Ideas can come from a lot of places. Sometimes you arrive at them entirely by accident. One of the key upcoming sequences involves a terrifyingly tall radio tower. My characters have to climb to the top while some of them are below in the control shack.
While driving back from our trip to San Diego (Belle had a show there), I snapped a photo of a tall radio tower just for reference. What you see in the photo above is the flash being reflected in the glass (as is my wife’s face in the upper left). It looks a bit like there is an explosion in the tower.
I have two characters up near the top. I have another character lower in the tower. After looking at the tower photo I took, it became obvious to me that I needed to blow up the tower so that the top part with two of my characters comes crashing down, destroying the maintenance building below. A lot happens in this sequence, but having the tower blow up gives me a much more satisfying ending. When I can kill my characters with only minor inconvenience to them, I intend to kill them as often and spectacularly as I can.
What’s Up with Us
While I was running an errand for Belle, I went into a Carl’s Jr. A very large and out of control individual had just torn the place apart.
I looked out the window and they were still there just outside, looking very menacing.
I got out of there just in time.
It is a rough neighborhood. I still plan to go see the new Jurassic World movie, despite how awful the last one was. I fully plan to be disappointed. I still remember the sheer delight of the first Jurassic Park movie. Belle’s father was a museum preparator and geologist and she spent a couple of summers digging up a fairly intact Mastadon. She had a few bones to pick with the movie as to accuracy, but still, it was so amazing to see such realistic looking dinosaurs. I was heavily involved in digital effects at the time, so we were both excited by it. Because so much of the original movie was practical, the scenes still hold up remarkably well. Some of the effects work looks better today than the over-reliance of all digital effects in the newer movies.