Rednecks and Wrongness

On Friday, Me and Chris visited the set of Steve's new film, Mum and Dad. It's his first feature and contains some of the wrongest things you could ever hope to see.

It was amazing going round the set. The art direction is brilliant, every room looks horrible, in the best way. We saw some shots that the stills photographer had taken, and they looked really good, even if they were pictures of hardcore gore.

It's weird the hidden places in a city though, the house they are shooting in is massive, and set back from the road - the thing is, it's about 300 yards from my house and I'd never even realised it was there. Maybe I should keep accidentally turning up at 1 o'clock, so I can get fed! - It was strange, I was stood talking to Steve in one of the sets, and John Turrell (one of the runners) came up and asked if I ate meat. I told him er....no, and thought what a strange question, maybe he thought the gore might be too much for my delicate herb munching constitution. About 20 minutes later, he returned with a big sandwich and salad. Bargain! At the lunch break everyone was sat in the garden having a lovely lunch and cups of tea, while inside the house was a den of bloody wrongness. It reminded me of that brilliant picture of Colin Clive and Boris Karloff having tea on the set of Bride of Frankenstein, with Karloff in full on monster gear.

(I just realised I've broken blog rule one here - 'Nobody wants to know what you had for your tea', but to be honest, I can't say anymore about the shoot in detail, because it would ruin the surprise/shock/revulsion)

I took loads of photos on set, but I'm not going to publish any, lest I give the game away, except this one, which I took in the darkness while Steve explained to Chris the workings of Dad's tool room with the aid of a torch...



I'm really pleased the film seems to be going well, and everyone is into it. You can find a detailed day by day account of the shoot at Steve's blog. I know Steve wouldn't ever say it, but I was speaking with Chris afterwards an we're both really excited and confident that Steve is onto something really good here - a genuinely good piece of British horror that will probably reignite some tabloid panic about video nasties! Which is great, because that's exactly what makes people go and watch...

Last night, in a moment of uncharacteristic spontanaeity, I went to Rock City to see Hayseed Dixie. They were fantastic, and amazing musicians. It was humbling to see people who play so well, and make such a brilliant racket. I always liked listening to Hayseed Dixie on the radio or whatever, but I worried that they were just essentially a novelty band, like a bluegrass Barron Knights, and that it'd get quickly boring. It didn't though, it was excellent, as well as funny and raucous - they kind of reminded me of a bluegrass Pogues, in that it was noisy, wild and punk as you like. Best bits - You shook me all night long, Walk this way, and I don't feel like dancin'.

Scruffy Doodles and Insomnia

Update to the doodles I uploaded last night...


I got sturck by insomnia last night, so ended up messing around with the built in edit tools on my phone, and made these. Nice, ain't they?

Scruffy Doodles

I've been working fast and scruffy on some character designs for the MAYA film. These are really scruffy, I admit, but I kind of like that... I'm meeting Andy tomorrow to start to see where we go next, and I'll be starting on a storyboard/animatic soon. Sorry for the quality, I took them on my phone off the living room floor!

Seeing What Sticks

I’ve been absent from the blog for a while. I’ve been trying to work out how to move forward with things now the MA’s finished, and how to tie all the things together I’ve been working on and thinking about.

I’ve spoke before in here about convergent culture ideas – fan cultures, A.R.Gs and ideas around the web as a space for development of creative work which is narrative, ‘interactive’ (for want of a better word) and which, while not dependent on audience involvement to exist or develop, is at least aware of how the audience might read, or work with stories presented across a variety of media.

Alongside this, there’s also been the development of animation and comic ideas, some of which I’ve mentioned before. I guess I’ve always seen my ambitions with these as fairly traditional, as in creating single screen pieces, but in reality, I can’t really see how I would take them forward without taking on the ‘transliteracy’ ideas which informed so much of my MA work.

I guess this blog has been about chucking ideas about and seeing what sticks. Some of the ideas I’ve come up with I can’t imagine carrying on with, but at least they’re there to look back over if I need them.

At work, I’ve been learning MAYA, motion capture and Motion Builder. I suggested that me and Andy should work on a short piece to bring all those elements together, and get some kind of output rather than just becoming software jockeys. I started to storyboard a story that I’ve had in my head for a while, a little thing about a drunk ghost set to a Be Good Tanyas tune. At the same time, I’ve been blocking out some comic things, again a little ghost story. As I’ve been going through them I kind of realised that they were joined in some way, there was a narrative connection between the two, not just the ghost theme. I realised too that they linked directly back to ‘How it was that we got to be Angels’, and that in a way, Angels was an ‘origin’ story, like the origin stories in comics (how Bruce Wayne got to be Batman for example)

I was excited by this, because it began to build a bigger world, and that it opened up a freedom, in that it doesn’t matter that the stories may be made in different ways (2-d, 3-d or comic/flash game/text message), or that they may not fit together in terms of continuity, as long as they are described as part of the same ‘story’, then that’s ok.

I started thinking about long-running comics, especially superhero comics like Superman, Batman et al, and how they have dealt with changing perspectives/styles/characterisation brought about by different writers and artists. In those worlds, the inevitable inconsistencies don’t matter, and are all ‘explainable’, albeit sometimes clumsily and seemingly insanely. So there’s a tension and opportunity which develops between continuity and truth to the overall story. I think there’s a playfulness to that which invites audience participation (through fan fictions and fan art, etc.) and gives artistic freedom.

I’m not suggesting that it’s a good idea to throw the continuity rulebook out of the window, and I think it’s important that single elements of any multi-layered/media hold together, but it’s I think it’s entirely possible to relate stories to each other without a slavish devotion to some kind of ‘bible’.

Here’s a tenuous example; A while ago, while I was storyboarding “In spite of all the damage’ (the maya piece) – I drew a girl looking out from a bus window. She was wearing a beany hat and had curly hair. The other week, a way after drawing the storyboard, I saw Steve’s latest film ‘Deliver Me’, which featured a scene with the main character on a bus – wearing a beany and with curly hair. I’ve decided to re-model my bus character to look closer to Steve’s character, and although it doesn’t join the stories together in a way that audiences need to be aware of - anyone seeing the two together will probably recognise the link, it places the two timelines in the same world and gives a sense that the film is not simply a standalone object – that it is linked to a wider narrative. – Sort of tagging applied to film.

Slightly off from that, I read a great post on PART about the idea of Abominable Snowman 2.0, which suggests that the way we create links and things from tagging and internet use are similar in some ways to the mythmaking, confusion, rumour and miscommunication that led to the creation of the Bigfoot myth. I think there’s a sense that that’s what I’m trying to get at, that from small stories, pictures and ideas, there is the possibility to create a tangible ‘thing’.