Lets start a podcast.
Let’s start a Podcast! Why?
Ross: I’ve been wanting to start a podcast for a while and you know I think it’s like one of the last free mediums on the Internet where you can just kind of do what you want. I listen to podcasts myself and I thought we had an interesting angle with what we are getting to but do you want to talk about that?
Colin: Yeah I think we do have an interesting angle to start a podcast because you’re a writer, I’ve known you for a long time and one of the great things about knowing you, for me at least, is that you really challenge me to think a little bit deeper about things like movies and books and stories so that’s what this is gonna be about. Talking about what movies that have come out and talking about why we like them why we don’t like them what’s good about them what’s not good about them in the hope that we can sort of enhance our enjoyment of them in the future.
How do we know each other?
Ross: So we met in film school
Colin: We were gonna make a movie
Ross: no no we met in film school, but we were just in different film schools, I knew your cousin from church and then she was like oh you’ve got to meet my cousin Colin and so it was at St. Aldates just sat at the back after one of the services and we talked about the Matrix so it probably wasn’t even 1999 it was probably 2000 because I was still talking about the matrix like years later but that was you know when we met and then it was like we should do a project together and I mean we’ve traveled, you’re one of my few friends which have actually traveled with because we’ve been to New York, Salzburg, London all over the place yeah.
Who are we?
Ross: So how would you describe yourself? entrepreneur, book seller, world traveler, journeyman?
Colin: I would say more entrepreneur. Originally I wanted to do filmmaking and I did that for a long time. I worked for a company called Framestore that does visual effects.
Ross: Yeah I was gonna bring that up because I mean when you’re talking about movies and books and stuff you bring a fair amount to the table in a technical sense which is really good whereas me I’m more kind of theoretical and analytical maybe.
Colin: So I in the way I’m envisioning this is that I’m gonna be like the producer and maybe more like the host and then you will be kind of the resident expert and talking about whatever movie or books or things that we decide to talk about. Let’s talk about you. So you were you were at film school like you said earlier although it was more like a script writing course right?
Ross: It was a script writing course but it was yeah at Bournemouth University during the screenplay writing for film and television course which was the only dedicated film and television course in the UK at that time and I wanted to do that not because I wasn’t interested so much in writing movies but because I wanted to study a kind marketable style of writing that people actually enjoyed because the alternative would have been to do you know kind of an English classics course where you just read books and write essays.
Superman Blog Post
Colin: I remember reading a while ago one of your blog posts about a Superman movie yeah and you basically said you don’t like this the title was something like you don’t like the Superman the new Superman movie and here’s why and then you went in to explain why even though it’s kind of a good movie and it’s you know entertaining everything you’re like this is why it’s not very good because it goes against a lot of what Superman’s actually meant to be about historically.
Ross: So often people will see a movie and they’ll, well for a start they’ll just enjoy it and they won’t know why or they’ll they’ll dislike it and they won’t know why. The Superman, Man of Steel movie the Zack Snyder reinvention really kicked off that post and it was the most shared posts that I’ve ever had and I think it was for the reason that people were not enjoying this movie but they were being told that it was great and it was awesome and they couldn’t figure it out. I think they came out of it and they’re being told that this was a great movie this is a you know bold reinvention and it had lots of special effects it was you know it’s well made it was well directed Zac Snyder is very competent but they were uneasy and unsure and they weren’t exactly sure why. So it’s someone like me who can open up exactly why they didn’t like it. It was reasons like Superman id not a nice guy, he doesn’t actually save anybody except in the course of saving himself.
Colin: And that is the kind of thing that this podcast is going to be about.
Other ideas for the Podcast
Ross: I think it’s got a lot of scope for a lot of scope so I would like to even go back and do an episode on Aristotle’s Poetics the first person to really analyze story and just kind of say what it is.
I was gonna ask you has Doctor Who started up over there yet because I’d love to do Doctor Who episodes and talk about what the history of that is get people kind of a handle on current culture. I don’t want it to be just a dry academic thing. ‘Here’s something that somebody wrote in the 1800s about Shakespeare…’.
Colin: Maybe we can do some Game of Thrones stuff as well when that starts broadcasting again.
Ross: I do want this to be interactive and you’re the perfect person for this. Because you do know the area and the medium.
Colin: I know what I like and I don’t like to think too much about it whereas you do think a little bit more about it and then you make me think.
Ross: In talking about these things you kind of understand them more yourself so this is gonna be beneficial as much to me as to anybody and just kind of sorting out thoughts.
The Marvel movies today, the people writing them may not necessarily be thinking in classical terms of genre exploration. But it’s still based on a foundation that goes all the way back to that. So even though you may think that some of this stuff is kind of academic and kind of oblique, I think it all does relate. So it’s it’s worth exploring if you like stories and you want to find out more about them, then we are going to start a podcast for you. If we are going to start a podcast, I don’t want this to be something that’s just taking down; here’s why we hate Game of Thrones, here’s why we hate Man of Steel here’s why we hate all this, which is fun to an extent but it should be more about, opening up your enjoyment rather than shutting it down.
Let’s start a podcast – What’s it called?
Colin: I know that we’ve got a very interesting episode coming up about Star Wars. Where you’re gonna get into your views on that. But let’s not say anything more about that now. But one thing we do need to decide before we start a podcast is what the name is going to be. If there’s anyone listening to this first episode which they may well not be, they will already know what the name of this podcast is but we don’t know that yet ourselves so do you have any ideas?
Ross: I’ve got a bit of a list but I don’t like most of them
Colin: That’s more than I’ve got. We don’t need to make a decision now. But why don’t you run them by me before we start a podcast.
Ross: So I thought something like ‘True Tales of Fantastic Fiction’. It’s kind of the best one I came up with otherwise; ‘The Story of Stories’ but I think we don’t want to put ourselves into too small a box. We could just have something fun like you know the ‘House of Fiction’. Or I got ‘Story Matters’ stories matter trying to play around with that.
Colin: I think I like the first one best ‘True Tales of Fantastic Fiction’ or TTFF. What about a tagline? Is there one sentence that encapsulates the experience of listening to our podcast?
Ross: Its about thinking about story and what we choose to entertain ourselves with. Unlocking a deeper experience in modern story.
Colin: Yes that sounds good. Unlocking a deeper experience in modern story’. That’s awesome.
Next week
There is a new Star Wars movie out at the moment. So next week we’re gonna talk about that and Star Wars in general so that should be fun.
You can find Ross and Colin on twitter