Archive for the ‘WGA’ tag

Nighttime

More and more I crave solitude. I use to have a real problem being alone but as I move through the years I’ve really started to cherish time where I am simply left to myself.

Being alone is best at night, often I’ll go and sit on the couches that line our pool and work or read or have a smoke. I’ve been staying up later than usual lately and sometimes I’ll even sneak off at 2:00 or 3:00 am and go get some food or take a walk around the neighborhood. My iPhone has become a real asset, and I’m constantly moving albums on and off it to listen to. Speaking of album I picked up an awesome LP the other day. Sufjan Steven’s Seven Swans, an original pressing… which cool because despite it’s age there have already been subsequent pressing that were much larger then the first.

A few nights ago at Denny’s around 4:00 am or so I got another 10 pages of my script done. I have a lot of work to do still, just in conceptualizing it even. In the next two weeks I have to write out a 3×5 card for every scene, and while I have a good idea of what my story is about, it’s going to be hard to come up with all the scenes that fill the story in. When I’m done I’ll have about 40 cards, which is normal for a feature.

Thanksgiving should be fun around here, all but one of my roommates will be in town so I am going to cook again. Hopefully my side dishes come out better than last year, but at least I know I can cook a turkey.

In recent news the WGA is on strike and while I’ve heard a lot about it at school it’s fun to look around the internet for different opinions. The major point of contention is how much money the writers of TV shows and movies get from the distribution of their work. In the ’90s the guild struck a deal for the royalties of DVD sales, the studios said that since DVDs were a “new” format that the guild should only get a small amount and if the format works out it can be raised. Well years later DVDs obviously worked out but writers only get about $.04 for every DVD sold. With a product that takes basically pennies to produce $.04 is not a lot and certainly isn’t anywhere close to the huge profits that the studios make. So now with the internet and other forums of distribution the writers don’t want to get screwed over again. The studios claim that pay-per-view downloads (like iTunes) and ad supported players (like NBC’s website) are also a “new” form of distribution and that the writers should take a small share for now. Well these “new” forms of distrubution already make the studios huge sums of money, so in my opinion the studios just don’t want to pay the writers their fair share.
A really good article about the writer’s view on this can be found here (from Newsweek) and a hilarious, yet educational video by the writers of the Daily Show is below.

I’m pretty much 100% pro union, while my high school job was lame I did like being in a union and at KTVB I really did have better working conditions and better pay because of one. At KPNX I’d sometime bring up unionizing with the other operators, while I was never really serious about doing it (because we’d all have been fired) it was amazing how much resistance even the idea of it got from people. I don’t have a mortgage and a family like most of the people I worked with, but hopefully when I do have those responsibilities I’ll have the courage to stand up for myself if needed. In this world workers need someone behind them, it’s the yin to our country’s corporate yang.

If I had a job and was still in a union I’d be on strike,
David

p.s. i did a small photo assignment for my cinematography class and it’s at the tail end of the class album in the static section of my site.