The first of the new goodies to kick off the new year – I got lots planned so we’ll start it all off with a tasty new spaceship inspired by a fusion of mass effect and district 9. Enjoy guys.

Wow what a crazy past few months. Andrew, Steve and I have been having to juggle some crazy website issues ranging from being hacked on Halloween (and a couple times after) then the reemergence of the spam bots on our comment service. So commenting has once again been disabled until further notice sadly…

In other news i just realized that it has been almost 4 months since I last post something. yikes, how time flies. But I’ve still been drawing, in fact learning tons taking a few courses while working full time. Since September I’ve taken to trying to learn anatomy which i foolishly neglected back in school. Here’s a slew of posts from these classes and my sketchbook.

Also I’ve updated the website with these and some minor organizational items.

I’ll try and do some actual finished work before the year is over. Thanks for watching so far everyone.

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So, we entered a 48-hour film contest called Bloodshots Canada 2009.

(I suggest following this to YouTube, and watching it in all its HD glory)

The contest is pretty fun, and we had a pretty good time doing it, and some of the other teams produced pretty excellent films.

Our film was submitted somewhat later than the 48 hour deadline, and was thus disqualified. In this, and other matters, lessons were learned. Some of these lessons really would only apply to future time-limited short film contests, others we can probably use generally. Here are some of those lessons:

Editors are important… if you are directing and acting in a film, and you have a 48-hour deadline, you must not also be the editor This can actually be generalized to a number of problems we encountered. In my excessive enthusiasm, I tried to take on as many roles as possible. It turns out, that starting to edit after having spent your entire previous 24 hours generating the raw footage behind and in front of the camera, leaves you with neither sufficient time, nor mental energy to do a particularly good job of editing. In these time-constrained scenarios, it is really vital to have someone dedicated to editing who starts that business up while you’re still shooting.

Dialogue is not your friend… or, Don’t Make it Better … we started with, I think, a very solid script that was almost entirely visual, with just a bit of dialogue in the scenes that bookended the visual middle… the dialogue wasn’t exactly catchy or natural, but it was functional. While we were shooting the middle, wordless section of the short film, Jordan was rewriting the dialogue, making it snappier, making it more show, and less tell. This seemed like a reasonably efficient use of everyone’s time.

Do not do this!

You end up with more dialogue than you can fit into the 7 minute time limit, and with more dialogue than you can memorize in the amount of time you’ve allotted to shoot the dialogue bits and finish up, and with an actress who arrives already prepared to speak the lines from the original version of the script and so on. When I got Jordan’s updated draft I tried to pare it down some, suspecting that the dialogue expansion might spiral into massive schedule damage, both during the shoot, and in editing. I was right on this account, but paring down wasn’t the solution. The correct solution would have been to revert to the original script. Not because Jordan’s draft wasn’t better, but because with the kind of time constraint we were working with, “making it better” is a pale third-tier priority, placed well below “getting it done”.

Even in the dialogue heavy 48 and 24 hour shorts I’ve seen, there is a common thread. One is that they all had Editors (something we really do need to fix for next time), and two, the dialogue was rarely good. Often functional, sure, but not much beyond that… and with good reason. They had to write the thing, and then they had to shoot the thing, and then they had to edit the thing. The script needs to be done as soon as possible and into the hands of the actors as soon as possible.

The Show Don’t Tell thing is bullshit anyway. Show and Tell, prioritizing for effect or efficiency depending on the situation… in the case of a 48 hour short film contest, generally prioritize efficiency.

Sounds need a sound-person… also, it’s time to buy a shotgun microphone … this is just a result of really poor planning and general lack of cleverness on my part. We had no one explicitly and exclusively responsible for sound. We did not have a good shotgun microphone. The sound quality of our short film is, as a result, quite sucky, all the way through. This cannot be helped now.

Oh, so that’s how fat I am if you choose to star in, and then edit your own short film, and were not exactly 100% aware of how fat you are, you will be. It will be rendered quite clear. I could say that it’s leftover Thanksgiving weight, but it’s isn’t. Not primarily, anyway. Although the early October reintroduction of Eggnog into store shelves in time for Thanksgiving certainly didn’t do me any favors.

Take your fake blood seriously our one really good blood spray scene, at the film’s climax, loses some of its effect because the fake blood is not red enough, and too translucent… it shows up as a semi-invisible purple-pink spray on the original footage, and with heavy colour correction in the final version, is only a little better. The initial thought, here, was that excessive fake blood thickness would have clogged the super soaker, so we emitted our standard opaquing agent (chocolate sauce)… I’m not sure why we assumed this without testing. We might have also loaded the supersoaker with some of our store-bought fake blood, which is fairly fluid, and unmistakeably blood-coloured. The shot is alright, but it could have been amazing.

When you are going to have a shot of red blood dripping onto a green shirt please remember that your cinematographer is red/green colourblind … this is pretty much self explanatory. All of the footage from the first half of the day looked so good… I forgot that there wasn’t much in the way of red/green contrast to challenge Gordon’s vision. Our final shot is of red blood dripping onto a green shirt. Only the red blood is black. The exposure could have been adjusted to fix this, but I was in front of the camera, and Gordon is colourblind.

Test everything testable before you start … the deliverable format of the movie was a DVD playable in a standard DVD player. I’ve never really done this. Ever. I haven’t rendered a film of any kind on my computer in quite some time. Months, if not a year. I have, maybe, forgotten some important settings. I have perhaps lost my intuition for how long certain renderings should take. Somehow, I thought that everything would just work out, when editing was done.

It did not.

We had renderings of video without sound. Renderings of video with sound far too quiet to hear. DVD burning software stating that the DVD had been burnt and popping the DVD out of the drive, but with the DVD still magically blank.

Awesome.

This is all stuff that can be tested ahead of time.

Camping … Steve’s house is very close to where the DVD drop-off point was meant to be. I should have camped out at Steve’s house to do editing. This way, I’d have only had to jog down to the place to deliver the DVD… I might have actually made it on time… also, Steve would have been there to trouble shoot the DVD burning bullshit issues, my mind having already been completely fried… we could have definitely had the thing finished and handed in on time.

The sound would have still been pretty terrible.

So, the blog was downed around Halloween, due to horrible internet pirates turning our sweet blog into a virus spewing demon. Steve made it better.

Steve always makes it better.

I swear these were done like a month ago.

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Actually, I can’t make a very good argument for this. I haven’t seen any of the masses echoing the above statement make much of one either. It tends to swing between two positions. First, with great emphasis, they ask you if you really got it. You know. It takes place in South Africa. The aliens are living in a slum, their second class citizenship enforced by bureaucratic weight and military force. Don’t you get it? I feel like a man who might look at a basic equation, 2+2=4, and shrug. It is certainly what it is, but another man might grab me by the shirtsleeves and shout, “But you aren’t getting it man? Did you even see that 2? Or the other 2? And then the four? It adds up! It all adds up!”.

And so it does.

From here on in, I recklessly spoil the film where I need to. If you haven’t seen the film yet, and want to be surprised by it, then don’t read this.

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Beefin up the ol’ portfolio with some stuff it’s lacking…women + medieval stuff and of course some revised designs for Simon Boy Wizard. The male couterpart to the woman is about 1/2 done and should be up in the next few days. Adios.

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You are stuck. Probably, there are still images vivid in your mind, but you can no longer link them together. They are no longer a part of any story. In your desperation, you start, for a moment, to write about a man sitting in front of a typing device similar to your own, suffering from a lack of productivity similar to your own. You are not the first to attempt this. You will not be the last. You have been told a thousand times to write what you know, and, at this very moment, not being able to write is exactly all that you know.

Wait. Feel yourself out, get a sense of your body, your environment, your feelings. Surely, you must know at least one more thing, you must know something beyond this most tired of cliches.

Your stomach growls.

You know that you are hungry.

Every character worth the words that make him wants something. Your protagonist must want something badly enough to propel him through the hell to which you are about to send him. You know about hunger. You know about wanting…

A delicious turkey sandwich.

So you are downstairs, in the kitchen. You’ve pulled the good bread out of the bread box and inspected your two slices for mold — better to risk moldiness than screw up good bread in the fridge. From the fridge you’ve retrieved your grainy German mustard. You smear it on thick. Lettuce and tomatoes are placed on the table, but not married to the sandwich; you eat a slice of each separately. Turkey and Mustard and Bread… a holy trinity of tastes… they deserve no flavour interference.

Lastly, you open the meat tray, and lo: There is no turkey there to speak of!

For every protagonist that wants, there must be a universe that conspires against him. You see, where you expected thick deli-chopped turkey meat, waits thin, grocery store roast beef slices, slick, and dull to the tongue. You must make a choice, eat now, in mediocrity, or move forward, overcoming whatever increasingly improbable obstacles rise before you.

This wouldn’t be a story if you settled.

You take your half-made sandwich carefully in hand, and in your trousers you stuff your Glock, and a keen butcher’s knife. You open your kitchen doors, and make your way into the woods. Somewhere, over the eastern hills, the prophets say, lies a field untouched by the hands of man, home to turkeys enough to feed man until the end times.

You walk for hours, over boulders the size of houses, and through hollow logs twice size of office buildings. Something had better force you to act, to make a decision; something must challenge you. You arrive at a river.

The river is as wide as an eight-lane highway, and roars savagely. You kick off your shoes and roll up the cuffs of your trousers. You raise the gestating turkey sandwich high above your head, and step into the water. You are barely ankle deep when the water’s tug begins to affect your balance. You are not more than an eighth of the way through, and the water is above your belly button. You strain on the tips of your toes to keep the sandwich as far away from potential sogginess as possible. This, a mistake. The water drags you off of your toes and then under. Your body tumbles and you thrash your arms wildly.

You are sitting on the riverbed, opposite where you entered, if a little downstream. Your clothes are soaked, your hair is soaked. The soaked sandwich disintegrates in your hand.

All is lost.

You rise to your feet, and check your trousers. You still possess your glock and butcher’s knife. You begin to walk. At first, each step is strained, deliberate, but you pick up speed, purpose. You enter the woods. The ground slopes upward.

If you didn’t face certain defeat and keep going, this wouldn’t be a story either.

You happen upon some grain, sprouting from between two rocks. You take your butches knife and cut it at the stem. You grind it up between two stones, and add water by squeezing out your soaked shirt. You build a fire, and this evening, you bake bread.

The next morning, after travelling even further up the hillside, you encounter a wild mustard bush. You squeeze out the remaining water from your soaked trousers, and grind the mustard seed. After letting it sit for a while, you spread the fresh mustard onto your fresh bread.

After a full day’s climb, you reach the top of the hill. The sun has just dipped below the horizon, and all life is bathed in the purple-orange glow of magic hour. The trees open up to a field. Before you a rusted wire and wooden stake fence barely stands. The wire has decayed enough to split in several places, and many of the stakes have toppled over. All of it, is nearly completely overgrown with weeds. In the middle of this grassy clearing stands a lone turkey.

You draw your glock and point it at the bird; you can feel the cold steel of the belted butcher’s knife against your skin. Your bread is fresh, your mustard is fresh, soon the trinity will be complete and you will feast on the finest freshest sandwich every assembled by the hands of man.

Your finger squeezes the trigger. And then, you are overwhelmed by the turkey’s majesty.

Its tail fanned like a peacock, it’s feathers striped like a bold tiger, it’s face decorated with the wild colours of a gaelic warrior, all in the subdued tones of the puritans. The turkey is the most regal of all galliformes. A pilgrim king.

The glock lands lands among the weeds, unfired.

You fall to your knees and weep.

Trying to do thinner inks… More humans coming soon.

A couple more things I’m working on – or rather the evolution of last weeks too WIPS. A bit more fooling and they’ll be all done. Also another reproduction of one of Sargents’ studies.

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