eruchkimballblog-blog

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

Behold, my declaration! #Fullsail #CWMFA

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

Effective Branding List

Branding is an elusive task of modern business.  It’s especially difficult for writers, as in this day and age, we all want instant gratification through visuals and flashy nonsense.  Reading takes time, and people don’t seem to have the patience anymore.  Truthfully, this is a misnomer.  Every generation has always struggled with youth working at their own tempo, and the older generations feeling left in the dust.

There’s a whole industry of writers and speakers who’ve never done anything themselves, and simply write books on how to increase brand and marketing and boost sales and blah blah blah.  It’s pretty sad that someone who is not an expert in anything, other than marketing to wanton buyers, is fanning the flames of the hopes and dreams of hundreds of thousands of people.  But, as long as book sales are good...

Branding has been around for a very long time.  It’s always been difficult to keep people’s attention.  It’s not recent at all.  My MBA was concentrated in Marketing and Branding.  That being said, here are some links.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2013/11/12/the-top-7-characteristics-of-successful-brands/#c21fff042f98

https://www.standoutbooks.com/author-branding/

https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2012/03/20/branding-author-platform/

https://www.thebookdesigner.com/2015/12/how-to-build-your-author-brand-from-scratch-and-why-you-need-to/

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamarruda/2016/04/26/effective-branding-is-in-the-details/&refURL=https://www.google.com/&referrer=https://www.google.com/

Most of these articles and most books will tell you that it takes some short list of steps to “build and design a perfect brand.”  Then, at the same time, tell you to just be yourself.  Irony.  FYI, all those “top five” articles are themselves designed to grab short attention spans and give you lofty, nebulous answers that don’t actually tell you anything.  They want clicks and conversions.

My advice is to look at the real writers who are successful.  If you research them, you will find that probably ZERO ever used a branding website or such garbage.  Instead, they wrote and worked and were themselves.

Stage performers tend to craft their brand because of the superficial visual nature of modern pop “music” and “reality TV.” 

Stephen King?  Nope.  Neil Gaiman?  Nope.  Tim Burton?  Don’t think so.        J. K. Rowling?  Please...

So, don’t be fooled by articles that are trying to bait you.  Instead, WRITE A LOT, CHECK YOUR GRAMMAR, and BE HONEST in your ideas.  If you’re a writer, you will write anyways, not just for a dream goal.

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

This is an inspirational meme created to inspire my fellow writers to keep writing!

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

These are stock photos and reference images for a pilot episode of a children’s animated TV show called “Dodgeredoo”.

LOGLINE

Eleven-year-old American city girl, Dodger Williams, starts sixth grade in Brisbane, Australia.  Leaving her childhood home of San Francisco for her Dad’s promotion, she learns about new cultures, makes friends from different countries, and travels through magical worlds and realms of science and the mind to grow as a person who is a part of nature.

SERIES OVERVIEW

Dodgeredoo is a children’s animated show about perception, perspective, cause and effect, and the symbiotic role between humanity and Planet Earth.

PILOT EPISODE SUMMARY

On Dodger’s first day at the Brisbane Academy of Lernitude, she sees animals talking.  She makes friends with Hafiz, and gets the “evil eye” from a square-jawed girl.  During Professor Koala’s class, she is told that cricket is a game and not bugs.  She forgot her “boat paddle” and has to find a way to get home, get the bat, and make it back to school in time for gym class.  Once the game is underway, she has to quickly learn to play cricket, avoid a runaway blue-necked cassowary bird, and score the final points to win the game, best the square-jawed girl, and earn a smile from a cute boy.  She learns to change her pespective and have fun, too.

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

The Knees of Bees

“The Knees of Bees”

A very short story by Alexander Drake.

How many knees are on bees?  I’ve been hearing a lot of things about them, recently.

Are they good?  Do bees have, like six knees?  I guess so, being insects.  All those legs and whatnot.

Maybe, that’s it?!  Because the knees of bees used to abound aplenty, we talk as though they still did.  I think I got it, now.

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

Gamification

This is a discussion post for my Full Sail CWMFA on the subject of gamification.

It’s often said that millennials don’t have long attention spans, anymore.  They’re always ready for the next thing, and they get bored and move on quickly.  While these perceptions are true, in part, these millennials, and everyone else, is being fed more content and sensory input at a faster rate with instant access in the easiest way in human history.  Children and young adults are requiring content to be delivered at an alarming pace.  However, I don’t think it’s their fault.  I would posit that it happens because of adults.  It happens because of the demand for quarterly profit gains in a capitalist hyper-selfish world.  It happens because stockholders need another yacht. 

The great and continuous advances in technology have given us all access to the entire world.  Yet, for every website about science, there’s a hundred about pornography.  Games are one of the oldest parts of human history, and video games have become more and more realistic, visually, yet less compelling as vehicles for character and story.

1)

Hollywood and the film industry is a great first example of this.  For 24 years, filmmakers have attempted to make linear, character-driven films inspired by video games.  From a financial and critical level, all have essentially failed.  We’re not sure exactly why this seems to keep happening, but there seems to be enough of a divide or disconnect between the mediums/formats that they don’t translate in both directions to transmedia applications. 

There have been lots of examples of films being turned into very successful games, but it hasn’t happened the other way around, yet.  At least, not in an industry-changing sort of way.  Beginning with the classic film of 1993, Super Mario Bros. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108255/?ref_=nv_sr_1), we saw a similar early treatment of video games to that of comic books.  They were “kid’s fiction”, whereas most of the truly great classic films came from novels, stage plays, and classic literature.

Nowadays, we have many comic book films that are highly successful, financially and critically, yet the video game segment of adaptations remains elusive.  The recent box-office bomb Assassin’s Creed (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2094766/?ref_=nv_sr_1), starring Michael “Magneto” Fassbender, is my example of the process of GAMIFICATION, more specifically “CANDY FEEDING,” that has had a drastic effect on storytelling so much that it has broken the fourth wall in its own film.  The world of the film submits the main character to “Virtual Reality” to unlock his genetic assassin memories and train him to fight the present day bad guys.  The writers chose to simply make their already fictional characters into game characters in a fictional world that the main characters (who are also fictional) pretend to be for a plot reason inside their own film!  That’s confusing.  No wonder no one saw it.  

2)

A vast number of YouTube channels and shows that are sponsored, profitable, and staffed in professional environments (not just a webcam on a laptop in a bedroom, but an actual production) are about geek culture, games, movies, and nostalgia.  Channels like REACT (https://www.youtube.com/user/React) show my second example of gamification in our modern world.  People are guests on a show to play a game, and not only is the show about games but so is the entire channel. 

No special niche or angle, just a group of millennials and web-types (cute nerdy girls and dorky but serious about geekdom guys) hosting these shows.  I live in L.A. and many of them are filmed here.  There are hundreds, if not thousands of these on YouTube, alone.  YouTube being the largest advertising platform on the planet, they’re playing their own kind of game.

3)

The infamous Tinder (https://www.gotinder.com/).  Probably no app has made dating more of a snap-judgement, superficial, externally-first focused practice that this one.  Dating and courting have long been games in both human nature and regular varieties, so there is no fault there.   The gamification present comes from our societal focus in things like selfies and subscribers, followers and retweets.  We have used the freedom of the internet to turn every platform for sharing into one for advertising and self-flagellation.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against anything, but the results are obvious (and debatable) and seem to be escalating.  If everything is a game, then what do we take seriously?  And if there’s no difference between fact and fiction, truth and belief, and life and dreams, then how long and how far can it continue?

//END TRANSMISSION??//

And just when you think that all the best questions, the one’s that actually matter to the longevity of humanity, are without answers, a giant green slime beast from the Ninth Galactic Black Sinkhole breaks through your studio apartment folding closet door and teleports you to the Fatherboat (it’s like a Mothership, but more sexist)! 

Thanks for reading!

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

Muskonauts

Here’s a link to my first pick-n-play Twine story!

http://www.philome.la/drakefable/muskonauts

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

Here’s a fun meme I made.   I have a lot more that I’ll be posting soon, and a new series that I’m starting, too!   #excited #nooffense #loveveggies 

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to share this link with you all.  It’s a really great and very inspiring article from a blog that I stay up with.

The author/blog runner’s book of the same name is also really fantastic.  I highly recommend it!

https://goodinaroom.com/blog/how-to-write-a-screenplay-sell/

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

ESW Staff Writer Review

At the end of October this year, I was working a freelance concert with the Santiago Symphony Orchestra in Chile.  I’d never been to South America and it was a really great experience...until the last night after the shows were done.

I was at my hotel with a coworker and for apparently no reason I just blacked out (we weren’t drunk or doing drugs), fell, and literally cracked my skull.

I don’t remember falling, nor the next five days that I was in a coma.

I do remember waking up and wondering what the heck was going on?

I also remember the Doctors telling me that I had a skull fracture, multiple brain aneurysms, and was in a coma.  They told me I had just as likely a chance of waking up with brain damage, dying in the coma due to blood and fluid on the brain, or waking up normal.

Amazingly, I woke up normal!  Well, medically speaking that is...

Anyways, that whole intro is important (not just because I almost freaking died!) because it caused me to miss an entire class that I’ll have to make up, and then while waiting to be re-enrolled in that class I was letting ESW pass by.

THEN, I was told to just do ESW and repeat the missed class next term.

So for me it was a lot like being hired for a TV show, still wet behind the ears with anesthetics, and having to make up two weeks of work in one week.

I’ve been a professional musician and audio engineer for close to two decades, and those positions are always supportive and collaborative, so for me, writing on someone else’s show didn’t feel odd.  As a musician, I’ve always studied the art, science, and craft of that skill.  Writing is no different. 

Any artist in any genre or field can be somewhere along a spectrum of two extremes. Some writers only write what they want and nothing else.  They don’t write with other people, etc.  Other writers are skilled at storytelling, structure, character motivation, visuals, dialogue, comedy, the psychology of the viewer and how to keep them hooked.

It was a great challenge and I really loved the class.  I’m very happy that my brain works again (I think) and it’s gotten me very motivated to write a lot of stuff.

Now, I’ve got 20 original short film scripts ready to shoot (2-3 minutes per film), 5 web series overviews and 3 TV series overviews as well as a pilot treatment for one TV show and a World Build for a 45 min short film that I’m writing.

I’m beginning to shoot the short films in January (as I’m on the road currently and have a few other video projects to finish before I have time to make films).

My plan is to pursue my career goal of writer/director/composer by being very productive.  My script writing samples are growing in number and quality, and in a few months I’ll have a proper reel of independently written, directed, produced, and scored short films that I hope to use to get a talent manager or agent.  Any representation that will allow me to find support and funding for my own bigger projects (20-45 min short films leading up to feature films) or will help introduce me to people who might want to hire me to help them on their projects.

It’s been incredibly inspiring and I’ve really learned a lot.  I can’t wait to see what comes next!

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

A much shorter and more edited and “sales-like”, but subtle review/demo video for TV Jones.  I know, I know, I’m repeating myself, but very often in the industry, you end up making multiple versions of projects, from short teasers and trailers to extra long director’s cuts.  This is the quick two-minute version.  Much more fun to watch if you’re not a bass player :-)

P.S. “Franklin Butterscotch” was a name given to me in a funk band I was in long ago.

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

Here’s a longer demo/review video I just finished for TV Jones bass pickups.  A simple project, but fun to post!  If you watch it, thanks a bunch. Very inspiring :-)

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

Hi, everyone!  Sorry, I’ve been out of the loop.  I was in the hospital in South America with a head injury for a few weeks. Thankfully, I’m okay.  But I wanted to share an inspiring post.  Here’s a video I made of me playing a new custom #electricbass that I designed and am very happy with!  #TVJones

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

Another great article about geometry in visual storytelling!

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

This is a really interesting article about long takes.  It’s very inspiring to me to think about how to break down large sections of a script into something this visual!

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

An old photo of me in the Army Band.  I’m the bass player.  We were a bluegrass trio that played mostly Souza marches and other military music, but in a raucous folk style.  I arranged the music and came up with the concept for this photo. Hopefully, you get the reference, but if not, it’s a nod to American Gothic.  That’s a photo of the actual house that’s in the famous painting, and we photoshopped the rest of it! Huzaa!

[eruchkimballblog-blog]

Here’s a little meme of mine, for some subtle comedy, maybe?