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Okay, first off, Jon’s foot is almost better. It’s definitely not broken. Yea!
Second, I’ll try to answer a question from the board.
Okay, guys I am about to risk answering a movie related question. Let me be very, very clear about this. There is no movie deal in the works as of me typing this. That could change, God knows, but to the best of my ability at this moment there is no, repeat no, movie deal. Someone asked about the movie script. Jon and I are taking a run at that script, or will be soon. That doesn’t mean there is a movie deal. Okay? That just means that Jon and I are taking a run at the script when we have a spair moment or two. The comic book scripts are actually good practice for this. In fact the whole comic book project has made me watch movies differently. I’ve had the interesting experience of having movies fall apart in front of my eyes, into story boards. I’m watching the movie, but I’m seeing what the storyboard for the movie might have looked like. It’s made me ‘see’ camera angles, choices of where to put people, how to move things around visually. Movies, like books, are starting to fall apart into their pieces, so that I can see how they are put together. How they are made.
I’ve only had this experience a handful of times. As I said, reading books in college, they began to fall apart, as if the words drew back like a curtain and I could ‘see’ how the stories were constructed. I had a similar experience a time or two in Judo, also in college. I just suddenly saw what the way everyone would fall, how to move to make sure I pinned them. On writing, I practiced so that I kept a permanent memory of how the process worked. Judo, I didn’t stay with, maybe if I had I would know it as intimately and as well as I know words. Chess, also, had moments when the board fell away, and I could simply see moves, know where to go, and what the other person would do. After you become very intimate with your art, whatever it is, you can have trouble turning off the ‘seeing’. I went through a period where it was difficult to read other people’s writings because I could see the structure so clearly that it was looking at buildings and all I could see was the scaffolding and blueprints. I learned to turn it off so I could read again with pleasure, and now I usually have to turn it on, on purpose, to see the building blocks of a book.
Now, thanks to the comic work, I can see the storyboard like a skeleton behind the movie. I wonder if directors and actors ‘see’ a movie in other ways. Does it fall apart in their heads to camera angles, or delivery of a line? Do they ‘see’ the structure of a movie from the perspective of their talent? Does a lawyer have a case fall apart in his head, and he suddenly sees how it will work, how to win the case? Do all hobbies and occupations have those moments when it falls into place and they see all the angles, all the parts and pieces?