Special Effects Budget

Happy Friday Post Guys!

I hope everyone's doing well on their New Year's Resolutions so far. It's only the third day of the New Year, so I hope that you're still going strong. If not it's not too late to pretend like it's a new resolution and you never messed up! Start today! It's never a bad time to make a resolution to be more productive!

This is actually a post that I wanted to make a few months ago and just never actually got around to doing. As some of you probably know and some of you might not, the movie "Enders Game" came out in November last year. I was really excited for that movie because it was an adaptation of one of the best Sci-Fi novels ever and it had Harrison Ford (whoot whoot) and Asa Buttefield whose parents were divinely influenced to meet so that he could be born to play Artemis Fowl.

End of story.

But, a story for another time, yes?

Sometime around the movie's release, my mom discovered an interview with Mr. Orson Scott Card and decided to email it to me. I read the interview and one answer of Card's really stood out to me. The reporter asked him if he wanted to make movies out of the rest of his books and he said, essentially, that if Ender's Game was a success sure why not, but if it wasn't no one would ever produce it even if he did. Then he said this:

"But, you know, whether that happens or not, my career is in books. There I have an unlimited special effects budget. And I can cast however I want." ~Orson Scott Card in an interview about the Ender's Game movie

Amen. AMEN. 

Can I just say amen again?

Amen.

Movies tend to have a lot of advantages over books, especially when it comes to appealing to the public. There's music, actors, movement, pictures, colors, explosions, it;s a lot shorter, and it takes a lot less brain power to watch than it does to read.

However, as Card so eloquently put it, in books, you can do a lot more. You can explore more. You can go places you can't with movies. You can create things you wouldn't be able to replicate (well or cheaply) with special effects. You can cast whoever and however you want and you don't have to actually hire anyone or deal with any fussy agents who want their actor's name first on the advertisements. It's great!

But as with anything in this world, it does come with a catch.

You have to be your own special effect's department.

You don't have to deal with money or how much it'll cost to make whatever crazy thing you're putting in your book, but you do have to describe well enough that  if someone did ever try to turn your book into a movie, fans would get mad at the special effect's division for messing it up.

The same goes for actors. You don't have to deal with fussy agents, or actors, or feeding them M&M with all the green ones picked out,  or dealing with their make up crew... but it also means that you have to bring them to life. You have to make them as real and substantial as a trained actor or actress can do.

So you do gain a lot by writing instead of creating a movie... you just have to make up for it later!