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Unfinished Projects
5 min read
I'm thinking about old, unfinished projects.
Back in 1999 through 2001 I had worked pretty hard on the conceptual phases of mounting a stage production of Shakespeare's the Tempest. It's an odd, thoughtful play in which very little actually happens, but there is great beauty in the spaces between sparse action. I did a close reading and fell in love with it's heart full of forgiveness, disillusionment and surrender to the crushing wheel of time.
These sketches were a joy to make. I dug through two wonderful Renaissance woodcut and 18th Century illustration reproduction books, Vecellio's and Lechevallier-Chevignard's, imagining up the looks of all the characters and trying to make some detailed, evocative pencil sketches. There are several more of them than I am posting, I've done all but one or two individuals from the play. I keep expecting to do something with this work someday, but what, exactly, I haven't been able to resolve.
In addition to all the design work I wrote a very large set of incredibly detailed notes about what I thought the history of these characters was, and what their lives became after the events of the play. I found connections in them to other classic literature. I tried in these exercises to stay as true to the characters as written as possible. Too often, I think, people will approach a play like this and bring too much of their own politics or convictions, and disrupt what is a carefully balanced mix of personalities with grafted polemic. Caliban, for example, is surely oppressed, but he is not a noble savage, though it is often tempting for a modern production to portray him so.
I made a physical map of the island in the play and did several illustrations of scene-scapes. I didn't think they would be built for stage exactly as drawn, but thought the work of drawing them would invite surprises in my thinking about how to arrange the sets.
As the geography started coming together, the whole story started coming together, and some real momentum was building.
Like splitting the logs in a seemingly endless woodpile, all these small acts of thought and drawing were reducing a mountain of chaos into a stack of ordered and useful ideas.
Unfortunately, in the end the steam ran out and I never got a solid thing completed. But this body of effort remains in sketchbooks and notes, and I come back and raid it occasionally for ideas in other projects. The final project for a CGI class. The subject for a sculpture.
Now, as I'm looking at what to do here in the coming year, I'm thinking there is still some life in here, and may be expanding on this work. What's in it? A book maybe. A gallery show. It could go in several directions.
Easily the most frustrating thing about having a restless imagination is not being able to settle on any one project to see through to the end. I've found I work best under the management of someone else, or as one member of a collaborative group. Without the fact of a project outside of my full control I am mostly unable to do the mental triage necessary to keep work focused on serving the project in a timely manner. All my self motivated endeavors stretch out endlessly and get big and unmanageable.
But I'm also generally unable to find collaborators I can work with. Either their ideas don't inspire me or I don't respect the quality of their work. I'm sure my ego is obstructing my growth as an artist here, but it's a fact I need to learn to deal with. There are only two people I've been able to repeatedly collaborate with.
One is a friend I used to do comedy with, we've made short films, live performances and multi-media things together and they've always been decent. With him it works, only when it revolves around comedy, because I find him incredibly funny, and so can almost always turn my work to serving his vision. I trust he'll have better instincts than me in that way.
The other is someone I produced a play with once, and later have done artwork under the direction of. She is a graphic designer with a really acute eye, and though I generally wouldn't go myself in the directions she generally goes, or maybe because of that, I also trust her judgment in following artwork down the paths she wants to take it.
I guess I do my best work partially blind, under the guidance of someone I trust can see the road. If you leave me to try the roads myself, I'll go part way up and down all the ones that look interesting to me, but I'll never decide which to follow all the way.
That flaw is what I need to work on this year.
Back in 1999 through 2001 I had worked pretty hard on the conceptual phases of mounting a stage production of Shakespeare's the Tempest. It's an odd, thoughtful play in which very little actually happens, but there is great beauty in the spaces between sparse action. I did a close reading and fell in love with it's heart full of forgiveness, disillusionment and surrender to the crushing wheel of time.
These sketches were a joy to make. I dug through two wonderful Renaissance woodcut and 18th Century illustration reproduction books, Vecellio's and Lechevallier-Chevignard's, imagining up the looks of all the characters and trying to make some detailed, evocative pencil sketches. There are several more of them than I am posting, I've done all but one or two individuals from the play. I keep expecting to do something with this work someday, but what, exactly, I haven't been able to resolve.
In addition to all the design work I wrote a very large set of incredibly detailed notes about what I thought the history of these characters was, and what their lives became after the events of the play. I found connections in them to other classic literature. I tried in these exercises to stay as true to the characters as written as possible. Too often, I think, people will approach a play like this and bring too much of their own politics or convictions, and disrupt what is a carefully balanced mix of personalities with grafted polemic. Caliban, for example, is surely oppressed, but he is not a noble savage, though it is often tempting for a modern production to portray him so.
I made a physical map of the island in the play and did several illustrations of scene-scapes. I didn't think they would be built for stage exactly as drawn, but thought the work of drawing them would invite surprises in my thinking about how to arrange the sets.
As the geography started coming together, the whole story started coming together, and some real momentum was building.
Like splitting the logs in a seemingly endless woodpile, all these small acts of thought and drawing were reducing a mountain of chaos into a stack of ordered and useful ideas.
Unfortunately, in the end the steam ran out and I never got a solid thing completed. But this body of effort remains in sketchbooks and notes, and I come back and raid it occasionally for ideas in other projects. The final project for a CGI class. The subject for a sculpture.
Now, as I'm looking at what to do here in the coming year, I'm thinking there is still some life in here, and may be expanding on this work. What's in it? A book maybe. A gallery show. It could go in several directions.
Easily the most frustrating thing about having a restless imagination is not being able to settle on any one project to see through to the end. I've found I work best under the management of someone else, or as one member of a collaborative group. Without the fact of a project outside of my full control I am mostly unable to do the mental triage necessary to keep work focused on serving the project in a timely manner. All my self motivated endeavors stretch out endlessly and get big and unmanageable.
But I'm also generally unable to find collaborators I can work with. Either their ideas don't inspire me or I don't respect the quality of their work. I'm sure my ego is obstructing my growth as an artist here, but it's a fact I need to learn to deal with. There are only two people I've been able to repeatedly collaborate with.
One is a friend I used to do comedy with, we've made short films, live performances and multi-media things together and they've always been decent. With him it works, only when it revolves around comedy, because I find him incredibly funny, and so can almost always turn my work to serving his vision. I trust he'll have better instincts than me in that way.
The other is someone I produced a play with once, and later have done artwork under the direction of. She is a graphic designer with a really acute eye, and though I generally wouldn't go myself in the directions she generally goes, or maybe because of that, I also trust her judgment in following artwork down the paths she wants to take it.
I guess I do my best work partially blind, under the guidance of someone I trust can see the road. If you leave me to try the roads myself, I'll go part way up and down all the ones that look interesting to me, but I'll never decide which to follow all the way.
That flaw is what I need to work on this year.
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Printcasting
5 min read
This is something I wrote to my blog, but I'm also posting it here to see if I get any interesting feedback:
Some thoughts around a theme.
I read somewhere once, and it strikes me as very true but seldom recognized, is that publishing on the web isn't really "publishing", it's "broadcasting", and different expectations determine it's success.
In a series of brief ruminative posts, comics writer, novelist, blogger, and general internet scourge Warren Ellis has been toying with concepts around an idea called the papernet. This is something like a notion to lay out versions of web content so it can be printed as something like a onesheet or tabloid, and distributed by enthusiasts in the physical world on paper, like the broadsheets of the enlightenment era.
He also has been anticipating 2009 as the Year of Print On Demand (POD). Two fantastic emanations from his sporadic mental exercise:
Looking at this ROTOR post in the context of his recent run of papernet tagged thoughts, I'm thinking the kernel here is trying to work out how a POD model could be dovetailed with serial online publication to produce a new publishing model outside of the withering traditional one. The proposed structure seems to be reaching for something like what fiction anthologies or fiction magazines once were, a churning, lively forum to get shorter works by many authors in front of readers and nurture careers. The difference is that the authors themselves become responsible for the mechanics of publication, for enforcing their own deadlines and professional discipline. I'm thinking the concept serves authors best when seen in that light, as a machine made of rules designed to grow disciplined professional writers. Your chances of success within it increase the more frequently you write, the more preparation you've done and the more of your piece you have in the can before publication begins.
And, since nobody has figured out a way to make good money off of stuff like this online alone, the POD goal at the end adds a potential revenue stream as a carrot.
All of this can be seen as an instance of a larger movement, of which other obsessions of mine, such as Make and Craft magazines, Instructables, Etsy, the resurgence of a craftsman's ethic with a 21st Century flavor. It's another outgrowth of empowering amateurs.
It's the new old way of making culture.
As Neal Stephenson said in an interview last year:
All of this has led me to a rough concept that, at the moment, I'm calling Printcasting. At a first pass, printcasting is:
Jared Axelrod, who did something like this under the title 365 Tomorrows, upon reading Warren Ellis' ROTOR thoughts posted this advice:
This seems like solid advice, so I'm adopting it as a printcasting ethic. Don't start printcasting until you have the full piece written/produced. Load it all and let it automatically update itself reliably and regularly. Spend the rest of your time while it is printcasting sorting your final, physical, purchasable products into the best objects they can be.
So what am I reaching for in jumbling all these references together in a post? Not sure. I don't want to lose track of these trains of thought, and I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing here online and here in the world. It's something about writing and something about drawing and something about small scale broadcasting and maybe there is something in all this for me.
What do you think?
Some thoughts around a theme.
I read somewhere once, and it strikes me as very true but seldom recognized, is that publishing on the web isn't really "publishing", it's "broadcasting", and different expectations determine it's success.
In a series of brief ruminative posts, comics writer, novelist, blogger, and general internet scourge Warren Ellis has been toying with concepts around an idea called the papernet. This is something like a notion to lay out versions of web content so it can be printed as something like a onesheet or tabloid, and distributed by enthusiasts in the physical world on paper, like the broadsheets of the enlightenment era.
He also has been anticipating 2009 as the Year of Print On Demand (POD). Two fantastic emanations from his sporadic mental exercise:
- A message board thread full of detailed and useful recountings of various peoples experiences with POD press production.
- A concept he has give the place holder name of ROTOR, which is sort of a set of rules to structure a group blog which will update frequently enough with enough content to keep a significant audience, and which is arranged so as to allow longform work to accrue in daily bursts until complete, at which time it would be printed POD under a group branded imprint and sold as a physical object.
Looking at this ROTOR post in the context of his recent run of papernet tagged thoughts, I'm thinking the kernel here is trying to work out how a POD model could be dovetailed with serial online publication to produce a new publishing model outside of the withering traditional one. The proposed structure seems to be reaching for something like what fiction anthologies or fiction magazines once were, a churning, lively forum to get shorter works by many authors in front of readers and nurture careers. The difference is that the authors themselves become responsible for the mechanics of publication, for enforcing their own deadlines and professional discipline. I'm thinking the concept serves authors best when seen in that light, as a machine made of rules designed to grow disciplined professional writers. Your chances of success within it increase the more frequently you write, the more preparation you've done and the more of your piece you have in the can before publication begins.
And, since nobody has figured out a way to make good money off of stuff like this online alone, the POD goal at the end adds a potential revenue stream as a carrot.
All of this can be seen as an instance of a larger movement, of which other obsessions of mine, such as Make and Craft magazines, Instructables, Etsy, the resurgence of a craftsman's ethic with a 21st Century flavor. It's another outgrowth of empowering amateurs.
It's the new old way of making culture.
As Neal Stephenson said in an interview last year:
"Hey kids, don't listen to your friends who try to tell you that it's all about bits and bytes. Information technology will only get you so far. Making things in the physical world is where it's at."
All of this has led me to a rough concept that, at the moment, I'm calling Printcasting. At a first pass, printcasting is:
- Simultaneous multiple format serialization
- Blog style daily posting
- Audio podcast reading of daily posting
- Cumulative audio podcast of whole work to date, updated daily
- A weekly one-sheet printable zine compiling that week's updates
- Final Project ebook for sale
- Final Project complete audiobook - probably free
- Final Project Print On Demand physical book
Jared Axelrod, who did something like this under the title 365 Tomorrows, upon reading Warren Ellis' ROTOR thoughts posted this advice:
First off, we'd finish all the content before we started. This is the major problem we ran into our first year, and why so many similar projects crash and burn... And we'll pre-load those suckers, so the site updates itself. Because when the site starts up, we don't want to focus on it.
Instead, we want to focus on the 5 POD books we'll be making with this content. Contacting illustrators, adding extra material, designing a visual look for all 5 books. Make them real works of art in their own right. In other words, make them worth buying. That's not going to be difficult, but it is going to take time, so we might as well start on that as soon as possible. Plus, we'll also be busy creating content for the next year. So, you know, the more the site can do without us watching it, the better.
This seems like solid advice, so I'm adopting it as a printcasting ethic. Don't start printcasting until you have the full piece written/produced. Load it all and let it automatically update itself reliably and regularly. Spend the rest of your time while it is printcasting sorting your final, physical, purchasable products into the best objects they can be.
So what am I reaching for in jumbling all these references together in a post? Not sure. I don't want to lose track of these trains of thought, and I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing here online and here in the world. It's something about writing and something about drawing and something about small scale broadcasting and maybe there is something in all this for me.
What do you think?
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Lo Fi Sci Fi
2 min read
Lo Fi Sci Fi - a name derived from "Low Fidelity" and "Science Fiction", meant to convey the impression of filmed science fiction created by amateurs or on a very limited budget. I don't know who first coined the term, but I first encountered it in the ad campaign for the Toronto based independent film Infest Wisely, and thought it described a movement I've been seeing quite a bit of lately. Science Fiction as a literary genre has always been composed of enthusiastic amateurs writing primarily for themselves and each other as an audience. Science fiction cinema has always suffered in thematic substance as it has generally been made by commercial interested non-fans targeting a mass audience. In general this has meant employing a heavy coat of science fictional eye-candy to recycled western, war and horror movie plots. Actual thematic as opposed to visual science fiction in film has been rare, but the Lo Fi Sci Fi movement, now that the tools to make convincing amateur science fiction films are widely available, is starting to change all that. Over on my blog I'll be reviewing films or filmmakers I feel fit into the Lo Fi Sci Fi movement.
I've got a decently long list of examples, some obscure and some more mainstream, that I'm looking forward to writing about. But I was wondering if anyone here knows of any films or filmmakers that sound to you like they are doing something like this. Even really obscure, no budget, youtube broadcasting auteurs. Maybe you yourself? Maybe your friends? Maybe some crazy low budget feature or short you saw at a film festival that nobody else you know has ever heard of?
I've got a decently long list of examples, some obscure and some more mainstream, that I'm looking forward to writing about. But I was wondering if anyone here knows of any films or filmmakers that sound to you like they are doing something like this. Even really obscure, no budget, youtube broadcasting auteurs. Maybe you yourself? Maybe your friends? Maybe some crazy low budget feature or short you saw at a film festival that nobody else you know has ever heard of?
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New Old Stuff
1 min read
Added a few renders of a 3D environment I did for a final project in an Intro to Maya course i took at the Gnomon School a few years ago. I was pleased with the environment I built, but generally didn't like the experience of working with the 3D software. I haven't really returned to 3D since.
Also put in a punch of animal sketches I did on a zoo drawing trip I think a year ago. They're in the scrapbook, as they aren't close to finished pieces. I have a couple ideas of what to do with them, and having them out there will keep them in front of me. Some of them are kind of nice to look at as is.
Also put in a punch of animal sketches I did on a zoo drawing trip I think a year ago. They're in the scrapbook, as they aren't close to finished pieces. I have a couple ideas of what to do with them, and having them out there will keep them in front of me. Some of them are kind of nice to look at as is.
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