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| I think that I've decided on a series of short stories that will eventually combine and make up a whole. I don't know if they'll be illustrated or heavily illustrated or small comics or what. I'm just writing them right now.
Think of it, I suppose, as something akin to NBC's Heroes. Episodic stories that could stand alone but which will begin feeding into each other down the line.
I expect each short to be in the neighborhood of 30-50 pages. I don't know how many there will be. As many as it takes to explore the world and tell the main story.
I'm writing the first installment now.
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| PANTHEON . . . the trilogy . . . of novels?We're still working.
Tolkien talked about a story revealing itself to the author, instead of an author trying to force something together that doesn't work. I don't think he was being mystical, but rather talking about the complex way that the imagination works. People often mistakenly assume that creativity is a forced affair, wherein one can create something amazing on the spot as an act of pure will. I submit that this is incorrect. The imagination is, I think, a process of comprehension and questioning. It is an ability to see and put things together. It tends, more often than not, to happen to you, rather than be a force that is wielded.
I am exceptionally happy that we are not presently shooting a script that I forced together last semester. It wouldn't have been nearly as good as the things my imagination has produced in the past week. New pieces have been produced that help me to not have to force much of anything, and indeed which will eventually lead to some beautiful imagery in the story. In the end, Pantheon will make you cry - it threatens to make me cry with these new pieces of the puzzle.
So . . . what is Pantheon about? I see now that it is about me. And probably many of you. It's about stepping into adulthood and finding that the things fed to us before weren't quite right. It's that disillusionment and disorientation, and its ultimately the true divine meeting us there and pulling us out of that pit. It's about love, romantic and otherwise - not the sappy feel good kind but the kind forged in survival and truth. There is a difference, to me, between sap and the binding love of connection. I am after the latter here. It's about tradition and ethnicity, about the culture we lose and the culture we gain.
It is a myth that is a response to the Father and the Son and the Spirit and to the last 8 months of my life.
As to what form it will take, I don't quite know. I've a friend who might be interested in helping with something of an illustrated novel. I'm trying to figure out whether I like my narrative writing enough to attempt it. Something in me likes the idea so I might do so. I do not know how feasible a movie is anytime soon. The story has grown to such a degree that I may be looking at two books, maybe three - but I don't like trying to force a trilogy where none exists. And it has become something that would cost quite a bit of money to try and make. That isn't to say that once novels are produced I wouldn't try to sell an adaptation of it to some small production company. It's not effects heavy, but the sequences necessary would put it in the 30-40 million range (I don't anticipate it looking very different from Serenity, which cost 40 million). Pantheon, of course, has the advantage of being set on an earth-like place and has no reason to venture into space for any reason.
Three illustrated novels might be the way to go right now. There are no budget restraints that way, there would be lots of beautiful art (my friend is incredibly talented and if he came onboard I have no doubt it would be breath taking), and I can go in depth a little more than a script allows.
So, stay tuned. Pantheon isn't dead by any means. We're just making sure we tell a great story the best way we can.
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| If someone were to ask me if there is a biblical theme running throughout Pantheon, I would say: "1 Corinthians 13:13".
Yes, its my favorite verse in all of scripture.
Yes, it's very powerful in Pantheon. Hopefully. But to teach that to your characters, you have to put them through hell.
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| The trouble with wanting to write something good is that its a process.
It doesn't help that I recently discovered some of Ennio Morricone's orchestral work. For those unfamiliar (probably everyone except maybe Craig), Morricone is responsible for some of the greatest scoring work in the western genre. I have a video of a 2005 live performance of "The Ecstacy of Gold" over on my personal Xanga (www.xanga.com/Lunar_Phoenix). It's one of the most powerful, moving pieces of music I've ever heard. I'd heard it performed under the purview of other orchestras and conductors, but Morricone himself is in firm control of his own work. It's really powerful and beautiful.
Pantheon is something with a life of its own. What I mean by that is that it has a different mentality behind it. So often people our age are so eager to make a film that we start cutting corners as far back as the writing process to get it together and get it done. I don't want to do that with Pantheon. I don't want Pantheon to be something thrown together with every possible corner cut, especially not here in the writing process. I don't want to just make a movie, I want to tell a good story. I want it to actually move the audience, not just draw upon inside jokes and the general feel of, "Oh cool, someone made a movie."
This is why the writing is going so slow. It's like the story grows up, in a sense. The early versions were kind of formulaic; connect the dots, and hope the character work that gets plugged in works okay. But it's grown. Pantheon keeps me awake and tells me that it doesn't want to be simple. It wants to be complex. It wants to be worthy of its influences - Tolkein, Whedon, Moore, Ben Slate and Dr. Gentry, and now Morricone.
Pantheon started as a kneejerk reaction. CIU cut something good down and I didn't want it to die. I wanted the arts to exist, even if it wasn't trained or supported or worth credit hours. But that's a fuel that burns up easily. And it leads to frustration when your influences demand, only in their influence itself, that this be more. Because a kneejerk reaction isn't art, and it only communicates frustration in the end. It accomplishes nothing.
Pantheon is alive. Its characters demand to be beautiful and broken and triumphant and real. Its story demands a level of rhyming complexity in its structure that can never be filled by reactionary writing.
So I write. And I write and I write.
Soon. As I've been saying: It's coming along.
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| As I enter into the home stretch of the first draft of the script, Frank Capra's words look over my shoulder. As a Follower of the Way, the Christ, I am all too aware of my responsibility when I speak into the fabric of our culture, and Capra's words drive that home for me. I have a framed copy of the quote below, thanks to my friend and former roommate Drew Merrit (CIU '04).
"Only the morally courageous are worthy of speaking to their fellow men for two hours in the dark. And only the artistically incorrupt will earn and keep the people's trust."
-- Frank Capra | The Name Above the Title (1971)
In the wake of the loss of the Performing Arts Department at CIU, this responsibility and necessity has weighed deeply on me. In the months following, I had the opportunity to speak in Chapel on the subject of Christians and the Arts. The immediate feedback was positive, but only time will tell if anyone listening identified and will answer the call to engage the American culture instead of put it aside in our zeal for the rest of the world. This culture is aching, deeply, for something substantial and challenging. and true. The screen and the stage have become a large part of our cultural preservation and the spread of our ideas. If Christ has allowed the creation of the mediums, I cannot help but believe that He has intent for them to be a conduit for His reality and truth. Art does not just communicate the cold data, it moves our souls and connects us to truth in the experiential ways that we so often think are useless. The marriage of knowledge and passionate experience is living. Art engages the full human. God made all of it, and all of it is useful.
PANTHEON will not make millions of dollars. Or even . . . hundreds. But that isn't the point, ultimately. The point will be to exercise the creativity that we who work on it are blessed with and to glorify God with our work, because we have done it well, and were inspired by The Greatest Story - He and Us.
Pray that I will be morally and spiritually and artistically courageous. That I will write and create with passion and deep conviction about the power and usefulness of the arts to speak into the fabric of our culture and to open doors about the reality of Jesus compared to the fiction which He inspires.
That said, here is the teaser poster. Hopefully I will have a couple put up soon if I can get them cleared. If you are interested in buying one, let me know and I will start working out the details of something like that with the people that I need to. Any proceeds would go towards the movie's prodution/promotional process.
The only thing I am responsible for are the actual flames of the phoenix emblem and the text, "A Six Gun and Swords Tale" and "asael.com". The rest is the wonderful work of my good friend and brother in Christ, Jake Page. He has been a blessing to me over the last couple of days with his generocity of time and talent. Please pray for him, just as a fellow believer.
Ignore the "asael.com" part. That was me just playing around. I'm still working on a website name and it won't be on the first display copies. The actual asael.com confuses me. : )
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