Images . . .
Sometimes the thought of working on the WIP is really hard. You know why? The novel I’ve just finished, the one that is being assessed right now, had the perfect protagonist. In a literary sense that may be a moot point, but in the physical sense, after watching Robin Hood for various seasons and Spooks most recently, I had no choice but to cast Richard Armitage as my protagonist.
Richard Armitage alias Guy of Gisborne
R.A’s form as the brooding Guy of Gisborne, the man who loves Marion and then kills her in a crime of passion, fitted my protagonist perfectly. Not that the storyline bears any resemblance to mine. If it did, I could no doubt have sold it and made some good money like Dominic Minghella et al did!
But Mr.Armitage looked the very essence of the damaged and eldritch Finnian and that suited me fine. And the reason working on the WIP is hard is because R.A. can’t be beaten as a model. I’m finding it well-nigh impossible to shake the image of Mr.Armitage in my mind.
To divert myself, I put in some serious work with the book -trailer last night. Brother and I sat as he worked from my shot-list, pulling up the images, sizing them so they translate visually on a computer-screen of any size and then laying them down in a ‘time-line’. There were a few problems, like pixilation and grainy images, but I felt the grainy vision added to the other world effect I was wanting. Our biggest problem is the music. It plays beautifully on brother’s PC, but when he transfers it to the AVID on the PC, it won’t play at all. So some serious messing around to be done in the big AVID suite at work.
All that’s left is overlaying the text, dissolving one shot into another in time with the music and it’s done! Will it be suitable for uploading to You Tube? Who knows? You may get to see it, you may not. But the thing that really impressed me was brother’s patience last night, going back over and over the problems until we had it sorted. In a past life he has filmed for television current affairs during the Gulf War and in Sri Lanka with the Tamil Tigers, on a Greenpeace ship in the middle of the high seas where he broke his ankle badly in a storm swell, so I guess I’m a piece of cake by comparison. Mind you, when I started asking for special FX and this and that, I could see the cake getting very crumbly!
Postscript: phone call from brother says that music is being sorted. Apparently Ogg Vorbis, the software I used to download the music from Wikimedia Commons, has a relationship problem with AVID. I feel as if I’m dealing with something from Avatar. As for dissolving one shot to another, it’s sorted. We’re on!
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