Re: Lawrence Miles' Doctor Who script

On May 26, 1:45 am, Mike Morris <nyder_o_le...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It might just be me who finds this interesting, but old Lawence Miles
(a former New Adventures / Eight Doctor Adventures author, for those
telly-Who-only readers) has stuck a Doctor Who script online. And here
it is...

http://davidjhowe.cogia.net/TheBookOfTheWorld.pdf

For one week only. But in saveable format. Ha!

He wrote in three days, just to prove that he could, and apparently it
takes place in a big otherwordly library. Which he insists predates
any news whatsoever about Moffat's later story.

Anyway... the boy can write, whether or not you think he's an unjustly
ignored genius / an arrogant wanker / a washed-up and bitter loser /
an interesting opposing voice in fandom / a gob*** / someone who's
frittered away his talent / insert opinion here... so I reckon it's
worth a peek. I've not read it yet, but I'd be interested to hear
opinions.

It looks good. Surprisingly good for something done in 3 days. (Mind
you, time isn't always an accurate guague of how things are going to
be. The Beatle's "A Hard Day's Night" was entirely written, recorded
and edited into final form in just 2 days.) The formatting is
something that is generally a bugbear in scriptwriting, as most
wordprocessors don't play nice with television formats, and formatting
is always the last component of writing of any kind, so the care and
attention put into such details is nice to see.

Not all of the effects would need to be done by means of CGI, either.
Quality work with models, bluescreen/greenscreen effects, and split
screen imaging (the technique used in the "Timesliders" series to
produce the illusion of walking through an invisible barrier from one
time into another) could be used to produce many of the same effects
and also give it a grittier feel that computer-generated images don't
have.

What would be really nice, though, would be if a scriptwriter made a
"dead" story available in this way but in an editable format. Not
editable in a wiki sense, but something you could load into a
wordprocessor and make changes, then send those changes back to the
writer, who would pick and choose which changes are interesting enough
to include. In practice, this is simply too dangerous for most authors
- there have been many cases of authors being sued merely for
receiving unsolicited ideas, so most will either refuse it or their
legal department will make them.
.