Videos, Art, PROGRESS!

This "approximately two months between posts" thing is almost a pattern now, isn't it?

That sucks and is made of fail. I hate that I've let myself do that and I have every intention of making every effort to make sure it doesn't continue.

Anyway. On to actual news.

Item One:
I've got a regular gig now with a fellow called Tony. On his dime, I'm a title card artist for 3 Fat Guys and a podcaster with the Random Odds Oddcast. I've also been receiving and filling art commissions like a mad thing. Details on how to commission some art from me can be found here on my DeviantArt page, along with my most recent commissions in my gallery there.

And now, to the videos!

Item Two:
A brief April Fools joke!

When these four jokers posted a thread to the forums on thatguywiththeglasses.com about taking control of the site and making demands for certain props and characters related to various producers' shows, I though it would be a hilariously good opportunity to do a bit of casual screwing around with these folks. My video reply is the second entry on page 2 of the thread, or you can just click here. I do recommend teaching the whole thread, though, and watching the videos made by the first four guys. They're all very funny.


Item Three:
Where Is Doctor Steel??



I have been a memeber of Doctor Steel's army of Toy Soldiers since 2007. For those who are not familiar with this person -- he's a guy who plays a steampunk mad scientist character and makes hilarious videos and really fantastic music, all in character. Rather delightfully, in my opinion, nobody knows who this guy is outside of his Doctor Steel persona.

Part of his schtick is that he wants to take over the world, and his fans are organized into an "army" to help him do it. The Toy Soldiers actually do organize regular "invasions," mostly of conventions and occasionally of theme parks, where large numbers of them show up in costume and distribute "propaganda" related to Doctor Steel's vision of spreading creativity and building a utopian playland.

It's all quite silly, but at the same time, it's also quite inspiring. The thing is... while the good Doctor used to post regular videos to his YouTube account and update the forums and such, he's been AWOL for something between 9-11 months now, from anywhere he has ever officially posted material. He's just... gone.

Toy Soldier Ven is concerned about this. Yes, deeply concerned.

The character in that video is actually a character, and not me/"Ven." I have unofficially named that character Detective Jude Grimlin. I had originally intended to play the Somaturge for this video, but after twisting my hair up under my hat so only my red bangs were visible, I decided that was a really good look and played with it.

On a related note, my satisfaction with the look of the character happened to coincide with my discovery that an artist whose style I especially like on DeviantArt was open to doing commissions for a rate even lower than mine -- and her art is at least thrice the quality. So on a whim, I commissioned a picture of this character from her. This is the collection of screenshots I gave her as a reference. Some four or six hours later, she E-mailed me this:



Impressed. I am it. I mean... other people have drawn me. Other people have drawn me magnificently well and I'll probably do an entry on their stuff here eventually. But none of them have been quite on THIS level of astoundingly professional, clean quality.... not to mention having something this good done in SIX HOURS or so. Jeezus!!


THE TECHNICAL SHIT:
I'm still having issues with video quality, which annoys me. A lot. I'm pretty sure now that my camcorder doesn't actually take HD video... but I DO have it set to the highest quality it's capable of and MY WEBCAM STILL TAKES BETTER VIDEO. This is pissing me off. I'm probably going to sell this piece of shit and try to save up for a proper HD camera. I believe my still-camera is able to take HD video, but I don't think I have enough ,emory on that thing to record for very long, plus there's no way for me to see myself if I stick it on a tripod and try to film myself. I blew 2 hours on testing distances from that thing to see if I could record with it before I decided it just was not worth the effort. I don't have that kind of time to spend testing the angle and distance I have to be from the camera every time I film myself on it. Frustrating.

But aside from video quality issues, at least my AUDIO is fine. Mostly. I'm aware that it might be a bit loud on the Doctor Steel video. The thing is, that audio wasn't recorded in one take. That's at least six different audio files, attached to dozens of video clips, transitions, effects, text, and background audio. I just couldn't quite figure out a good way to get all of it balanced at a lower volume, so I figured... you morons have volume controls on your computers, use them. :P

The podcast for Random Odds is the major audio thing I'm doing right now. It took us three attempts to record our first podcast due to none of us knowing how to use the recording software and messing it up twice beyond any ability to fix. HOWEVER, our first interview with Linkara from Atop the 4th Wall apparently went well and will be posted soon.... Tony, sadly, was stricken by food poisoning which prevented us from getting anything done this week. We also have another interview with Doug and Rob walker, two founders of thatguywiththeglasses.com, scheduled for late May or early June, which is exciting as hell. And by then at least we'll know how to make sure we're recording. XD

Vlog: Filming for new series, introducing Skelter...

Click To Play

The Somaturge reports following the first filming session for the new series, "Helter & Skelter's Bubblegum Boogiedown Showtunes Show," a review series covering... what else... musical theatre.

This video introduces Skelter, the snarky co-host who usually works with Helter. You don't get to meet Helter until the review is finished, but here's an idea of how the chicken "talks" to the audience. I do use him a lot more in the review videos. Here he's just been kidnapped nd helf hostage by that puppet-building psycho, the Somaturge. Not that that stops him from snarking every chance he gets.

Making the Character: The Somaturge

So then I decided to make an ~art film~.





Who is the Somaturge?

The Somaturge is the main character associated with Somaturgy productions. The character both is and is not me. The character is... a refined, focused collection of aspects of me, reflective of many of the elements of my personality that are most essential to who I am... but not all of them, and not in a balanced way.

The Somaturge is a fictionalized and idealized self. Idealized in the sense of having what I feel to be an "ideal" personality based on a few primary components, not in the sense of being without flaws. The Somaturge is an incredibly flawed character -- but in a way I control and in a way I find interesting and entertaining. If sometimes in a somewhat sadistic way.

The Somaturge is genderless, but mostly meant to be read as more "male" than "female." I'll therefor use "he" to refer to him. So... he is a mad scientist with the heart of a poet. You don't see much of the mad scientist element in this video, but that's to come soon enough. He can be played to comedic or dramatic effect as necessary, having somewhat of a leaning towards the archetype of the "sad clown." He has, naturally, a sordid past and manically unstable life in the "present."

There has always been a Somaturge character somewhere in my repertoire of creative works -- a character I invent and play with who fits more or less this same pattern. So I can't say that there is actually very much of this character that I've based on other people's works -- but to give credit where it is due, there are a few who helped to shape the naming and definition of the Somaturge and his purpose.

First and foremost, the word "Somaturge" is one I first saw in the book Iron Council by China Mieville. That character, Judah Low, is one of the three fictional characters I most identify with, the other two being Therem Harth rem ir Estraven from The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and Pierre Gringoire from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo. From that book comes part of the idea about golems connecting with stories, but I really learned about golems a very long time ago, from the movie It!, starring Roddy McDowall (my favourite actor of all time) as a museum director's assistant who discovers how to bring a golem to life and use it to his own advantage. It's a blatant rip-off of Frankenstein but I like it so much better.

There will be a lot more to be said about the Somaturge as this project lurches forward, so I think I'll leave it at this for now until other aspects become apparent through my ability to SHOW them in videos as well as EXPLAIN them in over-long blog entries. Just know that there's more to the character than the rather emo critter you see in the video above.


About This Series

Somaturge poetry WILL be a continuing series. I have been a life-long lover of poetry and I strive to show others how to appreciate it. There are so many people who say they "hate" poetry, usually because some dumbass grade school or high school teacher "ruined" it for them by forcing them to dissect some poor dead sap's verses to the point of meaninglessness. It's tragic. I've kept several blogs in the past that consisted only of reposting poetry I enjoyed, but I think dramatizing it and reading it aloud may help to get the point across and translate to a broader audience what I see and feel and hear when I read my favourite poetry. I want to do that with the Somaturge (as opposed to reading as myself or any other character I make up for other video series) because I think poetry should be as genderless as I try to make that character, open to interpretation from everyone. The Somaturge will inevitably end up cast as different "roles" (just wait until I'm ready to tackle J. Alfred Prufrock, JUST YOU WAIT, muahahaha!), but still remain always himself in some sense. I like the challenge of that. And I like thinking that I can eventually hone my film-making skills enough to make my dramatized readings entertaining and interesting enough to make my favourite poems accessible to more people.


Additional Notes

Just as a point of interest, that's not real wine. I mean... it could have been, but it's not. It's water that got colored as a side-effect of my testing out a science kit I want to review on polymer properties. The dyes turned the water the color if white wine. I funneled it into an old bottle and poured and pretended to drink it.

Why didn't I use real wine? Well... because I'm still sadly a recovering victim of a cold that tricked me into thinking I'd recovered from it, then hit me again the day after my filming session for my last video. So now I have an annoyingly persistent cough and am living off Hall's cough drops.

I don't know if you've ever tried to mix cough drops with wine, but trust me... the taste is a lot worse than pretending to drink dyed water. Besides which, I don't exactly need any alcohol to make my brain fuzzier than it's making itself at this point. :P It would have been a waste of good booze to use real wine when I wasn't going to drink it. But I think this looks real enough.


And finally... it's worth noting that most of the footage you see here comes from the FORTH time I filmed this. The first takes, based on my original concept, were filmed in Mouse's parents' boiler room, of all places... I had this idea about being backlit and shooting a silhouette against the weird diagonals of the woodwork under the basement stairs... and it might have been pretty cool, if I hadn't shot all the takes I did about three centimeters to the right of where I should have been, leaving a tiny sliver of a bulb exposed, but it was enough to make all of that footage totally useless. Except for the audio track, some of which is pasted into this video over my NEW footage.

And I honestly do like this better -- the original footage is just... a talking head. I feel like this at least makes a gesture towards telling a story and setting a scene. It is vague, but I like it, I like that it contributes to the development of the Somaturge's character by letting me ~act~ instead of just showing... a talking head.

Lesson learned: Art evolves.

Making progress with... a SET!

I know, I know... you don't technically need a set to be a YouTube video star. You don't even need one to be a SUCCESSFUL YouTube video star. Or a successful other-video-hosting-option video star. You don't need a set to be entertaining, interesting, or popular.

But in my opinion, it helps. At least... all the video folks I know of who top my list of favourites tend to do their filming in a consistent, purposefully-designed setting. Even if that setting is just a blank wall. I think a blank wall is always going to look better than just.... whatever random shit you happen to have stacked around your room at the time.

I am fortunate enough to have been raised in a house with a PERFECT potential set -- a bar in the basement. No one really uses the basement or comes down here except to do the laundry. I am free to claim this space and use it as my own. It has a wonderful sort of MOOD to it, which comes largely from the fact that nobody's really done anything to it except dust it every 10 years or so since it was constructed in the 1970's. Thus, without my doing anything AT ALL to it, it already has a very otherworldly feel to it, like a place that's been estranged from the normal procession of time and evolution of aesthetic taste. It's just downright cool that way.

All we've ever used the bar area for is storage, and not even for very MUCH storage. There's a lot of shelf space back here for relatively little in the way of things that need to stay here. So it'll take me a matter of maybe 10 or 15 minutes to shift all the stored things that need to stay here for the sake of maintaining everyone's sanity into shelf space that isn't going to be visible to the camera. Doing so frees up shelf and counter space I can now use to decorate and make this time-portal to 1972 even more suited to my themes and character by turning it into a sciencey anachronism stew. How? Well, mostly by relocating selected books and my electronics kits and power tools down here and arranging them to represent the Somaturge's tools of the trade, with the added bonus that they really ARE my own personal tools of the trade and having them all down here will make this a good space for me to set up my laptop and do some scripting or research with all my reference books within easy reach and out of the way of high-traffic areas of the house.

So that's tonight's project, which I've started on already by clearing the visible shelves and will now get down to the task of turning the 1970's bar into the Somaturge's lab.

I'd like to get some more filming done tonight but it's unlikely that I can, and besides I still have my preliminary basement tour footage to edit.

Tonight's projects... I must be both Martha Stewart and Steven Spielberg. Wish me luck...