Iteration-ing

Moving forward is fun. Its so much better than moving backwards, unless you're being Michael Jackson in Billy Jean, but then you have to deal with the children.

What was I talking about.

Oh yes. Moving forward is fun. Most (in fact, all) of the moving forward that I"ve been doing this week has concerned my dear old thesis project, entitled Rain.

Note that I say "moving forward" and not "moved forward and done and now we're doing some actual work on the project."

I'd have a finalized version of the project by now if I didn't continually get it into my head to run it by a few trusted friends of mine and getting suggestions that blow my mind in how perfect they are.

So the script and screenplay you all saw last week, or whenever the hell I last posted here has been demoted to a v0.5 and v1.0 is still to come.

I've lashed together a storyboard out of the rotted wood and metal that is the now-v0.5 and there's an animatic ready as well, but one thing at time, hey?

Here, have a storyboard:
Linky

More to come, soon.

Pontificating

So some people have asked me "Patrick, you lovely ultra-desirable piece of beautiful man-meat, where do you get all of your ideas?" Well I'm glad you asked that, Timmy. Now shut up and sit down.

The big example I'm going to to be blathering about in particular this time around is my thesis project. My big final opus of one minute and eight (was it eight? or was it nine?) seconds that will become the culmination of all of my efforts as a New York University SCPS student.

So, Rain, basically, the project I've been going on about for a little bit by now.

My primary inspiration for Rain doesn't exist. I cannot and could not say that there is one thing that inspired me to make this project the way it is, with the exception of my previous project, which takes place in a similar futuristic-sci-fi-dystopian-city-with-a-dome-over-it setting, Euphoria Inc.

But like so many fliers for shows that I'm never going to go to, picked up off of the ground outside of a club in midtown Manhattan, my inspirations came from all types of things.
For example, the story itself, or rather the style and attitude of the story itself. For all two (Timmy doesn't count) of you who remember, most of my previous projects have revolved around two attitudes: surreal horror and film noir. Adagio, Hellhounds, Royal and Manchester, Anathema, The Laboratory of Doctor Aken, they all generally fit into those two categories.

As much as I love these two categories like a fat man loves his chocolate, I felt it was about time I did something different. Just to tell myself, yes, I can do something different...after all, nothing's worse than realizing you're a one-trick pony. But what to write?
Now for the past five or six months I've been regularly (and by regularly I mean irregularly) dropping into the Barnes and Noble Booksellers in Union Square to read through Neil Gaiman's magnum opus anthology, The Sandman.
Four months and five books later, I was officially a fan of the way Neil Gaiman tells stories. Not necessarily the actual stories, which range from phenomenal to "meh", but the way he tells them.
WIth that on my mind and thesis season encroaching, it was only a matter of letting the right two brain cells rub against each other for me to attempt to do something similar.

Now how about the characters? Kryssi in particular comes from a bunch of different places, and has probably mutated the most over the course of the development process.
One thing that has not changed in the least is her underlying attitude, which is directly inspired by the female leads of a few webcomics that I read and still read regularly, Dresden Codak and Gunnerkrigg Court. In particular, they are quiet, observant and incredibly resourceful gals (each in their own way), with strong tendencies towards not only thinking outside of the box, solving their own problems, and not being afraid to go after what they want, when they get it into their head to do so.
Her appearance, however, has shifted all over the place. She started off as a spunky ten year old girl named Anna, then turned into an not-entirely-emo mid-twenties woman with the weight of the world on her shoulders, also named Anna, then back into a spunky ten year old girl, except this time with a smaller head, still named Anna.
It didn't really click with me though. It'd do in a pinch and a half, sure, buuut it stilll really wasn't something I felt was -there- yet.
It wasn't until I took a page from my previous Euphoria Inc. project that I settled on something I could really go with. You see, almost all of the characters from Euphoria Inc. are inspired by people I know in life. A friend, a lover, an acquaintance, some shmuck that I happened to live down the street from, its their stories that I try to tell, in my own way, and their personalities that drive their counterparts in the graphic novel.
It turns out that trying to come up with an entirely new character for such an unfamiliar means of storytelling was exactly what my problem was.
And so she went from being Anna to Kryssi. She's based on an old friend and romantic interest of mine from a long time ago and who I've long since parted ways with and who's insistence on deviating from the norm, no matter what it may have been, was responsible for drawing me to her in the first place.

The other characters, at least the ones with legs and sentience, consist entirely of the three hazmat suit workers who chase Kryssi through the city, and who are the first to discover, after Kryssi, the harmlessness of the falling rain outside.
Since they are almost entirely defined by the appearance of the hazmat suits, I made the decision to design the suits in a fashion that would outwardly express the terror that is contained inwardly, towards the rain and the environment in general that exists outside of the safety bubble of Los Cielos' dome, and where better to look for expressions of terror than Edvard Munch's Scream:




So to sum up, my inspirations have been pulled from a highly successful and lucrative author, a person who exists in my life, and an impressionist painter.

How's that?

Previsualizationerarium Update (aka about fcuking time)

Ok so.

The project is called "Rain."

No wait, we've already been over that.

Here's the update, I've finally got a script and screenplay that I really like, and that I'm almost 100% confident about whether or not I'm going to be able to actually pull it off.

Its just a matter of tweaking and dusting and punching it in the face until the kinks, which I'm positive are there, are worked out, like those annoying gas bubbles that always end up in your hummus and make you pick up less hummus every time you scoop. You know what I mean.

So yes...SCRIPT and SCREENPLAY...a moving Oscar-award winning film about a script and screenplay who move to Africa and embark on a journey to find themselves in the midst of...a lot of Africans. Also the meaning of twoo wuv.

More to come, summarily. SUMMARILY, so says I. This is shaping up to be cool. But first, I gotta get something to eat.

Blogstorm

Yes, this is exactly what I shouldn't be doing. I'm running my process under the big heavy tuesdaytuesdaytuesday wheels of dragged time.

But its how it'll happen.

Gimme a second.

Breakthrough

RE: Thesis

I finally have an idea I can truly be excited about. More on this soon.

PS: eu-fucking-reka

Boids

Did I ever mention that I don't have enough to do?

Have I ever in the past...two...three years of doing a shit job at maintaining this blog with any sort of regularity ever give the impression that I didn't have enough projects on my plate to wrap my teeth around, like some goddamned animal trying in vain for some ungodly reason to devour a beach ball?

But I'll be fucked if I don't think otherwise. I've got yet another new project that's slithering out of the works, and its gonna be a doozy, and by a doozy I mean not so much so.

Its about birds. Its for a "contest", the stakes aren't very high as its for the Digital Arts Network, a club formed entirely out of NYU and in spite of all its charms could better be termed "NYU CADA Fan Club". But that's why I love them.

Anyways, the contest is about birds and digital art and that's it. Make some digital art thing that expresses the idea of birds. Simple.
Deadline for the contest is somewhere around the end of October, or the middle, I'll be arsed if I can remember anything I didn't take the time to scrawl on the screen in big black marker.
That's anywhere from half a month to a month to pull some amazing out of our collective asses.

I'm pumped. So pumped.



I think its coming along nicely.

Handlebars

Some color references for what I'm thinking about.

This is more of a "kinda like this" than an "it is this" because its not exactly what I want.

For example, the reference I'm using takes place in the withered, poisoned ruins of a dead city, and my actual story takes place in a fully furnished condo with running water, clean not-utterly-destroyed walls and a shuddering similarity to a furniture catalog targeted towards young urban professionals.



This is from "Post Nuke," a webcomic about...well you can guess what.


The sun. The fucking sun.


Speaking of young urban professionals, here's a piss poor shot of the furniture from Fight Club. I'll have a better one once a wrangle a copy of the movie.

Put Something on the Something or Other

Oh, what the hell am I trying to do here.

Oh yeah.

YEAH.

So.

I revised the story a little bit. But like any good suicidal, after looking down the edge of the precipice, I'm having second thoughts.

So the original story for those one and half of you (Billy the Torso only counts as half a person) was about a girl who was trying to find rain outside of her domed, air conditioned shithole of a city. It was a big, fat, complicated idea that involved getting her favorite umbrella and trying to leave by car and then by train and then plane and then space cannon and nothing works, until she decided to say "fuck it" (not really, she's ten) and walk, which turns out to be what takes her out of the city and into the rain.

Possibly a bit much for six months for one man. But only because I want it to look pretty.

So I threw that into the "I don't want to throw you away because you're still an adorable halfway decent sploo of an idea but you're just too big and heavy and i'm not really ready for a committment right now baby but maybe a graphic novel in the future or something" box.

Its not a very big box.

The new idea keeps the girl and the city and the rain, except now the girl is in the room, is about eight to ten years older and never leaves the room, because in the room THERE ARE NO DOORS OR WINDOWS no, its a room in a condo-like flat in a skyrise building in the condo-district of the city.
The dome and the air conditioning over the city (aka a lot of production work) are gone, and have been super-shrunk into snowglobe size in the form of a...well, a snowglobe, on a table that the girl is now sitting at. Its not quite a snowglobe however, as instead of snow that falls every time you shake it, its rain. Impossible? Yes. But this is the future.
So the girl (let's call her Anna) is sitting at the table (one of those round breakfast tables), chin in her hands and is staring at the rain falling in the little globe and sighing wistfully. As is expected, the sun is bright, yellow and blaring outside through the glass-pane double doors behind her. For added effect, all the furniture in the room has that plasticine yuppie bought-off-that-catalog-that-was-in-Fight-Club look to it, there's a pot of eye-stabbingly red plastic flowers near the door, there's a calendar with a picture of a girl standing on a balcony smiling into rain falling on her face, with a checkmark for each day its been sunny (every day since the 1st, as far as we know) and there's a little figurine of a girl dancing in the snowglobe.
Everything I just mentioned will be strictly peripheral, as they'll be in scene, but the camera isn't going to give us any sort of up-front eyeful of them, because it'll be too busy focusing on Anna and the room at large, EXCEPT for a shot of the girl in the dome. A confrontational sequence of shots, as it were.
Anna is busily being wistful and casting longing gazes out the glass pane door behind her and generally looking like she wishes it were raining when....lo and behold...it starts raining outside.
Anna jumps up from her seat and runs over to the door, presses up against it, looks out and smiles.

Then she reaches over and presses the button (remember, future(is that stupid? that might be stupid)) to open door, and the door stubbornly refuses to do just that. She buzzes it again and again until she notices the words "EMERGENCY DANGER LOCK ENGAGED" glowing above the button and then looks outside again.

Outside is a potted plant (not so sure...its something she left or put out there at some point, like a book or a puppy, or a firstborn child) and the camera focuses to see little holes being burned wherever the droplets of rain falls on it.
Anna sees this and backs away from the window, then sits back down at the table and, with rain pouring outside, goes back to looking at the rain globe. Hopefully this time it'll feel more like she was wishing more that she was the girl dancing in the rain rather than just wishing for the rain.

Cause she sure got that.

So that's my new idea. As you can see I kind of took a machete to it. The only thing that's remained consistent so far are the overall attitude towards civilized society (aka its dirty, fake, depressing and pointless and weeee) and the color scheme, which is mostly yellows, browns, and some more yellows, with blues and greens thrown in during the rain.

It might be too much? Maybe I just need to man up and go wrangle the first idea onto its knees so that its a little more manageable.
I could be utterly fucking myself if I try to take that leap of faith, or it could be good.

Its hard to know what the right decision is, sometimes.

After all, its quite a drop.

Singing the Statment Blues

I have a new project idea...as if I don't have enough thousands of fuckin' projects on my plate and in my planning books already.

Its called "Rain."

Its a 3D animated short about a girl who wants to find rain.

More to come, fellows.

New Kids On The Borough

I'm surrounded by Hasids. And I couldn't be happier.

Let me clarify.

I'm living in a neighborhood full of Hasids, and I couldn't be happier.

For those of you who don't know what Hasids are, they are orthodox jews. Their collective group moniker translates roughly into "righteous", and they follow a strict doctrine of behavior so that they may place themselves in favor of the big glowy man in the sky.

Let me zoom out a little further.

For the length of last year I was living in a neighborhood of Brooklyn stammeringly named Bedford-Stuyvesant. I'd call the name a little odd, but its an hour or so's train ride away from another neighborhood tastefully named Flushing.
The Bed-Stuy is a shitty fucking neighborhood.
Its dirty, its noisy, its serviced by one of the most infamously terrible trains in the five boroughs, and its full of crime. The only reason I even lived there was because its bloody cheap.
I could say I was too busy being all doe-eyed at living in New York City for the first time to notice, but as it turns out, I continued not noticed for nine months straight.

That all came to a gloriously reality-checking halt when I walked out of my room one late night/early morning to find a guy I've never seen before standing in my hallway.

The little shitstain had already taken almost 600 dollars worth of stuff and passed it out the window that he came in to his friends.

The police arrived in the nick of time, fifteen minutes after the man had lost all of his nerve seeing me and taken off down the street.

The next month and a half after that before I moved out was a whirl of paranoia, wild parties, late nights and missed plane tickets, half fueled by my recent escapades into the business end of petty crime and half fueled by the imminent end of summer.

At that point, we installed bars on the windows and kept everything under lock and key. It wouldn't have been quite so bad if the same nuts hadn't attempted to break in two or three more times after that. How did I know? They left their greasy handprints on the window from trying to shove them up from the outside.

So Bed Stuy was a little late to the welcoming party. Nine months late, in fact. But the Hello Crew came in and did their job, and as a result, I moved. Sometime in the swirl that was the last month I pulled a place out of the ground in South Brooklyn, helped my roommate clean up the old place the best we could, then got the hell out of dodge.

My new neighborhood is fantastic, in every safe sense of that word. And not safe as in conservative, but safe as in safe. Its a family neighborhood. There's a jewish school across the street, and Bramsonort College a handful of blocks down 20th.
As a result, the place is also kind of boring, in terms of social scene. As in, there is none, unless you count going to a 24 Hour Grocery being social.
But its safe. After a few months of tearing my hair out, and going to sleep uncertain of whether I'd find the window broken when I woke up, I can rest easy.

Its Shabbas, and a few Hasids just walked down the street.
I'm freaking surrounded by them in this neighborhood.
And I couldn't be happier.

"Theses"

Look at all that time that's gone by. I can't even begin to imagine how long its been since I've set foot here. Its all just a matter of time isn't it?

As it is, I'm going to start spilling about my final project ideas here on occasion, or as its called in the annals of NYU CADA, "thesis".

A whole year, spent on one project, that's what thesis is. One semester for previsualization and another semester for setting in motion the plan laid out in the previous semester.

That's a lot of time to matter through.

Its to be expected. Its the final huzzah-house, the grand finale, the last big show of "holy fucking wow" that's supposed to make every money-stuffed executive and recruiter say "oh my god I want to hire you right goddamned now yes right goddamned now and I hope you take massive sacks of cash".

So we'll spend some time on it.

I really do wonder about what I'm actually capable of pulling free from the soil that all of my ideas crawl around in. Each of the Royal and Manchester micro-episodes, or "micro-sodes" as I've been calling them for the last four and a half seconds, were done in one semester, from pitch to print.

Maybe I'll pull off something amazing, a 3d animated opus that will brand itself in the leathery side of NYU's cowhide to be remembered for all eternity. Or I'll huck out a ten second shit of an excuse for a project and be told to never work in this town ever again.

Maybe I'll come out with a project that I'll love working on so much I'll just dive eyes first into it and swim around in work like a diver swimming around in a pool made of pure happiness. Or I'll hate it.

Who knows. Either way I'll have something at the end of all this. Something big, something fancy, and something that, hopefully will look good.

I don't quite know what it is yet.

But I will.

Its only a matter of time.

A Literal Font of Technicalated Mambojambonation

New York City is alright. Its a town of hustle and bustle, and a place where you get off the subway and get yourself lost in no seconds flat.

Its full of annoying things like raucous taxis, yuppies, crowded sandwich shops, stores full of clothing that's more expensive than god, posers, those little dogs that like to bark at you for no reason, advertisers, and people.

Its also full of awesome things like stage shows, famous people, non-crowded sandwich shops, stores that have anything and everythin in existence, artists, ice skating rinks, reliable public transportation, and people.

The technical expertise here is very nearly palpable, -tastable-, you could practically squeeze it between your forefinger and your thumb, some places you go. Or at least, all the hundreds of godforsaken powerwalkers who flock and swarm along Fifth Avenue and Forty Second want you to think that.

New York is everything and anything, in the end, and that includes a self contradiction. The city is quite possibly one of the most confrontational cities around and it gets in your face like its got something to show you often. But more often then not when you stop and look and show your face back, you find in the end that nothing too much was looking you down in the first place.

So what have I been doing while I've been sitting pretty here in the Big Apple? Well let's see...

Anathema is complete. At long, long, long last.

How about I take you on a journey through its creation?
Yeah that sounds like a good idea.

IN THE BEGINNING, God created the animals.

No wait, that's too far back.

SO FIRST, I came up with the idea.

No wait, that's still too far back.

According to this blog the last thing I showed you guys was the animatic. So let's start from there, shall we?


The Story Reel, a sideways glance at a first look at a beginning:
So in any video project worth its salt, there ought to be video....footage plates shot onto which the effects and everything else are added and edited against.

Bit of a no-brainer, this one, I shot my footage somewhere around October when my most gifted talent, Joanna "Akemi" Micco was in town. She did a bangup job of the role I asked her to do, adn there's nothing like looking at a bit of raw video plate and saying "yeah this is gonna be awesome."

STORY REEL WAS HERE

I would know. That's what I did.


The Rough Cut + Color Correction, chipping, chipping away:
A rough cut, as any video editor/producer worth his salt would know, is first pass at editing a piece, after the footage has all been slotted into their placeholders, marked out in the animatic.

A little while ago, a friend of mine, working on the same project, asked me what the difference between a Story Reel and a Rough Cut was. And so I told him. His response was that meant that they were the same thing, since a good portion of the editing was supposed to have already been done in the animatic.

I didn't have a response to that.

ROUGH CUT BEHIND HERE

I did all my color correction in the same pass. Why? It was a button. Well, a button and a slider, and a few more buttons and some adjustments and a couple more sliders....what I'm trying to say is that I did it, and I did it because there wasn't that much tweaking needed for the editing.


The Effects Pass, like a backstage pass into WHOA (not really):
Here's where the brunt of the work happened.

X - HERE BE EFFECTSPASSES

The aim was to terrify. And every single effect, filter, slider, and button that I inserted into this was made towards that goal. If anything seemed like it didn't more rightly align the piece towards something unnerving, something discomfiting, something that would give the viewer that sense of -unease-, it got chucked.

At the same time my knowledge with Aftereffects, as I'm doing this is about as stable as a palsy victim tapdancing on a seesaw.

Continually change, continually morphing, and acquiring new parts like some hideous metallo-bionic collective, I found myself having to throw out half of the effects that I started with whenever I found something better.
Radial blurs got replaced with horizontal-restricted gaussian blurs. Manual camera shakes got replaced with time squeezes and remaps.

Text was added and adjusted in ways that I hadn't anticipated before and as is evident, even the ephemeral title sequence got a complete workover.

But I like it.


The Sound Pass, a valley of audio connecting the Sound Valley to the Sound Plains:
Sound effects are horror. They are what makes the scary terrifying, what makes the disquieting unnerving, and the disturbing horrifying. It adds that extra thick filmy layer of immersion that is so essential to pulling your audience in when you're trying to disturb them.

In other words, I had fun with this.

HEREIN LIES SOUND PASS, GOOD IN LIFE, BETTER IN COMPLETION

Putting together the sound effects for this monster was a bit of a doozy. I wanted to keep the backing "music" track, I'd refrained from inserting that particular track into any other project specifically for the purposes of this very project.

So what else? It didn't really feel cohesive unless the individual cuts had some other sound things going on top of it.

Originally I recorded a bunch of audio using my lovely little headphone mic...gasps, wails, groans, and strange mumblings.

Exactly ten seconds after I put them into the track, I threw them out. Homemade audio is not conducive to scaring people, unless you're going less for "scary" and more for "really freaking sketchy".

So I went back to the library of ambient tracks that I had originally pulled the backing "music" from and began slicing and julienning things as I saw fit and sliding them onto the tracks.

And I liked it.

The finished product that made it onto the DVD deviates exactly none from the finished Sound Pass. Everything up until that point had been polished out nicely before I moved on to the next step so I felt no real need to go back and whip a dead horse that's already primed for the races. ... ...

...

More on my other projects later.

Stay tuned.

Lock, Stock and Some Other Things That Might Be Smoking

A few more highlights in the project, to show how things are coming along, more on all of this later.

This is the shot list, the name of which sounds kind of like a drunkard's to-do list. Aka fantastic.

Linky

MORE LATER

What's He Storyboarding In There?

So in the motion visual arts industry we have this thing called a "storyboard". What is a storyboard? Well for the three of you out in the world older than 21 who don't know what it is, a storyboard is a board that tells the story.

Quite literally, when the storyboard was first invented deep in the bowels of the media infant that was dubbed "Disney", which would later grow monstrously and terribly into the media giant that was dubbed "Disney", it was a series of boards, likely cardboard or foamcore or whatever they used in those days, upon which an entire Mickey Mouse cartoon would be laid out in text and drawn frames. Each drawn frames represented a key moment in the animation that would help all the animators know what was going on.

Cut to the present day, two thousand seven, the cusp of a brilliant era that gave birth to high definition television, touch screen displays, motion capture, holograms, computer chipped coffee machines and weird subliminal Sprite commercials involving guys in huge green suits that really don't make you want to drink more Sprite. Really.

And a storyboard is still a series of boards, likely cardboard or foamcore or whatever. The difference now though is that they are not only limited to cartoons, and they are not only limited to Disney's inner sanctum.

After all. If they were, how in the world would I be using for my in-development Anathema project right now?

The answer is: pure willpower.

Zoom In On That Thing Right There

It's called "Anathema".
Or rather it will be called Anathema, once it gets made.

The assignment is I will have thirty seconds to scare the everloving fuck out of you and yours.

Now, like any good obsessive artist/filmmaker/motiongraphicisisist/closet psychotic I want to avoid cliches when making something like this. It helps that the cliches of the modern day horror extravaganza don't really consist of terrifying people anymore.
Certain horror flicks go with gore. All over the place. Intestines and stomaches and hearts and brains and chainsaws and knives and more intestines and more knives and hey how about some more intestines guys I think this scene needs more intestines what do you think more intestines, yeah more intestines. And that works sometimes, it gets a reaction out of the crowd.

Others go with LOUD NOISES.

....
....
....
LOUD NOISES

And that's always guaranteed to get the audience to jump, right?

But is it really scaring them?

Showing a few dozen liters of red liquid in a scene and throwing in some screams, murder weapons and maybe a lampshade made from human skin isn't really terrifying someone, as it is more of a elaborate and puppeted disgust dressed in the trappings of fright. Also unsanitary.

Flinging loud noises and sudden scary imagery onto the scene is the movie equivalent of jumping out of a corner and going "BLAGHLABLGKHAL". This too isn't scaring someone as it is just surprising the crap out of them.

Its cliches like these that I will seek to avoid. The gore, the gotcha moments, the sudden loud noises and things rushing towards the camera going "AAAHHH!"

Instead I will rely on things more substantial...chilling imagery, the unseen, the implications of the unknown and a vague conceptual story about a curse, or a possession, to grab you by your ribs and leave a mark.

Or, at least.

That is the hope.

The script has been revised, and a style sheet is available for your viewing pleasure. Check it ouuuuuttttttttttt. T.

Footslogging

There's new recent developments all over the damned place.

But for now:
Link (not Zelda)
Linkimus Rex

More on these later.

Dr. Media Or: How I Learned To Love The Message

Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message.
If this is true, then the message of most media these days is
LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME PAY ATTENTION TO ME PLEASE AAHHH I CRAVE ATTENTION AHHHH mixed in with more than a healthy dose of "buy this because its awesome do it right now why are you still standing here looking at this go."

Needless to say, the last month has been a pure, unabashed and shameless complete orgiastic flood of media in all of its shapes, sizes and forms. Magazine, ads, books, video, ads, movies, DVD, billboards, video games, ads, and oh hey did I mention the ads?

In case you missed it, they're everywhere. On cars, on trains, on bathrooms, in the subway, in the sky, on the ground, on the sides of buildings, AS the sides of the buildings...

But the other day I was walking down 33rd street the other night, staring at a big cuddlepuddle of billboards on top of a collection of apartment buildings, telling me to get this new cel phone, and to buy more Gatorade in an extreme manner while sweating unhealthy looking colors. And I realized I was alright with it. And for this reason.

New York City is a city that breathes. Like you, me and that cat lying in the corner, it moves, pulsates, breathes and is alive, and not only that, it manages to pull off looking really cool in addition to that. And why?

The ads.

The billboards and the posters and the near technicolor eyegasmwashimitude of all the ads takes what would normally be a city full of stolid, sterile looking towers and skyrises sullenly staring down at the flood of people on the street and makes them all dance. It gives them color, it gives them expression, even if that expression is you need to stuff your face with this burger right now. Its like a masquerade ball, where instead of people its buildings, and instead of gold feathered masks its ads talking about how great juice is (especially this brand of juice which you need to go out and buy right now).

If it weren't for the ads, a lot of the city would be blocks. As a digital artist, I'm a whore for well done visuals, so I love all the billboards and ads ripping through the entire city.

The ads themselves look incredible too. We've come a long way from the day and age of curio-based ads and photo ads with helvetica and futura set on a drab gray background. Hell, even design itself has taken ginormous leaps and bounds since the days of Jugendstil and Art Nouveau.

I recently swiped a bunch of magazines from your friendly neighborhood bookstore. Check this out.


This is SoftImage's theme for their XSI software, lifted from 3D World magazine. Right here you can begin picking out the inspirations that drove the creation and the idea behind this piece. Its very centered. Strong, balanced.
Its human-centered, and revolves around the human in the ad, even though hoodie guy is completely anonymous. Newer influences that shaped this come from Hollywood, comics and film standbys...the strong shadows, the exaggerated pose that you could look at and you would swear it was a photo taken while the guy is in motion, even though it was probably set up over the course of four hours and the guy is probably sick of standing in the same position for the entirety of said four hours.
Not to mention the logo, a mystical, magical effect, the look of which was ushered in by ye olde After Effects generation, when suddenly making glowy mystal magical things wasn't so hard anymore.

Not to say everything is nothing but new and moving forward. Design tradition oldies are still goodies:

This is the first page of an article reviewing Adobe's interactive website advertisements in Communication Arts' annual publication.

Here we don't the fancy trappings of Lots of Fucking Effects and Filters, unless you consider text and lines to be Lots of Fucking Effects and Filters. But as a page, as a whole, it is well put together. Well designed, one might say. Why? Because even as a page that need bear the load of blocks and blocks of text, it still adheres to the formal elements of design, design standbys that have been with us forever, clocking in now at a millenia and a few centuries' change. Most importantly, the piece is balanced.

And finally:

Concept art for an unholy abberation against god, nature and every fluffy puppy in the world named "Schism", from the soon-to-be-released Silent Hill 4.

This is the new face of the terrifying, o ladies and gentlemen, and it is oh so very telling. Long time ago, horror consisted of a bunch of standbys, most of which were pulled from books and stories which had no visuals in hand to slap you in the face with: Frankenstein's monster, the Werewolf, Dracula, the Mummy, Zombies.
Ever since Hellraiser came out in the late eighties, however, that sort of thing took a bonesplitting surge forward.
Why is this so telling? Ours is an era where both art and design has flowered outwards beyond our diminutive little frames, our normal modes of thought. Some would say it has become even greater. Its become one of the big cornerstones of our new generation, and that's fast evolution.
Here's how it goes. Someone watches a bit of media. Its not really that out there, but it breaks new ground. This someone, being an artist or a designer, sees the ground broken and immediately pushes past the broken area into the new areas beyond. His work subsequently becomes more out there, even more groundbreaking, and even more evolved beyond our normal modes of thought. Someone else sees this artist's work, its kind of far away, but the vast area of this new ground expands her mind.
Then she sees the ground broken, and she, being an artist or a designer, immediately steps past the broken area and into even newer areas, pushing it farther. The next artist comes along and does the same, though their mind must expand that much further from their "normal" modes of thought.

If this trend continues one day art and design will both be beyond the reach of human comprehension while being infinitely accessible at the same time.

But Patrick! This sounds intimidating and scary and... worry not dear reader, for you can always remember two things.
One: I'm one guy, one short, asian guy sitting in front of a computer. There are probably thousands of short asian guys sitting in front of computers who could tell you I'm crazy.
Two: Design and art are almost always moving forward and changing, but its memory and its filial piety are near impeccable. Art and design are, in the very end, nothing more than expression and communication through unusual means. Art and design both started as cave paintings scrabbled all over some walls, and to this day, this method of expression through art and design can still leave a mark. I am of the belief that art and design will never forget its roots, even if its artists and proponents do.

That's what makes it so excellent.



God bless you, mediation. Bless you right in your stupid, stupid face.



PS: I have a new project idea, now in treatment format. Its here -> Chain Link Fence

And We're Live In Three....Two....

In a perfect world, this is where I'd fill in one sentence to stand in as the body of my blog, and leave the rest of you, oh dear sparse and few readers and spammers copious and plenty, riding the edges of your seats. What is he going to say next? He left off at two...what happened to one?? What happens when he gets to one??? Will there be prizes, and damned if I should submit....pie?!?!?

In a perfect world, you would be doing that, instead of reading this.

In a perfect world, there would be rainbows and kittens and bunnies.

In a perfect world, I would have seventeen ho-jillion dollars, and an army of robotic sex slave concubines that are capable of dominating the world for me while simultaneously delivering ice cream and massages to me every six seconds.

This is not a perfect world.

But hey, not that I'm complaining. As I write this, I'm currently sitting deep within the bowels of the concrete, metal, shitstained beast they call Brooklyn, New York. I'm a twenty minute subway ride from the heart of Manhattan, bar none one of the greatest cities in existence. There's gatorade in my fridge. There's a grocery within pissing distance of my apartment. There's a broken down car in front of my apartment building. And I have no bed.

Its like I'm living one of the best damned dreams ever.

God bless grad school.
Also, god bless debt.

But hey, its not a perfect world.


In other not completely unrelated news, rabid ferrets have invaded my apartment and are trying desperately to sell me life insurance.
Actually that's a lie, that's not as unrelated as you'd think.

But I've got one big project coming up. This one's on delivery courtesy of CADA at the NYU SChool of Continuing and Professional Studies. Chances are it'll fuse a lot of AfterEffects, and a little bit of Photoshop.

THe problem here is, of course that I barely know anything about AfterEffects. I'm like a toddler, who's had new feet surgically implanted onto his ankles. I don't know much about what I'm supposed to do.

I was however, asked to come up with some ideas for projects that I could do.

Some thoughts thus far:

STYLE: Horror
TECHNIQUE: Blending effects and filters, with strong emphasis on composition in general.

Using these tools, I'll attempt to create in motion one of my favorite ambiances that I have been creating for so long in stills: that of the horrific. The fusion of metal and flesh, the horrors of death, the horrors of life, all the things surreal and terrible that place us on edge.

STYLE: Punk/Rebel
TECHNIQUE: Rotoscoping and that neat line-drawing/scrawling effect that everyone and their mother uses.

Lots of moving around is planned, and heavy emphasis on aspects of punk/rebel culture will be used to portray the feeling. Expect graffiti, tattoos, mohawks, and kids that have bad attitudes. Or at least look like they do.

STYLE: Nu-Medieval
TECHNIQUE: Streamlined motion, 2d image layering, lights and other solid effects

A style of medieval that merges the ancient with aspects of modern design and technology that I dreamed up one day is going to be the focus of this one. It will celebrate a culture that has no gunpowder, has standardized bioengineering and has fused the primitive and the advanced that will hopefully be described as beautiful anachronistic.

In other words, I have barely any idea what I'm doing. I've been tooling around with AfterEffects for about two, going into my third week now, and I still have a whole metric fuckton to learn. I'd be more confident about taking on this project if I knew more. In a perfect world, I'd know AfterEffects like the back of my hand, and I'd have some storyboards by now.

But this is not a perfect world.

Sleep Is For The Weak. And The Sane.

I have no idea if its been a week or not since my last post. Everything beyond a few days before....uh....yesterday....is a blur. I vaguely recall going to class somewhere and ending up being seated behind a huge white pillar and having to stare at it for the entire class. Also something about gay sex on the computer screen, alcohol, Robot Chicken, kittens (particularly one named Sophie), and a metric fuckton of development on my projects.

No matter.

The last one is the one I want to talk to you today, all you total of three people who will end up reading this.

The zombie game has been splashed, after a huge step back, with a healthy, steaming bucket of perspective.
Right now, we have three people on our team, and oh man if it doesn't take at least three times that many to make even the simplest of RTS games.
I can at least say with confidence that in terms of design and art, we have just about as many people we'd need (barring cutscenes, but Ramon's apparently all over that).
There's me, and there's Ramon. One (me) on general art, texturing, and all the rough-and-tumble 2d design work including interface design, drawing pictures of zombies, designing levels, writing up design docs, laughing maniacally, and killing hookers. One of those isn't actually true. Ramon is on everything else, namely, the 3d stuff, namely, modelling, animating and the cutscene that he's working on for 430. This ensures a pretty constant and even workflow for the both of us.

Which leaves George.

George has gotta shoulder everything else that's -not- art. The code, basically. I've told him that I'll help him with any code that he needs. I've also made some hefty recommendations that we need more programmers, but based on his generally cold-shoulder reaction to all of it (he wants to pull it all himself) and all the humming-and-hawing and subject-changing that he did while we were talking about the prospect of getting more people to help with programming, I'm not sure how likely that is to happen.
I don't know George too well. I'm not gonna make any judgements on his capabilities, in fact, I've heard from a bunch of sources that he's a hand with the stuff. We'll see how it goes.
In the meantime I'll hope this entire thing doesn't turn into some sort of cosmic horror and eat me.

On the lighter sides of the news, thousands of capitalist pigs are sure to die in a space shuttle crash on the moon.

No wait, that's from Airplane.

On the lighter sides of the news, we've made some progress. We've settled on an engine to develop this thing off of.

BEHOLD. IRRLICHT. -ENSTEIN.

Yes we've chosen the Irrlicht engine to wrangle this thing to the ground with. With luck, we'll have better luck than Steve Irwin did with the stingrays.

In art news, I'm currently typing up a design doc, which first and foremost will outline what will be done by the end of the semester. Its not going to be a working game. In fact, it wont' even be a fully developed demo level. But it will be something, and you will be able to both blow up zombies and use zombies to eat people's faces.

And for now, really, that's enough.

In the meantime, the full Design Doc for the game is going to be written in case we want to pick this up at some later time, and all the designs will continue in spite of the pace of the rest of the game.

BUT ENOUGH TALK

GIMME MY WAFFLE SUNDDAAAAAEEE-

I mean

GIMME MY PICTURES OF ZOMBBIIIEEEZZZZZ-






These are just a few of the zombie designs I've dredged up, only about three of which will probably be in the game.

Coming up:
THE PATHETIC HUMAN FORCES

Fuckall I'm never going to get any sleep.

PLACES! LIGHTS! GET THOSE CURTAINS UP!

A year ago I left this little scrap of blog to the wild, dark and forbidding depths of the interwebs.

But a good creator never forgets about his baby, so here I am, after a yearlong hiatus full of sex, drugs and rock n' roll, except without the sex, drugs and rock n' roll.

Now you all may be wondering "But Patrick, an entire year has gone by! Surely you'll tell us about what's been going on, and relate to us all of the crazy adventures/wild parties/bear hunting expeditions/explorations of lost civilizations/mary-had-a-little-lamb-riding-a-goddamned-unicorn experiences that you've had? Or at least tell us what lamb-sacrificing insanities you're up to now!"
And boy, wouldn't I.

But I won't. I won't go into everything I've done in the past year because if I would, this post would be a ga-fucking-zillion pages long, and I'd be so laden down with hubris I wouldn't be able to walk to class without looking like a long-haired, asian Quasimodo.

As for the now, its September, and once again I'm loaded with more projects than Southern Chicago.
Let's go through a quick tally shall we?
-"Dusk of the Dead" a real time strategy game
-"Royal and Manchester, Cybernet P.I.s" a animation
-"Euphoria Inc." a graphic novel
-"Hellhounds On My Trail" a graphic novel
-"They Came From The Internet" a webcomic

An RTS, a 3d animation, TWO graphic novels and a webcomic. Out of these five projects, only two of them are -not- related to school, and those are the last two. I held back from going forward with Hellhounds On My Trail as a class project because as far as I know, AK isn't going to get me the next part of the script for the thing until he's fifty fucking years old, and I personally feel the webcomic could be kept up without any people stabbing me in the face to get me to do the work.

Needless to say, I got my work cut out for me this semester.

Of particular interest though, is the new game that I'm working on: Dusk of the Dead.
Yes, its a real time strategy game, its going to be a fully functional real time strategy game. Yes, its a play on "Dawn of the Dead," and yes...its a real time strategy game about zombies.
I'm working on this with two other guys, one is in charge of programming, the other is in charge of 3d animation and modelling, and me? I'm in charge of game design, specs, texturing, sound design, catering, being the fluffer, and all the things that no one else really wants to do. HAH, just kidding, I don't cater.

Are you excited? I am.

The basic idea is thus. Like any good real time strategy worth its salt, there are two sides to the conflict. And like any good zombie game, its set in an urban environment that's been completely and utterly destroyed.
The two sides are, to be expected, humans and zombies.
The humans are your typical real time strategy peoples. They collect resources, and crank near limitless amoutns of new units out of clown-car like factories, build fortifications, and send out waves of units to conquer the opposition/survive the impossibly huge onslaught.
The zombies are a little different. We haven't quite decided on a solid scheme for how they'll be implemented but my thoughts are thus: they collect resources, but instead of pulling stuff out of mines and piles of junk lying around, like the humans do, they have an entirely different set of resources: bodies.
The idea is in this hopeless, remnants-of-human-civilization world, not only will there be packs of congregated civilians seeking refuge in barely protected shelters, there will be bodies littering the streets of our cities, and using these bodies, the undead will bolster their forces.

I think its solid.
No.
I think its absolutely fucking kickass.

And this thing is going to be made. Dammit.