{"id":1979,"date":"2012-09-07T21:01:33","date_gmt":"2012-09-07T20:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/?p=1979"},"modified":"2012-09-07T21:01:33","modified_gmt":"2012-09-07T20:01:33","slug":"musing-on-iterative-creative-perfection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2012\/09\/07\/musing-on-iterative-creative-perfection\/","title":{"rendered":"Musing on iterative creative perfection"},"content":{"rendered":"

The film ‘wanted<\/a>‘ was on TV here again recently. I’ve seen it maybe 4 times now, and although it has lots of men shooting guns, for once it’s a film like that I really like, mostly because the actual gun bits are irrelevant. It’s a film about breaking out of a rut, in a job\/relationship\/life you hate, and becoming someone important and doing something you believe in. No wonder I love it.<\/p>\n

For me, the highlight of the film is the last 10 seconds or so. To sum up, it’s a scene of the hero shooting the bad guy with a sniper rifle, but it’s SO much more than that.<\/p>\n

I have no idea how the scene was written but I imagine it went like this. First, the writer decides that the hero shoots the bad guy (after distracting him) with a sniper rifle. Hurrah, a happy ending. Job done Ship the movie. It’s cool.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But then in re-examining it, the idea occurs to shoot the scene backwards, so we follow the bullet back to the gun. ++cool. Then, later, the idea occurs to do this in slow-mo with a voice talking over it. ++cool. Then the next day, thinking about the scene again, the idea for the decoy to be marked in post-it notes. ++… Then the idea for the bullet to go through the donut, then for it go through the drinks can, then for it to be a multi-part bullet, then for the sniper rifle to be huge. Then… the coup de grace, for the hero to break the fourth wall and deliver the last line to the audience. Genius.<\/p>\n

You could have written the final scene in 2 minutes. To make it as good as it is probably took a LOT of passes. A lot of attempts to improve it. A lot of effort, a lot of time. I’ve never been confident enough to go to those kinds of lengths with my games. I think I probably should do.<\/p>\n

(yeah I know that photo is from a different scene, couldn’t find the one I wanted :D)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The film ‘wanted‘ was on TV here again recently. I’ve seen it maybe 4 times now, and although it has lots of men shooting guns, for once it’s a film like that I really like, mostly because the actual gun bits are irrelevant. It’s a film about breaking out of a rut, in a job\/relationship\/life<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Musing on iterative creative perfection<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1979"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1981,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979\/revisions\/1981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}