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i want to start doing a weekly ’roundup’ of all my major ideas worth sharing, and also start scanning the week’s notable sketches and the like, and post them. weekly will become more than weekly and so on.

but i think i might want a faster scanner before that becomes practical. that or just get super-picky about what i scan and post…

anyways. i outlined the first few mini-chapters of notech saga tonight. realistically, i don’t know how the hell i want to do that. from talking to miles, i’ve got a bunch of ideas using the red/green/blue triad of sub-techs and bringing back dj notaste, on top of all the ideas i already had for the new characters and the massive storyline.

writing it won’t be too much trouble, i’m going to do it like i was doing gary dirin, where i work on it as i have time and energy and ideas, and just sort of make it up as i go along. i’ve got enough ideas that i shouldn’t have to worry about running out of material(rather the opposite) so the questions become how long do i want it to be, and what format?

should i script it and let miles draw it? or maybe try to do it as a flash epic? or just do it as a hand-scrawled geometric strip? geometric has appeal but i don’t know if i have the patience for that. same with flash, only it’d be testing miles’ patience, and then we have to worry about is it a silent movie, is it a serial, can miles veto my script and change shit, and so on.

so who knows. i suppose scripting it is the first step, i can always shelve it at that point until something presents itself.

i can’t stop thinking about ideas for star trek academy. i hate when the characters i come up with for my bastard sequels are more interesting to me than some of my own original ones. it’s probably the fact that all my bastard sequels are from stories that i like so much i can’t stop thinking about, to the point that i’m either trying to one-up the original, or just bask in my geeky love of it.

whatever, i suppose. i wouldn’t worry so much about having so many sequel ideas except for the copyright issue. and there’s the question of why am i letting myself get tied down to someone elses universe, when half the time i’m changing their universe so drastically it might as well be something else? am i trying to correct lapses in their judgement, screw with their established status quo, or just use their universe as a springboard to something else?

of course, half the time i’d say it’s more like fixing their mistakes. doing things that are cool vs things that are totally lame. all my matrix ideas stemmed from disappointment with the sequels. i’ve been yearning to remake star wars lately half because i want to remake the prequels and do them right.

so i guess my star trek academy ideas stem from enterprise going downhill so badly after the first season, failing not only it’s own potential, but the potential to be a good successor AND prequel to the original trek.

in any case, i came up with a wholly new character for trek academy today, and it was one of those cases of a random spark of a character idea fitting perfectly into the void in the character set. this brings the roster up to four solid, two half-an-ideas, and half a dozen bad ideas. i’ve got the captain, first officer, and two others. the engineer and doctor are working their way through the process, and the rest will work themselves out.

watched bits of attack of the clones on dvd tonight, skipping all the boring shit and mostly watching padme in her sweet white costume* and all the lightsaber action. i was struck by how blatantly fakey and awful everything looked, pretty much up until the vietnam war sequence when there wasn’t a single non-cgi object on screen for minutes at a time. real people interecting with a fake world, or fake people interacting with the real world very very rarely look good, and it’s usually only when they pull a peter jackson the fake thing the real people are interacting with was animated over something real, like andy serkis.

episode 2, on the other hand, isn’t any good any more. i liked it at the time, but now it’s just become this huge metaphor for why you need a director who understands why you use each particular trick in your roster, and doesn’t just pick one(blue-screen + cgi) and run with it in every scene. when the lightsaber motions of the jedi look more authentic in the fucking clone wars cartoon than in the actual movie, you’re doing something wrong.

i was thinking for some of it about how i would redo it if i had the chance, but i think i’m done with star wars. most of my ideas can transfer into mentalism easily enough.

the sad thing is i had been pretty psyched for episode 3, and now i’m not so sure. i’ll probably enjoy it, but i’m not sure it’ll hold up to more than one viewing. maybe, probably not.

e1, on the other and, got better when i watched it on dvd, which is odd, since it’s the one i’d change the most if i were to redo it. but then again, i haven’t watched it in a year or two, so who knows if it’s still bearable.

*not what you think, she was much hotter in that when she still had a midriff and the cloak