Mobile Hopes

My screenplay for Script Frenzy this year is set in the same story world and has the same title as my NaNo novel from 2008 which is set in a mobile home park.

In October 2008 as prep work for my novel, Mobile Hopes, I went walking with Ed around our trailer park and the surrounding neighborhood taking pictures. For most I did not raise the camera to my eye and aim at anything particular. I kept it at my waist or even down by my hip and surreptitiously took shots at the yards, carports, cars, flower beds, porches, trailer sides and fronts, children's toys, signs, pets, puddles, trees, bushes, bikes, trikes, strollers, etc. I took pains to keep people out of the shots tho as I did not want to invade their privacy that way nor did I want any record of which face belonged to which trailer for the same reason.

My intent was to make a slide show of those images to use as inspiration during November but I ended up not getting it made until late December when I discovered this site that makes putting together a slide show painless. I am reposting it here in honor of my current Script Frenzy project and to make it easier to find and use for inspiration this month as it took me over an hour to find it this time.

One of the things I'm itching to do now is to take some of those shots and crop out image to focus on. There are some photos I could crop out several separate images. Plus there are more photos in my files. This represents only ten percent of the shots I got that October and there have been many other photos taking in our yard and vicinity for various family occasions and some of those could be included.

The reason for doing this is to jump start my muse as my memory and imagination is triggered by visual cues. Usually only a few seconds to a few minutes of gazing at a still image or flipping through a stack of them is enough to start a series of moving images with people acting out on the empty stages or joining those already there.

One of my work habit issues though is that I love daydreaming those mini-movies so much and find the act of trying to capture the magic of them on paper or screen in words only, I stay stuck in the inner movie and avoid the pen and keyboard.