hmm… okay I can see your point I think. But I find it hard to give information in a different manner. This thread is all about the idea of making challenge and thus it is a little cluttered with opinions and suggestions.
I have tried to boil it all down in the starting post of the challenge thread so it is nice and short with the different points addressed. I really didn’t know that was still a confusing bunch of info.
But I will try to answer some of your questions:
First thing: I feel a month is really too long a time since people lose interest and you can write a 6- 10 page story in a few sittings 2-3. Usually if the time between those writing sessions get bigger the story gets more fragmented and the style tends to start shifting. Which means you have to spend still more time refining it later to get all that out. So I settled the matter and went for a shorter timespan. If that really is a problem I can change it of course.
Second thing: Doing a story inspired by one or more pictures raises the question from where to get the pictures. Roberto as a mod and busybody ( in a good way) tends to have all sorts of things going on here at CGtalk so for me it was an obvious thing to infrom him about our little challenge in the hope he could help us with the pictures.
And he did we got to use the pictures made by people on the other side of the forum. With the extra addition that our work could be used by others in turn to make a special fx movie.
And that last addition changed the rules a bit since those people have a need for action and sparks flying and not 40 pages of storyline addressing emotional characters.
But that is rather good I think since that gives a bit of change around the place. We have done that and the Souk has been posted with is more towards the original idea.
third: I am afraid I can’t make it as easy as you want with the 3 links… since this is a forum and not my web space where I can build forms and scripts to make everything as simple. But every new challenge has a new thread where you can sign in saying you are joining, where all the finals are posted, the first post has the rules and links to the inspiration image(s) or the images posted directly and once every entry is in we continue with voting, which we haven’t done last time, but comes down to you putting a couple of x’s in a table and maybe write a line or two for every entry. At the end I compare the tables and declare a winner based on that. No complex stuff.
fourth: yes it is a story writing challenge though you may write a screenplay as well. Story boarding we see as being too work intensive for as now. Since we count the work in “pages” which indeed might be a bit old school, the size of the page (which is based on it s paper ancestor) counts. However if you use your standard word processor setup you are good to go.
The thing is that when you do a maximum amount of words (which is also possible) you feel less freedom in writing since most will want to use every space they have. pages is just convient that way. The same goes for type size BTW… just to make sure some people double their space by going micro type.
And yes, if you don’t know what a souk is (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souq) you can make up anything you want. As stated in the challenge thread the only “rule” is that we can recognize something from the picture on your story. I also mentioned the fact that it is a marketplace back in the challenge thread.
I sincerely hope that you have visited the challenge thread… I must say I am inclined to think you haven’t. So let me post this again for superior clearity.
—CLICK HERE FOR THE SECOND WRITING CHALLENGE —
rules images and posting space included
I really hoped we could go along with the challenge today but without pictures it aint gonna happen… please wait while we adress this technical difficulty 