opening thoughts

I first realized that I want to write and create stories more than 10 years ago, when I was in school the first time around.

As that idea germinated, it developed into a loose idea for a business or studio that I wanted to be at the head of.

Part of the germ came from watching the travesty that was made of the movie "Starship Troopers" when compared to the book. I read the book in high school, and recognized that it was essentially a political essay on why to and not to go to war, by Heinlein, disguised as juvenile fiction, and aimed approximately at the impressionable young man trying to make the decision of weather to join the military. Several ideas on citizenship are also discussed. The movie completely misses this point, deliberately so.

From that came the idea of trying to make stories in audio/video format as close as possible to the original printed material, and intent of the author.

But some stories are simply untranslatable to A/V formats, while working within the time constraints of the Theater, or the budget constraints of broadcast. Many books work well in the audio format, thus the success of the books-on-tape/disk industry. An example of a not quite successful translation to video would be DUNE. Several attempts have been made to put this into a video format, none totally successful, simply because of the cerebral nature of so much of the story. Tolkien's Rings series are admittedly incomplete in their video presentations. Jackson and company themselves left out handfuls of characters simply because it would have been too unwieldy to include them and give them all screen time. Tarzan is yet another series that has never been truly translated to from the page to video.

So what to do about this?