We Write A Script

As Hollywood heads into the movie summer with a barrage of CGI-heavy kid's movies, we are kind of disheartened. Our demographic seems to be forgotten by the studios and these days we can find joy at the movies only at film festivals or maybe in the Oscar season.
Now, the least we can do is writing the movie we would like to see and go from there. We've been tossing around ideas for over a year now, but we're coming (slowly, much too slowly...) to an end.
Why are we doing this? First of all, it's fun. Sitting, for example, at a bar and talk about stories and characters just so perfectly fits to New York City. And the formalized and concise writing style of a movie script, suits us well with our tech writing experience. On top of it, it's an ideal art form for working together, again because individual writing style has a much lower priority.
Secondly, I think, as a screen writer you're competing on a relatively level field. Of course, having a well-known name gets your work much easier in front of producers and directors. But people watch movies because of actors and directors and maybe the people, who brought you some other stuff you like, but very rarely for the screenwriter. This means, as opposed to musicians and novel writers, there's no marketing power associated with a screenwriter's name. That may be frustrating at times (who remembers the name of the last screenwriting Oscar winners?), but we'll happily deal with that later.

3 Favorite CDs in May 2007

Blonde Redhead - 23
I've already liked Blonde Redhead's previous release Misery Is A Butterfly, but 23 is a CD where – at least for for my taste – everything falls together. It's the kind of album where every track kicks of a movie in your head and inspires highflying thoughts. The voices are unusual, but if you can get over it, then it's likely some of the best stuff ever.
Official Site | iTunes

Swati - Small Gods
We discovered Swati because, well, she's a regular at the Magician as we are and when we learned (through a full-page article in the TONY magazine) that she's putting out a new CD, we bought it on iTunes, more or less, to show support. But it's good, really good. TONY has already called her a guitar goddess, but she also has a great voice and interesting lyrics.
Official Site | iTunes


Hybrid - Morning Sci-Fi
Hybrid is an Welsh band, whose recent concert fell into the club section rather than into the music category. So I guess, it's not really band, but DJs and and programmers, who crank out atmospheric and probably very danceable music. But it's great stuff to put extra-loud on the iPod, while walking through the streets. It's music that gives you an extra kick of energy and let's your thought fly to more pleasant regions than they probably currently are.
Official Site | iTunes

Watching Apple TV

After having an Apple TV for a couple of weeks in our living room, I can confirm that it truly changes the way of watching TV or listening to music. Still there are some features I dearly miss and which can be hopefully added soon by a software upgrade.

• Something like a “Playing now” playlist. Maybe I'm overlooking something here, but every media player except iTunes supports an ad-hoc playlist. Basically there should be a way to select music and not play it right away, but after the current selection finished. This is a feature a love on our Squeezebox.


• Speaking of the Squeezebox: remote controlling Apple TV from a PC would be nice, too. Sequeezebox does it via a the web browser, for Apple TV iTunes would be the natural choice.


• The main reason for buying Apple TV was to present pictures on a large TV. But this feature of Apple TV seems to be designed in a hurry. The main feature that is missing is some sort of index page: if you want to start a slide show at a certain picture, you have to click through it one by one.


• Support of streaming from iPhoto: iPhoto itself can so it, so should Apple TV, too.
  At least allowing to sync iPhoto slides hows with all settings, including a soundtrack. As of now iPhoto just copies the photos of an album.


• Re-sizing pictures automatically before the sync, as it's done for iPod. A 7 megapixel photo doesn't do anything to improve the experience on the TV, but it slows down syncing and fills up Apple TVs hard disk in no time.


• Syncing iTunes with other computers. I don't understand, why I can sync a TV show to my iPod to watch it on a tiny screen, but not to my laptop. Yes, I know, I can just import it, but an automatic sync is much more convenient.

Last, I think Apple needs to think about how to organize the iTunes media library, as they grow bigger and bigger. And it will get only worse when finally HD content hits the iTunes store. So there need to be a way to distribute content on different disks and computers.