Dave Sweet emailed me last week all hot and bothered about wanting to make a movie. A real movie using a digital camcorder and with the group. He read "If Chins Could Kill" and was inspired by the creation of _Evil Dead_. That was a lot of work and hardships even for a low budget, less than $1 million movie. If Dave wants to make a movie, I'm all for it. I just hope that he has the same ardor six months from now, when the movie is still not done.

First thing you need is a good script. Check that. What you really need first is knowledge of how movies are made. If you understand how movies are filmed and produced and the editing and so forth then you can create a script with that in mind. Then the script becomes the most important thing. A good story, good plot, those are the only things that you don't need money to do well.

You need to be able to write and of course have a good idea. But you have in essence unlimited time and money for that. Movie equipment, DV tapes, actors, props and locations, editing all takes money and more money. Well, you can use friends for actors and homes for locations and your own computer for editing. But quality suffers. The story though, stays the same so if you have a good story at least that doesn't get worse because you run out of money.

So Dave should read a couple of books on filming and making a movie. Then he needs to put his story on paper and write a good script. Shannon can help since he's taken a couple of script writing classes and he's a good writer. I don't know if the rest of us can do anything constructive. And surprisingly Woo was all for it when I mentioned it to him. I guess I keep thinking that the guys don't want to do anything but they're generally open to new ideas.

I do wonder what idea he wants to turn into a movie. My guess is some sort of post-apocalyptic worlds, since he loves that genre. And that way you can use real locations, making them run down for that proper abadoned modern ruins feel. Still, he should work on the script for a few months to get it just right. Then there's the planning -- who's in the movie, what scenes are you going to shoot and when, etc. All the little details.

So Dave still needs to buy a DV camcorder, which he asked me about I think, or was that Dan Berger? Hmm, I think it was both of them come to think of it. Too bad I haven't really looked at camcorders. When I was looking I wanted a small camcorder and that was pretty much my only criteria. And it's a restrictive criteria that limits features. But if you actually want to shoot something you need a bigger camcorder which opens up what you can put in it and that means many more choices.

I've never had the ambition to make a movie. Dave said he's wanted to do something like this since high school. But to me it looks like a lot of work and what I'm more interested in is the story. So writing a good script would be more my cup of tea. And yet scripts are a really limited story-telling medium. You can't do the same thing with a movie as with a book. So the stories are different and I'm not a visual type of guy. I tend to write a lot more dialogue than anything else. I like the word plays and pal-ling around. So those are the kind of stories that I write.

What kind of movie would I make? It would have to be something more visual, not so much exposition as you might do in a novel. But not action -- I'm more into telling a story. Actually, there are some nice science fiction stories that I've read that may or may not make good movies, but the visuals would be great. Just these great special effects, which means it'd be impossible for me to do since I don't have the resources for good special effects.

So maybe a science fiction mystery. Then again, unless there's something particularly science fictiony about it you might as well set in today's world. But that's not interesting. Maybe a movie version of one of the Star Trek adventures, one of the mystery ones without special effects. I don't know. It requires more than five minutes of thought. You need to tailor the story to what you can do.