Living in Analogue

So... another anthology blog thing.

1) Arbitrary Stopframe - I scraped my self-imposed deadline pretty darn close on Saturday, but did manage (just about) to get Episode 7 uploaded before going to bed.  My supply of desktop objects and episode ideas is starting to run a bit dry, hence the fact that Tim guest-wrote this instalment, and I'm not too sure how much longer this thing's going to last.  But I don't plan on making #7 the last episode.  Not yet...



Anybody else got ideas for future episodes?  I can't promise that all suggestions made will be automatically accepted, but they will at least be duly analysed for animatability.

2) Painting.  Took my paints outside on Sunday afternoon and ran off this little sketch alla prima (apparently that's Italian, and basically means doing the whole painting in one go, without waiting for one bit to dry before applying the next).  It's a strange one in that it looks absolutely rubbish from some angles - especially upside-down and from a few yards' distance, but I quite like it so long as you look at it the right way up and at fairly close range.

#009: Impressionist Glade

3) Routines.  It's been bothering me of late how much of my life has been tied up in electronically-mediated activities, be they work or leisure.  So I decided last week to do something about it: I rearranged my morning routine from something like this:

• wake up
• find and apply socks
• read Bible while still in bed
• start computer
• find breakfast
• return to computer
• update webcomics
• eat breakfast while watching TV / DVD / YouTube
• get dressed
• ...and onwards

to something like this:

• wake up
• socks
• find breakfast and armchair
• eat breakfast while reading Bible
• get dressed
• walk (yes, really!)
• and only then fire up the electronics, update the webcomics, and resume business proper

Not sure how much difference it's making so far - I've only been at it a week - but I'll keep at it and see what happens.  This would also explain why my webcomics have been updating a bit later in the morning for the last few days.

4) Alien President.  I finished another batch of episodes yesterday (numbers 29, 31, 32 and 33 in terms of their positions in the story, but they bring the total to 37 as I've illustrated some episodes out of narrative order for technical reasons).  Number 29 in particular was a real pain to draw and colour - you'll probably see why when I publish it in a few weeks - but I was happy with the final result, which is the main thing.  Only 8 more left to illustrate now...

5) The fitful progress of Megastropulodon: a week or two ago, I managed to plug the last major hole in my character profiles, and started work on the second drafts of Episodes 1, 5 and 6, and for a few days it really felt like progress was being made.  But then I sort of dried up again.  I sometimes (read: often) doubt that I could actually make a living from creative expression, what with the way my ideas come in fits and starts, with productive patches separated by significantly longer dry ones.

6) Lack of blogging.  This is the first post on A White Horizon in 10 days.  Most of my recent posts have been triggered by having an episode of Arbitrary Stopframe to embed.  Is the lack of blogs indicative of a lack of life?  I wonder sometimes.  It might seem a bit ironic to make this connection, but: see point 3 above...

7) Firefox 4!  Mozilla have finally released the new, shinier version of my web browser of choice.  It's supposed to be several times faster than its predecessor.  Well, sometimes it is (smoother scrolling is noticeable), but it still takes a long time to load.  Version 4 has most of the same old good points (stability, for example), and several of the same old flaws, including the fact that whenever I open a new tab it comes up blank instead of going to my homepage.  The new interface is much prettier though, and the speed has improved a bit, so I'm generally happy with it.

8)


- The Colclough

What's Possible

Possible Stuff:

As of Wednesday afternoon, I've actually got a paid commission - making a 90-second computer-graphics-based advert for Day One Publications.  Still doesn't seem possible, but apparently it is.  Crumbs.

Following on from that: it is possible to handle financial and legal matters without your brain turning to an off-green goo and exiting your skull via the earholes.  Or so I'm told.

After seven months in the making, Fort Paradox gained its fiftieth episode last weekend.  Half-way to a hundred.  Wow.  And as if that wasn't enough, the project has its first episode or two by a guest illustrator.  I don't know about the rest of you, but from my POV that's all terribly exciting.  And it does seem possible (like I said, it's been a while since we started), but again, I haven't quite got my head around it.

It is entirely possible (and I hope probable) that I'll get round to doing Arbitrary Stopframe 4 in the next few weeks.  I've been a little distracted for the last fortnight by long-stay visitors, paid employment, and the fact that I'm running out of finished Alien President episodes, but I've got story plans for a couple more Arbitrary Stopframe clips.  Watch this space.

It is possible, but difficult, to design a bathroom by committee.  The way it's going in our family at the moment is that we came up with a perfectly serviceable plan several months ago (before discovering that Mum and Dad's bedroom was going mouldy around the corners, and deciding to de-fungus and decorate in there before doing the bathroom), and ever since then Mum's been revising the plan in every conceivable way, working out why the revisions won't work, and coming back to the original plan.

It is possible for the same composer to create some music that's crazy and thrilling, some that's beautiful and uplifting, and one little track that's deliberately, pervertedly, infuriatingly, brilliantly cringible, all on the same album. Case in point: Thomas Newman's soundtrack from WALL-E, which I've currently got on my hi-fi.  Oddly enough, exactly the same guy pulled exactly the same stunt on Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is also in my CD collection.

Speaking of music: it's probably possible to sit through the entire 2-disc Doctor Who Series 5 soundtrack by Murray Gold (had it as a birthday present), and not feel the slightest bit like you're having any fun for the whole two hours plus.  But I suspect you might have to be a corpse in order to achieve this.


Impossible Stuff:

I'm sorry, but a dying man simply can't do what he did, with that implement, without missing at least a little bit.  IMHO, that scene went beyond the bounds of Suspension of Disbelief and into the territory of Plain Impossible.  If you've seen Tangled, you should know what I mean, although whether or not you agree is another matter.  I've phrased it that way to try and avoid being spoiler-ish.

It is impossible to sit in the same room for too long without starting to feel like you're going to go bonkers.  It's taken me a long time to realise this, but it's finally dawning on me.

And finally: IMPOSSIBLE GEOMETRY!!!

#007: Impossible Triangle

It was really tempting to paint a big letter 'S' inside the middle hexagon thing, but I resisted.


- The Colclough

Basking in the Sound of Gold

I'm in the middle of drawing some new Alien President strips at the moment, but I'm taking a break for a few minutes, because it's not the easiest work in the world.  The combination of historic US architecture and semi-relistic humans is very taxing on my pencil-weilding skills, especially when the two things have to share panel space, as they do in Episode 13, which I just finished drawing.  It came out alright - the White House is more or less recognisable as such, I think (although once I've scanned and coloured the drawing, it won't be so white any more), and the humans are pulling the faces I wanted them to pull, so I think I can chalk that one up as a success.  Mind you, it turns out that the name of Darlan's presidential aide Cindy Payne was very well chosen: she's been a real pain in the art department.  She's a lot nicer to look at than her brick-shaped colleague Watson when I get the illustrations right, but it takes several times as long to draw her as it does him.

So I decided to put down the pencil and do something else for a bit before trying to tackle the limousine that I need to sketch for Episode 14.  And while I'm not drawing, I'll write some stuff.  I.e. this stuff that you're reading right here and now.

While doodling for the last... not sure exactly how long, but getting on for an hour... I've been listening to Murray Gold's Doctor Who soundtrack.  I had the Series 3 and Series 4 CDs ages ago, but somehow ended up missing out his original album from Series 1 & 2.  However, I was given a copy of the missing disc as a Christmas present, and I've got it on speakers right now.  As I type I'm on track 21, The Lone Dalek.

The interesting thing about going backwards like this is that some things (e.g. The Doctor's Theme, The Face of Boe and UNIT) are familiar, being variations on some of the same themes that appear in later albums, while there are other things that I'd completely forgotten about.  Cassandra's Waltz, for example, came as an out-of-the-blue surprise when I first listened to the disc a week or two ago.  I'd seen the episode involved, but completely forgotten the music.  I only remembered the Madame du Pompadour melody by virtue of having rewatched The Girl in the Fireplace not that long ago.

Cue next track on the hi-fi...

The nice thing about having the music on its own, in isolation from the episodes it comes from, is that sometimes you like the score better than the script.  For example, I never really liked The Impossible Planet as an episode (or two, as the case may be), but the corresponding track on the CD is a really nice one.

Now, here's the important bit: *insert metaphysical glitch here*  I'm sure I was going to say something all profound and meaningful about this album.  However, in keeping with a long-standing personal tradition of mine, I've totally forgotten what I was going to say.  Isn't that clever?

So instead I'll have a little ramble about my musical tastes in general.

Anyone familiar with my CD collection will know that nearly all of it consists of film music, and what wasn't written for the screen is in a neo-classical vein.  I'm not a fan of pop 'music' (note deliberate use of quote marks around the word there).  And one of the things that irks me most about film score CDs, apart from the way some engineers manage to get all the ID3 metadata wrong, is this infuriating habit so many album producers seem to have of releasing a disc which is 90% perfectly good film score, and then throw a nice rancid dead fly into the ointment in the form of a pop song that has little or no bearing on the film's narrative, and clashes horribly with the style of the rest of the CD.  How to Train Your Dragon is a case in point: tracks 1-23 and 25 are all orchestral score by John Powell (who is a bit inconsistent sometimes, but Dragon finds him at his best) - and then track 24 is a really naff song where I can't even make out what they're on about.  Bolt is another one: again, Powell does some nice things with the score, but the album is let down by multiple horrible vocal pieces.  Why do they keep doing that?  For goodness' sake, if you've hired a composer, then let them score the end credits.  Don't rope in some ghastly pop band to ruin the soundtrack.  Look at Spielberg and Williams: no pop songs.  Just score.  Imagine how much worse Jurassic Park might have been, for example, if Spielberg had brought in a pop singer for the end credits.  Scary thought.

Thank goodness Doctor Who has a proper instrumental theme tune and not an end-credits pop song, eh?


Stats time:

• 11 For 11 status: 5 down, 6 to go - I'm ahead again and I'm nearly half-way there!
• Latest book read: Stuart Olyott's commentary on Ephesians
• Latest film/TV watched: Murder on the Orient Express
• Latest music listened to: re-read this blog post and take an educated guess!
• Latest food/sweets/whatever eaten: one of the home-made chocolates Sophie gave me for christmas
• Programs and web pages currently running: Outlook 2007, Word 2007, Windows Explorer, Firefox (tabs: Google Image Search "the white house"; Blogspot Create Post; hannahlikessheepbaa.blogspot.com)
• Webcomics posted today: Cylinder and Miserable #1123

- The Colclough

We Got Clock

Today, for the purposes of my arcane webcomic project Alien President, I had to do a couple of drawings of the United States Capitol building.  It was a pain in the neck trying to get all that neoclassical geometry right.

I ended up asking myself "Okay, so I'm complaining about having to draw the Capitol.  Would I rather be drawing the New Palace of Westminster?"

My sense of patriotism said "Yes", but my pragmatic side said "No" - Westminster Palace is even more geometrically confusing than the Washington DC Capitol.  But this little exchange led onto another question: "Which is the cooler building?"

Of course, I'm not trying to compare the governments that lurk inside the buildings.  I'm trying to compare the buildings themselves.  So, which is better?  Naturally, I concluded that the New Palace of Westminster is much cooler than the United States Capitol, for four very important reasons:

(Apologies to any Americans who might have stumbled across this blog, by the way.  I'm just saying it like it is.)

Reason the first: a sense of geographical and historical context.  The Houses of Parliament (as you should know by now) are situated on a plot of land in London bordered by the river Thames on one side, and roads on another two.  The building is asymetrical, designed to fit the specific shape of its site, and it even incorporates the one surviving chunk of the previous Palace, the rest of which burnt to the ground in the first half of the 19th Century.  Said chunk is at a funny angle to the rest of the edifice, but that didn't stop the architects using it.  The Palace's concessions to its surroundings and to its past help it to feel organically rooted to its spot: a building not just in London, but for and of London.  The Capitol, by comparison, is a rather generic shape that could be uprooted, plonked down again almost anywhere else on the planet, and still make just as much sense.  Which is boring.

Reason the second: colour.  Now don't get me wrong, I do like the colour white, but I think it's deeply inappropriate for a government building.  The implications of purity, innocence and whatnot are totally misleading.  Everyone knows that politicians are lying scumbags (well, a lot of them anyway), as demonstrated by the recent Expenses Scandal.  Westminster's brown exterior gives a much more honest impression about the dodgy occupants, compared to the Capitol's somewhat hypocritical whiteness.

Reason the third: the royal connection.  Parliament has ceremonial features relating to the fact that it gets officially reopened every year by the Queen.  The Capitol doesn't.  Long live the Queen.

Reason the fourth (and perhaps the most important): that clock.  By far the biggest blunder made by the architects of the US Capitol is that they forgot to include a clocktower.  Whereas, the New Palace of Westminster is defined in the public eye by its enormous clock, as much as by the scandalous politicians underneath it.  Even without the other three points, the clocktower alone is enough to make the Houses of Parliament the cooler of the two structures, hands down.  Who doesn't like a good clock?


QED.  Just thought I'd share those helpful insights with you.  B]


- The Colclough

Alpha One's Winter Wonderland: the first preview

Among the many films, comics and other things mentioned in "How much have I told you?" and "The Answers!", you might have spotted my mention of Alpha One's Megalomaniac Quadrilogy.  The Quadrilogy is a series of 4 stopmotion films which I am helping to make, along with Tim and Sarah Johnston, revolving around the misadventures and failed world-domination schemes of a chap who calls himself Alpha One, and his long-suffering assistant Hooper.

I wrote the first film, Alpha One's Laser Cafe, on a whim in September 2007 and helped film it in late October, and it was finished in early 2008.  Like all of the films so far, it was produced by Sarah and directed by Tim.  Tim then said he'd like to make a sequel, and although he didn't have any story plans he suggested 'Hostage at the Hairdressers' as a provisional working title.  This phrase triggered strange events inside my twisted brain, which led to the script for Alpha One's Quantum Shampoo.  We shot the opening two or three times in late 2008, and then in summer 2009 we threw it out again and re-shot the whole film from scratch.

S&T then cooked up the first draft of the storyline for the threequel, before handing it over to me to be turned into a screenplay, which I eventually did after quite a lot of revisions.  Some of the early drafts featured a new character, but I got rid of him and gave his narrative function to the recurring character French instead, which helped to streamline the plot.  After numerous other tweaks to improve the action:dialogue ratio and to condense the script to a manageable length, we finally agreed that we were all happy with Version 4.1.

Back in October, we shot the opening and closing scenes for the new film, entitled Alpha One's Winter Wonderland, and after making the Root Hill trailer the other day I decided to cut together a little preview of A1WW as well.  A lot of the footage is from QS, to set the scene, but there is a snippet or three of the new WW material in the second half.

So here you go: your first look at the upcoming high-definition stopframe comedy epic from the team that brought you Fort Paradox!  Enjoy...




Also (totally unrelated), you can now see the first two episodes of my eccentric comic-strip project Alien President online at http://georgedarlan.webs.com/president/index.htm.


- The Colclough

Writing, Drawing, and Both

This post is basically a collection of little updates on different projects I've got on the go.

Megastropulodon, the TV Series version: I've hit writer's block with the first draft for the closing episode.  Written a couple of dozen words in the last fortnight, if that.  Getting annoying.  It's not that I don't know what I want to happen, it's just that it doesn't want to happen on the page.

The Root Hill video: I re-did the intertitle graphics this morning, as I wasn't happy with the way they'd turned out when I did them the first time a few days ago.  New version is much better.  Video definitely getting there now.

My surreal semi-untitled story about a failed packet-mix salesman: going well, albeit sporadically.  Wrote chapters 7 and 8 on Tuesday, which took the word count into five figures.  Chapter 8 ends with one of the most random sentences ever - and it's only 3 words long, so its randomness-per-word ratio is through the roof.  I do have a plan for how to start Chapter 9, which will make some sense of that random sentence, and I'm looking forward to penning it.  Just haven't got round to it yet.  I could email you the book so far if you ask nicely =]

Alien President: most of you probably haven't heard of this one yet.  Last time I saw Tim, back in October, I asked the random question (probably influenced by sleep deprivation): "What if George Darlan became the next president of the USA?"  Darlan, for those not in the know, is a notorious extraterrestrial inventor and self-proclaimed philanthropist, from Tim's webcomic Brothers in Shells.  Tim seemed rather taken with the suggestion, and I've started writing a short webcomic series dealing with this bizarre hypothetical scenario.  I've finished 8 episodes so far, with scripts written for quite a few more, and I'm planning to start posting the series online next week.

'The Answers': coming along nicely.  Will hopefully be on here by the end of the week.

Um... yeah.  I think that just about covers everything!


- The Colclough