As he stood, Ling Xiu glimpsed a flash of light at the very top of his field of vision.
The orbiter!
Feeling a sudden dread, he bounded up to the lip of the crater. The lander wasn't there. He turned back. Shun's body had vanished as well.
"I don't understand," he whispered, and was gone.
#
After...
King George Sound, Western Australia.
She had a name once, though she barely remembered it. It was difficult to think down to the level where she needed a label to tell her who she was.
The water of the Sound was blue and calm, the warm sand under her feet as fine and soft as talc. The round-shouldered promontories that embraced the bay were furred with grey-green scrub. The sky above was clear, the morning sun warm at her back. Across the water, she could just make out the ramshackle buildings and tall, white storage tanks where her parents' species had ensured their doom. Beyond the old whaling station, a crescent moon hung low in the sky.
She walked into the gently lapping waves. Along the beach, others followed her example. They filled their enlarged lungs and slipped under the surface. Webbed fingers splayed. Broad feet kicked together strongly, dolphin-fashion. As one, they forced air from their lungs up into the cavities in their cheekbones and foreheads, projecting the vibrations out through the fatty tissue of their skull crests. They sang.
Out in the middle of the bay, the whales - who had not gone when the Visitor asked, who had waited, believing that humankind could evolve - responded.
Software Review by Steve Cooper
BPC-Screenplay
By Berlin Picture Company (www.bpc-screenplay.com)
Debut Edition: €25 (About £17)
If you’re a screenwriter, and you ever get lucky enough to get something produced, you might see your work rendered as an animatic. It’s a cheap and cheerful animated ‘sketch’ of your film; a picture slideshow with dialogue, music, and SFX.
Normally, you can't really hope to produce these on your own; you need animation software and artists and voice actors. The Berlin Picture Company have created BPC Screenplay Debut Edition, which tries to give screenwriters the ability to put together a basic animatic with very little effort. Did they succeed?
The Software
The program has a fairly rudimentary script editor; nothing fancy, but enough to add scenes, dialogue, and direction. It's straightforward enough to create a scene. It looks like this:
Then you hit the 'create audio' button and a voice synthesiser creates your dialogue in audio form and loads it onto the audio-visual timeline, the second part of the program. This is more of an animation tool, and has channels for pictures and sound;
You drop some images onto the timeline and you’ve added your visuals. Add some special effects and soundtrack, click a button, and out pops your animatic.
At least, that’s what supposed to happen. There are some serious bugs. One machine I installed it on wouldn't generate the dialogue. Sometimes it fell over without warning. Once it lost my entire script. BPC are calling this the 'Debut Edition', which is a nice way of saying 'brand new and still buggy'. That said, there's a Pro version on the way, and if you buy the Debut view now, you get the Pro version free.
For all that, though, I can't bring myself to dislike this software. When it works, it's great fun. It's easy to knock out your own little movie scenes. If you’ve got a script already written, and a few pictures, you can knock out a scene in ten minutes. Trust me, there's something very satisfying to hear and see your script running in front of you. And it’s cheap – just €25, or about £17.
It's far too buggy and rough at the moment for me to recommend it as a serious work tool. But then, that's not the way I ended up using it. It's a playground for your ideas.
The Competition
If you want to try animatics, here are some other tools;
Dakine Wave Virtaul Stage: A £45 3D animation tool, a little like scripting The Sims.
Final Draft: £150 of 100%-hollywood-approved script writing software, which will synthesise the dialogue of your script. No pictures, though.
Toon Boom Storyboard: $250 of serious storyboarding software. Artistic talent required.
News – The Brightonomicon Audio Play
Long-time readers of Hub (and there are plenty of you) will know that one of our occasional columnists – Neil Gardner – is producing an audio dramatisation of Robert Rankin’s excellent Brentford/Hugo Rune novel, The Brightonomicon.
Things have moved on apace since we last reported on the play. A cast is in place, and the series is to be distributed by BBC Audiobooks early next year; but let’s just back up a moment and look at some of the cast…
The Man Himself, Hugo Rune is to be played by none other than genre favourite, David Warner! Sometime hitchhiker, and vocal talent behind The Chicken Song, Michael Fenton Stevens is the Narrator. Gollum himself, Andy Serkis is playing Count Otto Black with Mark Wing-Davey (Zaphod from the Hitchhikers radio and TV series) plays Fangio. Ben “Primeval is actually quite a lot of fun” Miller is Bartholomew the Bog Troll and Martin Jarvis OBE is Inspectre Sherringford Hovis. Neil Gardner (the producer) plays Ahab the Space Crab, and Robert Rankin pops up as the Cabbies (with his delightful lady wife Rachel playing The Lady in the Straw Hat). Others include, Iain Lee, Brian Murphy, Rupert Degas and many, many more!
This promises to be an amazing production, so pop over to www.brightonomicon.com for more info and to listen to some podcasts of the cast and crew.
While you’re there, why not enter their competition to win a small part in the production itself! You’ll even share a scene with David Warner! It doesn’t get much better than that…
Mike Carey – Video Interviews
Mike Carey – author of the excellent Felix Castor books (the third of which, Dead Men’s Boots, is on current release) – called into the offices of our sponsor, Orbit, and chatted about the series. See the video interviews here:
http://www.orbitbooks.net/2007/09/13/mike-carey-on-camera/#more-169
If you have enjoyed this week’s issue, please consider making a small donation at www.hub-mag.co.uk. We pay our writers, and your support is appreciated.
Hub - Issue 24 Page 2
