Kowalski Is Bleeding DVD Commentary Track
| Fanwork | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Kowalski Is Bleeding DVD Commentary Track |
| Creator: | mostly Speranza and some by Julad |
| Date(s): | October 2001 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | Due South |
| External Links: | Kowalski Is Bleeding DVD Commentary Track, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Kowalski Is Bleeding DVD Commentary Track is a DVD Commentary for Kowalski Is Bleeding. It is by Speranza, with some comments by Julad.
Author's Notes
Notes To The DVD Edition: Okay, so I caved and did this"DVD Commentary Track" meme, but I'm really not sure I say much--though I seem to say it at great length. I wish I could say that doing this changed my mind about the usefulness of author commentary, but I'm sticking to my original assertion that writers are less interesting on the subject of their own work than critics are,and that criticism is more interesting than autobiography.But whatever, it's done now, so hopefully those of you reading this will find something interesting!!
I also thought that it might be interesting to have another voice besides mine in here, so I asked Julad to do a beta track as well. My comments are in RED, her comments are in GREEN--and hers really are much more interesting than mine, because Julad is basically always right. *g* You can skip to our comments by searching for our names, Speranza and Julad, in the text.
sample
sample
Excerpts
[comment by Speranza]: Hello, Ray. I am Exposition Man. I am here to give you one version of this narrative--a first version that will be tested by Fraser's version, and Frannie's version, and others. You see, Ray, this story has, at its core, a mystery and an absence, and so it's a story about competing versions of the story, and the stories people tell actually tell us more about them than about what really happened to Kowalski. So don't believe everything you hear; rather, look at who's telling the tale and ask what their investments are. Now me, for instance, I'm a senior operative for the FBI. I am therefore going to tell the tale in fairly hard-boiled law-enforcement terms. I am, in fact, performing the function for this FBI case that Welsh often performs in actual episodes of due South.
[comment by Speranza]: Okay, so let's talk about the little boxes. *g*They're basically there to indulge my desire for multiple POVs in this scene--I really wanted, like, snapshots of things that were happening outside of my solid Vecchio POV. My first thought was actually pop-up windows--I'd still like to try that actually--where as you're reading the story there are certain phrases in bold and as you click on them, you get a kind of spin-off thought as to what the other character in the scene is thinking/how they're reacting. I actually went to far as to research the technology, the code and such, but ultimately it just didn't seem workable--and also, the story would have been damn near unprintable, and a lot of people, I know, want to download and/or print stories to read.
So I decided to just integrate my pop-up windows into the text, and so here you go. But I'd still like to do a pop-up story, where you could, say, wave your mouse over a character's name and get their reaction to something...
[comment by Julad]: So I've been betaing for Ces for a long time now, and this is how it goes. She'll say, I want to write a story where such-and-such, and whoever's around will say "cool!" or occasionally "Ray? a clown? an angry clown? What the fuck?" and a little discussion will ensue about the whys and wherefores. Usually at this stage, when we first hear about it, it's pretty fully formed in her head. Then we'll go back to betaing the current story and a year later we'll actually see the first few pages of the story she pitched way back when-- "oh, yay, you're doing this one!" or "oh, wait, that bizarre-ass clown story, you were *serious*?" She only writes one story at a time and then moves on to the next one, like they're all lined up, waiting their turn to get written...So usually I'll see the first few pages of a new story and sigh, either in despair or relief. In my experience, when Ces is *on* with a story, it shows right from the start, and if she's not on (or I'm not on board with what she's trying to do) then it also shows right from the start, and it's evident that it's going to be more of a gruelling process to get the story through to the end. So I read this and was like, oh, fuck, *yes*, because it had that BAM, the crack of the bat as Ces once called it. She's *on*, we're off and running.
Ray Vecchio is the perfect narrator for this, the dream narrator, because he knows enough but not everything, he's got no idea what the actual story is but he knows the background-- he's *us*, in a way-- partially informed, knowledge available for leverage, ignorance available for suspense, and so, yeah, I read this and the great RayV voice and the attitude and the rightness and went "*yes*".