Unleash Your Inner Mogul

Who says you need actors to make a movie? Why have your vision messed with by a director? A crew you need to pay? Network notes? Money to rent equipment and buy day old donuts on the craft service table? Forget it.

All of them are history.

Things of the past along with, “We don’t do period.”, “The horror market is over-saturated” and “Nobody cares about growing up Ukrainian in Winnipeg.”

Never again will an under-funded government program or change in bureaucratic policy torpedo your dreams.

Everything and everybody standing in the way of that brilliant script mouldering in your top drawer from becoming a film – or at least a youtube clip – is no longer a problem.

Now -- “If you can type, you can make movies”.

That’s the claim of a Xtranorml, a software developer offering a free download you can use to get that scene you just wrote on its feet.

Maybe it’ll help you figure out what isn’t working. Maybe it won’t. But it’s a lot more worthwhile than using a break to see if your Farmville cow needs milking.

Years ago, somebody sent me a primitive animation program that did much the same thing.

I was working a cop show at the time and used it to put an aardvark and chicken in a pink convertible squad car. Brought to life with the bad “Back up? I’m not waiting for back up” dialogue you’ve seen in every D2DVD hardboiled cop movie, the Aardvark bailed to get killed leaving the chicken to explain what happened to arriving carload of heavily armed hippos.

Like any software program, what Xtranormal offers is only as good as the talent of the people using it. This won’t make you Cecil B. DeMille. Although, if you’ve noticed how dated and overstated “The Ten Commandments” has become with time --- it’ll come close.

Simply install the free download, choose from a variety of visual styles and actors and feed in your script.

Then sit back and watch the oddly fascinating take on the material that results. Trust me, I’ve had real actors and directors come up with worse executions of what I wrote – or thought I wrote.

There is a growing selection of finished “films” on any number of websites dedicated to Xtranormal movies. Many of them are at least worthy of a Humpday coffee break screening.

So, unleash your inner Mamet --- sorry, UNLEASH YOUR INNER MAMET and give it a shot.

It might even help you discover why nobody else is interested in your masterpiece.

Or that you really are on the verge of creating one.

Like this…

H/T Joel Scott