Making A (Science Fiction) Movie On A Shoestring: Where Can You Cut Corners?

You're maxing out your credit cards, or you've found an investor. However it's happened, you've got money to make your film. Now the question becomes: how to make that money last? Where do you spend, and where do you save?


I've had lots of occasion to grapple with these questions during my time in film school, and I've learned the hard way that the less money you have to spend, the harder you have to work to make it effective. The mantra you should be thinking about is, "You get what you pay for."

Where to spend:

Director of Photography:

If you're a beginning filmmaker, chances are you don't have as firm a grasp on cinematography as you would want. I'm not saying that to be dismissive or rude, I'm saying that as a compliment to talented cinematographers, because it's a very specific skill set. A good DP will come to your project with a willingness to help you execute your vision, but also a viewpoint of their own, so they'll be able to make suggestions you might not have thought of to bring out the story better.

Yes, you can use a student DP and I know three amazingly talented student DPs that I would hire in a heartbeat for any project, no questions asked. But this is a place where using someone with great experience and knowledge will elevate your film and educate you as a filmmaker. Total win-win situation.


Camera:

You want to use the best camera you can afford. Yes, your story is the most important thing. Yes, the crew and the talent you bring together to bring that story to life are extremely important.
But don't cheap out on the camera in favor of any item on the "save" list. Because the better camera you have, the better the picture will look with the poor lighting you're probably going to be working with, and the less the audience will have to strain to suspend its disbelief.

It's not a perfect world. Audiences only have so much tolerance for grainy, ill-defined images, even if there's a great script. Film is a visual medium. Make sure your visuals are as top notch as they can be.
And some people disagree with me here, but if you have the cash to spend, there's still nothing that quite beats the look of real film, except perhaps the Red . Digital is good, and it has its own look to it. So really think about that choice and what look is best for your story.

Sound:

You might have some issues with George Lucas these days, but his insistence that sound is a fundamental part of the filmmaking experience is absolutely right. So please take this from somebody who has learned the hard way time and time again: get good sound equipment and somebody who knows how to use it. Or, get a good sound mixer/recordist and ask them what they'll need to supplement their own equipment.

Your script can be amazing, but if nobody can hear it, it doesn't matter. Sound is not as easy as you think. A good sound person is like a good DP — they'll elevate your project and help you learn how to make your own vision even better.

Script Supervisor:

Somebody on Twitter asked me the other day how important a script supervisor was to a low-budget indie project. Now, as a script supervisor, I'm obviously biased, but as I told them, it's MORE important the lower your budget and the more your constraints. The less budget you have, the more prone you are to cut corners and the likelier you are to have mistakes creep in. The more disorganized you get, the more hurried you become. Your script supervisor's job is more than just maintaining continuity (thought that's a large part of it) but also to help you make sure you've shot everything you want to get, that there are plenty of accurate script notes for the editor, that everything will cut together properly in the end... the list goes on and on.

To learn more about what a script/continuity supervisor does, "That Continuity Guy" has a wonderful section called Continuity 101.

Even if you find somebody willing to work for free or a very low rate, you should be willing to pay a "kit rental" fee to help them offset the cost of their consumables (binders, paper, pencils, etc) and the tools they provide to do their job (digital cameras, printers, laptops, scanners, etc.)

Food:

In one of my first film classes, a working professional came in to give a talk to the class. He told us that there was one golden rule of filmmaking, never to be broken:

Always feed your crew.

I'm going to say it one more time so you realize how important this is:

ALWAYS feed your crew.

Film sets are strenuous places, and the people who are working for you are working hard and doing it all for the glory of the director's vision, maybe it's because they believe in the project, or maybe they just need the work. But no matter what, they deserve to eat.

If you're shooting in the morning, have coffee (and maybe juice for people like me who don't drink coffee). Have lots of water available, because it gets really hot under the lights and because you don't want people dehydrated and sick. Have snacks for people to munch on.

But the big thing: if you're shooting for more than a couple hours, have a meal. If you're shooting for more than twelve hours, have two meals. Ordering up enough pizzas to feed everyone is perfectly acceptable, that's pretty much the standard on student shoots. But feed your crew. If you don't, it is a one way ticket to grumpy workers, sluggish movement, and bad performances. The simple act of making sure people have food will work wonders, and let you get away with low, low budgets on everything else including their paychecks.

On the bubble:

Lights:

If you're shooting mostly outdoors, you can probably get by with very minimal lighting equipment just to diffuse or bounce the sunlight the way you want it.

If you're shooting inside, you might be able to get by with lamps and the lights in the space. But you probably will need at least one lighting kit. Lighting is so key that it's hard for me to say you don't need much of it, but a good DP will be able to help you find ways to light your scene without costing you a fortune. This is a case where the amount you'll need to spend on lights is directly related to how good your DP and your camera are.

Post-Production:

Having a professional take care of your color correction and sound mix are just good ideas. You can learn it and do it yourself in a pinch — most people I know do. But in the end, there's just no substitute for somebody who has real talent and skill making sure your final visual and sound are downright perfect. Sometimes, you can enter contests and festivals with your almost-finished film where you can win money specifically for these finishing tasks.

Where to save:

Actors:
I should probably duck and hide on this one. But there are just so many wonderful, talented actors out there that are looking for experience and as long as you feed them (see above) they'll come out and give you a damn good performance. Put out a casting call and you'll be surprised at what you get. I'm talking professionals, too — not just casting your friends in the part because they'll do it for free.

I'm putting this at the top of the list though because if you can afford to pay your actors, you really should. They're bringing your vision to life, and they're the public face of your story. But there are a lot of actors just looking for good stories to perform, and if you treat them well they'll give you something amazing.


Locations:

You can find a lot of locations that are happy to let you film just so they can get their logo in the film, or see their name in the credits. Think about how to dress spaces to make them look different from what they are if you need to. (Try to avoid having your starship's engineering room look like a beer brewery, for example.) But feel free to make your friend's apartment look like three different houses with careful camera angles and decoration.

Your local film office might have a directory on their webpage of locations that are willing to let film crews in, though some of them might have a rental fee. But if you explain your project and they like it, they might be willing to work that out as well. Think about what you can offer the place in exchange. But make absolutely sure that no matter where you go or how much you paid them that you treat the place with respect and restore it to 100% when you're done. If you damage it, offer to fix it or pay for the repair. If you spill something, clean it up.

Production Assistants:

You can practically throw a rock and hit somebody that will be a production assistant. Don't get me wrong, a good PA is worth their weight in gold, but at the same time, a lot of people are just looking to get credits to their name and get some experience. If you just need somebody to fetch coffee and empty trash cans, get one of your friends to help. If you want somebody that is working with the camera crew, see if your local university has a film program and ask them how to post a listing to their students. My school has a listserv where volunteer jobs are posted all the time.

Other crew:

If you hire a good DP and sound mixer, then they might be able to help you fill out your crew with students from local film programs, or other locals that aren't as expensive because they're just getting started. I hate to say it, but media jobs are scarce right now so posting on Craigslist should get you plenty of responses from people who want the work to keep their skills sharp. Just be aware that the more inexperienced your crew, the longer your shoot is going to take, and the more of an ordeal it is going to be. Your camera crew especially shouldn't be all newbies, because the DP doesn't have time to explain what a c-stand is (if you can afford c-stands).

Makeup/Hair:

Like other jobs on the list, you can probably find somebody who is looking to start in the business and is willing to work for cheap on Craigslist or the like. But it's in your best interest to make sure you have at least somebody on the set to help the actors not just look their best, but look like normal human beings. Cameras have a way of making normal, healthy skin look weird in one way or another. Like script supervisors, it's polite to pay for their consumables and kits.

Special effects makeup is trickier. You can do a surprising amount of stuff yourself if you study up, or get somebody vaguely knowledgeable. But the materials are more expensive, and unless you intentionally want it to look bad (which is a valid style) it might be best to get somebody with experience.

Costumes:

When you're hiring your actors, ask if they would mind wearing their own clothes for your shoot. Depending on the style of the project or the style of the character, that might not be possible, but for most things it's pretty easy. But always ask politely, and if they don't want to, respect their wishes.
BUT, if you do use their stuff, make sure that you take care of their clothing and reimburse them for any and all damage that happens during the course of the shoot .

If you're doing something that requires a particular style of costume or period, there are a lot of ways to borrow things. Maybe a local shop or clothing designer is looking for some advertisement (seriously, offering ads and exposure is always good). Ask local theatres and university performing arts departments if they might be willing to loan costumes.

Set dressing/props:

You'd be amazed the weird and fun things your friends might have in their basements and garages. For a one-act play I directed, it called for all kinds of weird props like a steering wheel, a huge empty picture frame, a nightstick, and a head of lettuce. The only thing I didn't find in my parent's basement was the head of lettuce.

While you might want to avoid a situation where you use a razor as a communicator, at the same time props can be almost anything if you paint them or change them properly. I know you've probably sat and watched sci-fi series and movies and tried to figure out what some of their props actually were, so apply that kind of thinking. If you need help coming up with ways to create props cheaply and well, make friends with some cosplayers. They also could help on the costuming end of things.

Editing:

Editing software is another case of "you get what you pay for." If you really want to edit like the pros and do the absolute best post-production job that you can do, you want Avid Media Composer. Only slightly behind is Final Cut Pro. As much as people love to praise it for being such a cheap option, it still has a very hefty price tag (especially if you don't own a Mac and have to buy one of those). But in the end, if you're editing this piece yourself, you might not even know how to use the best features on those programs anyway, so why pay for them if you aren't going to use them?

There are several cheaper options, like Pinnacle Studio, which I haven't used myself, but I've used a similar product by the same company and liked it. Lifehacker has a rundown of some of the options that are out there.

But I'll tell you right now, that you shouldn't use Windows Movie Maker. When it comes to real editing, it's junk. You can string together your home movies using it, sure. But film editing? Never. Most people with any experience editing feel similarly about iMovie, but it does the job, just not in a very pleasing way once you're used to real programs like FCP and Avid.

Music:

There are a lot of local bands and musicians online that will work for free just for the exposure. It's a marketing tool for them, and you just have to dig and find them. There's also some surprisingly good music for low prices on sites like iStock. But don't use copyrighted music if you can help it, because its way more trouble than its worth and it means that you'll be in trouble if you want to submit your film to festivals or charge at screenings. Even YouTube could take it down if you use music without permission. It's dumb to risk it if you don't have to.

And last word of advice: please be prepared for your budget to disappear when you're not looking. Even the most well intentioned people end up spending money in places they never expected. So maybe you should only max out one credit card, so you have another to buy last minute props and set dressing.

Why this whole 3D business is starting to offend us (and others)

The new Clash of the Titans hits theaters this weekend in 3D — not because the filmmakers wanted it that way, but because Warner Bros. could charge more for it. Which is just plain wrong.


Listen, Hollywood, I know that we're in a recession and theatrical attendance is down, and you're all gaga over Avatar's titanic bottom line — which was undeniably goosed by the fact that moviegoers had to pay extra to see it in 3D. But, you know, this is starting to get silly.

lash of the Titans boasts some of the worst 3D of the modern age. Remember that 3D episode of Chuck? Better than this. Why? Because it's a movie that was shot in 2D, force-converted into 3D. Again, we ask why? Greed. Not because the film would play better or look better or achieve a sensory experience unattainable on a "flat" screen. Simply so that it would make more money.


And, of course, Hollywood's in it for the greenbacks. I get that. And I don't have a philosophical problem with 3D, either. When done well — in the aformentioned Avatar, How to Train Your Dragon, Coraline, Up, even Beowulf — 3D can be a wonderfully transporting, enveloping tool. But when it's done with all the deftness of a fingerless mercenary...I call bullshit.

Have a little more respect for me, the audience. Earn my cash with glory; if you deliver unto me true spectacle, I'll gladly deliver unto you my money. But don't reach in my pocket just because you can. Or I'll...I'll...I just won't leave the house. So there.

Off Topic: Decades-Long Physics Mystery Sparked by Ice Cream

So every now and then, we here at Weatherlight like to take some time away from Film and Culture to point out interesting stories. Our friends over at Science/Sci-Fi Blog io9 have posted a very interesting piece on the mystery behind the science of ice cream (and freezing boiling water).

How did a love of frozen treats lead to one of the greatest mysteries in physics? Find out in our tale of the Mpemba Effect, a still-unexplained phenomenon where boiling liquids freeze faster than cool ones.


In the 1960s in Tanzania, a high school kid wanted ice cream enough to do something unscrupulous. Who among us can blame him? Most of io9's readers are adults, and it's a safe bet that a number of them are willing to do something unscrupulous right now to get ice cream, just because they're reading about it. Young Erasto Mpemba's ethical lapse was far more minor. His entire class was making ice cream from scratch. They had to boil the milk, let it cool, and then store it in the freezer so it could freeze. Mpemba watched his classmates filling the freezer with their cooled milk, while his was just-boiled and still steaming. He didn't want to risk missing out, so he put his milk in the freezer even though it was hot.

To his surprise, his teacher's disbelief, and the no-doubt smoldering resentment of the kids had who let their milk cool and missed out on ice cream as a result, Mpemba's milk froze fastest.

Mpemba remembered this phenomenon well into adulthood, studied past instances in which people observed that warm liquids froze faster than cold ones, and worked with other scientists to verify this. They found that under certain circumstances, the Mpemba Effect does work. Hot liquid, especially water, freezes faster than cold liquid when it is placed in a freezer.

Why should this be possible?

Because the problem is so complex, there hasn't been a definite explanation. There are many posited theories, however. Cool water, when placed in a freezer, insulates itself. A layer of ice forms at the top, preventing more heat from escaping. Hot water does not form the layer of ice as quickly, and so it cools faster. Hot water in a frosty freezer melts the ice underneath it. Soon, however, the ice reforms around the dish that the water is put in, and wicks away the extra heat. Since cool water doesn't melt the ice underneath it, it sits on craggy frost, instead of a fitted sleeve of ice. The surface area between it and the ice is reduced, and heat won't escape as quickly
Only two theories, though, have passionately valiant defenders. These two theories are currently battling it out Rocky I, II, III, or V style.


The first theory features Io9's old friend, nucleation. Disgusting, yet unseen, pieces of dirt in water form sites on which ice crystals can accumulate. Different kinds of filth form crystals at different temperatures. The high-bidder piece of refuse, the one that forms crystals at the highest temperature, will determine what temperature water freezes at. James Brownridge, an independent researcher, believes that the nucleation temperature of water determines whether or not the Mpemba Effect will occur. If the impurities in one container of water are such that, it freezes at least five degrees higher than another container of water, then when the first container of water will freeze faster than the second if it is heated.

In other words, if you have two glasses of water, and you put them both in the freezer at room temperature, and the Wolverine Origins glass of water freezes at five degrees higher than the Thundercats glass of water; thaw them out, warm up the Wolverine glass to eighty degrees, and bet someone twenty bucks that it will freeze first.

But there's another contender for the title.

Apollo Creed to Brownridge's Rocky, or Mickey to Brownridges' Paulie, or perhaps the Robot Butler to Brownridge's Adrian – it's tough to make Rocky metaphors – is Jonathan Katz.

His theory rests on another property of water. Water doesn't just have invisible specks of grime floating in it. It also has little specs of grunge dissolved in it. Whether they are salt, or carbon dioxide, or magnesium, they merge with the water to form a briny muck that freezes lower and boils higher than water should. Heating water will shake free some of these substances, claims Katz, and will cause the Mpemba Effect to occur. Whether it occurs or not will depend on the composition of the water, the container, and how much the substance was heated.

The debate rages on. Perhaps someone reading this will finally put the question to rest.

More likely, though, they will go out for ice cream.

The Movie Studios' Big 3D Scam

Are we ready for 3D? As CG supervisor and avid moviegoer, I'm sad to say that I'm not convinced we are. Yet. And the worse is yet to come, as studios try to milk us all for these half-baked goods.
The only time that I have felt it was worth it was Avatar and even then I wanted to yank the damn thick-rimmed glasses off my face every 3 minutes.

The good Avatar 3D experience happened because James Cameron is a technically savvy director, and thus the 3D aspect of Avatar was technically well executed. When done right it allows the viewer to more seamlessly enjoy a 3D film. Done poorly and all it does is get in the way. One of the reasons I'm not digging it is that many of the stereoscopic movies have been made 3D after they were shot, which can cause heaps of distractions in the final product. Even if the film was originally shot 3D it takes someone knowledgeable in the field to make it effective. Decisions on convergence between the left and right eyes are just as much a part of the visual storytelling as lens choices, lighting, rack focusing, etc. If you overlook that you get a sloppy 3D experience.


The problem with fake 3D

The process of making a movie 3D after it was shot is a complicated and time consuming process but can be somewhat convincing. The problem is it will never reflect the same results as if you were filming using two cameras, simultaneously, from slightly different perspectives. Endless rotoscoping provides layers that can be separated to fake a different perspective for the second eye, but that's what it looks like, layers. So yes, you can push things away and pull things forward and enhance the depth, but the content within each layer has no depth. We use our eyes everyday and whether you know the geek stuff or not it's just not what we are used to seeing. The stereo technicians involved in bringing the images to us in 3D in the best possible way have their hands tied in some ways, they're not often working with two true perspectives.


The problem is it's expensive and difficult to do it right. Double the camera gear means double the footage and often doubling the camera crew.  It also doubles much of the visual effects work as you have to render everything twice. A lot of the old gags we once used to do our "movie magic" no longer work in stereo films.

But what you get is the real thing, a true stereo view of everything in the frame. Just like a director or cinematographer chooses to focus the camera to direct the viewers eye you must make the same decisions in 3D to direct the convergence of the two eyes. Not doing this right (or having to do it with a faked perspective in the second eye) is like overlooking composition or sound design, it's crummy movie making.

Avatar hit this right. They shot it stereo and kept all the depth within screen like it was a window into another world and never tried to wow you with shoving stuff into the theater at you. When you bring elements of the image into the room you run into the problem of the edge of frame cropping the content. During the end titles for Alice In Wonderland they created a false black edge to the screen so that when content did break frame and bring things into the theater they weren't cut off. But this isn't an option for the duration of the movie unless you're willing to give up valuable screen space. IMAX helps relieve this by filling your field of view but we are all far from having IMAX theaters at every cinema and you still have a limited view from within the frame of the glasses.

Milking the 3D cow

This problem will get even worse when you all get sucked into buying a 3D TV for your living room where the size of the screen fills even less of your view. And now there's talk on the rumor mill of re-releasing Titanic in 3D? Watch out for a flood of classics being shoved down the fake stereoscopic pipeline and into your Blu-ray player for an extra $10. Hopefully Cameron will continue to help set a higher standard.

And there's the final nail in this absurd 3D show: The eyeglasses. Simply, watching a $200+ million dollar movie with $.03 crappy plastic glasses is just silly. They are not only optically poor but they take almost a full stop of light out of the image. That's almost half the amount of light!  None of the prints or projectors I have seen 3D movies in properly compensate to counteract that loss of light. When I saw Alice In Wonderland at one of the industry screenings—where you think it would be dialed in just right—the image was still painfully dark. The situation in a majority of theaters out there is as bad or worse. - Alexander Murphy (io9)

Steampunk comes of age with Westerfeld's "Leviathan"

Plenty of young-adult novels feature teens reaching adulthood in a world that adults have royally buggered. And there's no shortage of books about a British Empire with improbably high technology. But Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan makes both of those themes epic.

Leviathan, out in a pretty gorgeous hardcover recently, doesn't feel like merely the latest iteration of the slew of "coming of age in dystopia" young-adult novels, even though that description pretty much fits: The book takes place at the start of an alternate-history World War I that looks to be every bit as bloody and horrifying as the real version. Nor does Leviathan feel like the umpteenth vaguely steampunk (or in this case, diesel-punk) book to come down the pike.

There are a few reasons for this. Most notably, Westerfeld leavens his dark wartime tale with a more-than-generous amount of humor and lightness — one character's catchphrase, "Barking spiders!", has already become a daily utterance among people of my acquaintance. But also, Westerfeld throws in enough odd twists to make his own peculiar alt-history seem quite unmistakable.

This seems like a good place to warn that there'll be spoilers in this review.

So as you might already have heard, Leviathan takes place in a very different version of Europe — the Germans and Austrians have fantastical machines, including Walkers (massive diesel-powered stomping machines that wouldn't be out of place among Star Wars' AT-ATs) and weird running machines. Meanwhile, though, Britain and some of its allies have developed a very different technology — in this timeline, Darwin discovered DNA, and now the British are able to recombine DNA strands to engineer new life-forms, including weaponized bats that eat and shit flechettes, and the Leviathan itself, a kind of floating whale kept aloft by the hydrogen created by the creatures in its belly.

So instead of merely being a conflict between two power blocs in Europe, World War I becomes the conflict between Britain's genetically-engineering Darwinists and Austria/Germany's mechanistic Clankers.

Into this odd (and somewhat implausible) alternate timeline, Westerfeld throws in two different young protagonists who are coming of age on opposite sides. Alek is the son of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination sets off the war in the first place, and because Alek could be next in line for the Archduke's throne (if his mother's commoner blood can be overcome) the Germans and Austrians will stop at nothing to destroy him. So his teachers take to the road in a walking machine, trying to stay one step ahead of the assassins who are trying to finish the job with the last family member.

Meanwhile, our other protagonist, Deryn Sharp, is a girl who pretends to be a boy so she can join the armed forces and fly through the skies on one of those dashing genetically engineered creatures. The plucky Deryn, now renamed Dylan, gets swept off to sea on a "Huxley," (a sort of floating jellyfish, I think), and winds up getting rescued by the Leviathan, becoming the newest member of her crew. Despite the constant risk of exposure, Deryn/Dylan never hesitates to throw herself into the midst of danger, scaling the heights of the Leviathan's rigging in the midst of peril at sea, and braving storms and enemy aircraft to do her duty and prove herself the best midshipman aboard. (She's the one who exclaims "Barking spiders!" at opportune moments.)

So both protagonists are guarding secrets with their lives, and they're both on the cusp of discovering first-hand just how ruinous the war the older generation has engineered will become. It's a good recipe for both protagonists to figure out who they really are, aside from the expectations that people have placed on them. Alek and Deryn figure out how to work the machines and organic creatures that they ride inside of, but at the same time we see them learning (by trial and error) to navigate the weird world of adult society, which is bumpier and more fault-prone than a thousand diesel-powered walking machines.

And the machines-vs-monsters war seems to hint at becoming a framework for a larger debate about which is preferable: to surround ourselves with raw technology, or to adapt nature to serve our purposes. The book (which is just the first volume in a new series) hints that the only real answer is a fusion between the two elements.

Leviathan is worth reading just for the larger-than-life adventures against a fascinatingly rendered backdrop of weird machines and weirder creatures — and Keith Thompson's illustrations, some of which we've featured before, add an extra layer of awesomeness to the mix as well. But as a new spin on the theme of young people discovering their place in an insane world, it's a genuinely memorable story. - Charlie Jane @ io9

Hollywood Hubris

Over at io9, Greame McMillian wrote an interesting piece about James Cameron's upcoming Avatar and why it "can't fail"...

WHY "AVATAR" CAN'T FAIL

You can tell that a lot is riding on James Cameron's Avatar by the fact that people are already talking about the backlash. But are Cameron and the movie studio the only people who can't afford it to fail?

2009 has been a hard year for fans, let's face it. Two high-profile movies had successfully wooed them with trailers, internet teasers and big promises from press junkets, and then failed to deliver when they finally appeared. To add insult to injury, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was dealt a death blow after finally convincing doubters that it had a reason to exist that didn't rhyme with Bummer Blau. Even the renewal of Dollhouse couldn't stop the pain (And, for some, just made it worse in a "Why this and not that? Why is the universe so random, oh God, why?!?" way, to be honest), and even a summer full of Star Trek and Transformers was overshadowed by the potential hall of suck that GI Joe is rumored to be (Although it may surprise us all, and the anti-hate backlash has begun, bizarrely and happily enough). In all the rush to talk about the technical successes of Avatar, one thing seems to be being overlooked: We need this movie to be a success as much as anyone else does. The alternative will be too heartbreaking.

In a way, Avatar itself is almost secondary to the whole thing. I mean, yes; we want to see it and we're excited about seeing it and the footage that's been screened is what we're all talking about and getting excited by, but it's like Watchmen and Terminator Salvation; we're buying into the hype and the promise that this won't just be a good movie, but one that will change our lives in some way. There's every potential that the movie can be good, even amazing, and still seem like a disappointment (It'll be interesting to see what Watchmen will seem like, years later, when it can finally be viewed away from the hyperbole that surrounded it). It's not enough for Avatar to be a good movie anymore; it has to be the best movie starring Sam Worthington about alien warfare in space that we've ever seen.

Where did this pressure come from? Why do some films become avatars (heh) of the hopes and dreams of collective nerddom, and suffer from those raised expectations when the movie is finally ready to be seen by the world? Some movies actively seek to become the nerd grail - Hi, Tron Legacy! - in a way of building enough buzz to try and cross over into the mainstream through noise and net presence as much as anything else (Call it The Dark Knight effect, I guess), but it seems to me that, just like Amy Winehouse's love, it's a losing game: By baiting fans continually with teases and hints and promises that they've never seen anything like this before, they're actively creating a million fictional movies in a million different heads that will be more exciting and personal than the real thing could ever be. The only way to win by doing that is by doing something that isn't what fans expect; getting back to Dark Knight for a second, the structure of the movie and the machismo nihilism - while both were frustrating - came out of left field, and in surprising the audience, deflated whatever expectations they may have gone in with. Watchmen didn't have the luxury to try that, and Terminator Salvation... well, we don't like to talk about that anymore.

Getting back to my point, though; Avatar could still win. So much of the movie is still shrouded in secrecy, and it's that element that allows Cameron and his crew the opportunity to deliver something that we really won't be expecting. What people have seen so far shows that one of the concerns everyone had - that the visual effects would disappoint - isn't really a problem anymore, but even though finding that out raises the stakes slightly (Now we get the "They conquered the effects! What could go wrong now?!?" euphoria, for one thing), we still don't really know enough about the movie itself to come up with a version in our heads that we could fully expect to see.

I hope that they manage it, and that the finished movie lives up to all of their promises and hype; the last thing we need to finish the year is another example of our selfish dreams gone sour.

So... where does that leave the rest of us?

Could Fox's Reincarnation Detective Show Signal The Death Of Scifi?

from io9: A pair of detectives tackle old unsolved crimes by talking to the reincarnated victims. It sounds like a totally off-kilter premise for a TV show, but Fox's Past Life actually made me question the future of genre television. Spoilers ahead.

Past Life, airing spring 2010 on Fox, seems to be trying to piggyback on the success of Medium, a show I haven't actually seen. You have a kind of procedural crime-solving aspect to each episode, but there's also a spooky supernatural aspect. And it's all sprinkled with a dash of personal growth. It's very loosely based on an M.J. Rose novel called The Reincarnationist, but I don't think much beyond the idea of reincarnation got carried over.

Fox kindly sent us a DVD of this pilot, and it's got the same rough edges as a lot of other pilots. It's also saddled with the task of selling you on one of the oddest premises I've seen in quite some time. In a nutshell, Dr. Kate McGinn is a psychologist who works at New York City's Talmadge Center For Behavior Health, which is dedicated to studying "the human soul." McGinn specializes in "regression therapy," helping people to confront the stuff that happened in their previous lives which may be affecting them today. McGinn is almost paranormally sunny and cheery, except when she's comforting someone who's grappling with having been murdered.

And because (I guess) these cases often involve ferreting out the details of exactly what happened the last time around, the Talmadge Center hires a detective, Price Whatley, to help McGinn out. Whatley is the Scully to her Mulder — he doesn't believe in all this past life nonsense, but he needs the money since he lost his job at the NYPD. But Whatley harbors a secret pain having to do with his dead wife — and you won't be too shocked to hear that he's secretly hoping all this reincarnation nonsense will lead to some sort of reunion. (I'm picturing Whatley eventually having a very serious relationship processing conversation with a one-year-old, which is how old his reincarnated wife would be now.)

The Talmadge Center, incidentally, is quite swanky, and seems to be able to afford to keep Kate McGinn in classy therapist outfits. The clients we meet in the pilot, whose 14-year-old son is having weird murder-esque flashbacks, seem extremely well heeled. So I'm guessing we're mostly going to be concerning ourselves with the previous lives of the wealthy and troubled here. Besides Kate and Whatley, the Talmadge Center is also home to Dr. Malachi Talmadge, who stands around looking worried and occasionally butts heads with Whatley. And then there's Rishi Karna, the hard-working research assistant who barely pops up in the pilot.

I'm just going to pause here and wonder whose idea it was to call our tough-guy detective character "Price Whatley."

So I'm guessing that not every episode of this show will involve murder, per se. You could have a character who got mugged during the 1920s, and never got over it, and now is still pissed about it thirty years into a new incarnation. Presumably, there has to be some kind of crime every week, though, or Price Whatley won't have much to do.

Judging from the pilot, there'll be two tracks to every episode: the therapeutic track, in which the reincarnated person works through all of their issues under the sympathetic, tight-lipped smile of Kate McGinn. And then the mystery track, where Price Whatley searches through old case files and says things like, "I know it sounds crazy, but I really think we're on to something here." (That's not a quote from the pilot. That's just the sort of thing I can imagine Price Whatley saying.) Price Whatley, of course, is on the outs with his former superiors, but there are still some cops who owe favors to him and will let him research old unsolved crimes on the sly.

And then, at the end of every episode, the two tracks will converge somehow, as the tormented reincarnatee finally discovers the truth of what happened and gets some closure. And Whatley gets his man, or woman, or whatever. A crime is solved, a soul is healed, and the cycle of suffering turns a bit slower. Or something.

If you're thinking "This doesn't sound like my cup of tea," then it's probably not. I went into the pilot feeling somewhat apprehensive, and nothing about it was quite able to change my mind — although there was nothing wrong with any of it. The main thing that jumped out at me, honestly, was that Price Whatley should be a laughing stock. He's a former cop who now runs around chasing leads that come out of vague past-life visions from people who seem a bit mental. Nobody should be taking Whatley seriously at all, and yet somehow he manages to fulfill the same role as every detective on every procedural show ever. And the show invests a lot of energy in showing how professional and serious Kate McGinn and the rest of the Talmadge team are, with their jargon about regression therapy and their great resources.

So why do I feel as though this is some kind of watershed for genre television? Maybe because it feels like an uneasy fusion of a few different genres, into something that I'm not sure is ever going to be as thought-provoking as other Fox shows like Fringe or Dollhouse (or the late lamented Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.) Rather than boldly venturing into speculative territory, this show reflects the gathering consensus that any speculative themes must be subtle, vague, and swaddled in formula.

So you have the "team of experts" model of detective show, not unlike Bones or CSI. (Except that instead of having a laboratory, these people have a therapist's office.) You have the therapeutic, personal-growth type show, where every week someone is going to get past his/her trauma. And then you have the one strand of actual speculative fiction, the past life regression, which doesn't look like it's ever going to evolve into a mythos or ask deeper questions. It's just going to be the McGuffin — and it's going to allow us to have spooky J-horror-esque blurry flashbacks to something vague and terrifying happening in the 1960s or 1970s, which get slightly more detailed every time we see them throughout the episode.

It's a perfectly solid show, and a nice enough cast, but the genre element feels like weak tea. And I'm really not sure how the reincarnation-of-the-week format will pan out week in, week out. It seems like it could suffer from the same problems as Tru Calling, only worse. Still, I have a feeling this show could be a humongous mega-hit, and further drive genre television in the direction of being somewhat apologetic, and vaguely detective-oriented.