. I'm excited to see how much bigger it gets in the next year.

Now imagine what it will be like in 5 years.

That's something I'm psyched to be a part of.

Back To It

So I've been ill, lazy, distracted and all kinds of other time-consuming things these last few weeks.

Better get back to it then...

Lifebringer is underway once more. Not much has been done, but I've identified what was slowing me down. The characters are currently travelling from one place to another, and by the time they arrive I need to have established some stuff stakes-wise, set up a few things character-wise and kept the progression of these characters moving steadily forward. Thing is, there's no particular time they have to have arrived by. It's not like I'm sitting down going 'in 5 chapters they'll be there, so I need to get this done in 5 chapters.' It's more like 'I need to get this stuff done, but I'm not sure exactly how, so I don't know how long it will take.'

I've heard it said that if you need things to progress, make something happen. Characters tend to not just change for the fuck of it, something external needs to bring about, accelerate or complete that change. So I need to figure out what sort of things need to happen for my characters to grow from where they are to where I want them to be.

I could have them just... arrive. But then they'd be so unprepared, and it'd be a terribly unfulfilling read.

I'll figure it out...

In other news, film school is an ongoing tragedy. After last terms' demoralising grind of studio shows and the hurtful barrage of 'feedback' that accompanied them, I decided I wanted to get a little more out of this term. There's 2 pieces I needed to shoot, and the first fell through. I'm still not even sure why, but at this point there's no use causing friction trying to get to the bottom of it. In the interim, I've missed out on every single other project happening during the term because of what I can only call blatant favouritism.

This is what $10,000 bought me.

I'm really questioning how quickly I'll go into the industry after this year, seeing as I've been fairly soured by my experience so far. Sure, I expect things to be a little different out in the industry (read: less disappointing), but I'll need a break.

So I've been weighing up other options. There's a lot of things I love doing, and a lot of things I'm good at doing, so I've started putting those things together and working out exactly how I can make a career for myself. Because at the end of the day I've put myself on an unconventional path in life, and I shouldn't expect to follow someone else's example in order to reach success. I have to make it for myself.

I'm officially at the point where I get my transport reimbursed when I shoutcast live eSports events. It's not profit, but it's zero-cost. That's a hell of a lot more than I was getting for it last year.

And I've realised writing can take me all sorts of places beyond the 'write-and-publish-a-novel' path. I still want to write and publish novels, but fiction writing skills can get me work doing things like writing for video games.

Now just to go and do it...

A Cool Thing: Thresher

I had an idea for a blog post, but then I watched this short film called 'Thresher' and decided to post that here instead.

It's a 7-ish minute piece of Lovecraftian horror. For those who are weak-willed, there is one jump scare, but it's pretty tame and the piece is worth watching regardless.

I have my thoughts and theories at to what exactly is going on, but I'll save that for another post...

The director has done a whole bunch of other cool stuff, including some pretty Steamy music videos (I mean Steampunk, not sex). Go check them out!

Backing Up

I have more fun with these titles than I should...


My laptop is on its last legs. Its last laptop-y legs. Laptops have legs. Leggy leggy laptops. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

I have everything on here. Maiden Voyage, Lifebringer, Ambervale, sequels, prequels, plans. Everything. Every resource relating to my writing is on this laptop. Plus all my scriptwork for school is here too.

It's also on a backup drive.

I own a PC now, which I finally have internet connectivity on. That means it too is connected to the aforementioned backup drive. When the laptop dies, Lifebringer will live on (ha ha).

And suddenly I realise how badly organised my files are. Well actually no, they're not too bad. They're better than most, I'd even wager. Everything I use is well-indexed. The organisation is clear, categorical and concise. Documents get labeled properly and folders are neatly arranged.

And then there's everything I don't use.

I haven't updated iTunes in a year, because my music is so disorganised that iTunes can't find everything automatically, and for some reason iTunes can't fucking update itself without WIPING MY ENTIRE MUSIC LIBRARY FIRST. I'm tired of having to manually add all my music into iTunes because I have things in all different places. There's files from CDs that went on to the back up drive before digital downloads were around. There's things I bought on iTunes. There's things I imported to iTunes. There's EPs I've downloaded from bandcamp. There's free singles I've got off Soundcloud. There's so much music, and it all ends up in different places.

It's my fault, really. I don't take the time to codify things like that, because I can just download them, open them direct from Chrome and throw them in iTunes. I don't ever have to walk down that file path again, so why should I bother making it all neat and tidy?

I should do it because every time I update iTunes, I lose music.

Then there's all the other stuff I lose when things update.

I'm migrating my things to a new PC, and it's not a 'clean' PC as it were (the previous owner still has game files and so forth on it). This time, I want to do it right, and it's incredibly hard. But it will pay off. Or so I've been told.

At least I have a backup of everything.

The Unemployment Line

A few days ago I went to the place I used to work. A lot of the old-timers were still there. A lot more had left. It was a strange thing to experience.

Then at 2 PM my girlfriend received rejection notices from two different jobs. That was rough, especially after we'd spent the morning talking about my passing nostalgia for my previous job. When someone talks about a good job they had, then you get turned down for what looked like promising jobs, it takes a toll on you.

Then at 2:30 PM she got a call from an employer regarding a job she had been very enthusiastic about. She had the job, and was starting the next week.

The tables had been turned.

I was happy for her. Hell, I was ecstatic. Almost as much as she was.

But still, I'm unemployed.

And I'm not happy.

And I'm going into an industry where your job status is tied to how many times you throw yourself at the wall.

This is getting tough.