Writing on a limited special effects budget

[Yora]

I recently came across a article on how authors have the advantage of having an unlimited budget for sets, props, and special effects while writers for movies and TV always have to consider whether an idea would be actually affordable. Having this freedom is certainly an advantage, but is it necessarily a good idea to imagine your works with an unlimited budget?

Many incredible movies have been made with very limited funding, which forced the creators to use the resources in very creative and clever ways to get the most out of it. It creates great art out of necessity, forcing creators to go for a bigger impact instead of being able to cover things up with awesome visual spectacle. I am wondering if writers could learn a lesson from this? Maybe we could push ourselves to go for a bigger impact and greater depth over range by approaching the writing under the imagined constraints of a limited effects budget? For a lot of concepts, you really want to, and perhaps even have to, go really big and awesome to create the desired overall effect. But it seems to me like a really interesting exercise to attempt to do more with less. Smaller battle scenes, less acrobatics, more indirect magic, inexpensive monster, and so on. Trying to amaze the audience with small and simple things rather than big and spectacular one seems like an approach very much worth exploring.

 

[skip.knox]

I agree about starting small, even about staying small. Whether we're dealing with emotions or distances or weapons or special effects, effective writing is more about manipulating perspective than it is about sheer scale.

But I would quibble with the article. We do not have an unlimited budget. We have a fixed budget. We have the words we have, that's it. We all work with the same budget, whereas in film there's always more money that might be had. The problem with film is that the FX folks, and pretty much everyone else on the team, believes that if they only had more money and time, they might achieve even greater things. Writers spend their time searching not for more words but for the right words.

Moreover, time is our enemy. Leave aside deadlines (and lifespans!), the killer limitation is reader attention span. In theory we have unlimited time to describe the battle scene. In reality we have heartbreakingly little time before our reader becomes impatient and starts scanning or, most disastrous, puts down the book. We labor under the cruel fact that it's much more common for a reader to put down a book than for a viewer to walk out of a movie theater. In fact, it's extremely rare to hold their attention for the entire novel--we have to keep them for more hours.

 

[Yora]

Good point. Managing the attention we are asking from readers is a related issue. Getting something across in fewer words does probably take more writing time then using a lot of words, but at the same time you also cut down on required reading time. If you're doing a great job, then readers will want to keep reading forever. But every page needs to be packed with content, not with empty filler to make them want to read more of you.

 

[Penpilot]

To jump off of what skip said, we have to remember, movies and books are two different mediums, each with advantages and disadvantages.

Remember saying a picture is worth a thousand words? How many distinct pictures are there in say a simple 3 minute action scene in a movie? Maybe 10, 5, more? If take the saying as more or less accurate, that's a huge amount of words to needed to convey the same thing that a movie can do in like seconds.

Now, I think there is a lesson to be learned about constraint. Bigger isn't always better. More complex isn't always better. That's a lesson I learned with my writing. For me, it's about knowing what I'm trying to say and finding the best way to say it. Sometimes simple and small is the way to go. Other times it's go big or go home.

 

[skip.knox]

>Remember saying a picture is worth a thousand words?
It must be my day for disagreeing while agreeing. Yes these are different media. Yes, more complex is not always better. But I dislike the statement above. A picture is a picture and words are words. One is not worth the other.

I invoke someone like Bradbury. Take something like "There Will Come Soft Rains" from The Martian Chronicles. Sure, pictures could show the house, show the ruin. A movie could even show the mechanical mice, and the 1950s version of a Rhoomba futiley picking up the mess. But no amount of images will capture the ache of the words as the poem is read to an empty chair.

Or take Tennyson's Ulysses, whose memorable images could not be portrayed as powerfully in any way other than words. "I mete and dole unequal laws unto a savage race..." Go ahead, paint that. Or again, "... and tho' we are not now that strength which in old days moved heaven and earth, that which we are, we are ..."

It's not so much that I claim pictures cannot do what words do. It's that the reverse is so rarely credited. As often as a picture is worth a thousand words and more, just so often a word is worth a thousand pictures.

 

[CupofJoe]

The original "a picture is worth a thousand words" probably came from newspaper advertising so I'm not sure what it means in fantasy...
But I like limiting my characters in what they can do. If you have too many demi-gods wandering around with apparently limitless power, then the stories of peril and danger are going to be fairly rare and probably boring.
Oh look there is a horde of crazed killers coming this way... and now they are decorative shrubbery...
Give me a small band of rebels with few resources fighting against an Evil Emperor and their numberless legions every time.

 

[evolution_rex]

I do a form of this. As I write, I always imagine it as scenes in a movie, so when things get really big or fantastic I visualize it like a movie and if the visual affects of this hypothetical movie feels excessive or not believable then it indicates to me that I should strip some stuff down.

I also think the rule from Jaws that was created out of a restrained budget; if you limit how often you see the shark it becomes more frightening and, when you finally see it, it is much more thrilling. I think that works well for not just monsters but magical or fantastical elements or pretty much anything that is rare or nonexistant in real life. You could have one story with a thousand mages but the one with just one wizard could bring much more mysterious and mystic atmosphere.

 

[ThinkerX]

I have read more than a few novels where the story became lost in the action. It can get a bit tiresome after a while.

As to my own writing...

'Labyrinth: Journal' is set in an incredible place - a living maze that spans hundreds of miles and is host to entire civilizations. But, it's so big the effect is piecemeal. There are multiple fights, but they involve few participants.

There is fighting aplenty in 'Labyrinth: Seed' - but much of that story involves a army dispatched to the frontier to halt a barbarian invasion. The ancient alien tech involved in some of these battles is dramatic - yet, it's not a truly a military tale.

'Empire: Country' opens with a small massacre and ends with a large one. But, most of the intermediate stuff is 'low action,' though there is tension aplenty.

'Empire: Capital'...well, hardly anybody dies in that tale, though the Imperial Palace is spectacular.

I'd best stop while I'm behind...

 

[Svrtnsse]

I think this is in part related to world building. Depending on how we create our words there are things that will be possible, while other things won't be.
With the setting I'm working in, I won't be adding scenes where dragonriders attack a giant flying octopus with a city on its head. That kind of thing just doesn't happen. That said, I did write a scene where a forest hurries out of the way in order to let through a sled drawn by transparent horses with fire for blood. Actually, described like that, it sounds quite spectacular.

....aaanyway.
What I'm thinking is that contrast and context matters a whole lot. If your story is full of magic and wonder, you're going to have to bring out something truly spectacular in order to impress the reader. On the flipside, if your story is mostly about people sitting around talking in pubs and cafes (guilty as charged), you don't need to go overboard with the explosions to cause an effect.

Example:
In Lost Dogs #1, Roy sits around at the Napping Piglet, which is a little hippie tea house. It looks like your average independent coffee-shop which also sells used books. It's dimly lit, with candles on the tables, and weird electronic music on the speakers. It's a place that could exist in the real world.
It is a (contemporary) fantasy story though, so it's not quite like the real world. The proprietor, Rhea, has some skills as a shaman. She's not massively powerful or skilled, but she's good enough to keep the place from catching fire when someone knocks over a candle, and she's very good at deciding just what kind of tea someone needs.

These are things that may not require actual shamanistic skills. The candles that get knocked over might not light anything on fire, and it may be Rhea just knows what her regulars like as far as tea goes. There's a hint that there's more to it than that though, and that tickles the imagination, and sets the wheels in motion, and suddenly the Napping Piglet is a magical mystical tea house and Rhea's some kind of exotic seer from the faraway northern islands.

As far as special effects go, these are very cheap, but they do add up to creating an atmosphere and a vibe.

 

[Yora]

What I'm thinking is that contrast and context matters a whole lot. If your story is full of magic and wonder, you're going to have to bring out something truly spectacular in order to impress the reader.

I don't think so. Spectacle is simply spectacular. It can look cool and fun. But wonder and amazement come from questions. It's the unseen that creates the mystery. Magic that is all in your face with sparks and flames tends to have more a feel of large machinery and guns. Things behaving slightly odd through unseen means is where true wonder is evoked.

 

[Svrtnsse]

I think I'm either not expressing myself clearly, or you might have misunderstood where I'm coming from.

What I'm trying to say is that if your story/movie is full of special effects, your readers/viewers are going to get blinded by it. If you're going to try and impress them with even more special you're going to have to go so massive it just becomes ridiculous.

That's why I think contrast matters. It's much easier to create this contrast if you're working with something small and subtle than if that which youy're trying to contrast against is already spectacular.

 

[Devor]

We don't have a special effects budget. Our budget works differently. We have only so many words (varies by style and context) before the reader gets fatigued. How much can we do with those words?

There are plenty of ways to have a big set piece or action sequence without causing that fatigue, and plenty of ways to have a description of a simple wolf wear the reader out. How much can we get readers to keep in their heads? That's the question. Our word-to-fatigue budget is hard for new writers to get a feel for.

Done right, special effects are one of the big advantages of the writing medium and the fantasy genre. Even now there have been relatively few fantasy stories set in film because of it. I say, play to the strengths.

 

[L. Blades]

I would like to point out that we as authors Do have a special effects budget; at the very least for our cover art, but also for possible things like supporting artwork for our work. This can be a huge challenge not only in terms of the actual book, but also in marketing, generating awareness.

Not every author will have the budget to pay for a professional artist to do their front cover, or portray scenes, or even do supporting art. This may even be budgeting for equipment to do it yourself; hardware or software.

One thing I can recommend to anyone is if you can do a good job of it yourself, for free, then go for it. For instance I use an open-source alternative to Photoshop to do all special effects/artwork as it were; 'GIMP' (General Image Manipulation Program), hence when I use it I'm 'Gimping' it out. I too even when writing my first draft, would imagine how good something would be if it were the scene in a film, and therefore until I do reach that stage, the next best thing is doing your very best with the tools you have, be it drawing, photography, digital art, or a combination of the three. I love seeing the supporting artwork of other people's books (even if it's not something to my taste, I can still respect the effort of the result), and would like to see more authors' work captured visually.

 

[Annoyingkid]

It creates great art out of necessity, forcing creators to go for a bigger impact instead of being able to cover things up with awesome visual spectacle.

This isn't art out of necessity though. It's unnecessarily simulating necessity. You're choosing to make your work less extravagant and flashy. For instance, how do you know what is possible within a theoretical budget? TV and film (mostly TV nowadays) don't necessarily restrain what's in the script, they instead cut corners in terms of implying the presence of things instead of showing them in detail. Meaning they let the audience imagine things that'd be too expensive to show. That's inherently similar to a prose novel, where the audience imagines visuals based on words. The simple fact is you're not in a visual medium, you can't expect complicated visuals to be inherently amazing in that medium anyway. In prose, the simplest of things can be more moving than the most complex of compositions or vice versa, just because of how it's described. A complex composition/visual can be communicated simply and a simple set up can be described at length and with purple prose.

So in prose, the distinction between a big and small special effects budget doesn't matter. It's about whatever the story requires. The danger in imagining a restricted budget is your novel reading like a play.

 

[Yora]

It's a metaphor.

 

[skip.knox]

Of course man's grasp should exceed his budget, else what's a metaphor?

 

[valiant12]

Books and movies are different mediums.
I think books imitating movies/video games is one of the reasons a lot of modern books suck.
Movies have a lot of limitations. Books are better at humanising characters. Even big budget films adaptations of other mediums must cut corners when developing characters and even cutting whole characters.

Making a scy-fi/fantasy movie is very expensive.If you want to recup the initial investment the movie must appeal to a very big audiance. This often involve simplifiing the plot, more action and jokes less quality dialog, less science in sci-fi, etc.