In almost every television show there is the “couple” whose unrequited love is the emotional focal point of the series and which is often a source of frustration for the fans.

The writers need the tension that the pending romance provides, while the fans want their favorite couples to get together quickly and, after a while, will grow tired of waiting.  However, if the characters do get together, often times the tension and chemistry on the show evaporates. Very few shows have been able to pull this off successfully.  Most shows only allow their main characters to finally get together as a last ditch effort to save a show when it’s trending toward cancellation.

Castle (ABC) decided to approach this dilemma differently and handles this situation brilliantly. The show follows the exploits of a beautiful tough cop (Kate Beckett) who is forced to work with a self-centered, but gifted writer (Rick Castle).  The relationship starts off antagonistically, but their tension is really hiding their natural attraction for each other.

Instead of forcing the audience to wonder if they’ll ever get together, at the outset of the show the producers and cast members have affirmed that the Castle/Beckett relationship will grow romantically and will eventually end up with them in a relationship.  There is no “will they get together,”  the focus is  ”when will they get together.”  Having done so the writers are now able to allow flirting and foreshadowing without driving the audience crazy.  When fans know, without a doubt, that their favorite characters will eventually enter into a relationship, they don’t mind to wait and, instead, enjoy the ride.

The writers, instead, focus on the individual character’s journeys, which is far more satisfying for the viewer. For example, at the start of the show, Castle was in no way ready for a committed relationship, but, over the course of the first three seasons, is slowly getting there. This is juxtaposed with Beckett’s evolution and her inability to commit to a relationship at this time because of the guilt she feels for not being able to solve her mother’s murder – a fact which Beckett told Castle at the beginning of this season.  So the expectations are clear for the audience and the characters, yet the flirting continues.  The writers have effectively established a realistic timeline for the relationship and that both of the characters need to grow before they are able to be together.

Bones (FOX), on the other hand, has handled this situation horribly.  The show is about a brilliant, but socially inept forensic scientist (Temperance, aka “Bones”) and her solving mysteries with a hunky FBI Agent (Seeley Booth).  The Bones/Booth possible romance is the emotional anchor of the show.

I didn’t start watching the show until a friend of mine expressed her elevated frustration with the fact that her favorite characters weren’t a couple yet.  I caught up on the show by renting the previous seasons, convinced that it couldn’t possibly have warranted her level of frustration. After all it was just TV, right? Boy was I wrong. Not only was the set up for their relationship blatantly obvious, it was the focus of every. single. episode.

For seven years the fans have yearned for their favorite couple to admit their feelings to each other, only to be continuously discouraged. They do eventually get together, but you can tell it wasn’t planned.  In between the pilot and their final “get together,” the show has mostly been filled with anti-climactic cases and, more importantly, virtually no personal character growth. It was as if they were just biding their time until they finally gave in.  If it weren’t for the fact that the lead actress got pregnant, I doubt they would have gotten together at all.  The writers were obviously not prepared for this because the story arc of their relationship did not lead effectively to their eventual consummation.  It just sort of happened.

And while fans are happy that the couple is together now, I think they deserved a better ending. Don’t the fans deserve more when they’ve put up with Brennan’s quirks and her unfulfilled relationship with Booth for seven years only to be rewarded with a one night stand that ended in a pregnancy and a relationship in which they agree on little?

I understand when the actress became pregnant that they had to change the course of the show, but still, that is not the ending I had been hoping for, and is no longer a show that I continue to watch.

Almost equally as unfulfilling is the relationship between Ted and his unknown future wife in How I Met Your Mother.

Granted, Neil Patrick Harris, as Barney, is side-splitting funny and the chemistry between the actors is undeniable. But here is what I don’t understand: Ted has a long list of attributes and characteristics of which he is looking for in a woman… a looooong list. He claims that he desperately wants to find this woman and marry her, yet, at the same time, he continually has one night stands and short-term relationships.  (They’ve hinted he’ll meet his future wife at Barney’s wedding, BTW).

His uncontrollable behavior shows he has absolutely no respect for his future wife. The show should be titled, How I Hung Out With Friends and Slept With A Million Different Girls Until Uncle Barney Manned Up and Stopped Being A Jerk So I Could Meet Your Mother. When the relationship an entire fan base has been waiting for rests on Barney getting married, a man who has slept with over 200 women and thinks of them as prey…we’ve got a long way to go.

If Ted’s future wife is this amazingly fantastic woman, why does he think he deserves her?  He’s been a selfish, immoral jerk who can’t keep his pants buttoned.  If she is anything close to what he imagines her to be, then she can (and should) do a LOT better than the lowly, shallow and self-centered Ted.

Creating lasting TV relationship romances is a difficult task and producers and writers approach the subject matter differently, with varying levels of success.  Who knows, perhaps it’s because making a successful TV show is so difficult that they don’t anticipate having to drag out an “almost” relationship for long, but when your show is renewed for a third season, you better come to the table with something better than “more waiting.”

Like in real life, people will only wait for so long.  Then its off to the next best thing, perhaps to be found with a more satisfying show on competing station.

“There are no original ideas. There are only original people.”

This is never more true than in the world of entertainment, where the phrase may be augmented to state..

“There are no original ideas.  There are only original executions of those ideas.”

In books, film and television, an idea is a cheap item.  Coming up with a good idea is the easiest part of the process.  Fleshing out that idea into a compelling story is where the talent lies.  So, it’s not so important that the idea is original, it’s the execution of that idea that makes it special.

Now, we’re not talking about remakes of existing movies (like Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, etc.), we’re talking about reusing ideas.

For example, the show How I Met Your Mother is a blatant copy of Friends.

• They’re both about five NY friends who take up social residence at a nearby establishment; Friends had their couch in a coffee shop where  HIMYM have their booth in a bar.
• The on-again/off-again relationship on Friends of Ross & Rachel is played out on HIMYM with Ted & Robin.
• The stable, but goofy couple in Friends was Chandler & Monica and that’s played out by Marshall & Lily.
• And, of course, the womanizing friend of Joey is played by Barney on HIMYM.

But, that’s okay from a creative perspective because the cast/crew of HIMYM execute the comedy very well, in spite of it’s often immoral subject matter.

Another example?  Well, how many movies focus on a top government agent/killing machine that “goes rogue” either by choice or because they were set-up?

• There’s the Bourne movies, a few of the Mission: Impossible flicks, Sean Connery in The Rock, and that’s just the ones that I can think of off the top of my head.  I’m sure you can come up with many more.
• Plus there are two new movies coming out that repeat that premise, Haywire, directed by Steven Soderbergh and the new Denzel Washington/Ryan Reynolds film called Safe House.

Humans have been telling stories since our creation.  It’s part of the way God hard-wired us.  We tell stories in everything we do; jokes, art, media, or just talking to co-workers at lunch.  The odds that there is one unique idea that the billions of humans that have existed haven’t yet discovered is a virtual impossibility.

What’s important is how you tell that idea.   Look at the Matrix.  It’s an inventive way to tell the superhero story, but at the end of the day, it’s just another superhero story.

Anyone can take a pencil and paper and draw a picture, but only some people can turn that into art and tell their story.  Anyone can write a book or screenplay, but only a few people will tell their story in a way that resonates with us.

So, don’t worry about coming up with the next great idea.  Even if the idea is new to you, it’s almost a certainty that it’s been told before.

Instead, focus on how to tell that story in a way that is unexpected. That is what will make it memorable.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,600 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

When I first started my training I would “indicate” or be too obvious in showing what I was trying to do onstage.  When I would get done, Doc Shelton would stand up, holding his side as if he’d been punched and say, “You’re being too obvious.  It’s as if you were elbowing me in the side the entire scene yelling ‘see what I’m doing up here, I’m acting!’”

It was a great lesson and something I worked on from that time forward.

I certainly wish most television directors of mystery shows would have been a member of my class.  The basic problem with all TV mysteries is that you only have about 40 minutes to relay the plot, add some twists and surprise you at the end.  And, with so little time, you can only introduce so many characters which means that ONE of them has to be the bad guy/gal.

With such limitations, the LAST thing you want to do in relaying that story is to indicate ahead of time who is the bad guy.  But TV directors do this ALL THE TIME.  It drives me nuts.

Case and point, Rizzoli and Isles:  Last week the story was about a bank robbery gone bad.  The security footage shows two masked assailants robbing the bank and one of them shooting the bank manager.  When the cops finally find who they think was the shooter, he’s dead in the back of a van and was dead before the robbery. Now, they have to look for two new suspects.

The next scene they go and interview the brother of the dead guy at a day care to get some background.

While the brother of dead guy gets interviewed by the police…

…the TV director chooses to spend an additional two seconds on a close-up of one of the other fathers at the day care.

Those two seconds showing, indicating, spending too much time on a guy in the background, tells you everything.  Since there are two unknown suspects on the loose, because of those two seconds, I knew instantly that the brother and the guy in the background committed the crime and the murder.  I only had to wait another 30 minutes for the show to prove me right.

This happens time and time again.

Stop it already, would you Hollywood?  It is so frustrating.

Well written shows like Law & Order, Castle and Person of Interest do a great job of adding so many characters and twists that you will often lose track and still get surprised at the end.

But for most TV cop shows, it only takes two seconds to ruin an hour of television.

When we started Sonlight Pictures in 2008 we had a specific plan on how we wanted to develop projects, what types of projects we wanted to produce and a strategic plan of attack for growing the company one project at a time.

The first phase of the plan did far better than we expected.  We decided to make short films first as a way to spread our production wings a bit and to get our name out there.  It was a great success.

Club God, our first short film, won the Bronze Award at the Faith Film Festival.  And our web series Purgatory, USA, retitled as Nikki & Babs, has received wonderful reviews, festival nominations and is being distributed by the established Christian film distributor company Cloud Ten Pictures.  The Nikki & Babs DVD, which includes Club God as a bonus, is available all over the world. Wonderful!

Our next project in the mix is a romantic comedy called An Unfinished Work and is in pre-production.  Our primary focus now is creating the title song before moving onto the film portion of the project.  This is taking a bit longer than we expected, but the Lord has been very clear that we should focus on the song first.

After that our plan was to shoot our potential “franchise” project, The Adventures of Gabby Wells.  We developed a film trilogy that would be the foundation of the company for the next 10 years.  However, our experiences from Nikki & Babs made us realize that developing a television series would also be a good idea and the characters in the Gabby Wells movies were a perfect choice for such an endeavor.  So, we decided to write two seasons worth of television episodes of Gabby Wells and her friends where the storyline pre-dates the plots of the trilogies.

When we finished writing out the first two seasons of the Gabby Wells TV series, we realized that Gabby and her friends would also make a good series of novels.  The novels could co-exists inside and outside the world of the series and the movies, as long as the novels don’t interfere with the TV and movie plots.

So, we searched for a novelist that could take the first two seasons of the TV series and convert that into the first novel in the novel series, hoping that the novelist would take the character and book series into directions we never dreamed of while, at the same time, establishing the Gabby Wells brand in preparation for the TV series and movies.

And that’s where it’s all backwards. Usually you would choose to adapt a book into a movie or TV series. You could also take a TV series and evolve that into a movie.  If successful, you would then spin that movie into a trilogy. We’ve done the exact opposite. The idea for a trilogy became a series and is now becoming a novel.

Unable to find a young writer that fit the specific needs required to turn Gabby Wells into a novel, we’ve decided to do that task in-house and are actively working on a first draft.  We’re in the early stages of the writing process, but the feedback has been very positive.

The end result is that a film company is writing a novel about a TV series based on a movie trilogy that we haven’t shot yet.  The plus side is that, if the novel is successful, all of the other items in the franchise are already written.

Writing the novel has been a rewarding experience, where we can delve deeper into the internal faith struggle of the main character and how her faith journey evolves over the course of the story.  It’s an exciting opportunity and we look forward to what God has in store for our latest efforts.  We’ll have more on this in future blog entries.

In the meantime, we have to trust the Lord on this novel approach to getting a project done.  It is certainly not the conventional approach, but, then again, when has the Lord ever been conventional?

Yeah, it’s true.  In the last two weeks, both the investigators from Ghost Hunters and Decoded BOTH got lost while driving toward their destination.  Thankfully, they were both driving GPS equipped cars that allowed them to find their way.

Whew!  That was close!  Thank goodness they could elaborate on just how exceptional each cars’ GPS assistance was when they needed it most.  I mean, think of the consequences!

In the old days they would have edited out getting lost.

Gee, I miss the good ol’ days.

Our first video answers the simple question “How Old is the Catholic Mass?”  It uses the letter of St. Justin to Antoninus Pius in 155 A.D. that describes standard Christian celebration in the second century as a basis to compare it to the modern day Catholic Mass.

We used this video as an experiment on using our DSLR camera (Nikon D3100) to shoot the video.  The pros of using the camera fall into the benefits of using any DSLR to shoot video… the depth of field options were great.

The downside of using the D3100 specifically is a complete lack of manual controls.  During some situations it would create a oddly bright video, washing out the actor.  And the digital screen on the camera shows the colors to be much more accurate than they actually are when you import the footage into editing system.  Everything was exceptionally orange, which forced an intense amount of color correction.

The end quality is hit and miss, but passable.  It taught me that using a DSLR to shoot videos such as these is a great idea.  I just need to shoot with a much better camera, like the Canon 5D or 7D.

That may sound like an extreme statement, but it’s true.

Our society has perverted the purity of love into the corruption of lust.  Most relationships shown in film and television are not love, but lust, where each person simply pursues their own pleasure.  And once the relationship stops being “hot” or “romantic” or “loses steam” the lovers abandon each other to pursue the next lustful encounter.

Our children are bombarded with “lust as love” relationships over and over again.  Do you think its taken a toll?  Absolutely.  Just look at what is accepted in society today.  Continuously promoted ideas of sex without consequence and the complete acceptance of contraception and abortion.

You can boil down the differences between lust and love this way…

• Lust is selfish.  Love is selfless.
• Lust is self-gratifying.  Love is self-sacrificing.

As a matter of fact, all of the Seven Deadly Sins are selfish.

• Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony and Lust.

And all of the Seven Holy Virtues are selfless.

• Faith, Hope, Charity, Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude and Justice.

That battle between selfishness and selflessness is the clear dividing line between Evil and Good.  Between Hell and Heaven.

Where do your relationships fall?  Which side of the line do your actions lay?

And which side of the fence does Chastity fall?  Is it selfish or selfless?  Is it self-gratifying or self-sacrificing?

Why is this important?  Because there is only one thing that can keep you out of Heaven.  Sin.  That’s it.  There is no magic formula.  It’s that simple.

But who decides what a sin is?  Since sin is an offense to God, God decides.  Not you, nor me, but God is the sole decision maker of what offends him.

When Adam and Eve bit from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, it was so damaging because it made them think that, with that knowledge, THEY could decide what was sinful and what was not.  It was the beginning of moral relativism.

And what is the consequence of offending God and sin?  Death.  That’s why Jesus’ resurrection gave us a path to overcome sin and death, through righteousness and holiness in His salvation.

But, if God is the only one who defines sin, then how do we know what truly offends him?  If you believe in Divine Revelation, that God’s will regarding the salvation of men has been revealed to us in some way, then you must start with Sacred Scripture, the written Word of God.

For example, how do we know that God wants to reserve sex until after marriage?  It’s in the first two chapters of Genesis.

Genesis 2:24: “For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall become one flesh.”

It’s all right there.  Since the term “wife” is used, it means that they are married.  And only after marriage do they become one flesh.

But, what about contraception?  Where does it say that God doesn’t approve of contraception?

Genesis 1:27-28:  “And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them; and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply…”

First they are married and then they become one flesh so they may be fruitful and multiply.  That’s what God wants.  That was his intent.  Doing something else offends him.  That’s not hard to understand, right?  The meaning and expectations are clearly stated.  So what’s the problem?

The problem is that people prefer lust to love.  And they don’t want to give it up.  “Who are you or some church leaders out there to tell me what I can and cannot do in the bedroom?”

Well, the Bible is also very explicit about fornication, adultery, sodomy and pornography.  It’s all in there.

Look, the Church has one, simple job… to get you into Heaven.  It’s not there to be popular or succumb to the societal whims of the day.  It exists so that you will know what God expects of you so that you can, by your own free will, choose the difficult and holy path.

It is your decisions that will decide your eternal home.  Nobody else’s.

And Satan has but one job… to keep you out of Heaven.  He doesn’t care how you don’t go to Heaven, only that you don’t go to Heaven.  So, he does two things…

• First he entices you to sin.
• Second, he convinces you it’s not a sin.

Ask Adam and Eve if that approach sounds familiar.

Satan and his fellow fallen angels never sleep.  The will attack your weaknesses every moment of every day until you die, luring you to sin.

Sin damages your connection to God, slowing down the protective and renewing graces God provides us.  And some sins, like the ones mentioned above, are so serious that they are deadly, as the Apostles Paul and John call them.  They are also known as mortal sins.  They completely sever you from God.

At that point, without proper reconciliation, you are lost.  For how can one expect to spend eternity in the presence of God when you have, through your own decisions, chosen to sever yourself from him?

That’s why the Church teaches that anyone who dies with mortal sin on their soul must go to Hell, for Hell is the only place in existence where God is not present.  For those who choose to remove God from their lives through sin, Hell is the only place in any realm that can house you after your death.

So, how can we save our souls?

First, seek out reconciliation with God.  Jesus tells that the only way to guarantee damnation is through blaspheming the Holy Spirit, which means refusing God’s mercy.  Seek out his mercy.

Second, you need to change who you are to who you need to be.  When it comes to sexual relationships, that change begins with living a chaste life.   And just as the Seven Holy Virtues cure the Seven Deadly Sins, so does Love cure Lust.

Convert your relationships from a self-gratifying, selfish focus and embrace selflessness and self-sacrifice.

After all, is not God’s love only selfless and self-sacrifice?  Is not his mercy selfless?  Is not Jesus passion and crucifixion self-sacrifice?

God gave us the ability to love so that it may reflect his love for us, not a perverted, selfish form of it.

He gave us marriage with the intention of becoming one flesh.  This was a precursor to his marriage to his Church at Pentecost, where the Bridegroom (Jesus) and the Bride (the Church) become one as the Mystical Body of Christ.

What God has planned for you and your relationships is beautiful and holy and eternal.  Become a reflection of God’s love to you in every aspect of your life, especially in your relationships with others.

Check it out at http://www.parables.tv/nikkiandbabs.

What had originally started out as an interview about our Nikki & Babs series turned into something larger and Patti Maguire Armstrong has written a wonderful synopsis about the struggles that preceded and were the catalyst for the creation of Sonlight Pictures.

Please take a moment and read the article.