A garden-variety linklist - October-November 02018

Good morning. If you haven't seen one of these before, well, this is what usually passes for content here. Don't feel obligated to respond to everything, or anything at all. It's an aggregation, meant to maybe help others find something they're interested in talking about. If there's nothing there that looks interesting or cute, that's fine. It's also a demonstration of how you can use the cut tag. I'm not as good as I might otherwise be about wall-of-text posts going behind a cut, so if that's a thing you would also enjoy happening on other posts, I can...try.

Let's start with a fabulous idea of transforming a person and her wheelchair into the Notorious RBG and desk. Which is perfect, given the actual Notorious RBG broke a few ribs in a fall. (The Notorious label is well-earned - check out some of the things she's argued before she became a sitting Justice of the Supreme Court.

Salutations of the Wolfenoot, a holiday celebrating those who are kind to dogs and wolves. Created solidly well by a seven year-old, and with further details available at the official Wolfenoot FAQ. I'm hoping for something similar from an enterprising 7 year-old for their cats, but this is a good one for dog-lovers.

If you're part of the Archive of Our Own, understand that you can designate someone else on the Archive as your next-of-kin by mutual agreement, just in case something should happen to you that leaves you without the ability to administer your own things.

A survival guide written for trans and nonbinary teens from people who are trans and nonbinary themselves. Which is awesome, and we could use more of this.

The beginning of a series in how varied gender identity and gender roles could be in the Medium Aevum, encompassing a much wider and more diverse world than what is told in your fairy tales and myths. (Or, depending on your fairy tales and myths, is exactly the right kind of world.)

( Tumblr, advice, tech, and a whole lot more... )

Last for tonight, the collective mood of Dreamwidth, based on the last 1000 posts to the site.

The definitive time to have a family meal together - 4pm.

And also, what happens to those who had an entire city's suffering placed upon them for the sake of the happiness of the rest of that city? Because, as you recall, utopia often rests on the knowledge that someone, somewhere, is suffering all the things that aren't happening to you. [PDF]

(Okay, fine, one more - a commemorative box of the various flavors of KitKat available in Japan. I would be entirely interested in trying them, but the price and the shipping are going to make it a nope.

December Days 2018 #10: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand, action!

[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]

Action often seems a lot easier to do visually than textually. I've pulled a DrawingHub tutorial on action poses by KingTutorial at random from my search engine results on how to draw action poses. There's a lot there, but it's well-explained in terms of drawing the body frame and making sure that you follow the line of the action and the body in the pose that you're aiming for. For people who are just starting drawing, that might be a bit intimidating, but for people who have done some work and practice at it, the tutorial probably makes reasonable sense. When it comes to writing, though, you have to describe the action as it happens and strike a balance between giving too much detail about what's going on (it becomes a slog and hard to follow) and too little detail (it becomes confusing about what's happening, and thus becomes hard to follow). Finding that balance is tricky, and there's a nonzero amount of people that, when they have to write action, say "I can see what I want to have happen in my mind, but I can't put it into words." Because visual media and the practice of special effects have made it a lot easier for us to be able to see the reality-defying things that imaginations can come up with. Something I've taken out of these kinds of tutorials that helps with my writing is the idea in a visual medium like a comic book, a good action shot shows someone getting walloped in the face, a better action shot shows them flying backward after being walloped in the face, but the best action shot shows them smashed into the wall after getting walloped in the face, along with a clear indication of who was doing the walloping. That last shot is able to imply the hit, who did the hitting, and how strong the hit was in a single image. Given that comics are a medium of limited space, being able to tell as much as possible with one drawing is a good idea.

One of the things that I've found that can really help with the flow of writing action, especially for people who see the things visually playing out in their head, is to learn and study fight and action choreography. Not necessarily to the point of becoming a professional about it, but if you can analyze how visual scenes, with effects, are constructed with the actors, the performers, and then framed by the camera to produce what you see, that cinematic vision in your head might translate a little more easily to words.

I took a "beginning fight choreography for casual fans" panel at an animation convention a few years back, which, somewhat surprisingly to me at the time, told me to treat fight choreography with people in the same way that someone might learn animation - start with key frames and then figure out how to fill in the rest. The choreography itself was described as a series of "pictures" that were to be achieved in sequence, first at very slow speeds to help with memorization, and then faster and longer sequences to be memorized until the action sequence is complete. Your characters, of course, have the benefit of having already memorized their action sequence moves, but the idea is still the same. Sketching out an action sequence first as "these are the pictures that I want to make sure happen during this action sequence" can help establish the flow of the action and order. Sometimes the picture sketch ends up helping you out, because if the picture you want is Chat Noir standing next to a squashed artifact of evil, then the action before that has to include how the thing fell down, which itself might require another unit of action before it. From one picture, you've just created three sequences of action, in the order they need to happen. That's great.

The next piece of the puzzle, after figuring out how the action goes, is that, as a writer and word person, there's often a lot going on in an action scene, and trying to describe all of it at once is going to be a recipe for action that doesn't move along at the speed you want it to go in your head. This is where seeing the action as a camera operator and/or director can come in handy.

Take a look at how action is framed in movies and in comic book panels - especially in situations where there's a lot of fighting going on. Compare the Burly Brawl from The Matrix Reloaded with the first (and second) half of this fight scene pair from The Protector. Both of these are one versus many fights, but you can see the difference in cinematography -- the Matrix fight focuses on Neo and flows the action relative to him in all of its shots, including the ones from above or the ones that follow the victim of one of his attacks as they fly into other fighters. There's a lot of camera cutting to get the action in frame and follow that perspective of centering Neo as he handles the increasingly larger number of Agent Smith coming at him. In The Protector, the camera doesn't cut away for the entirety of the staircase fight once the action starts until the point where the character yells for their elephants. That doesn't mean the camera stays focused on Tony Jaa's character - there are several points where it departs from his side or lets him get out of frame so that he can climb or set something up or otherwise do something that would be difficult to achieve with the camera staying right on him. At times, it even means showing only the aftermath of something happening instead of whatever led up to a person getting their face shoved through a partition. The action stays with what it needs to so that it can tell the story.

So how does all of that visual language material actually translate to writing action and such in words? Your narrator for the scene is the camera lens for the action. They need to be able to both see and not see what's going on, depending on their point of view. If there's something happening outside the camera lens, or away from it, it's not immediately narratively important in terms of describing the visual. If Ladybug doesn't see Chat Noir doing something that will squish the artifact, then the narration doesn't indicate that she sees it. In a first-person narration from Ladybug, it's not part of the narrative, because it's not seen. Ladybug could hear it, much like a sound cue in a movie that indicates something important is happening outside the frame, but that's the only information she, and the reader, is going to get for that until she can put eyes on what's happening. If Chat Noir is the first-person narrator, he might only see the target he needs to hit, and might not be able to describe anything Ladybug is doing, because he doesn't see it. If the narrator is positioned somewhere outside of both Ladybug and Chat Noir, then framing up the narration so that what both Ladybug and Chat Noir are doing is probably best.

Combine your cinematographic lens with the information density of a comic panel, and you've got an action shot. Like this:

Chat Noir engaged his Cataclysm and swiped at one of the supports holding the tower up. The destabilized tower began to list, and then fall, making a loud scraping noise as the other supporting legs tried and failed to keep the tower up, protesting as they were bent in directions they were not meant to go. Ladybug, hearing the sound of the tower falling, wrapped her yo-yo around a nearby support pillar and swung out of the way, leaving Lady WiFi without a means to easily dodge or arrest the large structure. Before she was crushed by the tower, Chat Noir's baton sailed through the air and knocked the phone in her hands to the ground. The tower made a deafening noise as it landed, creating a cloud of dust that made it hard to see everything.

Everything, that is, except the black butterfly attempting to escape the area, having fled Lady Wifi's phone when it was destroyed by the tower.

What happens next? If you've seen Miraculous Ladybug, you know that the next sequence that usually happens after an akuma is released is that it's captured in Ladybug's yo-yo, purified, and then Ladybug uses her Miraculous powers to essentially rewind everything that happened to the point right before the corrupted akuma entered the artifact. (Although it doesn't rewind time - people who witnessed the events still remember them, and so forth. But objects that were destroyed, stolen, or corrupted are restored to their former places and statuses.) And also, it'll turn out that Lady Wifi was standing just right so that she wasn't squashed by the tower at all (because it's very important to the narrative that she not), and thus there isn't a body count to have to worry about, either.

Action sequences are not the easiest things to write, because it's essentially figuring out what's important out of all the things that are happening, framing those things in the camera of the narrator, and then using enough words to be descriptive without interrupting the flow and speed of the action. Like everything else, it takes time and practice to complete, so if the first few don't come out right, that's okay. You'll get better.