{"id":5139,"date":"2007-05-18T21:04:00","date_gmt":"2007-05-18T21:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/box1047.bluehost.com\/~sonicci2\/wordpress\/?p=5139"},"modified":"2015-08-22T13:23:44","modified_gmt":"2015-08-22T13:23:44","slug":"creative-happenings-an-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/2007\/05\/creative-happenings-an-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Creative Happenings: An Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The time has come for a real update on what&#8217;s been happening with me; it&#8217;s been many a months, but I&#8217;m here to break the silence. Brace yourselves&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been doing a lot of writing recently (actually, for the past year). Mostly it&#8217;s been on the reviews front (I&#8217;ve been keeping pretty well up with not letting reviews fester), but also I&#8217;ve been doing some creative writing. Not just on &#8220;Unwinnable Hand,&#8221; but also in the form of short stories and such (click on the titles to read the posted-on-MySpace <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.myspace.com\/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&amp;friendID=43507563&amp;blogID=191051555&amp;MyToken=4c12471c-4dde-42ca-9c23-bc3190b822fb\">&#8220;Red Cup Mafia&#8221;<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.myspace.com\/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&amp;friendID=43507563&amp;blogID=258499962&amp;Mytoken=9B20CDF7-E1CE-435F-A3A95812412E4B1215540413\">&#8220;Requiem for a Lemur: A Short Story of The Grand Lemur&#8221;<\/a>). In addition to considering editing and posting one such effort from years back- be warned, though; even edited it&#8217;ll be a little risque- I have two &#8220;in progress&#8221; works, one the story about my friendship with my pianist Dawn, the other a work no less personal, whose subject I&#8217;m not quite ready to discuss yet. It&#8217;s a style of writing I&#8217;ve very much enjoyed getting into- it&#8217;s different enough from the reviews to be interesting, and close enough to screenwriting to where it&#8217;s been beneficial in sharpening my skills in that level of narrative. It&#8217;s also put some more on my plate creatively, but when inspiration strikes, you gotta put pencil to paper, regardless of medium.<\/p>\n<p>In the coming months, expect much in the way of &#8220;Unwinnable Hand&#8221; updates. We&#8217;re going to be filming again starting in June. The script is in its&#8217; final &#8220;official&#8221; draft; the ending has been problematic, but after the first idea for it was too long-winded, and the second one was, well, too complicated to explain, I&#8217;ve finally hit upon one that, well, just plain makes sense. The actors new to the story in its&#8217; second half have their scripts, with rehearsals to occur when we start filming with them. Three new locations will be featured- two of which are currently TBA, though- and all should be interesting to look at when the final film is completed, which I still hope to have happen by December. And recently, Ron, Dave and I went in together on a camera (and the necessary accessories) with which to finish the film. I still intend to use a second camera of Chris&#8217; during filming- for multiple angle takes- but from here on out, this will be our main camera for filming and post-production. In the next month or two I also hope to add more hard drive space to my computer so I can complete editing and such on the film. Once that&#8217;s in place, look for more in the way of Cinema Nouveau Production&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.myspace.com\/cinemanouveau\">MySpace page<\/a>&#8211; there&#8217;s a lot to share. (And don&#8217;t worry gentle reader- I do intend to film &#8220;Red Cup Mafia&#8221; at some point. Right now, though, &#8220;Hand&#8221; is my focal point.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve let my musical output dwindle this year. Save for the music I wrote for the &#8220;Unwinnable Hand&#8221; trailer, I haven&#8217;t been inspired to write anything new. And save for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sonic-cinema.com\/audio\/music\/Weightless%20Waltz%20in%20D.mp3\">&#8220;Weightless Waltz in D&#8221;<\/a>&#8211; a piece I wrote last year as a companion piece to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sonic-cinema.com\/audio\/music\/Weightless%20Waltz%20in%20F.mp3\">&#8220;Weightless Waltz in F&#8221;<\/a> (both of which are intended for a long-in-thought album inspired by &#8220;2001: A Space Odyssey&#8221;)- I haven&#8217;t been enthusiastic about recording any of the already-written pieces I&#8217;ve let build up for one reason or another. On a happier note, one of my earlier pieces (&#8220;In a Lonely Place,&#8221; off of my CD <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cdbaby.com\/skutle2\">&#8220;Dark Experiments&#8221;<\/a>) was performed at the locally-organized &#8220;Turned On&#8221; electronic music concert back in February(thank you to Ron, Dave, Dawn, Jennifer, Jeffrey, Melissa, and Chuck, who all came out for moral support); it was positively received from those I talked to (though unfortunately, didn&#8217;t get the performance filmed so I could post it here), even if it wasn&#8217;t one of the works mentioned in the Atlanta Journal-Consitution&#8217;s review of the show. On top of that, I was also able to finally release my Western-inspired CD <a href=\"http:\/\/cdbaby.com\/cd\/skutle3\">&#8220;Sonic Visions of a New Old West&#8221;<\/a> after a friend of mine from high school- Carrie Henry- designed some beautiful cover art for the disc; I even got copies of all three of my CDs- the third being <a href=\"http:\/\/cdbaby.com\/cd\/skutle\">&#8220;Creative Beginnings&#8221;<\/a>&#8211; professionally printed so I could make the CDs readily available on CDBaby.com. Unfortunately, that&#8217;s about all I&#8217;ve done for myself musically. None of my other performance submissions have panned out to anything, and I haven&#8217;t been looking into more opportunities beyond that. I can say that my focus has been more on the film, but the fact of the matter is I just feel unfocused in my life in general. I&#8217;ve pulled myself in so many directions (each with their own long-term rewards); I&#8217;d like to follow them all, but don&#8217;t know how to follow any of them really. I took a chance recently and sent a letter\/resume to the AJC in the off-chance they might take me on as a film critic, but that didn&#8217;t pan out (though to be fair, it was also a lot like a rookie baseball player gunning for the season home run record from their opening swing in the pros), though it wasn&#8217;t a complete devestation on my part that it didn&#8217;t. I know I&#8217;m capable of doing all of these creative forms I&#8217;ve discussed, and I know I have friends and family who have been supportive as I&#8217;ve explored all of them, but I think it&#8217;s more of a worry that I won&#8217;t be able to get my efforts out there so that I might have a shot of doing any of them professionally. I guess we&#8217;ll just have to see, however, what pans out in the long run.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, that&#8217;s really about all I had. I suppose I could go into some details of things happening in my personal life, but that&#8217;s for another blog. Plus, well, what you&#8217;ve just read makes up for a lot of my personal life as well. I hope I didn&#8217;t bore you with all the details.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks for listening,<\/p>\n<p>Brian Skutle<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sonic-cinema.com\">www.sonic-cinema.com<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.myspace.com\/brianskutle\">www.myspace.com\/brianskutle<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.myspace.com\/cinemanouveau\">www.myspace.com\/cinemanouveau<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The time has come for a real update on what&#8217;s been happening with me; it&#8217;s been many a months, but I&#8217;m here to break the silence. Brace yourselves&#8230; I&#8217;ve been doing a lot of writing recently (actually, for the past year). Mostly it&#8217;s been on the reviews front (I&#8217;ve been keeping pretty well up with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-news-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5761,"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5139\/revisions\/5761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}