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Subj: Re: Sounds like a good read to me. Posted: Tue May 10, 2011 at 02:58:55 pm EDT (Viewed 766 times) | Reply Subj: Re: Sounds like a good read to me. Posted: Mon May 09, 2011 at 04:20:08 am EDT (Viewed 4 times) | ||||||
Quote: I toyed with posting a section here as an example but I think I'd prefer to finish the thing and do a second draft before I show just how unready for reading this thing is.Whenever you think it's ready to be read, I'm interested. Quote: As it turned out, Vinnie's meeting with Claire (the aforementioned ingenue) became one massively long scene, the longest I've ever written as continuous prose. It covered around twelve hours from their first meeting and most of it was conversation and interaction (with a couple of monster attacks). When I read it back it was clear that I needed to intercut it with some other stuff, including some actual events and something that didn't require the reader to go to page 40 before any threat appeared.I therefore did what I tend to do with Untold Tales with this problem and intercut another narrative where the major threat unfolded, so there's two stories going that eventually crash together. Inevitably the non-Vinnie strand is a bit darker than the Vinnie one, not least because the only surviving protagonist in it so far is Tanner. When I'm a bit further in I'll have to check that the two strands don't have incompatable tones. Quote: Quote:Now, with horror films, I know quite a few that I liked that mixed comedy (even goofy comedy) with horror... from Sam Raimi's horror films to Peter Jackson's The Frighteners to things like Fright Night, House and even Buffy the Vampire Slayer (series). It can be a quite effective way to modulate the tension over the course of a work, and humor remains the best way (in my opinion) to endear characters to an audience, which makes all the difference in getting the audience to care if they get away from that axe weilding psycho or not. Actually, Buffy's not a bad tone example to aspire to for this. If you haven't seen it before, I do highly recommend you watch "The Frighteners" by Peter Jackson. I think its probably the closest to the mix you're suggesting. It was something of a flop at theaters, in no small part due to that mix of tone between comedy and true horror, but it has a fair amount of fans who find a lot to admire in it, myself included. The story is about a personable paranormal investigator played by Michael J. Fox who runs a con on the small town where he lives. It's not that he isn't psychic, rather it's that he's working with a crew of humorous ghosts to haunt people and then offer his services to remove the offending spirits. However, a truly monstrous spirit begins to prey on the people of the town, and what started out looking like a "Ghostbusters" kind of comedy goes to some really dark and scary places, while still maintaining a kind of pulp/comic book feel. I think it would be worth your time to watch and reflect on what you felt worked for and against a proper balance between all of the elements in it. As for myself, I rate it highly although some of the humor isn't to my particular taste, but I feel the overall story is really well done, and I attribute its failure at the box office to the studio having no idea who to sell it to or how to sell it (people going into it based on the trailer below likely were scared and disturbed far beyond what they were expecting.) I believe the whole film is on YouTube if you can't find it elsewhere. Quote: Quote:I think they should work quite well, myself. I might caution against throwing every concept you've listed here into the work at once... but that's just something to consider, rather than advice I firmly think you should follow. That's the big problem I have to face. I think probably Vinnie's "unique selling point" is the weird Addams-family type world he dwells in, complete with scholar ghouls and unpleasant relatives and werewolf guilds and the whole underworld infrastructure. Without that he's a bit generic really. So while I want to avoid a huge info-dump and lumping so much in there that suspension of disbelief becomes impossible I also want to stick with what makes Vinnie interesting to me. You've pinpointed one of the areas I'm struggling with though. Obviously, as a fan of the Parodyverse, that's the big appeal to me as well. It's perhaps the same problem that Marvel deals with in working their way to the Avengers film. In "Iron Man 2" all of the SHIELD stuff was good for world building, but it felt very extraneous to the plot and ended up annoying much of the audience, but in Thor (I've finally added my own thoughts on it to the thread below) they did a much better job with it. Finding just the right balance may prove a challenge. | |||||||
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