So like just about everyone else in the known universe, I went to see Avatar in 3D the other week. While the story was solid enough and the effects were just stunning, I walked out of the theatre feeling a bit empty.

It was the 3D. It just didn’t work for me. Admittedly I’d had this element of the film oversold to me by various parties, but ultimately I found it annoying for the following reasons:

1) Unless an object is in full view, it doesn’t really work. A ball in the centre of the screen works great, but as soon as the camera moves in and the edges of the ball touch the edge of the screen, the 3D effect is lost – sometimes distractingly so. Several times in the movie my eyes were pulled away from the action by a branch or something that was floating in the middle distance, apparently between me and the screen, suddenly snapping back as it hit the side of the screen.

2) Because of the depth element to the image, I found it took me a fraction of a second longer to get into the shot and adjust my brain to what I was seeing after each cut. Towards the end of the film my poor noodle was struggling to keep up with some of the faster cut action sequences, and I often found myself mentally two or three shots behind trying to process what I’d seen (This may just be me getting older and stupider…).

3) One of the key weapons a Director has in his cinematic armoury is depth of field. With the aid of a good focus puller he can draw the eye around a scene and add punctuation and stylistic elements to a shot that greatly aid the storytelling. This means that quite often much of the foreground and background is out of focus (the ‘filmic’ look), so burning embers falling down, apparently just in front of me, are also out of focus. When I try to look at them, they stay out of focus and it makes my eyes go funny.

I think this is possibly the biggest flaw with 3D. A perfect 3D system would be like life, where your eyes can alight on something in the near distance and everything in the background goes out of focus, then, when you shift your gaze to the wide blue yonder, objects near you go out of focus. But this is no good to the Director who is saying, ‘Oi! Over here – look at this wonderful actor, see our story’!

The problem, I suppose, is that 3D is cheating – you’re still looking at a two 2D images and your brain is being tricked into perceiving a depth that’s not really there.

The only solution to this would be to open up and have a wide depth of field, which would destroy every cinematographer living and make all films look crap. Even then it still wouldn’t work as everything would be in focus and it would still seem wrong.

I think for sports events, this is a good thing. You want a wide depth of field to keep the fast moving ball in focus at all times and get a much better sense of where the ball and players are in relation to each other, greatly enhancing the experience. But for cinema, it just doesn’t cut it.

It’s a shame as I went in really believing that 3D was upon us, but now I think it’s just a novelty, a gimmick that really adds no great value to cinematic storytelling. It’ll just take one major 3D film to flop (Alice in Wonderland?) and it’ll all be over (again).

What do yo think? Does 3D have a future for you? Do we just need to rethink or refine how we shoot it? Or is it dead in the water?

Things never quite go the way you expect, do they?

Last month, more on a whim than anything else, I applied for a management position within the company I work for, and ended up getting it. And rightly chuffed I was too.

So for the past two weeks I’ve ended up more or less doing two jobs as I tidy up affairs from my old IT Applications position and start my shiny new Marketing Communications role.

Rao and quite a few other people offline have, in the meantime, been asking about Return to Earth. Well, through all of this, I’ve had my thinking cap on, and thanks for some very good feedback from the previous draft I’ve finally nailed what the actual film is about.

I’ve also been playing with Mariner Software’s Contour, which has also made me realise that even though, after all these years, I thought I was starting to get what all this screenwriting malarkey was about, ultimately, I knew Jack. Quite a humbling experience.

Nonetheless, the fourth draft is starting to take shape now and muchly pleased I am with it too.

On top of that, I’ve been encouraged by various parties to make another short film. So, together with Blogger/Twitter friend @draconianone, we’ve been plotting a new featurette.

More details of this will emerge over the next few weeks as the script is finalised. Most of the actors are already lined up (the usual suspects plus a few surprises, hopefully).

Watch out for now customary Twitter onslaught of begging/pleading for finance to begin!

Trust me, it’ll be pure gold.

A couple of years ago I helped shoot and edit this little ditty by Ken Colley.

Alligator from Andy Coughlan on Vimeo.

In the spirit of all things Spiderman, I thought it was time to make a fresh start with the old blog here and try to do something useful with it.

My new decade resolution is to post more.

Promise.

No, really!

Anyway, best get back to the writing now. Got a nice little screenplay coming together.

If anyone is actually still listening, say ‘Hi’ below…

I wondered if I might ask a bit of a favour of you?

If you have time, and want to feel all warm and squishy, could I trouble you to add either a link to Geeky Gifts on your own site/blog, or, if your feeling uber-generous, perhaps one of these nifty banner ads wot I ‘ave made?

If you’d like reciprocal links back to your site, let me know and I’ll set up links to you from this blog (if there isn’t one already) and the Return to Earth site.

How’s that!? A two for one offer!

I’ve got four banners in two sizes -

1) 120×60 Generic Button:

2) 120×60 Film Funding Oriented Button:

3) 468×94 Generic Banner:

4) 468×94 Film Funding Banner:

5) The Text Link:

As an extra incentive, the owners of the top five sites that refer the most people through to Geeky Gifts get a credit on the film. Can’t say fairer than that.

With Geeky Gifts being primarily a UK thing, if any of you fab people beyond the shores of Blighty want to get involved, let me know and I’ll knock up some Return to Earth banners too. Let me know below…

Let’s make this movie!

It’s been quiet round here of late, but doesn’t mean there’s been no activity chez Cogs. Oh no Siree!

The latest draft of Return to Earth is almost in the bag (I know I keep saying it, but I’ve struggled with the third act – a moment of clarity last week has unclogged the old grey matter though).

I’ve also been busy coding. The latest effort is Geeky Gifts, which I urge/beg/implore you to check out, and perhaps, with the evenings drawing in and Christmas just around the corner, to consider purchasing one or two gifts for your loved ones through the site.

Go on, you know it makes sense. Hopefully it’ll make a film too.

Good luck to everyone doing Script Frenzy this year! If you haven’t quite sorted yourself out yet, get on over to their web site and get registered now…

I wasn’t sure what I should do for it, but thankfully the amazing Lucy Hay produced for me an incredible development report for Return to Earth, so I’ll be cracking on with Return to Earth Draft 3.

Lucy’s report is balanced, fair and honest; exactly what I needed. It’s brought so much clarity to what Return to Earth should be about, I can’t wait to get started on the next draft.

I can’t recommend her script reading services enough. When you get to April 30th and you’re pounding out those last few words, you could do a lot worse than letting your attention, and consequently your script, wander in her direction.

These past few weeks have mainly seen me flitting between three writing projects. The first, Return to Earth draft 2 – still not quite complete (six pages to go!); the second, developing an idea for a TV series based on the bits I’ve cut out of the first draft of Return to Earth; and thirdly, the just-for-fun adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s ‘The Wee Free Men’.

Now, it just so happened that at the beginning of the week I found myself working my way through the scene in The Wee Free Men where Tiffany finds herself in a dream not too dissimilar to Richard Dadd’s “The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke”.

Being a bit of a fan of the painting (and the song by Queen) I decided I’d do a bit of research to get a better feel for it, and thanks to the nice, relatively hi-res, image on Wikipedia, I printed myself off a few copies, sticking them up next to my desks at work and at home.

This morning, my good friend and work colleague, Adrian Phipps, and I were making a fresh cup of tea and chatting about the painting. Being the knowledgable chap he is (part of his degree was in Art History) we discussed the curious nature of the painting, the precision with which Dadd has placed everything and the strange deformities of some of the Fairy’s depicted in the scene.

Two things in particular jumped out at him. If you take a look at the painting you’ll see the Fairy Feller, his axe held aloft waiting for the sign from the Patriarch, the grey haired man watching him with the huge hat. Just below the Patriarch are two fairies with very squashed heads. ‘Hmm’, says Adrian, ‘those heads look like eyes. And the folds of that fairy’s cloak looks like a nose and the Fellers hat looks like a mouth’.

I looked closely and pointed out that the mound upon which Oberon and Titania stand (just above the Patriarch), looks like the curve of the top of a head, and the coat of the fairy to the left of the pinky-red cloaked fairy looks like an ear.

As soon as we’d seen it, it seemed obvious that Dadd must have intended the face to be there, perhaps just for fun, but it felt too prominent to be a coincidence. All I could see when I looked at the picture was the face and wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before. We found some other possible faces elsewhere in the painting, but none were as clearly defined as this one.

So this evening, I threw the image into Photoshop and messed around with the levels a little. A few things started to bug me:

• Firstly, the pinky-red cloak of the (female?) squashed head fairy, directly below the Patriarchs beard, lacks detail (which doesn’t match the clothes of the rest of the Fairies).
• Secondly, if her head is meant to be an eye, it doesn’t quite tie up with the eye/head of her partner.
• Thirdly, what’s with her partner’s foot? He’s crossing his legs at a very awkward angle.
• Fourthly, the hidden face is almost at the centre of the painting but not quite, it felt a little too far to the right and off balance.

Then I noticed the gold curve that stretches round the right hand side of the Patriarch’s hat.

And I saw it.

The profile of an Ape!

What’s more it’s the profile of an Ape overlaid over the profile of a man’s face, much like Apple Finder Icon.

Suddenly, it all made sense.

• The cloak is the smooth pink part of the Apes face.
• The Eyes don’t match as the Ape’s eye is looking to the right, and the man’s eye is looking forward.
• The awkwardly placed foot of the partner makes up the Ape’s nose.
• When you put the outline of the Ape and the Man together it’s right, slap bang in the middle of the picture, thusly:

Whoah, thinks I. What’s that about? Ape and Man? Evolution?

Now there’s been a lot in the papers and on the radio recently about Charles Darwin, so I knew that he would have been a contemporary of Richard Dadd. I did a bit of digging on t’interweb and found quite a few similarities between the two men.

• They both travelled extensively in their early careers.
• They both apparently suffered from Bi-polar disorder.
• Both had strong links with Kent.
• (You might even argue that they were both murderers, one of his father, the other of religion)
• Dadd painted The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke between 1855 and 1864, Darwin published Origin of the Species on the 22 November 1859.

So would Dadd, locked away in Bethlem in Beckenham, Kent, have known of Darwin’s ideas, perhaps even known Darwin, who after all lived a mere seven miles away in Downe?

Dadd painted The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke for one George Henry Hayden, the head steward at Bethlem Royal Hospital at the time.

A quick Google search revealed records of correspondence between George Henry Hayden and Charles Darwin at darwin-online.org.uk. I have no idea what was in those letters, but it’s not the greatest leap of logic to think that Hayden knew Darwin, possibly treated him, and spoke to Dadd about Darwin and his theories. As a gift, Dadd hid the image of the man and the ape in the painting for Hayden. Perhaps the hidden man is Hayden? Who knows? Pure speculation.

But great fun.

I’m with Neil Gaiman, who suggests that the ‘Pedagogue’ – the little bald, bearded chappy (or Sneebs as Terry Pratchett calls him), is in fact an old version of Dadd himself. I like the way he’s sat right on the shoulder of both the Ape and the Man.

I feel like one of those diabolicals from Umberto Eco’s ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’, which, incidentally, will be my next just-for-fun adaptation.

What do you think?

With the festive season (and all the family going down with flu) now a dim and distant memory, my thoughts have turned fully to Return to Earth (R2E). The second draft is slowly, much more slowly that I’d like, coming together, mainly because;

a) I’ve been working on a host of potential money-making ideas in order to at least part-fund R2E. More details of these to follow in future posts…

b) I’m having to do loads of research to make sure my ideas for R2E are realistic. I can’t abide Sci-Fi that ignores the laws of physics. An occasional bending of the rules for narrative brevity or style I can live with, but blatant disregard is right out.

and c) I had this great idea that I should take it upon myself to see how practical it would be to adapt Sir Terry Pratchett’s ‘The Wee Free Men’*.

But, pre-production on R2E rolls ever onwards – I’ve now got myself a provisional Cinematographer and Editor in the shape of the inimitable Will Docherty (@mejo).  We met up at Tuttle a couple of Friday’s ago to chew the cud and talk all things film, tech and geek (with the very tall Derek Mantle (@delboydare)).  A good time was had by all.

I’ve also had my nose deep in Adam Davies and Nicol Wistrechs’ Film Finance Handbook: How to Fund Your Film, which, quite frankly, if you want to make films and haven’t read can only mean that you’re a complete dimwit hell bent on financial ruin**. The book is an absolute goldmine of useful info. Buy it! Read it! Now!

In other news; there’s a rather useful resource page of the top 100 blogs for film and theatre students, and this humble blog has been selected along with the likes of John Augusts and Fun Joel to be on there. Chuffed to pieces I was when I got the e-mail telling me. If you’re here from clicking through from that page, welcome!

* Because Sir Terry is reported to have been less than impressed in the draft that Sam Raimi’s screenwriter came up with, and I’m convinced it can’t be that hard to do – he follows the STC! formula almost to the letter.

** The same could be argued if you still want to make films after you’ve read it! Ah, the Indie spirit…

Those of you who’ve followed this blog for a while will probably have heard me spout off about Phreadz, the threaded multimedia video chat system, and how excellent it is.

It allows you to discuss all manner of topics under various headings – music, politics, books etc, and drag in video content from most of the main video providers; YouTube, Vimeo, 12seconds, Seesmic etc. to illustrate, entertain and illuminate.

It’s been in closed Beta since the beginning of the year, but now the creator of the site, Kosso, is opening it up.  

Just this week he’s opened up the site for new signups in the Movies section, so if you want to see what all the fuss is about, head on over to http://movies.phreadz.com where among other things, TV writer and social media guru, Sizemore, will be posting some of his recent interview with Michelle Yeoh about Asif Kapadia’s new film, Far North.

Check it out, it’s a fabulous system.  See you on there!