quade's blog

First things first; gratz to all the nominees!

oscar.go.com/nominations/nominees

Extremely happy with all of this.

I am a little surprised by a couple of nomination in a couple of categories, but won't begrudge any.  Some of these are going to be extremely difficult to predict winners.

 “Up in the Air” is a character study. No car crashes. No giant robots. No space marines fighting aliens. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

 I don’t know about you, but when I went to see "Speed" I wasn’t thinking it would be great art. I thought to myself; “Sure, it’s going to be stupid, but I can tune out for a bit and be entertained.” And really, that’s all the movie was supposed to be anyway. Just a bit of fluff in your life to take your mind off of the insanity. Then, somewhere in the third act, they decided to ratchet up the action a bit and do something that was, well, so incredibly stupid that it took you out of the action and made you say; “Oh come on! Really?

Need to beat up and outline a story before writing your screenplay?  Yeah, I think you do and now there's an App for that.  At least there is on the iPhone.

I just downloaded and installed it with no issues.  I'll be working on a script tonight so will report if I find any.

Here are the minor improvements in the update:

Send to Script: Send content from your Index Cards (Summary Side) right to your script with a simple mouse click.

An exercise used in screenwriting classes is to split the class into A and B groups and pair each A student with a B student.  The A student then has five minutes to pitch his story to the B student, the B student then has five minutes to critique the story.

You can love or hate Starbucks for a lot of reasons.  I love it because for the price of a cup of coffee I can rent office space for an hour or two to work on a project while waiting for an appointment.  It's also a great neutral place to meet people to talk about projects or whatever.

I recently saw a series of commercials for Starbucks' new instant coffee.

Starbucks Postal Workers

Starbucks Three Men

 If you've never seen the movie "A Face in the Crowd" I'm going to be spoiling a few things here. If you'd like to not have the experience ruined in any way, please stop reading and start watching. It's available on Netflix and these words will be waiting for you when you get back. If you continue reading, don't blame me!

As a freelancer that lives in Santa Ana and books work in Burbank, I luck out sometimes and get an entire week of days at one particular location that I'll call "The Tower."  What this means is that even though I have this horrible, long commute no matter what, I can sometimes buy a Metro Link ten trip pass and ride the train in.  It still takes roughly two hours door to door, but I can spend that time reading, watching a movie or even writing.