A little flash doodle

Ooh, get me! I do writing now

I went to the NLAB Open Seminar on Friday in Leicester, where there were various workshops dedicated to online and digital writing. I've really enjoyed the NLAB sessions over the past few months, and they've helped me to filter some ideas about writing for my films and reconnected me to the web as an art space.

Now, I have to admit I'm a bit of a goon. The first session was called 'Writing games for grown-ups'. I got really excited - I'd love to write games for grown-ups. Wrong! This was games to help grown-ups write. What an idiot. I kept my disappointment and embarrasment to myself, but then we got started, and it turned out to be a great session. We had to do two main exercises, and here are the results - unedited, and perhaps not as good as I thought they were on Friday!

OK, so the first exercise started by describing an object in the seminar room - then describing it's journey to the venue. Remember, we had only five minutes for this, so it's understandably a bit rough!

"The TV snoozes peacefully, the standby light the only clue that it is still alive. It makes a loud yawn and click, and crackles as light becomes brighter behind its single glass eye. It consumes breakfast hungrily, on BBC, ITV and sometimes on the cable channels. It flicks to the travel channel, and sets off on a bus journey through the far off reaches of the world, a young, enthusiastic presenter as it's guide. Surfing through, it eventually arrives at the college. PR+ guides it up through the channels until it reaches a new place, "308: Seminar Room". Finally settled on the channel, the TV pretends to sleep, listening in on writers struggling to describe inanimate objects. It looks across and spies a black shirted man busily scribbling. It begins to feel uncomfortable; "He's writing about me", thinks the TV. He stares ahead. "I'll just pretend I'm not here"".

The second exercise involved us describing a place, either fictional or real (I chose a beer garden in St. Davids). Halfway through, the workshop leader gave us a prop, which we had to incorporate into the story. Here goes...

"This place is the place where the friendliest dog in the world tried to lick everyone once, in turn. It's the place where Stuart knocked over his beer and ruined at least one pack of cigarettes. It's a place where you can completely forget there's a world beyond, a place where low level drug dealers, happy campers and barbequed families jostle for bench space, next to the parrafin heaters (once the sun drops, it'll be cold), and munch away on crinkle-cut crisps and Nobby's Nuts. We've been here for hours, and to be honest, if time stopped now, forever, I'd be perfectly happy. Jason is using his glasses to chase an ant around the table, focussing the dying sun through the lens to make a death ray. It's like a B-Movie ending, 'Antor' finally chased down by the laser-eyed hero. We all shout, laughing, for him to stop. He does, and puts his glasses back on. Stuart drops yet another glass of beer on the floor - it shatters loudly and the whole place erupts in cheers. Stuart takes a bow - even he thinks it's funny"

Ahem. Anyway, the other sessions were less practical, but equally useful. Kate Pullinger introduced her new project, Inanimate Alice - www.inanimatealice.com. You should check it out. The day ended with a screening of a web film called EPIC 2014 - http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/ - a scary but funny vision of the future of the web. I am trying to wean myself off Google and Amazon as we speak.

Space....Man

I doodled this yesterday. I'm going to colour it up in Flash, and I'll post the finished version next week. I just thought you might like to see it. I might even turn the spaceman into a Machinima character.

Ricard has posted some stuff about the machinima project on his site - http://www.la-interactiva.co.uk

I felt the fear...

Yesterday, Me, Steve Sheil, Chris Cooke and John Ross went to Bradford for the last day of the 5th Fantastic Films Weekend. It was a great day, and we saw some great stuff, and heard some great people speak, all topped off by a great curry before driving home!

Steve's new film, 'Through a Vulture Eye', was on as part of the shorts screening, and there were archive screenings of 'The Final Programme', 'Theatre of Blood', and 'The Wicker Man', with introductions. - A sideshow highlight was an exhibition of original drawings, models and clips by Ray Harryhausen.

There are so many highlights to write about, but the key things that stood out for me were;

• The Harryhausen Exhibit - It goes without saying that one of the formative movie experiences of any child are Harryhausen's films. So it was great to see models of the skeletons, and clips of favourite moments. There qwere some beautiful models of heads from an old hansel and gretel stop motion project and clips of a king midas film I'd not seen before, which were great, with a much more children's look and feel. What was really good was watching a group of kids watching the shorts and loving the dinosaurs, which was something of a relief in our cgi soaked age. It's great to be reminded of how beautiful and effective stop motion is.
• Theatre of Blood - If you've never seen this film, you should treat yourself, because it's a pure delight! Vincent Price is an old ham called Edward Lionheart who exacts bloody revenge on his critics in the form of Shakespearean murders. It's so great to see a film where everybody is clearly loving their work, and acting up like it's the last reel of film left on earth. It's so good, and everyone is great in it, but Eric Sykes quietly steals the show for me, sneaking in comedy business all over the place. If you ever see it in the telly guide, ring in sick, and email me so I can ring in sick too.
• The Final Programme - I've never seen this film before, but the write up sounded great:
  
  The Final Programme is an unsettling slice of apocalyptic future shock that combines the talents of novelist Michael Moorcock and director Robert Fuest. Jon Finch is Jerry Cornelius, a sexually ambiguous anti-hero and playboy scientist seeking a vital piece of microfilm that can assist a giant computer in achieving the final programme: a self-fertilising, self-regenerating, immortal hermaphrodite, retaining all of mankind’s knowledge. With its messianic sub-plot and stunning production design this is a movie that is both of its time and ahead of its time – a psychedelic bad trip with a quasi Avengers feel. Bizarre ain’t the word.
  
  It was one of those great films that could never be made now; completely mad, but filled with it's own bizarre logic, and brilliant characters - my favourite being the three bumbling scientists. If it was made now, it would have to be a spoof, probably with Mike Myers in it. A while a go, Steve wrote a blog post called 'Fear of The Daft', about the fear that film-makers seem to feel now about going out on a limb and trying out mad ideas - funding has led the industry down a road of smoothing out the edgier ideas, and film-makers are seemingly forced to reference previously innovative ideas. None of that here! Robert Feust, the director of the film spoke at the beginning about the film and making it. He regaled us with great stories of how he got the film financed and how they worked around the constraints of a low budget, by coming up with ideas, not by calming his vision down. It was an inspiration to hear those tales, and made even better by the fact that he was a proper old school luvvie, and a bit like the old drunk from the Fast Show!

So, today, I'm inspired - I'm drawing away for 'In Spite of All the Damage..', working on the Bash Street kids - style project, and despite all the hurdles that the university where i work chucks in the way, feeling the fear and doing it anyway! On Friday, I'm off to a creative narrative workshop day in Leicester, as part of a group called NLAB I joined. - I'm really looking forward to it - the previous days I've been to have been great, and coffee is in constant supply, which is worth the admission price (actually, it's free) alone. I'll post about it later, should be good.

Don't put your avatar on the stage, Mrs. Worthington

I was in Second Life yesterday, tidying up the final bits on the avatars so Ricard can start filming, and started thinking about the whole game/animation/art/performance sphere that I've touched on briefly before.

Ok, so what's happening in second life is this - I've created costumes that the avatars (actors) wear. Then the puppeteers (players) control the actors who play the characters. That's quite a few layers - like playing a superhero; Christopher Reeve plays Kal El plays Clark Kent plays Superman.

It feels like a stage/game space. I am in a game, building objects. - However, I'm not building objects like i would in, say, Maya - I'm standing there (- or at least my avatar is) physically building objects, and adding textures and moving them around. Once I've made these objects, they exist and mimic the real world, but they are toys - props. That is, if I build a car in Second Life, it is only pretend - I don't need the car to get around, I can fly and teleport, so it's just a nice made up thing.

When I was at 'May You Live in Interesting Times' in Cardiff last October, the group I was with were talking about the difference between gaming/performance and art. Blast Theory were at the festival presenting Can You See Me Now, a performance game that exists both in the real world and virtually. It's a kind of 'tig' game, with players on the streets and online occupying the city and a 3-d representation of the city respectively. If you compare it to, for example, a Zelda game, there is a subtle difference. In Can You See Me Now, you play as yourself, and your tactical and even moral choices within the game are yours. If you play Zelda, you are a player 'playing' Link, in Link's world, with Link's concerns and character traits.

Second Life strikes a strange space in-between. In the world, I can have a Virtual Cardiff if I want, and an almost completely open ended experience. I can't however play as myself. That is, I can't go in as Gareth Howell, there are a set of predefined names I must use. To my constant regret and embarrasment, I am now Gareth Shatner in Second Life. Then there is the generic avatar, which looks nothing like me, which is probably a good thing! - And if I change my hair, jacket, bum and belly size or whatever in SL, it's unlikely I'm going to choose my standard issue George @ ASDA jeans, so I become a character. Like if I'm in a game. Or a play.

So then, if I'm in the game, as a character, then make that character dress up and act as another character, we're back to the Superman analogy. In Machinima, we're making characters who serve a narrative, and have motivations, gestures and 'voice' which are not me (as the player).
However, I guess Gareth Shatner is me. Or is he? I'd never dream of saying 'LOL' to anyone, or breakdancing at a meeting, and try as I might, I can't fly. Gareth Shatner can. And he can build things, and he can lose 10lbs just by dragging a slider. And he's an actor. In Machinima films. I hate him!

So where do I sit in this? I'm not the director, 'cos I can only control Shatner, not the rest of the cast. I've decided that in Second Life, I'm like Jiminy Crickett, or the Numskulls. And the monitor in my office is actually inside Shatner's head, just behind the eyes. That makes me feel good, because I was getting all confused!

Remember the Golem I was on about? Here's the doodle of him and the magician that sprang my insomnia last week.

Here's him a bit nicer...












And here's him cynically reworked to cash in on another card frenzy invented by Clinton's.













The other night when I was walking home (and not even drunk!), I found myself trying to walk like him, practising for the day I don the ultra-lycra Motion Capture suit. I really do wish I could lose 10lbs by dragging a slider!

Getting to know you...

Sometimes, it's a bit difficult to talk about the work I'm making, cos I don't want to spill every bean, sometimes I'm sworn to secrecy, and sometimes I don't know how to fully articulate where I'm going or how I'm arriving at the results I'm arriving at.

However, I'm currently working on some new characters for a range of projects, and have been thinking about that quite a lot.

I read an interview with Jon Burgerman the other week (who did a great talk at our latest 'Loving your Work' event at Eye Candy), and he talked about how a doodle can sometimes take a long time just to get right. It's easy to think that a doodle is a doodle, and the time it takes to come out of the pen is the entire time of the process attached to it. But in a way, it's like casting/acting and wardrobe all at the same time - it takes a while to find the character you want. It's a bit like that thing where hammy old actors talk about how they 'always start with the shoes, darling' - I kind of always start with the heads. I guess it's then that you can see the person you are trying to bring to life. My heads are always really simple - kind of playmobil style spheres in a way with contour lines on them. I like the simplicity of it, and the kind of deadpan expression. - It's oddly naturalistic, in that animation characters are so often exaggerated to express a stereotype, but these simple heads are more like real life because most people spend most of their time with their faces fairly straight. The deadpan face somehow allows you to look deeper to understand the character.

I read so many animation and cartooning books that say things like - a posh lady walks like this, a fat man is this kind of character etc., and it drives me mad. Animation so rarely gets beyond first impressions. - So, if you strip the face of all the cliches, potentially you can give more depth. I hope so!

For the Second Life project, I was working to a brief, and had to 'characterise' to personality types. It was a fight to get across the need not to give the whole character away from first impressions, but Ricard had seen the characters from 'Angels', so we were able to reach a point where the characters were enough 'mine' and enough 'his' to work well.

I'm currently working with another film-maker, Mark Devenport, to develop a new cartoon, set in a primary school, a kind of Peanuts meets Bash Street Kids, by way of Last of the Summer Wine, and last night I started some character design for a new short called 'In Spite of all the Damage I've Done', which is a really simple story, a kind of sequel (I think) to Angels, based around a Be Good Tanyas track.

The most exciting new project though, may be a new fictional blog I'm working on. I was trying to find a way to loosen up the whole animation process, which is in a way linked to my thoughts about live art and spontaneous animation. The idea is to be able to develop characters and stories 'live', through creating a blog by a fictional character, who just happens to be a cartoon.

The blog allows for slower development of character, from 'Hi, Welcome to my Blog' to 'Yesterday, my heart got broke', and allows me to sneak in narrative ideas that can be developed, or abandoned as I work out what works. I don't know what the blog will lead to, whether I'll pull strands out to turn into scripts, or whether I'll just let it go where it wants to go for it's own sake. The idea is to give me a space to work through animation and illustration ideas, and post them within a context. -I've written a few pieces to start the story, and I'll post the URL when it's set up.

Oh, yes - last night I accidentally came up with a new idea for a short, I can't tell you much about it for now, but it involves a Golem. - I was doodling and one of my standard monster characters came out (I generally ignore the standard monster character, it's like my phone doodle), but this time I thought it looked really nice, especially when I drew a Victorian magician next to it, which looked a bit like the Pringles man. From then, it was a simple case of a bit of common insomnia, and the seed of a new film was sown.

In real life...
I moved house last week; cheated by watching sneak preview Lost while babysitting (therefore destroying tonight's TV); and as you know, went to see Douglas Coupland, which was good, but ruined by a rubbish interviewer, who didn't even touch on the big themes of Coup Land. Oh, and Be Good Tanyas announced their new album! - It's been a long wait, nearly as long as the wait for the Breeders 3rd album.

3 hours to Coupland

Douglas Coupland is speaking tonight at Broadway! I'm really excited, because I think Coupland is possibly my favourite author. I was thinking about it last night talking to Matt;

I think part of the reason is because I feel like I've grown up with his books - they seem to fit quite nicely along the timeline of my life from the mid-nineties onwards.

The first book of his which really had an impact on me was Microserfs - I liked the other books, but this felt like the one where his characters became really 3-d, and also, coming at the time that we were starting Active Ingredient, it felt like someone was putting our lives down in a book! - It has some amazing passages in it - my favourite moment is the revealing of the tiny white lego house, and "Hello Jed" - If you haven't read it, I won't explain those bits further, I don't want to spoil it.

What strikes me about all the books is the warmth, and I think love for the characters - It doesn't read like Bret Easton Ellis, whose books I have always found difficult - a bit nasty (except Glamorama, which is really good). I'm a bit soft, so I don't mind admitting to a few near-sobs at the end of his books! - I was really angry at the end of Microserfs because I didn't want the characters to end!

Some favourite Douglas Coupland moments (remembered moments, so may not be accurate if they even exist at all);

"My name's Jared, I'm a ghost" - Girlfriend in a Coma. The opening line.

The Dead Speak from Life after God - beautiful - made into short films for MTV, you can see them on www.coupland.com

Letter to Kurt Cobain from Polaroids from the Dead

A story from an anthology about the turn of the millenium - can't remember what it's called, but it's about a special effects guy.

and many, many more... His latest books, Eleanor Rigby and Hey Nostradamus! may be his best yet, I loved them both - tonight we'll get a reading from JPod, which Jeanie has sneakily started reading already and has probably finished by now.

How Coupland, blogging about Coupland. I think I'll spend the rest of the afternoon drawing flames in Biro on pictures in the Ikea catalogue.

Second Life report
We're nearly there with the first episode of Ricard's machinima series - all the characters are finished and tidied, with their facial animations on, and I'll be able to post some screenshots from the pilot episode and a URL to the site next week.