by Voyage | Oct 8, 2015 | Audience, Blog post, Entertainment Business, Font Page, Pitching, Presentations, Producer Interviews, Screenwriting Tips, The Expert Network
Inside The Comic Book Industry’s Latest Cool Thing… Let’s transport ourselves to a simpler time for just a moment… Imagine you’re back in middle school and your favorite limited edition comic book has just been released… You and your friends race to the local comic book shop after school to get your hands on the newest edition of “Captain America” or “Wonder Woman.” You wait patiently in line, with 25 cents burning a hole in your pocket… Finally, you get up to the counter and hand your pocket change to the clerk who slides over the goods. At last you get your hands on your coveted new comic book… And as you begin to flip the pages, a whole other world emerges… While this may or may not have been a reality for you, we can all agree that comic books and graphic novels have played an important role in pop culture and media. What you may or may not know is that there’s a thriving digital marketplace for NEW comics and NEW graphic novels with distribution and sales portals populating various corners of the Internet with readers of all ages scrambling to get their hands on the latest thing. And while we all know many of the blockbusters films we’ve come to know and love are based on comics from Marvel and DC, you may not know that comics and graphic novels have paid a very significant role in the development and sale of numerous other movies and TV series, some of which might surprise you… -30 DAYS OF NIGHT -CONSTANTINE -MYSTERY MEN – 300 -HELL BOY -THE...
by Voyage | Oct 8, 2015 | Entertainment Business, Producer Interviews
How to make your audience care about what’s important to YOU, and use your voice to provoke social action…not reaction What does it take to get an audience to care about ingrained political and global issues? How can you inspire empathy in your viewers? And what social responsibility does the creative have to their wider audience? Bonnie Solomon tackles these questions and more in our latest Voyage producer interview. Oscar Wilde once famously wrote, “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” This is a quote that rings very true to the tone of Bonnie Solomon’s work dealing with hot-button, sometimes uncomfortable-to-talk-about social issues. But death, continues Solomon, is of course not the only possible outcome when you need to convince an audience that the truth is relevant and important to their own lives. “They’ll kill you,” says Solomon, “…or they’ll completely tune you out, and watch the Kardashians.” When your goal is to make people listen, you must grab their attention as soon as possible, or their inaction will make future change impossible. Audience boredom is certainly a frustration for many writers, and for Solomon it means that the urgency of her issues aren’t getting through to the people who might need to hear them the most. Of course, not all of us writers are social activists, nor do we specifically call on those themes within our own work. However, what is striking about Solomon’s work is how she strives to inspire a strong ethical sense in her audience, through only the language of film. Knowing how to engage an audience...