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’.