One of the passions I’ve take up in the past few years is writing and directing my own films. Last September, I shot for five days on a short I wrote called “The Two Hundred Fifth.” Just this weekend we finally got around to doing reshoots. I try to avoid reshoots, but they are inevitable. Unlike most other ways of telling a story (books, comics, etc.), there’s something permanent that takes hold during the development process that is hard to correct if things go wrong: the captured image. Editing can do a lot, but only so much. In this case, I had to go back into the story and gently shift in a direction a couple of key scenes to make the arc of the main character a little more defined and the relationship at the center of the film a little more connected and real. The performances my actresses gave me were wonderful, but the script had failed them. My bad.

Luckily, what we were able to do by reassembling not only corrected the problems, but also improved visually on what had come before. That’s a pretty cool trick. I’ll know more about what we have wrought once I start editing it all in, but I feel so, so good about what’s sitting in the hard drive in my bedroom (one day, I’ll have a real office… one day…)

All of which is to say… well, I don’t know what, exactly. I guess I really enjoy the freedom comics affords. Corrections can be made constantly, sometimes even after putting it out into the world! (Case in point, there’s an entire strip I have come to hate and regret producing so, so much that I’ve excised it from the archives. So far, no one seems to have noticed.) Film isn’t like that. Film is permanent, which is part of what it makes special. Not MORE special. Just special in its own way.

ZURIDA

Yeah, Thrice’s lines in that last panel. In the words of Tony Stark: “Not a great idea.”

See you on Wednesday with 759 – The Color of Thrice!