One of the things that is often ignored in science fiction is consequences. Comic book movies are probably the worst offenders. The characters go through rough experiences, cities are leveled, and yet there is little emotional impact on the characters.
In the just finished jungle sequence, every character has gone through hell. I will take a chapter to deal with how the events of the previous chapters affect them. Spoiler alert. They are all a mess. Grace will have to pull them back together as a team. How that happens will take some thinking on my part.
What I have been doing is trying to see the last few chapters from each character’s perspective. At this point I know the characters quite well, and I know their weaknesses, and what they would find challenging from what they just went through.
For Wall, he feels like he does not have the tools he needs to do what he does best- quickly make almost anything needed. Grace resolves that for him by helping him get all the tools he needs with a nearly unlimited budget.
I personally don’t have an unlimited budget, but this part of the story was inspired by our building our own workshop. My wife Belle is a magician and she makes and develops her own original magic effects. We have not really been able to do it properly, as things were a disorganized mess even with the tools we had. My dad is in his 90s and not able to use his workshop (a lot of which came from my grandfather’s workshop), so some of those tools are moving to our workshop.
We have decided that for Christmas we are going to get a 3D printer, which we have wanted for ages. The first time we saw them in action was when we visited Cal Tech years ago. They had a bunch, including some that could print enormous parts that would eventually go to Mars. As impressive as it was, 3D printing has come a long ways since then. There are now seven different types of 3D printing, each with many variations.
The type we are getting uses material extrusion, called fused deposition modeling (FDM). It prints things using filament that is melted and extruded through a nozzle onto a print bed. This is the best starting point as it is the lowest cost and has the widest variety of materials you can print with.
Different printer types have different capabilities. There are many types of vat polymerization, all of which use lasers to solidify objects in a tank of resin. This is generally known as stereolithography, and is the oldest 3D printing technology, developed in 1986.
Powder bed fusion selectively heats areas of a powder to solidify it. This is great for very complex geometries. It can use metal, ceramic, and plastic powders. The powders can be melted together or fused together on a molecular level.
Then there are more exotic and expensive methods. Material Jetting is faster but more expensive. Binder Jetting uses droplets to bind the powder together. It can use sand or metal powder. Sheet Laminating uses layers of thin sheets of paper, polymer or metal. It is fast but not very accurate. There are many variations on these technologies and other technologies for more specialized applications.
In my story, the bodies are printed using specialized 3D bioprinters. This is not that far away. Researchers can already 3D bioprint skin, bone, vascular grafts, tracheal splints, heart tissue and cartilaginous structures and even organs.
3D printing technology is moving fast, and it will be an important part of Wall’s tool chest. I just have to dream up some amazing things for him to make.
What’s Up With Us
We have a friend through magic named Daniel Roebuck. He produces movies and is a well-established actor. While we were still under full covid protocols but much later on in the pandemic, Danny was trying to finish a film that he was making and needed to do a pickup scene. It was originally set in a magic shop, but that was not easily available, so he wound up using our house with a bunch of our magic props in the background. While we all stayed masked and followed the proper protocols, it was just really nice to have people in our house again, something we had not done since covid began.
That was awhile ago, and we recently got a showing at Danny’s of the initial cut. When you have friends who do creative projects that they are going to show off, it is always a great relief when they turn out to be good. His film, Lucky Louie, turned out to be quite good. It is so hard to know what to say when you don’t really like it. Thankfully that was not a problem.
Sadly, the star of the film passed away just after the end of shooting. Basil Harry Hoffman had a five decade long career as an actor, and he wrote two books on the subject. He worked with top film directors like Peter Bogdanovich and Carl Reiner. Some of his films include All the President’s Men, My Favorite Year, The Box, The Electric Horseman, Night Shift, Lucky Lady, Switch, The Milagro Beanfield War, Rio, I Love You, The Pineville Heist, Ordinary People and The Artist. He also did tons of television, with appearances on Kung Fu, The Rockford Files, Sanford and Son, Police Woman, Columbo, Kojak, M*A*S*H, Barney Miller and he played the fingerprint technician on Ellery Queen and Principal Dingleman on Square Pegs. He was on the Board of Directors of Screen Actors Guild where my wife used to work. He was an acting coach, loved acting, and got to do it to the end of his life.
For Danny, a major collector of primarily Universal monster memorabilia, and an actor who actually enjoys sitting in the makeup chair as they apply the prosthetics, being cast in the new Munsters movie from Rob Zombie as Count Dracula (that is who Grandpa was supposed to be) was a dream come true. The cherry on top was that it is being released by Universal. Being in a Universal monster movie was a lifelong dream for him.
Sadly, just after he got cast, covid hit, and the film had to be delayed for a year. The frustrating part was that during all that time, the details about it, including the casting, were being kept secret, so we could not tell anyone. The film has been shot, the promotion machine has geared up, and we got to see a whole bunch of set photos that Danny took. It looks great, and I am so looking forward to seeing the movie itself.
October continued to be crazy busy, setting a record for my wife of 12 shows in different venues in a month. That may be as much as she can do, along with her very high pressure job working for a major hospital during covid.