the bride of episode 5

Two teaser images from episode 5. They are not colour corrected, so expect them to look ever-so-slightly different in the final episode. ;)

Scheduling Episodes 4 & 5

Scheduling might be my least favorite part of the filming process. It might get better, I suppose, when I have money to throw at actors and crew members as incentive for them to leave their jobs, but since I cannot do that, I have to schedule the shoots around everyone's school and work schedule.

One nice thing about episodes 4 and 5 of The Ruffians is that not only are they a two-part singular story, but they use all the same locations. So instead of trying to shoot this in chronological order (by which I mean focusing entirely on episode 4, completing it, and then moving on to episode 5), I am dividing the schedule up by location. We'll be shooting both episodes simultaneously. It's going to be a bit of a challenge come the edit, but it'll ultimately be worth it -- I think.

Breaking Bad & 50/50

Just when I was starting to feel good about myself as writer, I watched Breaking Bad's fourth season finale.

Big mistake.

It is a perfect episode. It is absolutely flawless. There's nothing anybody could do to make it a better hour of programming. The characters, the script, the acting, the special effects, the story, the plot, the twists, the conclusion and the set-up for next season . . .

It humbled me. I know that artists are all different -- because we, as people, are all different. Present a group a problem and each person in that group will try to solve it in a different way. Give a group of writers a story idea, each writer is going to come up with their own way to tell that story. Sure, some structures will be the same, some content might be similar, there may even be identical dialog. But the pacing will be different. The tone will be different. The perspective, the reason, the conclusion, the moral, will all be different.

That is the only solace one can have in the shadow of an episode like "Face Off." It humbled me -- humbled me and challenged me.

I can be that good.

I know it.

UPDATE:

I followed this episode up with a trip to the local cinema, where I took in the equally superb 50/50. Tonight just a cavalcade of good writing and excellent entertainment.

The gauntlet has been thrown down.

Challenge accepted.

A Profound Sense of Accomplishment

I like it when a day ends with a profound sense of accomplishment. I don't have enough of them. I have so many days that, at the end of, feel like not enough was accomplished -- or worse yet, were a complete waste.

Working backwards, tonight we had a costume fitting. Bri will be playing Marlena in the next two episodes of The Ruffians and she will be in a wedding dress for most of her screen time (spoilers!). We found a wedding dress for her (thanks to my wonderful co-worker Heather), but Bri somehow always seems to be a little bit smaller every time we see her. She says she's not shrinking, and we are inclined to not believe her, as size can be a relative thing and if she's not getting smaller every time we see her, we're getting bigger. So Kelly had to resize the dress. Bri came over, tried it on, Kelly pinned it where it needed pinning and not an hour later, we had a perfect dress for Marlena.

An hour before Bri came over, I made dinner. It wasn't a huge deal, just black beans and rice with chicken, but the sense of victory over the kitchen cannot be denied.

Leading up to dinner, I was working on a new script -- well, not a new-new script. But a new-ish script. A new script based on an old outline. I wrote an outline for a story that I'm still quite fond of, but I abandoned it upon the release of Inception. There are some very clear similarities between the two and I shook my fist at Christopher Nolan, a little angry that he beat me to it and a little in awe that we had such similar ideas. But with some time having passed, I'm ready to give the story a shot. It is quite different from Inception -- if in nothing else the tone and overall story -- and by the time it gets made, nobody will be comparing it to Inception (ha, as if anyone would have ever).

Fast-forwarding in time to the point after Bri left, I watched the magnificent German film Downfall. I haven't set so still, so enraptured by a movie since . . . well, Inception. It's a fantastic film that everyone should see.

Which brings me to now. I'm taking a moment out from storyboarding the next episodes of Ruffians to share all this with you. I don't do this to gloat or boast, but to share what a good day for me looks like.

McKay: Books

Behold! McKay Books' first Internet promo!

Mean Man & The Ruffians

How long has it been since the last Ruffians? Three months? . . . Nope. Just checked Vimeo. It's been four months. For a project that I said I wanted to shoot one a month, why's it taken me so long to follow up the third episode?

Two words: Mean. Man.

We filmed the short in the summer of 2007 and due to a long and convoluted story, it was never properly finished. That's been nagging at me for the past four years. Knowing that there was a project out there that I had begun, that I had invested time and money into and it was just sitting there, not being finished, it drove me a little crazy. So I decided that I was going to include snippets of Mean Man in episode 4 of The Ruffians. I was going to reveal that Charlie was something of a writer, working on a spec script in-between kills. It was going to be a somewhat lighthearted episode that would have ended in someone's homicide.

But I couldn't make it work. For the past four months, I have wrestled with this thing. I have tried to make it work and . . . it just couldn't. Mean Man kept trying to take over the episode and this episode of The Ruffians was suddenly no longer about Charlie, Alexander, or their hit list, but about this strange story that Charlie was trying to tell. It didn't make any sense, it didn't fit into the story, but I was relentless.

Until I relented. I finally admitted that it was just a bad idea that needed to go away. I slapped together a montage of the short film and posted it on Vimeo. That way, people could see what we worked on. I could get out from under its shadow. I could move on with my life. And, no kidding, within 24 hours of me making that decision, episode 4 of Ruffians opened up and revealed itself to me.

It's still going to be something of a strange episode, but I love it. It makes much more sense. It's internally consistent with the rest of the show. It's a little metaphysical (something I wasn't counting on), it's a little out-of-the-box, but I like it. I'm moving into pre-production now.

So stay tuned. There's at least two more episodes of The Ruffians headed your way.

Logan's Mean Music Montage

So here's a little something I worked on one sweltering weekend in 2007.

Due to a great many production problems, this is probably all you'll ever see of it -- which is probably for the best.