Projects in the Works

Starting this re-done news section of my site with a bang, I’ve let my personal creatve projects fall by the wayside while I’ve finished my MFA last year and it’s taken these couple of months since to start rekindling my creative juice. I’ve switched computers multiple times since last working on anything substantial, so there’s only a couple for now, and are as follows:

In fact I just cleared out my projects folder and there’s only two!

Positron

Positron started out from two distinct places. One, I wanted to create something with the 3d program Art of Illusion, which I was immediately taken by when I found it. Using AoI actually came from a necessity when I was using my 2007 Thinkpad x60t “screenful” which struggled to run blender initially, until I figured out how to force the graphics to do what I wanted. The program is written in Java, and has a slew of plugins too! I got as many as I could and sincerely reckon that with a bit of learning through whatever tutorials I can find, I could make a full short film in this strange little program.

Art of Illusion

The second inspiration for Positron was the particular style of 3D rendering and compositing present in various videos on Classics of Game. Easily one of my favourite channels ever. In particular, #162 with its oddly dim overtone.

Now that I think about it, this was further backed up by other “fucking around in the desert” type environments. Such as jetgreguar’s art, the starship troopers mod for squad (namely the reporters video and criken playing it) and oddly, the podracing race in the phantom menace. I think it’s the only part of that film I like, such a well done edit of racing in general. OH and in the same vein, Redline too. In particular for the phantom menace, the live action test which mashes together several different mediums into one clip. I think its the true origin of this idea, but #162 and finding AoI refreshed it in my head.

The results so far are quite fun:

So after I’ve trailed through more tutorials that look like this:

I’ll be rocking with something really quite cool!

Sepulchre

Sepulchre comes from my love of a game that wont be named made for Shockwave. I found a working copy of adobe director and got obsessed with it. It essentially has everything extra that I want in flash. Granted, late stage flash can do everything shockwave can and more with enough extra stuff, but there’s something about director and shockwave that fascinates me. Especially that it’s even more dead than flash and harder to find stuff for. There’s a bunch of stuff on blue maxima’s flashpoint which is great, and with enough digging there’s xtras and tutorials and all sorts on how to make a game with director. Spurred on by my research into AoI too given it has a similar output and also that the game was found on Classics of Game too (and can still be viewed on archive.org thank fuck!). I considered making it in Godot because I badly want it to be a web game, but godot has really shit multimedia support so I’ll just stick to director even with all of its quirks. I was thinking of possibly setting the game in my regicide world which would make it quite surreal, but we’ll see where it goes from here.