Building a World's Countries

A few years ago, I reorganized all of the regions for Magic-Earth. My original version (probably done in high school) was random chunks of land. But I wanted them to follow natural landmarks, like rivers and mountains. And I wanted them to be all relatively the same size. 

 Now I have the monumental task of figuring out how the different cultures from our world will translate into the countries of the other world. Some countries are broken up, or combined together. Vaircress is the main region I use, because it coordinates with where I live so I'm most familiar with the land. 

I looked in my little American Indian encyclopedia and found all of the tribes that lived in that area of land. It's broken up into different groups, such as Northwest Coast, and California. I listed out the tribes in these groups, and to my excitement the groups actually lined up remarkable well with the borders of the Vaircress region. There are just a few outliers.

Though I came across a different complication. My useless little encyclopedia took the California region and listed ten tribes. But as I got online to do further research, I found nearly 50 tribes. And that's not even counting some tribes that are broken into smaller categories.

And California is one of six regions I have to go through for Vaircress. The others don't have over 40 tribes, but some of them get close. So, yeah. This is gonna take a while. And Vaircress is just one of many countries. 

Juvenile Magellanic penguins

Always Something New

If I've grown up with a movie and seen it repeatedly throughout my life, I don't really think about it when I watch it. I guess they've just ground a groove in my brain and have trouble getting out if it. Which means I don't always notice things about movies I've seen a million times. Then occasionally I will notice something that I'd never really paid attention before. 

For example, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indie and Elsa go into the knight's tomb under the library, and wade through a petroleum well. While they're in there, someone drops a match and ignites the petroleum. Indie and Elsa have to swim to safety. But when I just watched this again, I noticed that Indiana is wading through the petroleum with a torch that's dripping embers all along the way! How come that doesn't light up the highly flammable liquid? 

Or Disney's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (I read the book, but it was too long ago for me to remember many of the details, so this is just about the cartoon). As a kid, I assumed you were supposed to root for Ichabod, since he's the protagonist (even if I didn't know what "protagonist" meant back then). Eventually I kinda realized that he's not a stellar example of a hero. And I just watched it again, and finally put it in words. Do you really want to root for him? He wants the girl because she's pretty and her dad's rich. And the narrator says that Brom is a prankster, though there's no malice to his mischief. Except he's about to punch Ichabod's lights out at one point (and if he is actually the horseman, that's full of malice right there. Though we never know if it's actually him). So neither guy is much of a role model. But that's life sometimes. 

When I got back from Europe, I watched several movies set in places that I visited. It was a cool perspective!

Titanic was built in Ireland, so I decided to watch the film when I got home. I was crazy about this movie when it came out. I think that when I saw it as a kid, it just struck me as a really flashy movie that my best friend happened to love, so we loved it together. But this time, when I watched the movie it struck me that this really happened. Of course I knew it was true - Cameron does his research. But this time the details hit me as if they were real life. It's not just a movie. 1,500 people went into the ocean when Titanic sunk. And only 6 of those people were rescued from the water.

Sometimes I learn something new that helps me see a movie in a new light. 

In Paris, I saw some of the unicorn tapestries. The Last Unicorn was one of the films I watched on my return, because they use some of the historic unicorn tapestries. The entire opening sequence animates one of these tapestries. And now I can see that the unicorn's forest is illustrated to look like the foliage in the tapestries! Cool! 

 

Flutes on Screen

When I was little, there were a number of movies I liked, and at the time I had no idea they were from Japan. Such as Totoro and Kiki. Unico in the Island of Magic was another. Made by the same person that did Astro Boy, which is more familiar to American audiences (Tezuka is wildly popular among manga fans - he's considered a classic mangaka).

Unico in the Island of Magic is a sappy movie about a little unicorn who brings joy. I loved it as a kid - my dad had recorded it from TV for me. And as I grew older, I kept the nostalgia for it. And one day, to my surprise, I found that movie was actually a sequel. I watched the first one, but I guess the second one is just mine.

Anyway, that sappy nostalgic cartoon sequel has a really cool, haunting flute song in it, played by someone who is a villain for a while. 

I gave myself one of those ridiculously crazy massive projects that I occasionally come up with. This one is to find cool flute songs from movies, and get sheet music for them. 

Easier said than done. For many of these flute songs, I can't find sheet music. Either I don't know where to look, or it's just not there. And for some of these songs, I doubt anyone would have gone through the effort to write them out.

Toby's flute songs are in this latter category. So I took it upon myself to write out the sheet music. By hand, because I don't have a computer program for it (I had one once, but it was a nightmare to use. Maybe there's something better now, but it seems easier to just write it). Transcribing it was crazy. Especially since I had to go into the movie to get some of it, and try to listen to the music through dialogue. But it made me appreciate the songs all the more. The first song is slow and haunting, and the second variation is much faster-paced. And to my immense relief, the third one was exactly the same as the second one.

I've written out a few more flute songs from other movies, but Toby's were the trickiest. Even trickier than Cardinal Knowledge, because it's less repetitive (Cardinal Knowledge is played in the end credits of Secret of Kells - I've almost finished that one, but not quite). 

So, I'm playing my hard-won sheet music. It will be cool when I get these tricky ones under my fingers.

Writing vs. Intuition?

I was listening to a talk, and someone said something that was fascinating. I have no idea how true it is, but it makes you think. They said that when writing was invented, people were lamenting that it was the death of intuition.

It makes sense. Instead of trying to figure out or feel things for yourself, you just read someone else's account. It would have been a very different way to learn.

I obviously find writing helpful, because it's hard to remember a lot of details. And it lets different people can build off of new ideas. But then again, the whole point of the statement is that we have bad intuition now. Maybe I wouldn't need writing if my intuition was incredible?

Meerkat

Wolves and Wargs

I recently watched parts of a couple movies with my dad: Lord of the Rings, and Wolfwalkers. We watched Wolfwalkers between a couple of the Lord of the Rings movies. And as we were watching Wolfwalkers, my dad said it was violent. I was astonished, and asked what he thought all the battles in Lord of the Rings were. They're far more violent than Wolfwalkers. He said that Lord of the Rings was "fun violent." What a weird thing to say. I mean, I guess there's a bit of that with Legolas and Gimli bantering about how many orcs they've taken out.

But violence isn't fun. There's slapstick, which is funny if it's good. But there's a line between slapstick and violence. Wolfwalkers doesn't have fun violence because there's nothing fun about violence. And Lord of the Rings has some silly stuff in their battles so the films don't get too heavy and dark. But Lord of the Rings doesn't make violence fun either. Think of Boromir.

There are movies that make violence funny. I don't like them. There isn't anything funny about people getting badly hurt and killed. People shouldn't be thinking that way. (It depends on how it's done - in Coco, it's kinda funny when the bell falls on top of a certain famous singer. But that is part of setting up a movie about the dead. It was a deliberate way to lighten people up about death for the duration of the film, so they could really get immersed in the Land of the Dead. Oops, that turned into a Coco tangent).

Write Your Ideas!

An ongoing hurdle with most of my stories is finding a plot. Well, not always a plot. But something going on that the characters, themes, and events center around. 

For example, I recently did a short story to explain how Joaquin came to live at Evva's farm. I knew basically what would happen. But it wasn't enough to fill out a story. As I was brainstorming, I filled out the setting. The city gets seasonal wetlands, and is a place where migratory birds spend the winter. I'd heard of places that have festivals to welcome the migratory birds. That even fit with the themes of the story.

This is why I keep a big file of random ideas. Sometimes I only need something small like "migratory bird festival" to fill in a gap that makes a story whole. Once I have that, the characters will help me fill in around it. 

White ibis

Take a Seat

As I was going through that big character questionnaire for Evva,I started thinking about something from  Big Hero 6. In the bonus features, they show an animation test for developing characters. For each character, they animate them walking into a room and sitting in a chair. It was amazing how much they could fit into such a simple scene. How the character walks. Do they yank out the chair and crash into it? Prop their feet on the table? 

I found myself trying to picture Evva in a similar situation.

But yeah, Big Hero 6 has incredible characters.

Your irregularly schedule interruption in writing to look up hitching horses to a two-horse wagon.

Can't Stop Talking?

Back when certain people were my friends, we would regularly talk about stories. Now none of my friends are into that. Nicole will analyze movies with me, though she hasn't read my stuff. Nick hasn't read my stuff either, and says he can't analyze it because he's my friend. 

So I don't get to talk to anyone about my stories, and it's like keeping a lid on a volcano. Sometimes it bursts and I end up trying to discuss stories with people who don't care. Such as this account. It always ends badly, since I'm all excited and no one else has any idea what I'm talking about.

La Mancha goat