Supanova 2009

For this year I only managed to go for the Saturday, but still managed to get in a couple of seminars and trawl through the mountains and mountains of pop culture merch in my short time there. I think the number of cosplayers probably increased by around 100% which was scary (that said I do admire the effort put in and most of them are well done).

Jhonen Vasquez, author of comics such as Squee!, I Feel Sick, and animator of the infamous Invader Zim (pictured left). His general speech was about letting go of his past work and not being a Hot-Topic cliche` fanboy/fangirl, of which there was an unfortunate number of in the crowd. After the warning not to ask stupid questions, most people obeyed and asked atleast not-too-retarded questions and we all got some valuable feedback.

Next stop was to listen to actor Richard Hatch in the show Battlestar Galactica (both versions!) and what the parallels and differences are between each version. He plays Tom Zarek in the 2004 series and Captain Apollo in the 1978 series. I would have stayed for Katee Sackhoff's (actor who plays Kara "Starbuck" Thrace in the 2004 series) talk after but they (the studio? who knows) wanted us to hand in our cameras and mobiles to staff and vacate the building, pushing everyone in the room to the back of the line to which I refused.

Also it turns out Hayden Panettiere looks about as airbrushed and flawless in real life as she does on screen... Well, at least from a distance, I didn't bother getting signings or anything :>

DVD Cover 1

It's both intrigueing and repulsive...
It's glossy and cute but it's sickening and grotesque...
I hereby give you... A parody! Kind of a mix between that glowing baby in 2001 Space Odyssey and disgustingly cute popular culture (I was blindingly reminded of our cute culture from all the cosplay at this year's Supanova).

Needs some fine tuning but I think it has the impact that I'm after. And if you're wondering, yes that IS fried chicken...

Extreme Sheep LED Art

This is just so cool:

... And the illustrations

I'm getting rather sick of Blogger. I've had to make a new post just so this text doesn't get squashed between the images in the last post below and the right boundary. But here's what I was going to say below:

"And below are my own versions drawn in illustrator (mind you after having to resave these all with photoshop, making no actual changes but tricking blogger's compression system to not convert the colours of the jpgs I uploaded after saving in illustrator :facepalm:):"

Much more of this and I swear I'll be coding my own blog system! Or maybe not. Maybe tumblr might be better...

Scene setups

Each scene created for this project are based on photos taken by actual goons:. The five below were chosen out of an entire thread for use in my project. If you look closely you should recognise features from each scene evident in my own drawn ones, mostly from different perspectives:

Garfield Minus Garfield

Most of you have probably seen this but if not, check out Garfield Minus Garfield... It's pretty self explanatory but you'll see when you go there.

Animatic for Project 1 (and a small rant about my deep hatred of video formats)

I figured instead of screwing around trying to put up frames and frames of my storyboard that a Flash animatic might be easier. Note that it is the first version and some tweaking needs to be done, particularly at the end where they're all cheering (that part isn't so clear yet)

Also I apologise for using Quicktime format, I realise this greatly increases file size for web but after screwing around with Flash trying to get it into a nice exportable FLV with a media bar, then attempting some conversion using Adobe's lovely new media encoder, and doing so unsuccessfully thanks to a plethora of errors, I gave up and you get 16mb of glory. It's either this or no media bar for now. If I actually manage to work out what the hell is going wrong, I'll put up a nice small FLV.
Enjoy! >.>

PS. Turns out blogger doesn't like the audio to my upload, it probably thought a really neat way of dealing with file size would be to JUST STRIP THE AUDIO COMPLETELY WITHOUT TELLING ME. Good going *golf clap*.

I give up.. see the .swf here. Or see a small soundless version below.

Understanding Comics

There's a talk by Scott McCloud (author of Understanding Comics) that I found on www.ted.com, a nice generalised talk to accompany week two readings if anyone is interested in checking it out.

Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics on TED.com

There's a good talk on here too about videogames and reality

David Perry: Will Videogames become better than Life?

Project 1 Concept

Project Outline: Create a short animation (one minute) that deals with issues surrounding the topic "Post-human"

After reading the article in the reader for this subject "Toward embodied virtuality", my initial perception on what it means to be post-human had been drastically altered. When we consider the term "post-human", frightening visions of loss of human values and hostile technological takeover are probably what first comes to mind, but there's a far more subtle side to the issue: the mentality of the individual today. Many theorists argue that we are already in the post-human phase, and puzzled by this concept, I read on. When it was explained, I realised that everything about our visions of post-human stem from this one single concept: post-human deals with the human ability to conceptualise the mind separate from the body.

Using this as a basis, I began to see why we are already in a state of being post-human. One particular area of note is the world of Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, and the focus of my proposal is Eve online: a universe of players who fly virtual spaceships in gangs of hundreds, maybe thousands of players. The corporation (a large group of players under one title, known in other MMOs as a guild) that I find most interesting within the game is a corporation called Goonfleet: whose main policy seems to be to ruin the game for the rest of the Eve community, mainly through griefing (see points two and three of the first definition here). The reason Goonfleet are of particular interest is because of the community created outside of the game: on their teamspeak channels, there are reading rooms, music rooms, fleet operation rooms, and other types of social rooms, with around 500 people at a time listening in.

The concept for this animation itself is to take a recording from a fleet operation on teamspeak, in particular the Titan Kill event, and synchronise an animation to it, but not of the actual event: of the actual people playing in their home environment. The concept behind this is to show how absurdly involved the post-human can become in an online environment, leaving their bodies behind in the "real world". This in itself shows exactly how the post-human has become engaged in a completely global society, using only an online persona and conscious to interact with other human beings, and the body has merely become an instrument to interact, much like any other tool we might use.

More detail on style and events to come.