That Was the Week That Was - July 23rd: Watchmen and Bittorrent

Hugely busy week, not made any easier by my promotion to Acting Marketing Manager – woohoo - and my wonderful editor at ‘Nett Magazine’, Josh Mehlman, forgetting to tell me next Monday’s copy deadline has been bumped back two weeks. (He’s going to read this and claim it was deliberate to help me get ahead of the curve. Trouble is, he’s probably right!).

The response to my offer of guest posts was incredibly successful, meaning I’ll be busy in the evenings for the next few weeks submitting posts to some great blogs. You will also start to see some guest bloggers here as well, giving me a break when I need it. I love how the blogging community continues to help build each other.

Watching the Watchmen

It´s been twenty years in movie development hell, but finally, ‘Watchmen' will make it to screens next year.

The problems have always been adapting a densely structured and immensely detailed mammoth work into a two hour film. Something was always going to be lost in the translation and this has been enough to discourage many of the names previously attached to the project.

Thankfully, after his incredible success with ‘300' last year, Zach Snyder was brought on board. His ability to translate the comic image to the page has already been proven, so we can now rest easy that the visuals will be taken care of. Not we just need to worry about the script.

And if you needed proof, here is the first teaser trailer. It is clear Snyder has used Dave Gibbons’ original artwork as storyboards for the film as some of the shots are fantastically close to Gibbons’ layouts. There are also sufficient snippets of certain scenes to indicate many of the key plot-beats are still in place. The trip to Mars, the Vietnam flashbacks, the rioting. Previously released photos have also revealed the newspaper vendor storyline (with the young boy reading ‘Voyage of the Black Freighter’) is also included.

The trailer quite rightly describes ‘Watchmen’ as the most celebrated graphic novel of all time. To any of you who are unfamiliar, this is true. ‘Watchmen’ is not, repeat NOT, to be considered just another superhero yarn. This is the closest superhero comics have ever come to serious literature. After the wonderful adaptation of ‘V For Vendetta’, it looks like the trend of dismal Alan Moore adaptations has ended Here’s hoping I’m right!

Cue fanboy geeky delight.

Piracy is Good?

I’m currently writing an article for ‘Nett Magazine’ on the evolution of copyright online and the development of new business models that take advantage of the distribution landscape currently dominated by piracy. In carrying out research, I came across Mark Pesce, an evangelist for new business models that embrace the modern realities of consumers downloading behaviour. Mark has been very helpful in providing material to me. I hope to extract more from his brilliant brain in the future.

In his lecture for AFTRS – ‘Piracy is Good?’ - Mark puts forward some highly persuasive arguments for the commercial adoption of bittorrent. It’s an hour long, but well worth watching if you have any interest in accessing or distributing your media online. It is also available as a text article.

Woof Contest – Top Five Picks

The votes are in and CopyWrite is happy to be included in the Top Five Picks for the week over on the Plotdog website. Each week, Plotdog Press highlights five noteworthy blog posts relating to writing in all its forms. Bloggers who produce quality posts on writing are encouraged to submit their posts to be reviewed and voted upon by Plotdog readers

Hand me the envelope please…

About Writing and Author Interviews / About Poetry

Kimota - “How to Become a Writer - the Harsh Reality”

Annetta Ribken - “Finding The Time To Write”

Robert Stevenson - “For improved writing think visually”

Qugrainne - “Cluttered Desk, Cluttered Mind, Clear Desk…….”

Flash/Fiction – Serial Fiction

Jennifer M Scott - “In Pursuit of Jack”

Brought to you by Plotdog Press, featuring: "Stephen King’s Bones"

And Finally…

Listening to… ‘Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts I-IV’. Perfect soundtrack to writing. It is also released under a Creative Commons license, allowing fans to reuse the tracks within their own non-commercial work. I’ll be writing more soon on how Trent Reznor is creating new models for distributing intellectual property online.

Reading… ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ – this could take a while. Also recently reread the old ‘Mean Arena’ comic strips originally published in ‘2000AD’ in the early ‘80s. I loved this comic adventure as a twelve-year-old so was excited to find it reprinted.

As you were. Class dismissed.