I’m slowly working on a second draft of Jathia’s Wager. I’ve heard back from my trusted first readers and those on the public forums. As a result, I have a laundry list of things I need to work on. However, don’t expect to see any updates until maybe the end of next week. I’m still mulling over a few comments made by my trusted first readers.
This last week I’ve been working on an alternative version to Solomon Rothman Films‘ Jathia’s Wager. To quote the press release he wrote:
Jathia’s Wager is a science fiction story about a young man living in an isolated community of humans, who must make a life changing decision about his future and his species.
As I read the script I saw it being more of a science fiction “coming of age” story. I also asked myself what would drive someone to leave behind their own “species” and give up their humanity with no hope of returning.
And if you can’t guess it… The reason I found was “love.”
Not saying it’s an original reason, but love tends to be a driving factor for many of us to do things we wouldn’t normally do when we are sane. And I didn’t set out to transform it into a love story. It just happened as I was attempting to resolve the main character’s motivation. =-)
With that being said I present my version of Jathia’s Wager – Draft 1 – A Love Story Envisioning.
I’m not one for “yaoi” (homosexual relationship) when it comes to TV or movies, and I find it interesting that a group of people have tagged Princess Princess as such when it is closer to shounen ai (relationships between men). But I do bring it up because it has a decent plot for a twelve show series (Note it was licensed by Media Blasters for american distribution).
I watched The Plague Dogs, Wizards and The Cave. And of the three I have to say The Plague Dogs was the best. There was more warmed and humor in it, and it had better characterization. Like with Watership Down I have to say the author and the film director did a very good job in peering into a world and making us feel for the main characters’ plight.
Wizards is just well… Weird. It may have been fine if I didn’t watch the director’s take on it. After watching that I decided I really didn’t like it. He missed every target he wanted to hit in my personal belief. It isn’t a”family” show (The female main character shows that for heaven sake), it doesn’t have an intreging plot nor character nor characters. As for the animation style I have to say that the addition of the rotoscoping felt tagged on (which it was), and he may have felt he did justice to the movie when in reality it was just too stark of a difference. [..more..]
A friend of mine suggested Watership Down and The Plague Dogs. The latter I’ll have to talk about another night, but I watched Watership Down, and I have to say that it’s an interesting story.
I’ll leave it up to Wikipedia to describe the story, but I have to say that it is interesting to see a story about animals that doesn’t attempt to assign large amount of anamorphic properties to the characters. In fact, it attempts to portray the animal group closer to their behavior patterns.
The reason I bring this up is because as a writer I find this level of writing to be interesting. Wolves High is about an anamorphic highschool, but after watching the animated movie it makes me wondering, if I were to ever finish it, if I shouldn’t research animal behavior more and reflect those attributes more.
Why? Because it shows that you don’t need to nearly transform an animal into a human in order to tell an interesting story.