I Don't Like Fanbase Movie Making - Like Current Star Wars

All my life, I just sort of looked at franchises and thought nothing much about them. They were like Walmart or McDonald's to me. Just sort of there, you go there whenever you feel like it once in a while, and otherwise it's just sort of always there in the background of society's social detritus.

Funny, that coming from someone who likes Star Wars, but it makes more sense when I tell you that my interest in Star Wars has largely always been the movie as a movie. That is, the craft of it.
For certain as a little kid I played with my Star Wars toys right alongside by GI Joe toys, which seemed to occupy the same universe on my floor for some reason, but ... so did He-Man, so... I wouldn't read too much into that. However, while by all accounts I was taken immediately with loving Star Wars as a toddler coming back from the theater, it was really when I saw Indiana Jones in the theater and was completely confused why Han Solo was in the movie that my interest in Star Wars really took off.

Because that's when I learned that movies were real. They weren't made like animation was (for no reason I can really understand now, this made sense to my little mind). And once I realized that people made movies, all I wanted to know was one thing: HOW??!!

But this was the early 1980's and I lived in the middle of no-where land where movies showed up a year or years late for their first run in our town. But then this amazing thing happened. Star Wars started making books about how they made the movie. Whole art design books, showing what was going on. And then the doors blew off. Star Wars making of documentaries started showing up, and we had just gotten a VCR. I ruined every one of those tapes.

I consumed every piece of material I could ever find anywhere on Star Wars production. Any clip anywhere in any magazine I could find with interviews. If I couldn't afford the book, I'd read it right there in the bookstore.

Star Wars, you see, was my first instruction in making movies - largely because it was the first mass commercially available source of behind-the-scenes documentation at highly detailed levels that covered everything from story inception through to postproduction.

Anything Lucas talked about that I didn't know, I would track down to the best of my ability and watch. A lot of what he did talk about, I had already watched because I grew up in backwoods no-where land so all of our television was old and cheap reruns of 1950's era shows and movies, so when I'd read him talking about stuff he was exposed to as a kid, I felt relatable. Any of his ideas about the philosophy of film, I'd eat it all up. He was literally the only instruction around and he was a voluminous and seemingly endless source of information on the history and philosophy of film.

As time moved on, more came like this. The fad caught on and there was more to study and consume of like material. I studied film and media in any class I could ram it into, basically rigging any English class I could into film studies of any kind.

Point is, in that long side-tangent, I liked Star Wars because of what Star Wars was to me: film school.

I was never really that into it as a fan in the way people mean that. These days I don't really tell folks that I like Star Wars because if they're into Star Wars, I'm going to greatly disappoint them with confusion because they'll inevitably want to start talking about lightsabers, the Force, some planet somewhere, some group of Sith or Jedi that I know practically nothing much about, or something everyone effectively calls, "Lore".

My term for it is, "Lord of the Rings stuff".

And the reason I bring that up is to put a lens on this conversation so that I'm fair about things. If it's easier to dismiss me as "Not a true fan", please feel free to do so.

Alright, with that out of the way... to the actual point...

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I have a new career that started a few years back, about just before Covid hit. It's sort of a dream job as I now work in the movie business, get a salary doing it so I'm not feast or famine, which is all great.

A lot of my work has been hundreds of feet deep buried in story. I've written a couple screenplays on assignment, as well as created several requested pitch decks and one-sheets for more, and as Story Lead at the studio, basically everyone brings everything to my desk to either check over or ask for help.

Over this time, I've had some evolution in my ways of thinking.
Probably the best way to kick this off is retelling an experience on one of those screenplays.

One of them took a really long time to complete. It was a massive undertaking to pull together. I can't go into details of it, but at the end I flew down to my boss. We sat around for a few days, enjoyed some company, talked things over, and at the very end on the way to the airport he turned to me and asked something I never even knew I had any opinion on until that moment, "Would you want to do this as a franchise?"

Without hesitation I whipped out, "Oh, god no! I mean, if we want someone else to pick it up and run with it after, I've no problems with that, but I have no interest in being involved at that point creatively."

After some time later, I reflected on this as I hadn't really ever thought anything personally tragic about doing franchises, but then I realized during reflection why my gut reaction was so averse. Fans.

You're all fine people, that's not what that means. What it does mean is that if you make something that has fans sitting around waiting for it, to me, this is a personal sort of nightmare. Fans don't engage with movies as movies.

Recall, I got into making movies because I love the craft of making movies. I love movies as a medium. When I'm watching a movie, I'm not seeing just the movie - I'm seeing the implications of everything that went into it in every shot, and every narrative arc. I'm thinking about why things look and sound the way they do.

And part of what I love about movies, a big part, is how they interact with the audience. How the audience interacts with them.

I have a few sayings around the shop people get used to hearing me say. Things like, "Always watch your metaphors", "Watch your visual sentences", "Ask yourself one question: is that page worth it? Well, is it, punk?", "Learn, fight, ride"... little phrases that help remind of common oversights.

One of them that I have is: "Your story doesn't carry the last scene into the next one. The audience does."
Another related to it is: "Emotion determines the narrative. Change the emotion, change the narrative."

I'll often shorten these to...
"The audience is your story" and "Emotion is the narrative".

What I'm getting at with highlighting these last two is that a big part of my love of movies is the mechanics of audience engagement. A movie is interacted, basically, like the following:

The audience saw something about the movie and got a sense of what it would feel like to watch it, then decided they'd like to feel that way and went to watch the movie.
The movie starts and the audience's curiosity kicks on, they watch, feel, and think as the scene plays on and the dance begins. The movie hands them stuff to carry, and they put it back on the screen when it's time through emotional connection - hooking one emotion from one part of the movie to another part of the movie and therefore getting a new emotion from the old one in the past scene.

It's a marvelous dance. And it's completely different than reading. With reading, the required order is think, feel, visualize. Some people might be think, visualize, feel. Either way, it's think first because it takes cognitive processing to read and form a sentence into a sensible idea to digest.

Movies fundamentally don't require that. They are quite simply watch, feel, then think.
Your sense get sensory information, you feel reflexively to that sensory input, and then you think about things biased by how you've been provoked to feel. Then you take that thinking back to watching and the cycle starts over with you compounding the first moment's experience into the second, and on and on.

But a fan very frequently doesn't engage a movie this way. They engage it more like a book. They come in thinking. And thinking. And thinking. They've done a lot of thinking before ever getting there. So much thinking there's practically a checklist of things they're looking for. And they aren't emotional experiences - they're cognitive ideas. Some array of representations of the fictional universe rendered in the ways they want to see, some insight into that world in the avenues of interest to them. They're hopping onto a tour bus and wanting it to go places they've mapped out a desire to see.

That's not to say that those aren't emotional experiences for the fan when they happen, not at all. It's that the first formation of it isn't about an experience of emotion, but a cognitive idea. "I want to see ROTJ Luke in his prime. I want to see the origin of the Sith." That kind of stuff.

A general audience member wants to feel something. That's pretty much the full stop. Why did you come to this movie? "It looked fun" "It seemed funny" "It looks scary!" "I like romance movies", "Tom Cruise jumps off a cliff!", etc....

It's an array of pretty much just emotional expectations, not cognitive ideas. Their cups are empty. A lot of fans' cups are at least half full when they walk in. The movie can't actually pour fully into them. It can only meet them half way and be the movie they already were looking for, or not.

That is, with regards to a lot of fans, by the very nature of things, it's not a movie watching experience purely. It's a movie approval experience.

And that is so fundamentally different to me. It's more like reading. Thinking is happening first. And in some folks' case, it's happening first and so frequently that there's not much room for emotion to take place. It's all in happening in the thinking, like a historian watching a biopic of some epic battle constantly remarking what's right and what's wrong.

And to me, this just isn't what I want to interact with. It's not movies to me. It's definitely movies, but it's a type of interacting with movies that's completely alien to me. It feels, from a creative point of view, very sterile and restrictive. You either choose to battle and try to knock their cup over so that it can be filled completely, or you try to meet them half way, knowing that you can't. You'll reach someone half way, but you'll always reach a whole bunch of others not half way.

And further, because you're busy reaching all of these fans' cups half way or trying to knock them over, you're not attending to the general audience's way of engaging a movie emotionally, so now your scenes struggle to work for them either. Or you do focus on the general audience and put in stuff for fans' cups second fiddle, and just accept that you'll only get some of those fans and a bunch won't be really tickled, but they'll be fine enough... etc...

You just start playing politics too much instead of working on making a good audience participation movie.

This wraps around to Star Wars because when I look at how Lucas did Star Wars and I look at how folks are making Star Wars now, boy... if I had to make a franchise style movie because a gun was against my head, I'd pick Lucas' way of making it. Which would not be fun as that really just guarantees that the general audience might like it, but fans will likely chew your head off, because his approach was essentially to ignore the fans and do what he wanted to do for a general audience the way he wanted to do it.

And that was very unpleasant looking. Equally, I look at the folks doing it the newer way and hats off to them... that is some insane level work. The amount of marketing and focus group studies they have to sit through to do everything and try to balance is completely nuts. And then they still don't get it right very often because it's a psychotically hard method of movie making. It's more like toy making. In fact, it is the same business model that toy making uses. It's just far more complicated to make than toys.

So, hats off to anyone making Star Wars today. I don't have that in me, and I don't know how you do it.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Funny, you say that of comics. That was my relationship with them as well. I collected quite a few for a while. Bone usually grabbed my interest for its style. I was mostly intetested in the art and paneling.

At 18, not getting anywhere on film, I signed to an independent publisher as a penciler of an original idea I had titled The Adventures of Matchstick & Shogun, which was a sort of Bonesque satire of comic books and movies. Things fell through between me and the publisher. I was terribly undisciplined as an employee and they lied about creative control and started usurping critical creative decisions. I walked. That also ended a life-long enjoyment of drawing. It just doesn't feel good to do anymore.

But I'm glad it happened because I learned a ton, wised up, and am where I am now in part because of it.

I don't have much left from it, considering it was almost 30 years ago now, but here's two rough sketches of the Shogun character that aren't in great shape, but have survived. One day, maybe in retirement years, I might return to it since I did win the rights back to it eventually... but if I'm honest, probably not.





Cheers,
Jayson

 

A lot there that is very relatable. Definitely stick with it. I can say from first-hand experience, you never know if a door knock will happen.
For me, I just started helping other indie filmmakers and writers for free. Script doctoring and reviewing their screenplays (did one with NinjaRen at one point, even). I just figured, to hell with it - if I can't make movies, I'll do as close to it as I can in my free time with the lowest investment and risk attached. Which was why I just did it for free to anyone who wanted. I just didn't want to bother with the headache of business crap. Funny thing. When I did things this way for music, art, and screenwriting... as pure hobbies with zero strings attached in aspirations, no thought beyond the now, it was like I was ten years old again. Pure enjoyment.

One thing led to another over time, and I ended up getting a phone call one day that turned out to be a new career I wasn't even looking for.
I had written it off. I was nearly 20 years into a corporate job compiling reports and expecting another 20 more at least. I was purely feeding a hobby and settling in for the long stretch ahead of me.

Maybe you won't make it, maybe you will. Who knows. But at the very least, I can say that you'll likely enjoy the hell out of it if you do it just because you want to do it (which it sounds like you are).

Your cover is extremely high quality with sharp contrast and a great dynamic eye. I can imagine the styling within is dramatic, clean, with dynamic camera angles and strong use of bold blacks with defined edges between characters and backdrops. I expect it is visually rich and dense.

--- --- nerding out on comic art stuff follows --- ---

And yeah, Bone was really interesting to me because what I was pushing in my art style was towards what I called 'animate impressionism'.
One thing I didn't like about a lot of comic artwork when I would flip through it was that it lacked what I saw everywhere all over Looney Toons or Garfield Sunday strips. Even if I just took a picture of a single frame from Looney Toons or a panel of action from Garfield, there was more active and expressive life to the lines than what I would see in the highly more detailed comic art (which was odd, because when I'd look at older 1940's/50's era comics a ton more life was present - just not the detail).
The definition in comics went considerably up, but the life went down. So many high-quality comics were filled with high resolution mannequins. In fact, most. It was the rare frame where bodies looked truly active and moving instead of posed figurines.

Then I found Bone and immediately saw a way out because Bone just said screw it and slammed multiple mediums into one with no sh**s given about conventions, and I remember being an adolescent and thinking, "Wait, you can do that? You can put cartoons and comics right next to each other?"

From then on, that was all I focused on. Translating my cartooning style (which is extremely simplistic based and about geometry of core lines) into a middle ground area from my comic style (which I never liked because it looked highly detailed, but... like everything else I was seeing, stiff). I started pushing further and further, simplifying every possible little line out that I could. Anywhere I could remove a line, I'd remove it. Anywhere I could imply one, I would. I'd stretch proportions, exaggerate the lines, squeeze them and pinch them, and center everything always around a central geometric shape or "brush stroke" - leveraging all composition usually reserved for matters of the frame down into the character to push the weight towards a direction of the geometrically shape of them all to imply the motion even further. Lighting didn't matter. One character could have completely off lighting from another. The shading was completely bent around creating the impression of animation in a still picture as much as I possibly could.

I wanted to show you what I mean, so I went digging around storage to see if I could find anything left and I got lucky. There was one folder with an array of drawings in it still.

Here's a couple of drawings from almost twenty years ago I did of inspired by my (then only) daughter.
Note - I am not a colorist (or even that good of an inker). I just basically aim for "don't make it look like complete trash" (when I worked on the comic, I had a separate colorist).








Alright, but anyway - on to the actual comic stuff.
Here's what I mean. I started out with this, to identify the basic form factor.



Then refined out to a more fleshed out look of this, again, focusing on form.


Then it went into those forms you saw in images above (which were the forms that would have been published had things not fallen out).
Which themselves were a step up, because this was one of their predecessors (this is also one of only two surviving drawings of Matchstick).


Which, while I liked Matchstick and the air of it, everything else was terrible. It didn't have enough animation about it. The glasses and gun were too literal.
So that's when the drawings in the previous post came in as I continued to evolve and simplify.

This paired with a villain who at that time looked like this




But I wasn't really happy with Shogun yet. Still felt very cluttered and not geometrically biased enough yet. So, even after everything fell through I kept pushing until I finally got to where I was more pleased.





And as one last image, this is the only surviving full body shot I have of Matchstick. Strangely, he's been cut out. I have no idea why this was done. But I don't think it matters here.


Anyway, I think you can see what I mean by the idea of employing a creative thread of Bone to reach for an almost Disney-esque-like styling that looks animated even when sitting still.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Please do!

Art is the blood that animates humanity!

Cheers,
Jayson

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 12, 2023, Original Post Date: Dec 12, 2023 ---

Unless that script is locked, I'd like to take a wink at it as it might be interesting to consider putting in front of my boss as a potential project.
WB, if they bite, is going to be a better win - most likely - for you at this stage since we're pretty small, but we have loads of connections (that's our power play).

Right now, we're focused on feature films, but I've already been asked for and delivered a pitch deck for one potential series, so who knows...

And yes, it's very much "who you know".
That's why I tell inbound writers to get up to a point of decent writing, get a solid grip on film theory - like, really solid (which is all just mental training), and then stop dinking around with refining and contest entries. Instead, focus on networking by taking interest in others and helping them out with their projects rather than shoving yours in every email box you can find.

Anyway, if you want, send it my way and I'll look it over to see if it can fit in our future or not.

Cheers,
Jayson