The time couldn’t possibly be more right for Oliver Stone’s sequel to the classic Wall Street. Check it out: Money Never Sleeps

Have you ever heard a riddle or puzzle that you couldn’t figure out right away? I’m sure you have. Some of the best riddles leave you completely mystified, and all the logical power you can muster up can’t point you to the solution. Finally, reluctantly, you force yourself to forget it. You move on and think of other things. Then, suddenly, while you’re doing something else, hours, maybe days later: the solution just reveals itself to you. Seemingly without effort, and with no use of logic.

This is called incubation. And it can play a pretty important role in writing as well.

Have you ever heard this children’s riddle?

Would you rather have a tiger eat you or a lion?

You have no control over when so-called inspiration strikes, or when that golden idea hits you over the head. What you can do is increase the odds by making certain your story is incubating in your mind.

This is useful in all stages of a writing project, but especially in working your initial ideas into a first draft. I like to do research and spice it with short bursts of free association writing. I set my timer to 15 minutes and I write whatever comes to mind concering my subject or story. Each session results in about an A4 page of text, which I then save to the project folder on my computer. And then I forget about it. At least consciously.

But what happens after a few weeks of research and free association writing is that certain elements start to crystallize in my mind. They are incubating. What I’m left with is a nice bunch of ideas, characters, settings, actions that I would like to explore in scene format.

When you allow your ideas to incubate you open yourself to the possibility of writing something extraordinary. Structure is of course important. But structure is merely a tool to shape and deliver your story, and if that story is boring and ordinary, structure won’t save your ass. In fact, too much structure can do violence to your ideas. If you focus narrowly on hitting plot points on the page number that Syd Fields tells you to, your story becomes a slave to structure. Syd Fields will be happy – you won’t. And your audience will say: “There’s some good potential here. I just wish that damn writer would have the courage to let his ideas incubate!”

And the answer to the riddle? I’d rather have the tiger eat the lion.

Everyone’s doing it, so here goes: My top 10 movies of the decade that just passed into history. Right off I regret not making it the Top 25, but I liked the challenge too. I tried not to agree with all of Pål’s choices below, although I easily could. Here’s an alternative take, then:

10. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson)
9. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher)
8. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron)
7. Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo Del Toro)
6. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan)
5. Big Fish (Tim Burton)
4. Hunger (Steve McQueen)
3. The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky)
2. Lady in the Water (M. Night Shyamalan)
1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry)

Could not argue that the decade saw a better film than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Innovative, emotionally engaging, bold and unafraid. I loved it, and still do.

I just got my hands on the Canon EOS 7D – a camera that has created some buzz over its HD video quality. I’ve just started exploring the camera, trying out different lenses and settings. Fortunately there are a lot of resources and sound advice to be found out there on the web. Here’s a quick summary of the best sites I’ve found so far.

Filmmakers
Philip Bloom has quickly become something of a HD-DSLR guru. A few months ago he was invited to George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch to demonstrate how to get the best out of the 7D and the 5DmkII. Lucasfilm has a history of pioneering in the field of digital filmmaking, and apparently they were impressed with the results you can get out of these tiny Canon cameras.

Stu Maschwitz has a background from Industrial Light & Magic and The Orphanage, and he is the authour of the useful The DV Rebel’s Guide. He’s also the Creative Director behind the popular Magic Bullet products, great for colour grading digital video. His blog has loads of useful info on the 7D and digital filmmaking.

Shane Hurlbut is perhaps best known as the cinematographer that got in the line of Christian Bale’s verbal fire during the shooting of the latest Terminator movie. His blog has tons of great info on using HD-DSLR cameras on professional shoots.

The people behind Canon Filmmakers gather excellent info and links on the Canon line of HD-DSLRs.

Liam Finn’s Finndependent.

Forums
Cinema5D is home of the best forum on Canon Filmmaking.

Norsk Amatørfilmforum (in Norwegian)

7D forum at DVinfo.net

Other sites
Photocine News

Planet 5D

Canon’s own tutorial videos for the 7D

Learn DSLR video

An excellent guide to using proxy files for smooth editing

The Digital DSLR blog

Camera 7D blog and forum

Article on color correcting 7D footage

Advanced DSLR of the year (article in Norwegian)

The DSLR Cinematography Guide

Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Canon 5D mkII

We’ve updated our download section with pdf’s of some of our work. All scripts are in Norwegian.

We’ve started a new decade, and it’s time to look back at the one we just wrapped up. These are the ten films, released between 2001 and 2009, that have made the greatest impression on me. So, without further ado or explanation:

10. Ying xiong (Hero)

9. Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain

8. Children of Men

7. Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In)

6. No Country for Old Men

5. Memento

4. El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth)

3. Good Night, and Good Luck

2. Mulholland Dr.

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Gunnar Iversen, professor of film studies at Trondheim University, is co-author of a new book on recent Norwegian film history, tracing trends and development from Orion’s Belt to Max Manus. For our Norwegian readers, here’s Gunnar’s blog entry about the dangers of writing contemporary history.

It’s a new year, and a new decade. I will make it my own resolution to follow Pål’s advice on writing habits, posted below. But the word resolution has more than one meaning, and for writers there is always a potential nightmare hiding behind it. How to conclude? How to find a story’s resolution? How to construct that brilliant ending?

We can’t all hope to come up with something as brilliant as the twist ending of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, but Night himself doesn’t even do that very often. Two things come to mind when I think of resolutions:

First of all, even Shyamalan didn’t just pull his brilliant “Malcolm is dead”-twist out of thin air. Indeed, the writer and director went through many drafts before the twist found its way into the fabric of his story. There is the lesson: The brilliant resolution doesn’t appear magically, but is the result of hard work, and most likely the result of constructive writing habits.

Secondly, in my experience a resolution to a story is just about impossible to craft if the story doesn’t take its flight from that place within yourself where desire burns. There is a lot of trial and error involved in writing (most likely neverending trials and errors, and some success thrown into the mix from time to time), and one thing I learned over the past several years, working with Pål and other writers, is the importance of finding the project that you can’t resist. If you can’t NOT work on your writing project, you are on to a good thing. No matter if it ever gets produced on stage or on the screen, you yourself have taken important steps.

Here’s to a great 2010 where resolutions don’t have to be thought about too much, but rather find their way in because you work hard and love your project.