Three Little Pigs and a Knife Fight
Day 193 of Writing
In the last entry I wrote about writing the chapter that has since been titled Maggie’s Dance. It took me over two weeks to write this one chapter, which is much much more time than usual. It presented its own unique challenges.
This is the first hand to hand combat scene I have ever written. In my acting days, I have done a couple of choreographed fight sequences. I was thrown over a hitching post in one, and I got to do a fight with broadswords (very fun). I have never had to choreograph a fight sequence, though.
This scene is essentially a knife fight. I do not know anything about knife fights, or at least I didn’t until I did the research. Watching television and movies is not your best guide if you are striving for some level of authenticity. Fortunately, there are tons of resources on the Internet, from descriptions of the best techniques and approaches to collections of CCTV videos depicting actual knife fights, with analysis. The main thing I learned is that I do not want to be in a knife fight.
One of the rules I had with the novel is that fight sequences would not go on and on. In the real world, they tend to be fairly short. No one can take the many repeated body blows and still keep going like they do in the greatly exaggerated fights you typically see on the screen. Knife fights in particular tend to be quite short. You start to take serious damage right away. Unlike in a fist fight, each blow has the potential to be fatal and will cause serious physical harm.
My main character in this scene has no weapons at all. She faces four opponents, two of whom have knives and one of whom has a bag of torture instruments. It takes place inside a locked cell. This is not a situation you normally walk away from, but I have to figure out how she can win the fight in a way that is believable, entertaining, and makes sense.
It finally came down to doing some rough storyboards so that I could map out the action. In a series of drawings you draw the key action in each key moment. You can add arrows to show the direction of movement of different elements. This lets you visualize how the entire scene flows, and helps you catch things that don’t work. I have to be able to see a scene in my mind to describe it, and this helps me to actually see it.
Storyboards have been used in movies and animations for nearly 90 years. Georges Méliès, magician and the great pioneer of special effects on film, was one of the first filmmakers to use pre-production art to plan out the magical and science fiction sequences in his films. Beginning at the tail end of the 1800s, Melies essentially developed most of the early basic techniques for in-camera special effects.
Storyboards as we know them today go back to a specific cartoon- Walt Disney’s 1933 The Three Little Pigs, one of the most successful animated shorts ever made. Storyboards became an essential part of animation throughout the animation industry in the 30s. In 1939, Gone with the Wind became the first live action movie to be fully storyboarded. Now it is almost inconceivable to create a movie without storyboarding it.
Storyboarding evolved naturally from cartoons, inspired by comic book panels and the process by which cartoons were made. Animation uses a process of key framing known as in-betweening or more commonly tweening. A senior artist draws the main poses that show the action, and other artists copy his style and create the in between frames for animating it. This process was developed by long time Disney artist Dick Huemer in the 1920s. Disney gives credit for inspiring the first modern storyboard to Disney animator Webb Smith.
In modern computer animation, the computer does the tweening. Computers also really up the game for storyboarding. There are a number of software programs for storyboarding, typically in the $300 range.
I don’t do traditional storyboarding often, so it is not worth the investment for me. This time, though, I used the open source Storyboarder. It is an amazing piece of software, especially considering it is free, and does everything I need. I have more powerful tools, up to full photorealistic 3D previsualization, but for the basics this does the job. It also integrates with a lot of other software.
I was having problems with the end of the fight scene when it is down to just two characters. I opened up Storyboarder and in a couple of minutes had my jail cell space and my two characters. You can draw everything freehand, but the preset mannequins make it much easier. I loaded in a male and female character and posed them, using simple control points. I have used the 3D software Poser a lot, and this is not that. In general, almost any 3D software has a significant learning curve, and I turn to it when I need a fully realized scene. Here I just need a sketch that lets me see how things flow. This is more than adequate for that job, has a fairly short learning curve (made even simpler if you know anything about storyboarding and 3D software) and has tons of features for working pros.
I read that an increasing number of novelists are turning to storyboarding. I believe it should be in the tool chest of anyone who writes action sequences or has complex scenes with many moving parts. For many years I wrote software reviews for magazines like PC Computing, and I want to write a full review here, but that is not appropriate. Instead, I urge you to check it out yourself.
What’s Up with Us
Things are a bit nightmarish here in California. As I write this, there are 42 active fires. California has lost nearly 4,000 structures and 12 people have lost their lives. One of the fires is the largest in state history. From one fire alone, we lost 1.3 million Joshua trees. Many believe they should be on the endangered species list, and now their prospects look even worse. San Francisco had to keep their street lights on all day yesterday in the dim red glow that was all the light they got from the sun. Smoke choked the air.
We are about 350 miles from San Francisco, and our skies have darkened here from different fires. Hard to tell what might be overcast and what is just smoke. Everything has a red tinge to it, and what little of the sun you can see through the clouds is red. It makes it look very eerie outside.
These fires are one of the worst disasters in state history, made even worse by the fact that we are also battling a pandemic, which makes evacuating people that much more complicated. Our state covid numbers have been dropping, and we are at around 750,000 cases and over 14,000 dead.
It has been hellishly hot here in the San Fernando Valley. It hit 121 degrees last Sunday, an all time record for Los Angeles County. I can tell you, that is unbearably hot. It burns just to go outside.
We lived in the Valley the last time it hit a record setting temperature at a balmy 120 degrees, which was several years ago. We had not been paying attention to the weather and had been driving for awhile and the thermometer on our brand new car read 120 degrees. We thought we would need to get it reset, but we realized that was not the case the moment we stepped outside.
The heat caused many transformers to blow, including the one to our house, and we were without electricity for days during one of the worst hot spells ever. We and our two cats wound up in a motel. One of our cats was as new as our car, and they did not yet get along. They finally bonded at the motel, hiding together under the bed.
Trips back to the house at night (unthinkable to go there during the day) were really strange. It was pitch black as there was no moon, and the entire neighborhood was without power. It was stiflingly hot inside. You could barely breath. It was a quick in and out, grabbing what we needed, and we were out the door and back to the air conditioned car.
We have a break in the heat for now, down into the high 80s. Going outside is still a problem as you can really smell the smoke. You don’t want to breath a lot of that air. The combination of fires, climate change, and deregulatory actions has led to Los Angeles now having the worst smog in 30 years. In the early days of corona we had some of our best air quality, as so many fewer people were driving.
Even in the last couple of hours (it is not yet 3 pm) it has gotten darker and redder outside. The entire sky is a reddish gray and you can just barely see the sun. There is no ash raining down on us currently.
(Update) This is the day after I wrote most of the above. The loss of life is up to 20 and there was a light dusting of ash on our cars. The air remains unhealthy to breathe. There are apocalyptic scenes from all over the Western United States. This is the anniversary of the 9-11 attack, and today, things seem much worse even than that.