By Allegra May.

Eight months ago I blogged a neat path for the AWU movie project. From that I created an optimistic three-year time line, the view from 10,000 feet you could say. But life as it’s lived on the ground is much more interesting than the view from above. Looking back, we’ve both made progress and stalled out.

Eight months ago I thought the project would develop organically out of the talents of two friends and myself, and we would learn what we needed as we went along. That’s more or less how things went, but it was a lot messier than I’d pictured. Today we’re more intentional about we what do.

As the writer on the project, I undertook creating the screenplay, which was a new form of writing for me. It went well: in January the pages crept out like little snails, but by March they trotted forth like eager puppies. At the end of April we had a polished screen play of 143 pages to send to anyone who was interested. I was glad to have produced this important component of the project.

On the other hand, we struggled to get a handle on the visuals for the movie. I hoped we’d have a set of illustrations that would demonstrate the beauty and mystery of the final animation, but we lacked an illustrator. So we thought we’d go directly to a short piece of animation to use for fund raising. The estimate for this little animation was more than two times what most people would consider a nice chunk of seed money. We decided to conserve the seed money in order to get to the fund raising stage.

We went back to the idea of making a set illustrations to help raise funds—without realizing that the illustrations were the most difficult part of the project, because they would define the look and feel of the animation. A friend of a friend suggested creating a Director’s Lookbook to guide the development of the style, and making this Style Lookbook enabled me to hone in on an “everyday reality” style and an “expanded reality” style.

It seemed like a simple thing to ask an illustrator to create the illustration styles from the Style Lookbook. Not so! I discovered it’s not realistic to ask an illustrator to invent a new style; either they draw the way we want, or they don’t. So now we wait to discover the illustrator who’s already drawing the style we want.

In contrast to the illustration struggle, recording the voice over audio is like a walk in the park (possibly because I have experience recording voice over). Steps we’re in the process of taking:

• Creating scripts from the screen play (stripping away most of the visual information)
• Getting voice demos from local actors
• Updating my recording equipment
• Locating recording studios

We’ve chosen to record the actors ensemble rather than individually, so they can play off each other.

Now is the time for us to broaden the participation in the project, and to start running the story by producers and actors to hear what they think. Involving voice actors is a good way to expand who we know and to meet producers.  It’s also time to design a promo for crowd funding, using snippets of dialog from the voice over track, and to speculate on the images that go with the audio. Our intention is to have an online crowd funding project by the end of the summer—assuming of course that we’ve found our elusive illustrator(s).

My personal growth in the project has been unexpected. By now I’m clear I’m the project leader, with all the responsibility that requires. Where I was a private creative artist, I’ve taken on being a public creative collaborator. And I’ve come to realize, all we know for sure is the present. The future changes shape as we go forward, and we can reshape the past according to who we’ve grown to be. What we have for real is the present.

By Allegra May.

So, we have a story, and a pretty good one by some people’s estimate. It’s a psychological adventure at the borders of reality, a story of finding deep connection on a human level and beyond. Some say this is a story for our times, that we’re looking for deep connection now and going forward.

So far so good, but how does a small publisher on the coast of Maine, with no contacts to producers, directors, or actors, turn this story into a movie, when CGI or animation costs $15,000 to $25,000 per minute? It looks like a hopeless project.

But we at Kai Press are fond of playing in the unknown (see How to Love the Unknown), and our intention is to create a movie “from the ground up.” What this looks like (although in the unknown, you can never be sure how anything will look) is a natural, cumulative process that starts where we are, with what we have, and grows from there.

What we have to start is a story, writing talent, and experience in graphics, acting, and film documentaries. More important, we have a few passionate people, a wide circle of connections, and a spirit of play. From the ground up means finding needed resources as we go along, refining our ideas of how to translate the story to a screen, and expanding our network of connections.

Ideally, these are the steps of a the book-to-movie process from the ground up:

• Movie outline: We have a writer so we can do this step right away.
• Scene outline: Ditto on having the writer.
• Scene sketches to visualize the story: But we need an artist!

We asked a close friend, a well-known artist, if she could recommend an illustrator. She surprised us by saying she would love to do the scene sketches, and by the way, she likes to work from photographs. Sometimes the unknown really delivers! So we replace the third step with:

• Photos for scene sketches: This includes exploring locations and using a stand-in for the main character, Lee. This step is on-going, as fall turns to winter in the story and in real life. Our timing was good to start the project the same month that the story starts. With a background in documentaries, I know having an opportunity to photograph on location at the right time of year will feed my visual imagination as the project moves forward.

The next three steps don’t call for any new resources, so we could move right through them. But these are vital steps, and need to be taken in order so they build on each other. Speed is not always a good thing in a developing project.

• Character descriptions: Two main characters carry the story, as they attempt to resolve the story’s premise. To make their characters compelling, they need clear, believable backgrounds and motivations. Minor characters aren’t critical at this point, and the (spoiler) non-human characters will be represented rather than portrayed by actors.
• Scene sketches: This is an on-going task of the artist, who will receive a steady supply of photos. In this early phase of the project, we’re concerned only with pivotal scenes, but eventually we’ll need a visual rendering of almost every scene. Scene sketches promote the visual quality of the film, opening doors that words can’t open. They also replace the need for a story board.
• Screen play: Writing the screen play is not only a big job, it’s the best representation we’ll have of the final film.  Producers, directors, and actors read the screen play before committing to a project. The screen play determines location, characters, dialogue, voice over, time of day, point of view, scene transition, and more. It has to work out many unknowns, such as at what place in the story the movie begins, how the gradual drift into the unreal is handled, what can be omitted from the book, and which scenes are essential. The screen play is also the foundation of the shooting script.

By this stage we’ll be well into the project, and it will be time to wade into the visual invention we need to convey an experience of unreality. There’s a huge catalogue of visual effects from shows like Star Trek and Marvel movies, but none of them feel right for this story. This is a personal story of two characters grappling with something they don’t understand and consequences they can’t predict. So here is where we get to discover and create:

• Visual experiments: Using a high quality graphics program, we’ll play with how to represent the unreal. We already have some ideas on how to do this.
• Animation experiments: From the beginning we knew that, because of its content, this story would require CGI or animation. We want to depict a seamless shift between the real and unreal in a believable way. Amazon has done this in the animated series “Undone,” but that technique carries the price tag of $25,000/minute, and we’re not sold on its look and feel. Our artist will consider what programs are available outside an animation studio, and what styles can produce the experience we want to give our audience.

There are five final steps in the first phase of from the ground up:

• Preliminary casting: We have our eye on a possible Tomás, a fortyish priest who believes that someday he will save, maybe, the world. We’d love suggestions for Lee, a mid-sixties retired mental health counselor who, despite being a hard core realist, believes there’s a thing hiding in her mind.
• Selecting which sample scenes to produce: Feasibility will be a big factor here.
• Sample scene shot lists: We do this from the screen play and scene sketches.
• Music composed for sample scenes: This step will have started earlier, by discovering a composer and having extensive conversations with them.
• Sample scene production: Depending on whether we’re doing live action, animation, or some combination of the two, we’ll use standard low-budget video production methods.

With a reel of sample scenes, we can now look at the market, our potential audience, a budget, and sources of funding. Will it be a GO or NO GO? If we’ve grown and discovered and had fun along the way, we’ll be ready for either.

We invite you to come along with us, making suggestions, cheering us on, possibly contributing your own talents to the project. Email us to let us know your opinions, questions, and suggestions.

#kaipress #AWUmovie #AWUbook #intheunknown

By Penelope May.

All my life I’d been creating fiction in my mind, so it wasn’t surprising when I moved to a small house in Maine, that I would choose to make it official and take a shot at writing for publication. My kids were grown and I had no major responsibilities, leaving a wide open space in which I could do what I wanted. I came to this writing project with a “let’s just see what happens” point of view, putting myself deliberately in the unknown.

In the past, I didn’t like the unknown; the idea of unknown always made me very anxious. Knowing gave me a feeling of control and the illusion of security, and over the years I’d gotten very good at knowing. When I adopted kids as a single parent, I treated it as an adventure within a known space, just a different way to create a family, and put the many unknowns out of my mind. It was similar with the fiction in my head; when my kids were young and I wrote for my own entertainment, I would dream up a plot, follow it to its satisfactory conclusion, and be done. At the time, I had very little confidence as a writer.

But as my kids grew, it became clear I couldn’t manage a high tech job and raise two kids by myself; you might say I’d arrived at the dreaded unknown. Except I now know that unknowns are neither bad nor good; instead they contain infinite possibilities which are all…unknown. This particular unknown went on to provide me with a new life. At my job I was invited to do a program at Landmark Worldwide, which eventually enabled me to create a life I loved with my children. This was the program that taught me to love the unknown.

I like the Joseph Campbell quote, “If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” Said another way: If you follow the path you know, you’ll only find more of the same. It’s in the unknown that discovery and miracles happen.

When I began writing Appointment with Unreality, its working title was “The Unknown,” which described the book’s subject matter, its unknown plot and characters, my as yet unknown writing process, and the unknown outcome—would there even be a book in the end? I was game to find out.

I started with the unlikely premise that an alien being was lodged in a woman’s mind. There were plenty of obvious sci-fi plot lines to draw from such a premise, but none of these involved any discovery on my part. What I was eager to discover was: How could this alien be physically inside her brain? 

To answer that question, I had to locate the story firmly in normal reality. This gave the main character, Lee, both a psychological danger (was she insane?) and a puzzle to solve (what was this thing in her head?).

The puzzle grew to be an important plot element, as Lee pours over online neurological research, and I was only one step ahead of her. At the point when I had to write the solution to the puzzle and move on, I was almost as anxious as Lee that the answer hadn’t revealed itself yet. Then I chanced on a paper about synaptic input in the brain, and bingo! My answer was right there, so clear and consistent with the story, it seemed as if it had been waiting for me. It was a great day of discovery in the unknown, and I was elated.

So what can writing from the unknown provide us as writers?

• First, it frees us from clichés and conventional thinking. In the unknown, all the stuff that stuffs your brain is gone.
• It allows a deeper exploration of characters and scenes. You have to keep asking yourself “why?” and listening for the answer.
• It creates discoveries that can’t be anticipated, sometimes taking the story to unimagined places, for the better.
• It makes room for a greater depth of feeling about the characters, their experiences, and the lessons of the story.
• It’s an adventure like none other.

Cultivating the unknown can require a lot of silence. I stop listening to the news when I drive, so I can have uninterrupted silence in which to muse about the story. Walking the dogs is a great time for me to immerse myself in action sequences, and weeding the garden usually generates a bunch of dialogue. It can take patience to wait for the unknown to deliver the creative goods. I learned not to write a scene before it had autonomous life in my mind. For instance, I could wake up with a clear image of a scene, or hear dialogue running in my mind. Usually a feeling of excitement would accompany these signs.

The unknown is a realm of creation and creativity, in life and in writing. It may not be comfortable for everyone, and it may not be as efficient as some people want. I did use a small group of readers to let me know if I was on the right track, because being in the unknown can feel risky. But by the time I wrote the last part of the book, I, like Lee, was in a place I’d never imagined, and I was grateful for it.

As readers may guess from the cover of the book, Appointment with Unreality mentions a galaxy. Early in the writing process I went online to find a good-looking galaxy, and discovered this gorgeous composite image of NGC 300 (NASA GALEX). Perhaps it’s a simple JPEG image on the web, but it’s as fine an image of the unknown as I can imagine.

#kaipress #AWUbook #iwrite2discover #theunknown #landmarkworldwide