Jim Carrey gives a moving commencement address to Maharishi University of Management’s class of 2014, revealing how his late father inspired him to follow his dreams.
What?
As the human race’s quest for originality hits an all-time low, they’ve gone and done what looks to be a frame-by-frame rehash of Breaking Bad. But in Spanish.
It premiered last night, June 8. Extended trailer:
Instead of Walter White we have Walter Blanco. Instead of an RV we get a school bus. Instead of Albuquerque, New Mexico, we’re in Bogota, Colombia.
I’m just hoping we have Gus Fring posing as manager at The Chicken Brothers.
(via Indie Wire)
Scientists now think they’ve found evidence of Theia, a Mars-sized planet that collided with Earth and made our moon.
This totally taps into something that’s always seemed obvious to me:
The main problem with the idea of extraterrestrial flesh-and-blood beings visiting Earth is a matter of physics. Lots of us wouldn’t be surprised if they’re out there, but most would agree that traveling all the way over here from other solar systems would be both impossible and impractical.
But:
Is it not possible that — in ancient history — there were other populated neighboring planets in our *own* solar system that no longer exist today? That immediately removes the distance factor from the equation.
While this is an idea that occurred to me with no outside influence, it’s apparently nothing others haven’t also thought of. Astronomy nerds call it the giant impact hypothesis, or Big Splash.
(via geekosystem)
I just finished the first draft of my next spec script. For this one, I adopted a system called the “mini-movie method“, which has been championed by Chris Soth. He says he learned it at USC.
The point of the MMM paradigm is to structure your story into eight manageable chunks. Soth points out that working with the conventional three-act model can quickly prove to be unwieldy, particularly in Act Two. Dividing the whole script into eight equally sized “mini movies” makes things easier to manage, especially while banging out the first draft.
The origin of the MMM dates back to the ancient days of analog, where film reels were roughly 15 minutes long. A two-hour feature consisted of eight separate physical reels of film; the projector’s operator would need to swap reels every 15 minutes. Because of this physical limitation, those films tended to have natural breaks at those 15-minute intervals. Chapters, if you will.
I found the system helpful. Not only in this first draft, but also in a recent rewrite of Under Angels. Both of those scripts weigh in at 100 pages, so each of my reels are roughly 10-13 pages.
Note that the MMM is not about just breaking the script up into eight parts arbitrarily. As is the case with any story structure model, each of those separate parts serve the hero’s story in specific and classic ways.
Below is a reel-by-reel breakdown of the system, which served as my guide in the early plotting stages of my latest piece. For extra perspective, I’ve also tossed in Blake Snyder’s corresponding beats from Save the Cat! The two systems complement each other quite nicely.
Act One:
Reel #1. Ordinary world. Ends with the inciting incident. (i.e., Snyder’s “Catalyst”, Vogler’s “Call to Adventure”, etc.)
Reel #2. Reluctant hero. Wants to make the problem go away. (i.e., Blake Snyder’s “Debate”.)
Act Two:
Reel #3. Hero tries to solve the problem lazily using his ordinary methods. He fails, and realizes he needs a new plan.
Reel #4. Hero identifies a new plan. Puts it into action (ending with Blake Snyder’s “Midpoint”), but it’s gonna backfire.
Reel #5. The errors of the hero’s old ways are revealed. He realizes he must change. (i.e., Blake Snyder’s “Bad Guys Close In”, ending with “All is Lost”.)
Reel #6. Hero takes action, committing to change once and for all. (i.e., Blake Snyder’s “Dark Night of the Soul”.) But, alas, that backfires.
Act Three:
Reel #7. The battle! Our hero triumphs, but “the hand comes out of the grave” in yet another reversal. It ain’t over yet!
Reel #8. Looks like villain will win in this twist, but it all swings back to a resolution. Then perhaps an epilogue.
SIDENOTE: Notice how reversals are everything in any story.
Here’s Soth discussing the mini-movie method in his own words:
It’s called the eephus pitch.
In a Nippon Professional Baseball game against the Hanshin Tigers, Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters pitcher Kazuhito Tadano broke out one of the wildest pitches you will ever see.
On a 1-2 count, the right-hander confused both the hitter and the umpire with an eephus pitch. The ball’s high trajectory led to the umpire calling the pitch a ball, even though it looked like it ended up in the strike zone.
The umpire didn’t reward Tadano with a strikeout, which apparently left the catcher perplexed.
(via Bleacher Report)
From 1981, LaRoche strikes out Thomas on the eephus pitch, also called a lobber:
A relatively fascinating data-driven study shows how chess openings have changed in popularity over time.
One thing that jumps out at me is how much of an impact the “between wars” grandmasters like Alekhine and Capablanca had in the ’20s and ’30s. They played 1.d4 most of the time as White, eventually countering it with the unorthodox 1…Nf6 as Black (leading to “Indian” defenses and other hypermodern ideas). These were relatively radical ideas at the time. Now they’re classic, and fundamentally sound.
White’s first move:
Black’s first move:
Full study here.
A classic late-eighties/early-nineties instructional video from my old friend Greg Irwin. He even demonstrated this stuff on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson:
