The Psychological Need And Its Connection To The Ghost.

The hero’s problems do not solve for two reasons: The first is lack of information; the second is an earlier unsolved problem on the same subject.

Like us, a character has to evaluate information in order to resolve problems. When a character fixes his attention on something dangerous he is probably over-evaluating the information. When he is unable to fix his attention, it is because he cannot find information to evaluate.

This will become clearer to you when you have completed the following exercise in creating a back-story for your hero. This has a lot to do with the revelations your hero has along the way to their Self-revelation, near the end of the script.

1. List five problems, with people or objects or circumstances, which your hero is not solving in the present.
2. Now list what your hero wishes they knew about each one of the problems above. (The missing information they wish they had)
3. Now list how important your hero now feels these problems actually are or whether or not they are now solved.
4. If any of the five problems remain unsolved, list what your hero would have to do to solve them.

 Now let’s take a glance at the hero’s past. There are several problems, undoubtedly, which your hero will feel they didn’t solve.

1.  List five problems, with people or objects or circumstances, which your hero feels they didn’t solve in the past.
2. Now list what your hero wishes they had known about each one of the problems.
3. Now list how important these problems actually are to your hero’s present circumstances.
4. If any of the above problems still bother your hero, what would they have to do or know in order to resolve them?

Let us now take a look at the problems of the future. This deals with the actual script and your hero’s dealings with the opponent, minor opponents, and the opponent’s allies throughout the story. 

1. List five problems, with people or objects or circumstances which you think your hero will have to solve in the future.
2. Now list what your hero will have to do now to solve these problems in the future.
3. Now list how vital these problems may become to your hero’s existence.
4. If any of the above problems worry you, it is because you have not decided upon your hero’s course of action. Try to list your hero’s course as it will probably be taken in the script.

We should also include the Goals of the hero. Some poet once said that a man’s dreams were important and that when the last of a man’s dreams were dead, dead was the man.

Dreams, goals, ambitions, these are the stuff your hero uses for fuel. SURVIVAL is nothing but the effort to accomplish action. There is the broad goal of all survival. There is the small goal of a good action. SURVIVAL, action and goals are inseparable.
 
The hero’s happiness could be defined as the emotion of progress toward desirable goals. There is an instant of contemplation of the last goal in which your hero is content. But contentment becomes boredom immediately that new goals do not come to view. There is no more unhappy thing than a man who has accomplished all his ends in life. For instance Edward Gibbon (an English historian best known for his history of the Roman Empire), died immediately after finishing his great work. It is doubtful if men die when they have great goals ahead of them, except perhaps in the violent action of some attempted attainments. It is doubtful if it would take more than a flick with a feather to kill a character who has no goals. A neurotic without goals catches a harmless bug, sneezes and dies. Or sneezes and dies without a bug getting near him.

Your hero always has a goal. They often fail. When they have failed often enough they stop thinking about the future and start worrying over the present. When the present hands them a few failures they start worrying about the past. They go “out of present time”. If you were simply to walk through an insane asylum and tell each inmate, “Come up to Present Time” a small percentage would immediately become sane and stay sane. The order would unfix their attention from a past maybe or fix their attention on the present. It has been tried and has succeeded.

 
More happily, let’s brainstorm and examine your hero’s goals and fears—their psychological need.

1. List five goals your hero had in the past.
2. List what happened to the five goals in the past.
3. List five fears which your hero have in your present.
4. List five fears which you might expect your hero to encounter in the future.

Now go back over your lists and for each item in the goals columns, see if you can find some person in your hero’s past or present in your script who might have these goals or who might have had them. Some person other than the hero themselves.
 
Now go down the past and present and future fears column and see if you can find some person in your hero’s past who might have had these fears other than the hero.
 
When you have noted down these people or one person from your hero’s past, answer the following:

Is that character dead? Are those characters dead? Did they fail?
 
You should be able to sort out your hero’s own goals from “dead men’s goals”. And you should be able to sort out your hero’s own fears from “dead men’s fears”. It’s a very peculiar thing that the hero may be seeking a life continuation and life realization from a character no longer amongst him/her in that precise identity.

Out of nobility and grief, the hero takes on the burdens of those who have laid down their burdens. This includes pets. There may be one dead character or half a dozen. One dead pet or two or three. List briefly the goals of each dead person your hero has loved. Then briefly list the goals of each pet.

You may have wept doing this, remembering your own loss. If so, come up to present time. Now recall the last fun time you had in the fullest detail. Be very precise in trying to re-experience this good time.

Better?

Let’s see now if you can create the following for each person and pet you may have listed for your hero.

1. The precise moment your hero first decided they had affection for them. Then any moment they decided they had affection for them.
2. Any moment they decided they were like them. Now, the first moment your hero decided you were like them.
3. Any time your hero regretted something they had done to themselves. The first time your hero regretted something they had done to themselves.

With this much background failure the world has been in apathy about the body. It was born, it grew, and it died. Surgery and drugs could stem the tide of time a brief moment. But that was all. This dramatic struggle for knowledge of the human body was a struggle against time. Time’s scythe in the hands of that grim gentleman, Death, won every contest.

Now and then a mystic would rise in the world and with a few passes of the hand cause the crippled, the sightless, the faltering to bloom with life once more. Then the mystic, the adept, the master would vanish and Man would struggle on with attention to their relics but without many repetitions of the miracles.

That faith or thought could do such astonishing things in the hands of a master or adept brought men like Freud into heavy ambition to resolve the human body’s ills by resolving the ills of the mind. The medical profession of his day ostracized Freud. Today psychoanalysis and psychologists speak with contempt of Freud—perhaps they owe him too much. But Freud is the grand old man of psychosomatic healing. He popularized the idea that something could be done about human unhappiness via treatment of the mind and that human ills might be handled by handling the “ego”, the “id” and the other mental entities Freud thought he had discovered. Freud had many pupils Jung, Adler and others who decided only they themselves could see the light and so went sailing off into further and further incredibles. Of all these it now seems evident that Freud himself was the only one of them who had even started toward the straight and narrow road to complete physical rehabilitation of the body via the human mind.

The hero’s identity is the composite of all their experience, PLUS an initial decision TO BE and occasional decisions NOT TO BE. The hero doesn’t die as an identity or heroality or an individual. There is a family line, then, from generation to generation, modified by your hero as experience. They are not necessarily part of that family line. Every child, for instance, distrusts his identity as a family member. And there are numerous cases of record where a child, up to the age of three or five, recalled entirely who he had been in a past life—but forgot it under the pummeling of his “imagination” by adults. Perhaps your hero will take off after some lifetime and go to heaven. Nobody can argue successfully about that. But your hero is the source of themselves with regard to various generations. Now this becomes so irrefutable, so clear and unmistakable that if it can be disproven, then the laws of heat and fission can be disproven as well. We are on solid ground about immortality and all the rest of it for the first time in history.

Your hero is evidently quite eternal as a heroal identity. They get snarled up in the modern social aberrations about only living once and play the game as though they would never get another chance—which they will get at the self-revelation as certainly as the sun will rise tomorrow.

Now if they can handle a body in construction as a superhero, they can certainly modify one in growth and form, as in the superhero stories such as Superman, Batman and the X-men. And so does your hero. You can modify it to the degree of going blind or getting arthritis and being bed-ridden or having migraines or putting any other imperfection on them. Your hero, as CAUSE, is continually shouldering the ills of the world and modifying themselves accordingly.

Once having taken on such an ill to “help” another, they may be very reluctant to give up the infirmity. Evidently it doesn’t help the other very much but your hero, with their social aberration that a hero lives only once and never again, take the illness or demise of another very seriously. Much too seriously. Remember Bruce Wayne’s parents were gunned down by the Joker when he was a petty thief, causing Bruce to become Batman. As Bruce, in his latter life, became emotionally close to Alfred, the butler, who has arthritis, and if dies, and so there he is with Alfred’s arthritis. Of course, it isn’t his. It’s an old injury of his own—which he is holding in place for him. Characters will give up any illness or infirmity which is theirs—their very own—with immediate ease and no qualms. But they are quite tenacious of the ills they have shouldered for others. This caused old workers in the field of the mind to suppose that people simply refused to get well. No, character simply refuses to give up the illness of others for whom they have made themselves responsible, until they clearly see that holding the illness will not bring back or restore the health of that other. It’s a wonderful world. Man has condemned Man for selfishness for eons and here we find Man only gets lastingly crippled or lame to “help” another.

Once it was said that if a character knew the world was going to end tomorrow, the phone lines of the world would be jammed with calls from characters seeking to say they loved one another. It is probably quite true.

In the field of illness, however, once one realizes how little it helps, one can give up another’s aches and pains and resume his own health. It is quite a decision. You may find that your hero will be trying to make that decision. For example, a totally blind man making that decision could make the abrupt realization that he would see wholly and clearly for the first time in years. Just an instant before his sight turns on, he balks. Why? His trouble with sight had to do with the death of his brother. His brother had been injured and was blinded in an automobile accident. The moment the brother died, this character had taken on the burdens of his brother.

1. Now list 10 things which your hero wishes they could attain in the tomorrows, such as physical beauty, of strength, whether you think they can attain them or not. Get as wild as you like.
2. Now let’s be critical. List five things which you think may be wrong with your hero’s present physical being. List them with the thought that they might be remedied. Such things as frequent colds, etc.
3. Now list the 3 characters or pets that have failed or are dead who had things wrong with them. There may be more than one with each. Take the first error you listed above as number one and write the name of the character who might have had that ill after number one below and so on. You may not be able to account for some of your hero’s conditions.

The truth behind psycho-babble

If you've ever felt that most psychiatrists and psychologists are just making it up as they go along, you're not far off.

Most Shrinks place little to no value on science and research, just the value of your insurance check. In return, they'll give you whatever screwball treatment they feel like -- whether it works or not.

But you don't have to take my word for it -- just take a look at the damning new report in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, the result of a major two-year analysis that lays out the ugly truth behind this shady industry.

"Many clinical psychologists today, perhaps the majority, are deeply ambivalent about the role of science in informing their practice," the authors write.

This report wasn't written by some unhappy fringe or radical group looking to discredit psychology. It was written by a group of top psychologists, some of the few rays of light who see the darkness engulfing their profession.

Any so-called doctor who ignores real scientific research and just goes with whatever he likes is a QUACK, plain and simple. As far as I'm concerned, it's always hunting season for these lame ducks -- but I'm going to let someone else take aim…

"The disconnect between what clinicians do and what science has discovered is an unconscionable embarrassment", Columbia University's Walter Mischel told Newsweek in an article on the report.

Dr. Mischel isn't some sharp-tongued malcontent -- he's one of the leading names in his field, a man who has written some of the textbooks used in psychology courses. Mischel wrote an editorial that went along with the study, and if you take a moment to read it you'll never look at your shrink the same way again.

That recent article in Newsweek looked at the solid research behind proven techniques such as cognitive behavioral therapy for conditions such as panic disorders and depression.

Yet many psychologists prefer bizarre treatments like dolphin-assisted therapy, where the animals are supposed to help people overcome their disorders.

The great shame of it is that there are some effective psychological treatments that work far better than meds for some tough disorders.

Just don't expect to get them from your local quack doctor.

Global Integration Of The Film Industry: A Suggestion

The ways in which corporations and companies operate vary considerably, and they may informally be classified in several ways:

When two companies directly competing with each other merge, the process is called horizontal integration; when suppliers and customers merge, the process is vertical integration.

Vertical integration characterizes companies that engage in the different stages of manufacturing or marketing of a product, absorbing them into one corporate structure that retains its original identity. Studios involved in the production, distribution, and exhibition of films in their own theatres and TV and cable stations demonstrate this vertical integration. This differs from a consolidation, in which several concerns are dissolved in order to form a completely new integrated company, or a takeover, which is a purchase of a company against its will or the will of its shareholders.

As you know, in October 2006 Macquarie Bank in Australia, a venture capital company that provides some film funding to Australian film productions, contacted us wanting to buy WSAI for $300 million. We knew they had intentions of consolidating us into their production service arm, which is why we had no hesitation in turning down their offer. (Besides, Universal offered $180 mil more). WSAI is a globally integrated network as well as being a global literary and production consultancy. The sale would have been paramount to selling Sony Pictures to Kinko’s.

Horizontal integration embraces companies engaged in the sale of the same or similar products. Absorption into a single firm of several firms involved in the same level of production and sharing resources at that level. A conglomerate, such as Sony and Technicolor, is where a holding company controls other companies conducting diverse types of business, ranging perhaps from financial services to motion picture equipment manufacture to special effects houses to talent management to production to distribution.

Up to now we’ve been aware of the multinational corporate model where a company duplicates itself in different countries. Many of the studios such as 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros apply this business model. So no matter what country you are in, the company is identical to the parent company down to the last detail, but they use different suppliers in the different countries. But is the 20th century, mid 40’s multinational business model on its last legs, doomed to dissolve into the history books?

As an industry, we are now more global—Hollywood is a global industry—so we need to apply globalization methods to the way Hollywood works and integrate independent contractors and independent companies into the model. Hollywood is not vertical integration. It is not horizontal integration. It’s not even a company—it’s become a style and technical method of storytelling that even Bollywood is now using.

Global Integration

Driving growth globally in the film industry today requires companies to leverage the skills and capabilities of a global workforce, integrate operations and successfully manage their business globally. This is what I mean by Global Integration. Through global integration—not labor arbitrage—we can capitalize on emerging talent pools and integrate them with our local expertise to drive value for audiences and investors. Moreover, we should be using our technology to automate processes for continuous productivity gains and driving fundamental change in the way we manage our operations. When we do this—transform the processes and integrate globally—two things happen: costs go down and service levels go up. And this creates unique capabilities for the film industry to drive growth.

Globalization is a concept that encapsulates the growth of connections between people on a planetary scale. Globalization involves the reduction of barriers to trans-world contacts. Through it people become more able—physically, legally, culturally, and psychologically—to engage with each other in “one world”. People experience global consciousness, inasmuch as we define the realm of our lives in trans-world, planetary terms.

To us, globalization is having the ability to assemble the right skills, in the right place, at the right cost and being able to harness them along with our expertise and experience on behalf of production companies and production services.

It is about global integration, the ability to integrate vast capabilities globally to innovate, and this should be our strategy. Innovation and integration are key drivers and they underpin the three elements of the new business model—growth, productivity and effective use of cash.

Global integration supports the new Indie business model. It is how we are developing capabilities our businesses can leverage to drive growth. And the power of this approach boils down to three things:

The film industry has unmatched global capabilities.

1. 
   
   We can all globally integrate these capabilities to enable growth and provide competitive advantage.
   
   
   
2. 
   
   We can be more confident in our ability to deliver on a sustained basis three points of Earnings Per Share (EPS) growth from production.
   
   
   

WSAI Virtual Studios have a portfolio of businesses and unique capabilities:

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  Breadth and depth in services.
  
  
  
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  Unique capabilities in research, intellectual capital, business relationships, deep local roots and industry insight and global experience.
  
  
  

 We are using some of the savings from productivity to:

1. Help Reinvent Service Delivery

We’re pairing film production professionals with services delivery experts to create a virtual global delivery platform to unify the film industry’s entire network of production delivery centers such as Hollywood and Bollywood. Standard processes and automation will allow us to distribute work seamlessly, globally between centers, providing unprecedented levels of reliability for our clients with automatic back-up and fail over capability.

In addition, the automation of service delivery will allow us to scale without adding as many new resources, dramatically lowering costs by reducing the dependence on labor for micro budget films.

2. Assemble Global Teams

In global production services, the scale of our global capabilities is an advantage. To make it easier to leverage them, we’ve created a professional marketplace. It is a unique resource staffing model that lets us and you quickly assemble and deploy global production teams based on skills, availability and cost that meet the requirements and price points of an engagement.

Because our approach is transformational—not simply helping you cut costs—our ability to deliver three points of EPS growth from productivity is sustainable.

Through global integration we are addressing nearly all of the film industry’s cost structure.

Some are the benefits we’ve seen include:

1. Integrated Supply Chain

Significant annual cost takeout on procured talent and services–optimized sourcing, vendor leverage, production design efficiencies, and disciplined processes.

2. Global Support Functions

Integrating IT, Finance, HR, Sales Operations, Real Estate, Communications, Marketing, and Legal.

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  Targeting 10-15% film productivity annually;
  
  
  
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  Establishing Centers of Excellence to streamline and optimize specific production processes.
  
  
  
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  HR globalizing employee service centers, Talent management, and learning.
  
  
  
• 
  
  Introducing the utilization of IT and recommending the deployment of low-cost VOIP and e-mail offerings, shifting to global delivery centers.
  
  
  
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  Deal Hub centers of expertise to optimize pre-sales support – demonstrated improved win rates.
  
  
  

 3. Service Delivery

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  Created Global Competencies –75% of resources are now optimized globally to reduce costs, capture best practices, add flexibility in delivery, invest in tools and enabling technologies.
  
  
  
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  Improving services margins.
  
  
  

These capabilities individually are impressive, but integrated they provide a significant competitive advantage.

We all can use the process discipline demonstrated effectively in the production service supply chain and apply it to more processes across company. We are:

1. 
   
   Gaining access to talent and skills wherever they are in the world; and integrating them globally to develop new, distinctive capabilities to enable growth.
   
   
   
2. 
   
   Transforming business and production processes—componentizing, simplifying, standardizing and globalizing them to ensure a consistent and high-quality experience for clients. We are doing work where it can be most effectively and efficiently done
   
   
   
3. 
   
   Infusing technology and process transformation; automating workflows to improve speed, eliminate latency and improve responsiveness to production companies and production services while dramatically lowering your cost structure.
   
   
   

Globalization is the trend whereby these various kinds of global relations emerge, proliferate, and expand. As a result of global integration, social geography gains a planetary dimension. “Place” comes to involve more than local, provincial, country, regional, and continental realms. With globalization the world as a whole also becomes a social space in its own right.

Thus global connections in the film industry entail a different kind of geography. Whereas other social contexts are territorially delimited, global relations transcend territorial distances and territorial borders to unfold on planet Earth as a single social space. In this sense globalization might be characterized as the rise of “supraterritoriality”.

Of course globalization does not signal the end of other social spaces. The rise of supraterritoriality does not eliminate the significance of localities, countries, and regions. Nor does the spread of trans-world connections abolish territorial governments or dissolve territorial identities. Global integration means the coexistence and interrelation of local, national, regional, and other dimensions of geography when working with filmmakers and production services on a global basis.

More advanced storytelling technologies mirror this global culture. Culture is now expressed as the land, people and technology in use and the social systems and stages of the character world and the particular cultural stages that go with them.

WSAI was one of the very first companies in (1997) to use a globally integrated enterprise model. This model provides you with actual people or services in different locations around the world that have the expertise that you may require. These guys are independent. Their companies are independent. So, we don’t own their companies and they are not on staff. So we’re not a vertical or horizontally integrated company, but a globally integrated NETWORK.

Global integration is the promoting of an open business environment and identifying, developing, and capitalizing on individual expertise on a global scale and integrating them into a business model. But you must be open-minded to be globally integrated. The difference is that there is a global relationship connection to those companies or people that have the expertise in their particular field that you can utilize to carry out any element of your production.

eBay is a good example of a globally integrated network. Created by the Bank of America, eBay’s core activities are the provision of a global portal (website) where sellers can display and market their wares and service providers can promote and sell their services and by providing a global payment system (PayPal) anyone can use.

They provide a network for thousands of retail and service providers around the world to be connected with customers and clients from diverse countries. They created PayPal as a single payment point that can be accessed readily by anyone, and distribution is made easier for all because instead of using hundreds of different transport companies for sellers to get their wares to their customers halfway around the world or next door, they can recommend the choice of just a few of the better international ones.

In the same way, WSAI provides a portal (crew list) of experienced above and below-the-line crew from around the world along with their resumes, linking the world to you, and you to the world. Our other core activities are the provision of development, production, and consulting services to the film and television industries.

What global integration means to you as a producer is you have a global—not just local—connection thanks to the internet, email, and broadband, etc. It also means, since the film industry is global, you can have office staff from three or three hundred handling your core activities and a potential production team of up to fifty thousand, operating in almost any city in the world. It also means that you can pay or receive salaries and fees across the Internet by use of PayPal straight into your or their bank accounts. And it also means you have an instant connection to advanced technologies.

Forces Behind Globalization

What generates globalization? What makes it happen? Different social theories offer different interpretations of how and why trans-world connections have grown. For example, liberal economics of the film industry stresses the role of unfettered market forces in a context of technological change and deregulation.

Technological innovation in the film industry has contributed to globalization by supplying a new infrastructure for trans-world connections. In particular, developments in means of transport, communications, and data processing have allowed global links to become denser, faster, more reliable, and much cheaper. Large-scale and rapid globalization has depended on a host of innovations relating to coaxial and later fibre-optic cables, packaging and preservation techniques, semiconductor devices, computer software, and so on. In other words, global relations could not develop without physical tools to effect cross-planetary contacts.

Next to technology, regulation of the film industries have also played an enabling role for globalization. Supraterritorial links would not be possible in the absence of various facilitating rules, procedures, norms, and institutions. For example, global communications rely heavily on technical standardization and advancement. Global film finance depends in good measure on a working world monetary regime. Global film production and trade are greatly promoted by liberalization, that is, the removal of tariffs, capital controls, and other state-imposed restrictions on the movement of resources between countries. Tax laws, labor legislation, and environmental codes can also encourage (or discourage) global investment. In short, globalization requires supporting regulatory frameworks.

Consequences

What, then, are the consequences of integrated globalization? I have already noted the most direct impact, namely, that globalization changes the contours of social geography. However, since geography is intertwined with other dimensions of social relations, it is not surprising that globalization also has wider implications—among other things—for economics, politics, and culture.

In terms of economics, for example, global integration of the film industry substantially alters the organization of production, distribution, and consumption. Many production companies and studios still “go global” by duplicating themselves across the planet as a multinational. This is fast becoming an outmoded business model because, in many cases, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

For example, an American Citibank credit card holder may be paying 6.45% interest on their gold card. If they moved to Australia, Citibank Australia will charge them 19.7% on their account without the knowledge or authority of Citibank America, refusing point-blank to honor the parent company’s agreement with the customer.

Many enterprises are now forming trans-world alliances with other companies and individuals through global integration, and this allows the creativity of the staff because they are not locked in to a regimented hierarchy structure. This means there is creative advancement and the opinions of even the mailroom boy mean something. IBM is currently restructuring the lateral business model it created in the period 1970 – 1972 in order to make way for global integration of their products and services.

In IBM’s lateral business model, the head of each division was answerable to that divisional head of the country’s head office, and in turn is answerable to the divisional head of IBM’s world headquarters, and each department head was answerable in like terms. The left hand KNEW what the right hand was doing... WHILE it was doing it.

In standard multinationals, such as Citibank, only the CEO is answerable to their world headquarters and can be answerable to anyone in the company, even the mailroom boy, because they aren’t interested in technological or business advancement, just the bottom line.

In a knee-jerk reaction to globalization, countless mergers and acquisitions occur as business adjusts to global markets. Questions of competition and monopoly can arise as a result. As a result of this reaction, studios relocate many production facilities as globalization reduces transport and communications costs. Globalization also expands the “virtual economy” of information and finance, sometimes at the expense of the “real economy” of distribution and production. All of this economic restructuring in the face of globalization raises vital issues of human security related to employment, labor conditions, poverty, and social cohesion.

The future extent of global integration above globalization is unclear. In one scenario the 21st century will experience a continuation—if not a further acceleration—of recent high rates of globalization. In an alternative account, globalization will slow down and stop once it reaches a certain plateau. In yet another forecast—for example, if globalization is a cyclical trend or succumbs to traditionalist opposition—the future will bring a process of de-globalization (centralization) that reduces trans-world connections.

The first step made into the global integration of the film industry was made when Melissa Gilbert—during the time she was president of the Screen Actor’s Guild—created and instigated Global Rule 1, which also includes the “better rates principle” which means if the production originates from a country that has a superior agreement protecting performers, that superior agreement will apply to that production as the offshore agreement.

This means—using Spielberg’s “Pacific” as an example—all Australian actors on the project are subject to the SAG Agreement and USD fee rates and Australian Extras are subject to Australia’s Actor’s Equity Extra’s Agreement and AUD fee rates, because they are the more superior Agreements.

The global integration of Hollywood, using an extended version of the Global Rule 1 to include crews as part the model, would mean that crews would work under the superior agreement no matter what country the originating company is producing in.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you’ll be paying everyone on the globe in US currency rates based on American crew Agreements. A Canadian script supervisor is still going to be paid $29.77 per hour Canadian (negotiable), if the agreement in Canada says that’s their minimum fee and it may even be the superior Agreement. An equivalent Scripty in the US might get $45.00 per hour, so you would not only be saving $15.23 an hour; you’re making a double saving because Canadian money is cheaper than American money. Even $45 Canadian is cheaper than US currency.

On the other hand, a production service in Madrid that sends you a bill for eighty thousand Euros is still going to cost you a little over $100,000 US dollars. What I’m saying here is that it generally balances out or is cheaper, so you can still have your production manager in Los Angeles budget to US dollars for your investors, but they will, of course, know the rates of a good location manager in London based on that country’s .production crew Agreement.

That is only a small part of global integration. Global integration also means that you have global reach. The world is your studio. If a script calls for your hero to briefly go to and be attacked in New Delhi and the cost of creating identical sets in your location is prohibitive, you can call on a production team there to do the filming and send the completed shots back to you for editing or you can use the facilities there, saving you money and heavy logistics.

With global integration, you can be in Canada, acquire a UK-written script, develop it in Italy—with the director in Los Angeles, Director of Development in Melbourne Australia, script editor in Oklahoma, and Production manager in New Zealand—get funding from Germany, do pre-production in Los Angeles, film in Omaha, the Ukraine, and Ireland (simultaneously), do post-production in Sydney, have the CGI done in Singapore, have the music and re-recording done in London, and still be regarded as a wholly Canadian production because your core production activities are there. What would’ve cost $60 million to produce if completely done in Saskatoon, might only cost you $37 million in the end, based on the differing currency rates, but also depending on the “better rates principle”.

With global integration, “Runaway Productions” is not a problem but the name of a US production company.

During the last 12 months The International Producers Alliance has taken to global integration like a duck to water. Almost daily I read requests of a production company in one country requiring contact with production services in another to film the scenes requiring an overseas location.

Even though global integration is still in its early days and still being tweaked by us as well as IBM and others, if global integration of the film industry was applied, as well as an extension of Global Rule 1 to crews, negotiation would be less taxing and less heated when filming in other countries, because everyone would know the score (and that country’s crew and performer’s Agreements) before they go there.

Each of the organizations and people in WSAI’s crew list, and their corresponding best practices, are recognized on a world-wide basis as the standard guidance for practitioners in their respective fields.

Global Integration: The Framework

The Global Integration framework brings together industry standards, integration, best practices, formal modeling techniques, and other initiatives to create a prescriptive approach to integration.

The global integration practice in the film industry is coming of age. The film community has been integrating production in some way, shape, or form ever since Hollywood’s golden age. In the mid 1980’s, the integration field exploded with the introduction of independent middleware technology (set building, editing, special effects and visual effects houses) as discrete industries. What followed was the rapid development of myriad production solutions by hundreds of integrated production software, production services and consulting companies, and the introduction of many new proposed standards. That market has since consolidated, matured, and middleware technology has demonstrated that it is here to stay; although it will continue to morph into new forms as innovations drive new solutions to complex production problems.

With the maturing of the global integration of markets and services, comes a new demand; the need for consistent and proven practices that will carry the film industry forward for a long time and compliment them with a number of additional elements to create a holistic framework for integration activities.

A vendor-neutral reference architecture,

1. 
   
   An integration methodology including prescriptive templates and standards,
   
   
   
2. 
   
   A central registry of production personnel and companies,
   
   
   
3. 
   
   An education program, and
   
   
   
4. 
   
   A certification process to validate the skills and knowledge of individuals, the conformance of film industry-related products and standards, and the maturity of organizations.
   
   
   

A global integration network is intended to be prescriptive in nature. In other words, it is much more than the typical guidelines, principles, connections, and heuristics. It’s purpose is to provide specific integration solutions to specific production problem scenarios. This is not to say that there aren’t other ways to be successful, but the value of global integration is that it is based on real-world scenarios that have been proven to work; follow the prescription and you will be successful.

One of the reasons for the success of the Internet is that it has achieved, in some respects at least, the “holy grail” of continuous innovation while retaining a low-cost shared infrastructure. When everyone plays by the “rules” of the film industry, then everyone can use it and improve it, but it continues to operate efficiently. The vision of the global integration of the film industry is to achieve the same level of utility for application and data integration as the internet has achieved with the ubiquitous browser. Specifically, this will define non-functional production requirements such that vendors can build highly modular production components that can be assembled flexibly and easily. Furthermore, the standards will be sufficiently proven and ubiquitous that production companies will mandate it.

The vision is not unique in some respects. It can be described as a boundryless information flow. The fact that many organizations have a similar vision is good.

There are many dimensions to making global integration easy and it will require broad-based industry support to make it a reality. The vision is not to duplicate the work of other organizations, but rather to use what works from different groups and assemble it into a holistic solution.

Hollywood will support global integration because it allows it to focus on solving business problems rather than technical integration problems. A few years ago, many production companies and production services’ production strategy still had a strong proprietary emphasis which resulted in a double-edged sword of competitive advantage and vendor lock-in. The focus has changed in recent years and the majority of vendors have embraced standards and open systems given the reality of needing to interact with products from other vendors and in the interests of efficiency. But a key challenge remains; which standards to adopt and how quickly? Global integration of the film industry will help answer this question.

A further motivation for production vendors is that global integration will enable the creation of an entirely new category of tools to support the production framework. Those vendors that are early pioneers and leaders in its development, will have a time-to-market advantage in developing the new tools.

Production service companies will support global integration because they also want to focus on business problems rather than technical issues and because fundamentally it will lower the cost of production. Production companies can and should demand that production services conform to a specific set of standards. But doing so by “boycotting” products that don’t conform to the standards the production company likes at any given point in time is a backhanded way of achieving compliance. Production companies will participate in the global integration development in order to “earn the right” to demand that their production services conform to the specification.

Room For Discussion

The process by which the Hollywood will achieve the global integration vision is an open collaborative process that involves all film industry members that are willing to participate. Elements of the global integration framework may be contributed by any member. Once submitted for consideration, it is debated at workshops, refined in discussion and practice, and may be combined with other elements. Once accepted by the film industry, it becomes an official proposed global standard.

A frequently asked question would be, “Why the extra work? Aren’t the standards as delivered good enough?” The trouble is that the standards are often put together by differing subcommittees, and while in theory the film industry standards bodies should reconcile all such differences, the reality is that this doesn’t always happen. There are production service agendas at work, and the elimination of one alternative in favor of another sometimes is politically impossible, or technically undesirable. This is where a proven reference interpretation is useful.

Tech Talk: The Ghost Hunter -- Handling Ghosts

In creating supernatural elements of the Horror/Drama genre where your hero is chasing ghosts, you need to use the same technology that actual Ghostbusters such as Hans Holzer did. Unless you're doing a supernatural comedy, you're not going to grab a group of University students from the parapsychology lab and give them cool gadgets that do nothing more than pick up the radiation from electricity and phone lines, or Night Vision goggles that pick up heat signatures. Only bodies give off heat, ghosts don't. Most often, the goggles just give off the residual heat from where a character stood moments before. An essential tool in the Ghostbuster's toolkit is a verified Medium, not a run-of-the-mill psychic.

Everyone is psychic to one degree or another. It's what we are. We are spirits that created and use a body as a vehicle in the physical universe. We are not the body itself. So just use self-confessed Psychics as comedy relief.

A Clairvoyant is the next rung up the ladder. Clairvoyance means "Clear seeing". This does not authomatically mean that they see ghosts. In Ghost Whisperer, Jamie Kennedy plays a character whose clairvoyant abilities are that of clairsentience (meaning he can feel the presence of entities) as well as clairaudience (he can hear them). The character of Alison Dubois (played by Patricia Arquette) in Medium is regarded as a low level Clairvoyant. To regard her as a Psychic would be taken as an insult by actual Clairvoyants, as it is a much higher level.

Mediumship is the next rung up the ladder. Very few Clairvoyants are perfect mediums between the seen and unseen worlds, as mediumship is a high ability. To refer to the character of Melinda Gordon as a Psychic would show gross ignorance in the even basic idea of the subject. Melinda Gordon is a Medium.

As Hans Holzer once discoverd, more often than not poltergeist activity is caused by a living person in the room. The first question he would ask is who was the person that mostly witnessed the activity. He found that th activity was, in most cases, caused by that person.

In the case the haunted house is really haunted, and not the residual effects of the negative emotions of those currntly living there that has permeated the house, the Ghostbuster would proceed as follows.

If an entity of some sort gets stirred up or shows up or grabs your attention in some way, the first thing to realize is that they generally have very little ability to affect you. It is you, not them, who mocks up your subconscious, your somatics, your emotions, and your existence.

All they can generally do is stir things up and remind you of things that are disturbing.

First and foremost, hold your position in space and face up to these guys.

The most useful techniques are:

a) Point to the being you divided from (discussed at greater length in the write-up on “Divide and Conquer”).

b) Have them spot the various entry points discussed in the section “Handling Loss” below.

c) Especially, simply asking “Who Are You” and coaxing them into answering “Me”.

In the rare case that a full being (rather than a fragment) who is between lives shows up, Technique B is usually best and they may require a bit more information. If necessary, you can teach them how to use one of these techniques themselves, having them blow off one of their Spirit Bodies or teaching them how to run out incidents by alternate spotting etc.

This is especially useful if you run into somebody who is being some sort of angel or demon and working on some kind of mission, because it helps them out and gets them on your side and they may start helping others with this stuff. Remember that even the ones who are being demons are only doing so because the game has gone rather badly in this universe. If you show them a real way out, they are often more willing than others to begin helping people because they have no mistaken illusions about how the current oppressive mess is really good for people.

Only once did I run into a demon who was so bound and determined to bother me that he wouldn’t get into communication or run a command. So I mocked myself up as real big and dangerous and scared the hell out of him. He left immediately, and a palpable feeling of terror which had been washing over me snapped off as if I had turned a light switch. They work so hard at scaring people that they themselves can be scared very easily. They can dish it out but they can’t take it.

Handling Loss

At this time we do not have very many techniques for handling loss. This is a grave deficiency and more research is needed.

Loss goes back much earlier in our existence than did pains and negative or controlling memory traces.

One thing you can do is to run out the incident of loss (by alternately spotting something in the incident and then something in the room or by any other incident running technique) with special attention to the moment when you first discovered the loss.

You can look for earlier similar losses and run those, but this is not as useful as it is with handling engrams. With engrams, the actual pain of early incidents is long gone, so the earlier ones are easier to look at. But with loss, the item lost long ago is still gone.

For loss, the incidents are easier to confront in the future. One technique would be to spot how far in the future the loss would have to be for you to find it acceptable. In other words, it might be horrible to have your wife die now, but you could tolerate it if she were to die in a hundred or a thousand years. So you find when it would be tolerable and make up an incident of the loss occurring then and how it might happen etc. and get your confront up on that. Then you should be able to confront it happening a little closer to present time, so you repeat the step, gradually bringing the loss in closer until you can confront the real loss which did occur.

In handling a heavy loss, you want the tears to flow rather than suppressing them under a heavy barrier, so don’t make people stop crying and consider it a good indicator if they begin to cry after holding it all bottled up.

Realize that if someone starts crying heavily about something that seems insignificant, they are usually crying about something else (or you have really misevaluated the importance). In that case, you might like to find what the real underlying loss is, but it might not be accessible. So learn to tolerate what might seem to be foolish causes for upset and handle them with care because there might be some earth shattering thing hidden just out of sight. Kids cry easily at trivial things and it’s usually because they just died and have lost everything and everyone they cared about in their last lifetime and have even lost their memories and awareness of what happened.

The ultimate mastery of loss consists of being able to recreate anything at will (so that there is no loss of things) and to re-contact anybody no matter where they now are (e.g. total communication so that there is no loss of beings such as friends and loved ones) and mastery of time (which is the same as the ability to recreate universes at different times in their existence) so that you can replay anything and have it come out differently (so that there is no loss of doing).

Note that many of our aberrations are the fixed solutions that we are holding in place to handle loss. A powerful process I came up with one day was “In this lifetime, what do you use to keep others from leaving”. My answer was that I get sick. Other things we do as solutions to loss are forgetting and becoming upset.

On the subject of assists for loss, one is to simply mockup the lost person (or whatever) and mentally reaches and withdraws from the mockup.

Another thing you can do is to do mockups of destroying the person (or thing) various different ways at greater and then lesser distances. i.e. blowing them up, tossing them in the sun, etc. until you can confront what actually happened to them.

You can also run the PROTECT button because usually you will feel that you failed to protect the person (or whatever). For this you generalize the relationship (use “a wife” or “a lover” rather than the specific girl who left or died, etc.) and then run “How could you protect ____” alternating with “How could a ____ protect you”. Note that we run the positive aspect rather than the recent failure.

There are other kinds of loss. One can lose a group or a country or even one’s faith or hopes and dreams. For a Spiritualist, becoming disillusioned can be a terrible loss even if one hangs on and remains in the organization. The same will be found in other religions if somebody loses faith after orienting their life around it. This needs to be handled as an incident of loss and mis-emotion just as if one’s house had burned down or a friend had died.

Divide and Conquer

From the earliest days of Spiritualism we have known that things are not one sided, but operate in both directions. The engrams of Dianetics, seen in 1950 only from the view of what has been done to the person, were in 1952 found to have a balancing side in the person’s commission of negative acts against others.

1. Divide and Conquer

In light of this, it would seem obvious that if the person was suffering from being infested by others, then he must also be infesting others himself. If there were incidents which joined beings together, then there must also be incidents which caused the being to divide.

Unfortunately, this is the only technique (as far as I know) being to run mockups of dividing.

This was the rock on which I floundered for many years. I tried all sorts of techniques. I researched implant platens where the being was forced to divide and found that they would not run out more than a few of these splits before I would start to get sick. I tried techniques and found them almost unworkable in this area. I experimented with trying to blow out ridges that were dividing me by means of energy flows. Everything failed or only worked briefly and marginally.

And then I found the key process which is easy and works consistently without problems.

It is quite simple. If you spot or otherwise sense something that might be a part of yourself which is split off, isolated, or otherwise blocked from your awareness, you have it do the following command: POINT TO THE BEING THAT YOU DIVIDED FROM.

Something will seem to go somewhere. And you will feel better and unbothered.

Apparently there is an important factor in the order or pattern of division. Let’s say that A0 divides into B1 and B2. Now B1 divides into C3 and C4 and B2 divides into D5 and D6. Here and now all there is, is C3, C4, D5 and D6. If C3 is the conscious viewpoint and it finds D6, then when it runs the process on D6, D6 will point to D5 and rejoin it. If you try to handle the split any other way, you find yourself trying to force D6 to rejoin C3 which doesn’t work.

This indicates why the other techniques I tried worked so sporadically. Occasionally I would be dealing with a split off piece that could rejoin directly, but usually I wasn’t. And the attempt to get it to rejoin would create a sort of bypassed charge in terms of the missing piece that was in between, which is why it was so easy to get sick while fooling around with this.

Furthermore, the above process will work to some degree on Spirit bodies, so you don’t have to worry too much about whether you’ve really got a split off piece of yourself or something else. If there is any remnant after running the above, use “Who Are you”. Sometimes there is a whole crowd of Spirit Bodies that become visible after blowing one of these splits, and usually you can just run the Who question immediately. You can also repeat the Point command given above. The pointing often undoes valences etc. because it gets back to the basic identity.

Occasionally blowing one of these splits will reveal some large very solid mental machinery built out of programmed machine entities (which I abbreviate to PME). If so, then use the key command on them for undoing the machine building implants. The command is “Spot being made into a machine”.

If you run this point command on yourself, you should find that you can indeed point in some strange direction and you feel a bit better and more certain of yourself and who you are. But you will not takeoff and rejoin some other Spirit/Individual or something like that.

There apparently is a difference between truly separate individuals who split off of the same earlier being and unconsciously split off pieces of an individual. The latter will rejoin on being handled whereas the former will remain separate but know better who they are.

The “pointing” works even when it is done in a vague and sloppy manner, you don’t have to be very precise about it. The pointing is not necessarily in a physical direction. Also, you are not necessarily pointing to where the other being is now. Usually the pointing is towards the original direction in which the split occurred.

Since this works on any Spirit body, it might act as an undercut or at least as a repair, but this has yet to be determined in a practical sense.

I am nowhere near finished with running this level. Therefore, I can’t guarantee that everything I say about it is correct. The best I can do is give you my notes and trust that the above process will carry you through any mistakes or restimulation.

To the best of my knowledge, there were only 10,000 individuals on the early track. My guess is that this is the number of separate pieces of theta that split off from the infinite static and went through the Jewel of Knowledge independently of each other. Their only connection is that each one is part of the underlying static and they all share the fact of having experienced the jewel.

Each of these basic individuals was capable of assuming many identities simultaneously and being in many places at once. This total level of skill and ability is still available to us despite the fact that we have been heavily implanted and otherwise aberrated into being located in one place and doing only one thing at a time.

These individuals eventually divided many times and eventually became the trillions who inhabit this universe.

When an individual truly and completely divides, the result is two complete fully capable copies. There is no parceling out of spiritual resources or loss of horsepower. Both are identical, one is not senior to the other. Both copies have the full remembrance of being the original that divided. From that point on, they each evolve individually. If my analysis of the original purpose behind it all is correct (e.g. to balance the infinite nothingness with creation), then these two will never rejoin because there is no benefit to having fewer unique individuals.

A split off piece of an individual, on the other hand, is not a separate being. It is simply a part of themselves, often sent off somewhere or hidden or otherwise kept out of sight.

These fragments can be aware in the sense of perceiving and recording and reacting to things, but they are not self aware. They can think, but they have no self perception of their own thinking.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have some big conscious oversoul that you are a subordinate piece of. There is stuff at higher realities which you might call an oversoul because it generates much of the manifestations of space-time and arranges things for you, but it is not somebody else. It is you, and you are the conscious self-aware portion of that “oversoul”. It is simply that you are completely unconscious in those higher realities. As you wake up, you will find that you are still you, except bigger.

So this “oversoul” is simply part of your greater subconscious and works much like your heartbeat and all the other things that you do for (or to) yourself automatically.

An individual cannot actually have an effect imposed on him by another. The only mechanism consists of an individual copying and mocking up for himself the proposed effects that another is attempting to project at him. But it is split of portions of the person operating at a sub-awareness level which do this copying and mocking up on an automatic basis so that you have the apparancy of one person hitting another when the only thing that can really happen is for one person to give a picture of getting hit to another and talk him into creating it.

All a Spirit Body can do is talk one of your own split pieces into mocking up a somatic for you. There is no way that they can impinge directly. It’s just that you’ve got so much of yourself running on automatic and most of it is stupid enough to accept orders from anybody.

The assist where you put somatics or emotions or drug effects or whatever into the walls or room objects is actually a drill whereby you are redirecting your own split off machinery to aim at another target than the place where it’s normally directed.

Most of the determination of agreed upon reality is coming from PMEs (Programmed Machine Entities) of which you may be a few of them but most of them are part of other individuals. However, the copying of the results computed by this machinery and projecting it into your own reality is done exclusively by split off pieces of yourself because there is nothing else that could affect you.

An interesting process at this level is “From where might you be mocking up ...” and when you find a spot that seems right, have it point to the being it divided from.

Note that the pointing is done mentally and must not be limited to three dimensional physical universe directions. Most of this stuff is not within the current 3 dimensional reality. Some of it is sideways of reality in a sort of 4th or 5th dimensional direction.

Other stuff is in other universes and the “pointing” is sort of a pointing out the location of something in a completely disrelated space and time.

There is some natural splitting. You put bits of yourself onto people and places and things that you want to keep track of or influence. Since these are not enforced, they can pretty much be brought back under control by simple exercise. You can master dissolving these things and putting them back at will. There’s actually nothing that stops you from dissolving these or controlling these pieces except your own worry that you wouldn’t be able to put them back or that you will loose track of things. So all you have to do is drill projecting and dissolving split pieces because you’ll let go of the ones you don’t need as soon as you’re certain that you can put them back as needed. This is actually your natural mechanism for staying in the game and remaining connected to other people.

Putting out split pieces is not the actual aberration. The aberration is splitting without control or awareness and losing control and awareness over pieces that are already split. This often happens under the impact of implanted ideas.

One point that is still under research is whether or not we have multiple self aware operating centers. In other words, we might each be a number of different people and making a point of not knowing about our other selves from any of the individual viewpoints.

This might be like a computer running multiple programs and shifting memory subconsciouss as it time sliced between the different programs. Or imagine setting up a 4 player card game and playing each of the 4 roles. You might mock up a personality for each one (maybe one is greedy and one is skillful and one is having fun and one is trying not to make a fool of himself) and then intentionally pretend to not know what the other 3 are thinking as you play each role.

If this is the case, then it is different location, information, resources, and goals which differentiate your handling of the individual operating centers. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’re everybody else. You’d only be a small percentage. Maybe one in a billion. But the galaxy is large and even that ratio might mean that you are millions of different people. We used to operate this way on the early track, but we were aware of doing it.

I will guarantee that there are complete splits which make other individuals and that there are sub-aware split off pieces of each individual but I cannot guarantee that this third area of split self-aware portions of the same being is real. In the presence of heavy charge, it is possible either to dub-in something that isn’t there or to suppress knowledge of something that is there and I’m not yet far enough along on this area to avoid those pitfalls.

The entire subject of beings splitting has been heavily aberrated by implanted ideas. These include:

1. 
   
   Simply smashing the person apart by force.
2. 
   
   Making someone be in two places and implanting the two locations with different mutually antagonistic goals so that from each viewpoint, he will fight back against the other one.
3. 
   
   Nasty tricks like showing you a fake mirror reflection of yourself which shows you dividing (when you’re not) and telling you that you are splitting and can’t resist doing it (and eventually you resist too hard or go into apathy and then you do split).
4. 
   
   The big mass implants made you put pieces of yourself onto others to control them and keep them human.
5. 
   
   In a similar vein, there were police implants which made you split off and place “control entities” onto “criminals”. Some societies made everyone do a bit of this on a regular basis as part of their civic duty.
6. 
   
   Some of the early track military organizations had officers splitting off and pushing control entities onto their underlings etc. going all the way down the chain of command so that an invasion force would operate as a single unit managed by a Spirit/Individual at the top.
7. 
   
   Sometimes you were made to split to provide servants or laborers for various reasons. Spirit/Individual are the coin of this universe. One of the reasons people can be infested with Spirit bodies so easily is that they have early postulates about acquiring entities for use as servants and slaves.
8. 
   
   It was common, especially in the symbols universe, to put pieces of yourself into thought pools to copy emotions and sensations. Some of this was of your own free will (you liked having sensations etc.) but some of it was enforced or later hidden and removed from your control so that you could be made to feel pain etc.
9. 
   
   You intentionally set up machinery (which can be found in various non-physical directions) to create reality etc. for yourself and put pieces of yourself into it. But again this was heavily implanted and put out of your control so that you could be enslaved.
10. 
    
    Even the penalty universes used items like “To eat is to be the tiger in back and hide from myself forever” (there is a whole series of these “tiger in back” items).

 If anything got stirred up by reading this, have it point to the being that it divided from.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that we’re all one. There are other people out there.

But we are fewer than we think.

Since I’ve barely started on this area myself, I don’t have a lot to say about it. So instead, I’ll round this chapter out with some related topics.