Business Letters

I got about half way through sending out licensing request letters to companies via e-mail and fax before I realized, I'm sending things to corporations, i.e. actual professionals. Additionally, I'm not a student anymore and even though this is for a student film, if I wanna be taken seriously I need to send this letter looking nice and professional and starting off with the letter looking like it did (just Dear Sir or Madam at the top and nothing else) wasn't gonna cut it.

Anyway, thank GOD for the internet because I would not have remembered correctly how to write a business letter otherwise.

Here's what my original letters looked like:


Here's what a proper business letter should look like:


I was about to start praying that I still had my Writers Express or my Write Source 2000 books. Actually, it kind of makes me wonder if I still do have those books...

Another Day at Work

I guess it can be gathered pretty easily that it's a slow day at work today from the fact that I'm writing about it. Despite that, however, I have learned a few more things.

1.) A full(er) night's sleep (6 hours) is wonderful and packed with interesting dreams that I had no trouble remembering when I was a kid but now have difficulty remembering. (Odd tid-bit but there it is)

2.) Pandora Radio is great.

3.) Life minus IPod Touch is pretty good too.

4.) Getting myself to write when the internet is available is difficult.

The fourth and last one is probably the only one that's really really annoying. I hate having projects hang over me but at the same time I'm really bad in that I tend to have a lot of them hang over me and this script, as well as other ideas, are projects that are hanging over me and it's a problem, as I've discovered, because I can't seem to get myself to do anything about it. I learned from Sam Pollard a year or so ago that so much of film making is just about discipline and I feel that discipline has been a problem that has plagued me since the age of 5. I'm horrible at keeping myself in line and have been for as long as I can remember.

It's always frustrating when you discover something that your parents said to you that you just rolled your eyes then is valid. I remember my dad saying something about my needing to learn discipline. I never took it seriously nor did I try to do it because it seemed like too much effort. I just trusted that when it came to crunch time I'd do it, and that, for the most part, is how it is with me now, but is that how I should be doing things? What happens when I have no "crunch time," or, rather, that "crunch time" is ongoing because there is no deadline because no one is keeping me accountable? How do I get it done then?

I guess I just need to learn discipline. Now's a lot better than later. I guess.

A Note on Developing Characters

It's always easy, when watching a movie or reading a book, to say "yea, so and so and their friend's relationship needed to be developed more,". Hell, I say that all the time. However, at least with myself, I would say it but not be able to pinpoint how exactly that needed to be done.

Developing relationships in between two separate characters can be tricky if you don't have a good grasp on each character's personality as well as the general relationship between the two characters, i.e. "how do they feel about each other?" That's generally a good question to start off with in discovering and building a relationship between your fictional works.

Going back to my previous post about Street Fighter, the relationship between Chung Li and her master is just that, a girl that goes to some guy to learn things, the relationship is, in that respect, too materialistic and way too one-sided for me to feel anything for him when we're lead to believe that he's dead.

Relationship development is tricky because you must know and have developed all your characters so that when they interact with each other, we see a bit of emotion from them, be it joy or sorrow or indifference (yes, indifference is an emotion, or, at least in this case it is because that character should be indifferent for a reason). Your main character should not be the only one that gets something out of a relationship, that's generally not how relationships work... unless they're just that kind of relationship, but even then there's a reason why it exists (and is usually a point of conflict.)