Interview with JT Velikovsky in `Writer' Magazine (2012)

INTERVIEW - January 2012 issue of national Writer magazine (Australia)
Transmedia Writer at Work: JT Velikovsky
Transmedia Writer JT Velikovsky is often writing a feature film script, a game, a novel, and a graphic novel all at once. Among his achievements are the feature film Caught Inside (http://www.youtube.com/joeteevee), satirical transmedia novel A Meaningless Sequence of Arbitrary Symbols. (http://am-so-as.webs.com/), The Feature Screenwriters Workbook (available free online: http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/feature-screenwriters-workbook/15459299), and the comic strip Dr N Sayne (illustrated by Deane Taylor). He works as a Transmedia Consultant and as a Script Assessor for the Writers’ Guild. He writes a blog at http://on-writering.blogspot.com/ . See also:  http://storyality.wordpress.com/   [Revised edited version of interview]




Tell me about your involvement in the 2011 National Young Writers’ Festival.
I received an email asking me to appear on two panels at the Festival: ‘Games Writing’ and ‘Transmedia: The Business Behind the Buzzword’, so I was honoured to accept. It was an exciting time, as I’d recently finished writing a videogame and a comic - and also the feature film Caught Inside, on which I was also a screenwriter opened in cinemas the week after the Festival.

CAUGHT INSIDE (2011) - Trailer (Screenwriter: JT Velikovsky)
The Festival (NYWF) is terrific for writers of all ages, and it was nice to get back to Newcastle NSW, where I'd lived for five years, including when I was studying for my B.A. in Communications (Screenwriting major) at University of Newcastle, and also playing in the band Texas Radio. I’m deeply fond of Novocastria: that's where I started my professional writing career, working in comedy theater with Footlice Theatre Co, and as a TV sketch-comedy writer, and making short films at uni.

ROCKET MAN (2003) - 10 min short sci-fi docu-drama
(Co-writer: JT Velikovsky) - Rated R (language, violence)

How involved is the task of game writing? How did you land that gig?
Game writing is a truly, madly, deeply involved process; it’s not just a case of iteratively ‘making up a story to fit the game’, although that’s certainly part of it. As a writer, you also need to consult regularly with the Game Designer (the equivalent of a film director), and also the game's Level Designers, and Producers and artists, programmers and sound teams, to make sure that the game story and the dialogue all ‘works’. Sometimes it seems around half of what you’re doing - the game you're all making - changes every day, as the game evolves while it’s being made over two or three years, so the writing (and re-re-writing) during the game production process can be ultra-intense. I think it’s actually about three times as much writing as on a feature film (even when a film script goes through several drafts, over many years).
It’s also a different way of thinking about narrative, to linear stories. Feature films and novels are (generally speaking) linear narratives, but with non-linear stories you need to design the many parts of the story (and lines of dialogue) to work effectively, even if they're experienced in different combinations and orders.
The Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal game I wrote had around a thousand lines of dialog (in an Excel spreadsheet), but there’s also much more writing involved than simply the dialog: there were Story Outlines (which include mission goals and objectives), Character Design (art and functionality) briefs, and also 70-page illustrated Treatments/Walkthrus for each of the ten levels (or ‘chapters’) in the game. Warner Bros told us they expected it would be a million-seller-plus game (it eventually sold 1.5 million units) so I made sure the research on Looney Tunes detail was as comprehensive as possible, given the time constraints. It's always so important to respect and honour the fans, both old and potentially new, and everyone also has their favorite character/s - and in Looney Tunes, let alone in Merrie Melodies, so, there's about 50 years' worth of canon. 


    Get More: GameTrailers.com, Looney Tunes: AA - Behind-the-Scenes: The Weapons, PC Games, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 LOONEY TUNES: Acme Arsenal (2007) - JT Velikovsky (Game Designer & Writer)

I actually landed my first (professional) gig writing games, the day that I completed the `Game Writing and Design' short course at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, in 1995. Someone rang the school that day looking for a Game Writer, and my name was put forward. Possibly in part because I was mainly studying Screenwriting at AFTRS, but I’d also been making my own computer games since I was seven years old, on a HP-19C calculator, and then later on an Amstrad 6128, and Microbee pc's at high school. (What an über-nerd.)

HP 19C - with Reverse Polish Notation.
NASA astronauts took this calculator to the moon. Though probably not this exact one. 

What’s the biggest challenge you have faced as a Transmedia Writer? Your most memorable moment?
One time, it was challenging working on a game project where, we were adapting a movie that I personally thought just wasn’t very good. So, it was hard to take the game and its story seriously, and passionately, when the film story in my own view, wasn’t all that brilliant. Another challenge is - when several external producers all want to pull the project in a different direction. That can sometimes drive you a little spare, but when collaboration really works (with a great blend of creatives, all working in sync), it’s one of the greatest rushes. For more on all that, see Csikszentmihalyi on `flow' theory (e.g. Creativity, 1996, and also Sawyer's Explaining Creativity, 2006).
Probably, my most memorable Transmedia moment was when I was working on a project with Robert Watts, the producer of the first three Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies. I co-wrote a screenplay that Robert had optioned and, while we were working on the film, the game and a comic all at once, in the middle of it all we met with George Lucas, who was one of the contributing reasons I wanted to be a writer-director-producer in the first place. Robert also worked on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and was telling us about working with Kubrick (one of my other film heroes).
To cap it off, Robert completely blew our minds by telling us his idea for a new form of non-linear cinema storytelling. His idea was this: The audience watches a 10-minute `introductory/story setup' film about five main characters, then the movie stops, and the lights come up, and then - the film branches off into five different films in five different cinemas, with each film following a different character within the one over-arching story. So, having seen one film, there are four other films you have to see, to get `the whole story', and of course there are multiple twists, so that characters that you assumed were ‘good guys’ based on one point of view actually turn out to be villains once you’ve seen what they were up when they were ‘offscreen’ in the other story streams, or points of view. It’s a brilliant way to tell a story in my view, and is exactly what transmedia storytelling is, except that with conventional transmedia the idea is split across two or three or more different media formats (e.g.: a film, a game, a comic).

I've actually experimented with non-linear storytelling quite a bit, over the years. In 2004 we made what is possibly the world's first mobile-phone soap-opera comedy, LIFERAFT. The core idea was to let the viewer/player control the decisions made by a couple of bickering newlyweds on a liferaft, after their honeymoon yacht has sunk. The decisions that you as viewer/player make, affects whether the liferaft floats or sinks, and so you can choose how the story progresses, depending on your own personal reaction to the couple in the story. - If you like them, you can help them to make good decisions that will save them - and, if not, you can just sink the raft, and doom them to the sharks. Sort of like, in the movie Flying High / Airplane!: i.e.: "I say, let 'em crash-!"

LIFERAFT (2004) Writer & designer JT Velikovsky     And in terms of other writing-career highlights, I also loved working with Marv Wolfman on an XCOM game last year, Marv was the creator of the character Blade. Apparently, Marv also actually published Stephen King’s first short story - and actually, was THE guy who first got comic-writers a credit, back in the 1950s: he signed ‘by the Wolf Man’ under the title of a horror comic story, and suddenly every other comic writer insisted on a writer’s credit. Marv certainly taught me a lot about storytelling, and has done so many great things for writers in general, over the years.

Marv Wolfman 
Author of DC Comics'  CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS (1985)
Photo courtesy of  http://marvwolfman.com/
What are your tips for writers who want to be published?
Well, if you want to be, say, a published novelist, then I'd probably recommend you read Elizabeth Paton’s thesis Creativity and the Dynamic System of Australian Fiction Writing, which is available online, and include interviews with 40 Australian published fiction writers who have over 400 books published between them. It's available as a free .pdf online through the University of Canberra library:
http://erl.canberra.edu.au/public/adt-AUC20090825.125448/index.html
The thesis even delves into ‘What is Creativity, and How Do I Do It?’ based around Mike  Csikszentmihalyi's work on creativity (see: Creativity, 1996), which is possibly something that a lot of writers don’t study enough, just in my personal opinion... Also, for would-be Game Designers, I recommend Mike's work on `Flow Theory', which is the state (`flow') every gamer wants to be in, when they play a game. Or - viewer when they watch a movie, for that matter. Or even, a reader of a novel. There's also `transportation' theory which is a version of flow theory. (See: Scientific Study of Literature journal for more on 'transportation' theory.)
My other big tip for writers is: Submit, Submit, and then Submit some more, and - work on through the rejections. Use any advice you get from publishers, but know also which advice to ignore as well, if someone simply doesn’t ‘get’ your work. Some readers sometimes `miss' that my own satirical novel AM SO AS is a satire of The Catcher In The Rye, and as a result, often don't quite `get it'...

For writers who feel they’re merely ‘running on the rejection treadmill’, I highly recommend the book Rotten Rejections: The Letters Publishers Wish They’d Never Sent, which is a hilarious and very encouraging collection of rejection letters. http://www.writersservices.com/mag/m_rejection.htm

But all successful writers were rejected once. Some, like Robert M Pirsig (Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), 122 times... So, learning about `resilience' in general is probably also helpful.
What about Comics?

Comics can be tricky - as in some senses, it's a highly-competitive market, and there's a lot of free stuff now on the interwebs.... I don't mean graphic novels, I'm just talking about "4-panel daily newspaper syndicated comic-strips" now... With the comic Dr N. Sayne, I was actually very fortunate, in that I'd known the artist Deane Taylor, as we'd work on games together before, with Deane as concept artist. We decided to collaborate on a comics project, and so, I wrote it, and Deane drew it. Then we put it in a competition, and found a publisher. It was (possibly) the world's first `exclusive mobile phone comic strip'. It was a lot of fun, Deane's worked with everyone from Tim Burton to Miyazaki, so I sure learned a lot from him too.




Dr N Sayne - by Joe (Tesla) Velikovsky & Deane Taylor

Is there a large community of Transmedia Writers in Australia?
Funnily enough, no, I don’t believe there is a large community...Or if there is, we should all join forces and fight crime together. Gary Hayes and Christy Dena are probably the two main forces in the land of Oz, at http://www.personalizemedia.com/ and http://www.christydena.com/
And of course, internationally (in the US), there is Professor Henry Jenkins: http://henryjenkins.org/(See also: http://storyality.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/storyality-96-transmedia-practice-a-collective-approach-2014/ - Ed)
Some other Transmedia writers who I've been fortunate to work with are Matt Costello, Ernest W Adams and Noah Falstein (and in fact, they're all also in my novel about Transmedia, AM SO AS...)

Did you plan to build up such diverse experience in media?
I don't think so. It just sort of happened. Insert something profound here, about Robert Frost, and `way leading on to way'. I actually started my Bachelor Degree in Communications aiming to get into advertising, as a copywriter (partly as, many of my favourite authors, like say Joseph Heller, Don deLillo and possibly even Flann O’Brien (author of The Third Policeman), seemed to work in advertising, before they cracked novel-writing). But then I did `Horror Film Studies' at uni in 2nd year, and also made some films, and I was hooked by it.
I guess I enjoy telling stories across as many media as possible. They (whoever `they' are) also say “You should write what you know” and so, with the novel A Meaningless Sequence of Arbitrary Symbols (AM SO AS), I wrote a Transmedia story about a Transmedia Writer, and using transmedia to tell the story (films, games, novel, a cult manifesto.) The title is actually an obscure and contrary allusion to Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code". But the story itself satirizes Salinger's "The Catcher In The Rye", and Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". If you haven't read all three, it's possible you may not appreciate all the literary references or allusions in there, but, the story is `stand-alone', and hopefully `works' either way. It's really about Transmedia, and how videogames are made. After 20 years of writing and designing games, movies, comics, I figured it might be fun to do a satirical expose on the process. Actually, making games is probably more fun than even playing them. It also depends on how you define fun, I guess.
A Meaningless Sequence of Arbitrary Symbols Blog: http://am-so-as.blogspot.com/

A Meaningless Sequence of Arbitrary Symbols 

Transmedia Site: http://am-so-as.webs.com/

E-novellette on Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0074RW1O0

So do you have a favourite medium?
Currently, feature films, which have probably always been my ‘first love’. Though I do like the relative freedom from constraints of novels, mainly because the budget of any given genre, scene or story is less relevant. By which, I think I mean, imagination is possibly the main "limiting factor" in novels, regarding story scope. Also I suspect you can use a more distinctive `voice' in novels; to me it seems that you can take more creative risks, in a way. 
A-Rage - Sky Invaders (2004) An augmented reality game that you play in your backyard

Games really are loads of fun to write, and make - but just in my experience, one possible downside is that sometimes, they’re simply not as narratively satisfying, for a writer. I suspect the main reason for this is that, as Henry Jenkins says, ‘Player freedom annihilates Character’ (see Ernest W. Adam's PhD thesis, on Problems in Game Storytelling). It’s the old ‘Agency versus Structure’ (`freedom versus constraints') issue... Besides which, Games are also usually so expensive to make... In my experience, the more expensive the art form or medium, the less interesting and `edgy' it becomes; the product always becomes ‘safer’ as the budgets go further north. That’s probably also why self-publishing is so interesting, satisfying  – and empowering. But who knows. Everything's a tradeoff. Sometimes it's nicer to have the marketing muscle and expertise of a publisher, but sometimes, they also want you to change your content. It's a case-by-case problem, probably.
Do you work with other Writers much?

Well, yes, I collaborate about half of the time, and the other half of the time I write solo. I've worked a lot with my great friend
But either way I think it's helpful to have a community of like-minded writers around you, just so that you're not writing in isolation... I'm a member of a few writer's groups - The Decent Ventriloquists over in Adelaide - which includes some truly amazing writers, guys like Pat McNamara of "Dragonscarpe" and "SpaceLord Mo-Fo" fame, Alex James the novelist and film critic, Shane Dix (of Star Wars novels fame), Greg Moss the writer-director, comedy scribe Dave "The Wiz" Osbourne - and some incredible artists like Dan Foley, Dave Williams, and legendary writer-critics like Dave Bradley. A really amazing gathering of talent there...

Dragonscarpe: The Last Realm  by Pat McNamara, Gary Turner, Michal Dutkiewicz 
Over in Melbourne, I have another writers' group, with guys like Damian McLindon, Mitch Forrester, Warwick Holt, Allan Cameron and Ev de Roche...

Screenwriter And I'm also in the legendary Skip Press's Hollywood Screenwriters group, and a few other online communities... So - in amongst all that, my writing gets a decent amount of feedback and critiques from some pretty amazing scribblers. I'm very lucky in that regard, to have met and become friends with so many talented and creative writers and artists. I'm also lucky in that - some years ago, my sister married an awesomely-creative guy, Dr Phillip McIntyre. He's actually got a new book out this month, called Creativity and Cultural Production. He's also taught me an immense amount about the creative arts as well, including music. He taught Daniel Johns of silverchair songwriting... We've also got a band, Texas Radio. Our forthcoming album has a song about aliens on the moon... So... (nods to the sky, with wry grin) "The Truth is Up There..." It's based on some NASA astronauts talking about what they saw. Conspiracy theories are like stories on steroids. (See Gottschall's The Storytelling Animal (2012), for more - Ed).

Do you think your experiences as a Game Design/Writing Mentor for the Australia Council and as a Script Assessor and Judge for the Writer's Guild have contributed to your ongoing development as a writer?
Absolutely yes - as Mentoring is just teaching, really, and ironically you learn so much more by teaching something... When you're passing on ideas, skills and techniques that have `worked before' - you're also constantly comparing those techniques to other possible approaches (for example, different ways to structure or `reveal to the player', a game story, say), and - mentoring also sometimes involves additional research (say, into game development tools for a certain game platform - e.g. iPhones or Android phones - etc) that you may not have otherwise explored... There's some kind of `ratchet effect' there, where your own knowledge gets amplified faster than it would, if you weren't teaching something.
Also working as a Story Analyst/Script Assessor (for the Writer's Guild, and film studios) is a priceless experience for any writer - having to read and think critically about all aspects of hundreds of scripts makes you consider all those same issues in your own work - so that's helpful. The Guild is actually running training sessions at the moment, for aspiring script assessors (see the AWG website). The Writer's Guild does a terrific job in advancing the art and craft of writing, hats off to those guys.      

JT Velikovsky