Questions?
The Website Design |
The Format |
About Season V
The Website Design
Why did you decide to start the FK4
website instead of posting the episodes on a fan fiction list or putting them on one of the archive sites?
When I got a new computer in 2004, I searched for Forever Knight on the Internet. I
quickly discovered the FORKNI-L and FKFIC-L lists, and the major archives of Forever Knight
fan fiction. But I also learned that posting stories required converting them into text format.
I had written everything on my old computer, whose wordprocessing software was WordPerfect 5.1
for DOS (which, indeed, I still use). Although it would be possible to preserve some of
the formatting if I converted to text, it would not be possible to keep everything. In
particular, the page breaks would have to go. This would seriously affect the appearance
of the episodes I had written. It would also take me a long time to alter the episodes page
by page so that now-unwanted material would not intrude inexplicably, thus confusing the reader.
So, I thought I’d try to figure out a way to offer Season IV to other fans without altering it
in any way. The most efficient method turned out to be to put the episodes in zip files
without changing the format at all, and link access to these zip files through a personal website.
Where did you learn about website and webpage design?
From books. The first one I bought was Creating Web Pages for DUMMIES (by Bud
Smith & Arthur Bebak), from which I learned enough about WYSIWYG programs to realize that that
was not the way I wanted to go. I wanted something more flexible. Well, okay—basically,
I wanted something that was totally mine: my vision. This decided me to learn
HTML so that I could write my own pages.
The other books were bought simultaneously, simply because I couldn’t decide between them. I
first read HTML 4 for DUMMIES (by Ed Tittel & Natanya Pitts), and then Creating Cool
Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS (by Dave Taylor)—which, by the way, turned out to be
the best order to read them in. I picked the first one because I’d found the “DUMMIES”
series to be eminently readable; and the second because, while all of them talked about italics
and boldface, it was the only one to mention a way to use small-caps (something that I’ve been
using for years in word-processing).
Once I’d read all three books, I then went to a website mentioned in one of them, and played
for a bit with the hexcodes used to describe colour, working out sets of colours that work well
together.
Then I wrote my first webpage. For those who are curious, it was a version of the
ratings page. I did three colour variants (for PG, 14+, and 18+).
Although I have since revised the page, tightening up the HTML a bit, it remains essentially
the same as it was way back then.
Then I did a lot of on-line browsing for free and linkware graphics, building up my own little
library. I needed these to fulfil my vision of how the homepages and notes pages would
work. I also got permission from Forever Knight fans with photo archives to use
some of their screen captures to illustrate my site.
After that, I wrote another page, and another and so on, learning as I went. I don’t
know about practice making perfect; but it certainly leads to improvement.
Aren’t you leaving something out? Didn’t
you first practice writing HTML by using the exercises in the books?
No. Why should I? I wasn’t interested in their webpages. I wanted
to get my own written!
But, of course, for my first attempts I did pick out something
that seemed to me to be pretty well the simplest thing that I’d want to do for my site. The
ratings page involves just a couple of nested tables, hexcoded colours, font sizes, and CSS-tweaks
on the borders. Yes, it did take about three hours to get it right—and most of that was
spent getting it to run at all. But, starting this way, I finished up with a webpage that
I could actually use on my site. A practical achievement, in other words.
The Format
The format you use takes quite a lot of
getting used to. Why don’t you write regular stories?
Because TV isn’t prose. If you’ve ever read adaptations of actual movies or TV shows
into prose, you’ve probably noticed that the ones that include strictly what was in the
script—maybe, if you’re lucky, with the addition of some of the on-screen action—do not
make very satisfying prose. When we read novels and short stories, we expect more
detailed description and more introspection.
When prose is adapted for the screen, it is equally unsatisfactory. If you are accustomed
to a story in a prose version, something always seems to be missing when you view it. Even
with the best possible actors, there is no way to convey all of the character’s internal
musings, except perhaps with voiceover, which always seems very artifical, even when the same
text appears in the original prose.
Yet it is not that prose is the superior narrative format. Each has its own weaknesses and
its own strengths. Film does a much better job of conveying action. No adaptation
can ever be quite so exciting in that regard. And prose requires sequentiality: you
cannot simultaneously describe the setting, the costume, the dialogue, and the action in
words. But there is, of course, no problem in having all four on screen together, which
speeds things up considerably. Film is inherently a “tighter” format than prose. Also,
of course, the facial expression and vocal intonation of the character can only imperfectly be
conveyed in prose. Actors—well, good actors, at least—can do a very much better
job in that regard. And the regular characters on Forever Knight were certainly
played by good actors.
Forever Knight was a television series. I wanted more of the original. Failing
that, I wanted more stories as close to the original as possible. Obviously, I couldn’t
actually film new episodes. But I could adapt the full script format to include as much
of what I would have been seeing and hearing as possible, so that—by visualizing and
“auralizing”—I could come as close to watching new episodes as humanly possible. Well,
short of CGIing them, anyway.
So what’s the difference between the new
format and a script?
Apart from generally more detail, I include every cut—that is, every change from one piece
of film to another. Basically, this means I’m doing the editing.
Of course, in real life, the editor can’t work until after the filming is done. And I
obviously haven’t done any filming. But what you have here is a virtual television show.
Was any special preparation needed before
you could write in the new format?
Yes, I had to know what the original sets for Forever Knight looked like. In
excruciating detail, since I was going to have to describe the movement of the actors around
the sets, and—as closely as possible—the exact camera angle involved in each shot.
When I decided that the full script format was unsatisfying and I wanted to do something more,
I therefore had to piece together what the sets must have looked like before I could adapt the
already written material into the new format.
So does that mean that you started by writing Season IV scripts?
Well, fan fiction scripts. Yes. I had, I think, eight of them written when I decided the format
was too skimpy to be satisfactory reading. Remember, real scripts are intended as the first
step in the filming process. A lot gets added when you bring in the actors and
director. But, as nothing I wrote would be filmed, everything had to go into the written version.
So you must already have known how to
write scripts. When did you learn?
Back when Star Trek: the Next Generation was on, I tried my hand at writing some fan
fiction based on that series. Regular prose short stories. But I wasn’t
satisfied. Partly, I guess, I just wasn’t all that good a writer! It wasn’t just
that, though: the prose format was too different from the television show; and, as
later with Forever Knight, it was the show I wanted. I realized that I was
visualizing the stories as episodes, and then trying to convert them to (inadequate) prose. So
I tried converting them into the script format instead.
How did you learn to write scripts?
By closely examining the only example I had to hand, the script of “The Trouble with
Tribbles” that David Gerrold included in his book about the episode. Later on, I
also bought Harlan Ellison’s book about “City on the Edge of Forever”, with his original teleplay.
From those I puzzled out, more or less, how the bits and pieces fitted together. I did,
at one point, borrow a book on script writing from the library; but it was pretty well useless,
except for providing a list of additional terms (like HIGH ANGLE SHOT, O.S., ZOOM) beyond those
used in the two scripts I'd read.
I also thought a lot about the things I saw on television. Particularly helpful was
analyzing why certain stories didn’t work very well. Picking apart the factors that
lead to success can be hard, since you are trying to pry open a seamless whole and peer inside
while the wheels keep whirring round. Failure can often be attributed to a single
cause. When you are starting to learn to write, figuring out where other people go wrong
can be very useful: part of identifing a factor that failed involves simply identifying
the factor’s existence—and hence identifying one of the many things that you need to consider
when putting your own stories together.
Apart from that, it was simply a question of writing everything over and over and over and
over. Each time I made a pass through the embryonic scripts, I’d suddenly find myself
synthesizing something I’d read with something I’d seen, and realizing what was meant. Or
I’d suddenly realize something about structuring a scene, or alternating between scenes. And
then I’d go back and rewrite everything all over again.
Eventually, I shoved everything in a box and stuck it in the back of a cupboard. But
it’s like riding a bicycle. When I wanted to write Forever Knight stories, I
already had some idea at least of what was involved in writing an episode of a television show.
About Season V
Is there going to be a Season V?
Eventually, I hope. Certainly, I have been working on it; and about half of the episodes have been completed.
When? Starting next September, maybe?
As you will have discovered if you’ve read the notes to the various episodes in Season IV, I didn’t
write them in order. Furthermore, when I finished a section of a season (and again when I
completed the entire season), I went back and tightened up the continuity. I’ve been writing
Season V in the same way. This means that I can’t start linking in the finished episodes until
the whole season is done.
I have no idea when this will be; but it certainly won’t be for at least two or three years.
However, some September (though not this September), you will find the Season V premiere
up on this website. And, as with Season IV, I will run Season V in real time, putting up
the “first run” in weekly installments.
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Forever Knight and all characters and images from the original series are the property of Sony/Tristar. No copyright infringement is intended.
The cartoon comes from
www.free-clipart.net.
The divider bar comes from GRSites.com.
All original material on this webpage copyright © Greer Watson 2005, 2012.
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