Some writing, more needed

Recently, I have just been working on writing the sketches for the television show. The ones I have written I am pretty happy with. They are short, but so far I have received a good response from the people who I have shown them too. Hopefully, they will translate well to the screen. I have a good feeling about them though.

I still need more sketches. I have other ideas, but a lot of them may be out of the realms of what I will be able to work with. I know other ideas will come to me, but I need to stop forcing them, since that is when nothing comes to me.

I have been watching The Kids in the Hall and paying close attention to how they structure their sketches, as well as the content within them. I find them very funny because the sketches are, at times, very strange (or the idea around the character(s) scenarios is weird). The sketches can be pretty smart too, which I think makes them funnier. I would like my sketches to be within the same realm as theirs in a sense. Though, my ideas don't tend to be so outrageous to start with, but the endings of them should have a type of shock element to them. I think that is how good comedy works, since you don't see the joke coming.

Also, with The Kids in the Hall, in the later series they are sketches that continue throughout the episode. That was how I was planning on doing mine. Have one major sketch, with a story arch, and placing mini ones in between. This idea comes up in another show that I will mention in my next post.

Here is a sketch from The Kids in the Hall I think is really smart.

Quick update

So far, I have basically just been working on the sketch/tv show ideas. They are coming along. I realise that it is going in a slightly different direction than I initially intended, but one which I think is going to be pretty weird. A little darker perhaps too. The different direction is mainly that the sketches are longer than I anticipated, but they are going to stretch over the entire series (There would be a 6 episode season, which I'm basing off a normal British series length, which I am influenced by).

Also, I have been looking for different resources. The main aspect of that is just digging around to see what I can find and what I feel will be useful for my project.

Other than that, nothing too exciting to mention. I find these initial stages pretty slow. Whoa is the life of sketch comedy.

How to Begin a Comm Capstone

I am re-posting this post on this blog since I think I did it incorrectly on the previous one. So if anyone read that one, this is the same stuff.

This is my first entry for the Capstone and so far I've been running behind. I missed the entire first week of school due to some stupid flu (which I never get) so I have been playing catch up with all classes.

What I have done for the Capstone, is I have decided on what I will be doing. I am going to center my Capstone around my comedy writing. I will also be doing a complete first episode of a comedy-sketch television show. I also want to try to finish the play I wrote as well as write at least another script (considering a comic book format) so I will have an extensive portfolio.

The main focus for my Capstone is going to be on the writing, so while those of us who will be in the show are not professional actors, I am more concerned with the overall structure and writing of the episode than on the quality of the filming.

With that said, I am going to make this the best I can and am not going to half-ass anything. I figure this is a unique opportunity so better take advantage of it.

So far, I know what the show will be about and the structure I want to take it. I have most of the sketches planned out, but I just need to begin to actually write them. That should be the easiest part. I hope.

What I learned this semster

Throughtout this semester I learned quite a bit, and not all of it was strictly towards coding and gameplay. But what I think was the strongest aspect I learned was just how hard it is to program a game, even a simple one, by yourself. Through this semester I thought I would have gotten a lot more done on my game, but I did not get nearly what I wanted done. Some of this was me having to do a few different things on my own, when another group had three people to split the jobs between. But, some of this was also me spending more time on certain things than I needed to, or having to go back and reprogram/design aspects of the game, which put me behind.

Overall, I am reletively pleased with the progress I have made on my game, even though it was not exactly the finished product I had in mind. Some changes were made so I could at least have some type of playable game. I still have to try to program some more on the game. I at least want to get the collision detection code on my villian to work. If not, at least I tried. What I do know is that I am not the best when it comes to coding. I'll just stick with the aesthetics.

Competitive

This is just how competitive the older style gamers actually can get over their different games. The way video games worked back in the early 80's I think allows them to be more compettive and die hard about gaming. These days people can spend 12 hours playing but they are at home. Then, these people actually had to go out to an arcade and spend their day there. I feel that this meant that they might have even more passion about games then people now may have.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-RG9c3tk0A

Just been coding

So I've finally been making some progress on my game. It is not exactly turning out the way I had originally planned, but do to some coding issues and the difficulty aspect (and the fact I'm working by myself) I made a few changes to make it easier. It is looking pretty good overall and I'm just happy I'm getting things to work. Hopefully I can make some more progress to get at least a full first level together before the end of the semester.

Flash is a Pain

So after making some progress last week, finally getting my character to stay in the areas I want him too. Now, i tried to code my bad guy to chase him and everything went to pieces. I realized at first that my layers in Flash were not set up properly or things were in the wrong place. Anyway that confused me. Then when I tried to start over and move everything into a new window none of the scales were right, so I had to try to redo all that and then I still couldn't figure out what was wrong with the layers and that threw me off even more. By the end of only an hour I was ready to break the computer, which is usually something that doesn't happen to me. So I needed to take a break and thought I'd write it down for this blog.