Chennai Screenwriting Workshop-Part 2
The final session was about the Industry Aspects of writing. Anjum and Atul, both of whom have been instrumental in crafting a standard contract for writers in the Bombay film industry led this session. They talked through the writer’s rights - fees, credit, termination and rolayties and the writer’s duties - schedule of submission and presence at meetings. I was stunned to learn that they had a really hard time of getting people to agree to a minimum fee [...]
Chennai Int’l Screenwriting Workshop
The day kicked off with an introduction by Kamal Haasan. He put the entire workshop together to make screenwriting more accessible to aspiring writers. … He also introduced the rest of the presenters for the workshop - Hariharan, Director of the L.V. Prasad Film and TV Academy, Anjum Rajabali, Head of departments of screenwriting at FTII and Whistling Woods, and Atul Tiwari, a professional screenwriter and an excellent dialog writer.
Anjum Rajabali took charge of the next couple of sessions. He’s a very impressive man - funny, engaging, articulate, compelling. An excellent presenter who captures and holds your attention. [...]
Valuing forests
This is a brilliant example of using logic and business sense to preserve our forests. I wish more NGOs adopted this approach.
A MOST unusual document landed on your correspondent’s desk recently: a financial report from a rainforest. Iwokrama, a 370,000-hectare rainforest in central Guyana, announced that it was in profit. It added, more intriguingly, that rainforests had entered the “global economy”.
Iwokrama is part of the largest expanse of undisturbed rainforest in the world, which overlies the Guiana Shield. It has a unique history. In 1989 the president of Guyana had the foresight to give the forest as a gift to the Commonwealth for research into global warming. Today it is administered by an international board of trustees, who have devolved the day-to-day management to the Iwokrama International Centre. It is this centre that has been working to exploit the forest sustainably.
Edward Glover, one of Iwokrama’s board of trustees, says that it became clear more than a decade ago that the forest could not rely on donor funding to survive, so it had to look elsewhere for finance. The centre’s first job was to identify the forest’s assets and to exploit them. It seems to have perfected its art. Today the centre makes money in areas such as ecotourism, timber-extraction, forest-products such as honey and oils, bio-prospecting and forestry research. Its results for 2008 reveal that it made a surplus for the first time that year, with revenues of $2.4m and a profit of $800,000. The previous year it had lost $200,000. Revenues from timber were up by 44%, ecotourism by 26% and training by 22%.
When forests vanish, people suffer. That is why many believe that there is an urgent need to bring forests onto the global financial balance sheet. Last year Pavan Sukhdev, an economist at Deutsche Bank, reported that the world was losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year as a result of deforestation alone. If money could be made by selling these ecosystem services, then the financial equation for forests would change.
Rainforests | Growing on trees | The Economist.
Quality
A group I’m involved with was embroiled in a debate. One side contended that passion was the most important factor in a blog post - do you care enough? Do you bleed onto the page? The other side maintained that passion without quality is just… drivel.
Forget blogs for a second - let’s consider work. Can you get away with delivering a sub-par, error-filled deliverable at work if you offer that it was done with passion? Work is not the same as blogging? Really? Why - are blogs your fun/amateur activity? If you think so, read John August’s piece on professionalism. And remember in this Google world, everything lives forever. And your name is on it.
What do I think? Quality is absolute. Evaluated on an absolute basis and absolutely required. In this instance, a Hugh MacLeod cartoon says it best…
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Can you imagine a movie almost entirely in close-ups? Would you feel claustrophobic? Want to shove your elbows outward to create some breathing room? Stand up and stretch and take huge, gasping breaths? Or perhaps even hit pause and take a walk outside?
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of the Joan of Arc made me feel all of those things. And therein lies a lot of it’s brilliance.
The carcinogen-free store
In the past couple of weeks I’ve had several people say to me “Is it me or am I hearing the term cancer more and more?” Knowing a clutch of people who have or are dealing with the big C, I’ve had the same thought in my head for the past several months.
What’s going on - is it our lifestyles - what we eat, how much we sleep, how much we drink? Is it environmental - the chemicals in the everything, the air we breathe? Is it that diagnostics are getting better - technology is catching tumors that might have gone undetected in the past? Is it that I’ve reached an age where my friends are just entering the zone of risk and the parents are firmly in the risk zone?
It is probably a combination of everything.
But as I think about what I can control, I would love to be able to consume “safer” products. Of course every product is made of chemicals and not all chemicals are bad, but we know there are some which are or could be carcinogenic. I’d like to avoid those.
The only way for me to do that right now is to read a ton, educate myself on which chemicals are dangerous and then read every single label to ensure it doesn’t contain any chemical on that list.
But there has to be a better way - couldn’t there be a store that did this research and only carried the products that fell within the bounds? Since I’d want these safe products in every category, it would have to be a really broad selection - cooking utensils, clothing, accessories, etc.
Think of Amazon, but with a layer on top of it “carcinogen free (CF)”. This entity would do the research and identify the products in several categories that are safer. It then sets up it’s CF Store. All the items are on Amazon, this is just the CF Store’s selected short list. When a user shops at this store, the transaction is completed on Amazon and the CF Store gets a cut. There are no guarantees with this stuff, so the CF Store would do a to-the-best-of-our-abilities thing. But that’s a heck of a lot better than what I can do right now.
The CF store doesn’t just have to be the CF Store alone. It could also be the CF and Green Store that also picks environmentally friendly products. That would just be another slice of what’s available on Amazon.
Or what if on Amazon itself, there were filters- CF, Green etc., in addition to the Brand, Material and Color filters that already exist. I do a search and check the filters that are important to me. As I check more filters, the number of products reduce, but hey, I’m willing to deal with less choice for being more picky.
Does something like this exist? If it does, let me know and sign me up.
Sherlock Jr.
Sherlock Jr. is a Buster Keaton classic. At just 45 minutes, it is short, but packed with action and innovation. The stunts are astounding. At a time before CGI, I have no idea how he did this stuff. So I started digging around to try to understand it better.
Sherlock Jr. is about a projectionist who wants to be a detective. He proposes to his lady love but by doing so irks her other suitor who frames Keaton in a robbery of the girl’s father’s pocket watch.
In the first amazing sequence, Keaton follows the other suitor to try and investigate. This involves a Keaton-usual where he walks within an inch of a person he’s following, every movement synchronized. How? [...]
Life
This is one of my favorite pictures. From our trip to Iceland in 2007.
It’s a metaphor for life, really.
[Updated - if the picture loads fuzzy, please hit reload. It is not out of focus, but sometimes renders soft - not sure why.]
Slumdog Millionaire
Now then, is it a filmmaker’s duty to show every part of every city? To show every strata of every country a film is made in?
What if a filmmaker came in and made a movie about the crème de la crème of Bombay - South Bombay society. What would the reaction be? Hmm… let’s see… It would be that the filmmaker is showing one small section of Bombay. That Bombay is not filled with people who spend more on their handbags than most people spend on rent.
Here’s to the crazies
The crazy people will change the world for the better. The people who hear they are insane, it can’t be done, it’s silly to do it *now* and still go ahead and pursue their dreams - these are the folks that will have a positive impact on large groups of people.
The crazy people are special in many ways - most importantly, they are super-smart, very capable, confident, and almost universally acknowledged for their capabilities (unless you are an emerging crazy, in which case you have yet to be universally acknowledged)1
The people who rely on the status quo, have never earned a job or title on their own, and skate along trying to fool people might be fine now, but average is all they’ll ever be. These people look down on the crazies. They may secretly want to be one of the crazies, but only for the glory that will eventually await the crazies - they don’t want to do the hard, grinding work that it will take for the crazies to succeed. And therein lies the core reason they’ll always just aspire to mediocrity.
The truly bold ones - the ones who may fail big, the ones jump off the treadmill of safety - are the most likely to win big too.
This wonderful piece talks about how young crazies from Yale are pursuing their dreams.
it’s refreshing to know that the world keeps minting idealistic young people who are not waiting for governments to act, but are starting their own projects and driving innovation.
I know of a couple of others who had the courage and capabilities to walk away from secure, stable jobs to venture out on their own. To those crazies, whether you are in Madras, London or New York, my most sincere good wishes. May you soar. May your hard work and your idealism be rewarded. I’m rooting for you - you’re inspirational.
- My “crazies” are different from Hugh’s Crazy Deranged Fools in some ways. CDFs seem to be creative or artistic, my crazies can be pure business folks although successful business folks have to be creative too. And my crazies may not pay the bills for a while - they will live without if they have to, they will adjust their lifestyle downwards. CDFs could work alone but my crazies want to start companies/ventures/projects. I am not quite a crazy, but I am a CDF. [↩]
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