#Might not make next week's posting due to some art deadlines I really need to tackle

[katreal-fic]

Amberina by Morning

Summary:

The downing of the Aurora was one tragedy among many in the long history of Planet 4546B, but it is, perhaps, one you can survive.

Once a young boy stood on a sterile, white sand shore, dreaming of the stars.

After those broken dreams rain down like the thousands of red-hot meteors that scatter across an endless ocean with no hint of land in sight–maybe this tragedy will set you free.

Chapter 3/?? - [Link]  

[Discord Server]

[felassan]

DA4 Lead Producer Scylla Costa’s BIG Festival talk, “Challenges of Dragon Age production during the pandemic”, can currently be rewatched on YouTube here starting roughly at timestamp 8:57:02 after a lil presenter blurb/intro. It’s 1 hour long. When it was streamed live, there was an English translation ‘voiceover’. There isn’t in this vid, however I want to post the link for Portuguese speakers, and also it’s neat for everyone to be able to see all the slides he presented with for themselves in context.

I don’t know if an English-language version will get put up so I’m sharing the notes I took during the talk below, in case anyone’s interested and because I might as well since I wrote them. The rest of this post is under a cut due to length.

Edit: Found a place to re-watch the English version of the talk

(Quick note: I didn’t note down everything, mostly things that caught my interest, so this isn’t exhaustive, and when I was watching I was real tired, so pls bear that in mind and don’t take these notes as bullet-proof 100% accurate gospel or direct quotes. If you watched it and think I’ve written down something wrong/misunderstood, let me know and I’ll fix. Also if you’re a Portuguese speaker and I’ve gotten something incorrect or missed something important etc, again just let me know.) **

** Edit: I’ve now gone through my notes while watching the talk again. I’ve filled in some of the gaps (although they still don’t cover everything said) and so forth, and now I’m no longer worried about there being possible errors in this post.

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For some context, this slide contained the breakdown of the talk’s structure. Bear in mind there are other slides present in the talk than the ones I’ve posted here, I didn’t include caps of all of them, just ones which were of note to me.

In the talk, chief Producer Scylla goes over challenges of DA4 production during the pandemic. He discusses the adaptations - necessary skills and learning from remote work - and he ponders on the future of teamwork.

After the launch of ME3 he became a producer, all his MMO and other experience helped a lot. He was on DAI for 3 years and MEA for 9 months, then Anthem. Today, on DA4, Scylla and another Lead Producer were the heads of the whole project, and there is his boss is the Executive Producer Christian Dailey. 

^ the usual AAA game development cycle (brief introduction)

AAA games are games that are launched for several platforms simultaneously. 

In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase of the game development cycle can have from 5 - 30 people, and up to almost 60 people when they’re just about to go through the gate to production. 

In the pre-production phase, they go through the game’s concepts and prototypes and start developing systems. They seek the game’s concept and focus, and its key features. They do lots of market research. In the case of BioWare, all their games are strong in narrative, so they have lots of tools related to game narratives and supporting the development of a narrative (cinematic design, dialogue system etc) that get focused on in this phase. Other parts of the team such as writers and cinematic design need these systems to do their own roles. 

In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase through to launch can take 4 - 6 years, but it does depend on the size of the team during development.

With regards to Dragon Age 4, they were coming close to the time when they would shift from pre-production to the production stage when the pandemic hit.

During the production phase is when the development of content and features takes place, with the systems mostly already existing from the pre-production phase. A few new systems may be developed in this phase. In the production phase is when things start escalating, and the team really starts growing, to like 2- or 3-fold the prior pre-production phase size. 

(DA4 is currently in the production phase.)

In the alpha phase, features have to be fully implemented and systems all have to be running / working. All the game features should already be in the game by now. They test from pre-production onwards, but this phase is when they run heavy technical tests with lots of players trying to play at the same time. In the beta phase, the idea is that you should now have full content and that now you’re balancing it and running more and lots of different tests with players before launch. There are final tweaks and then the final launch, when in the weeks prior to launch, all the different business units and areas e.g. marketing team, technology team, publishing team, get together once a day and all of the game’s issues are reported and brought to the table to be prioritized. Then they decide the next steps re: these issues (this is known as ‘the war room’).

After the launch there are usually patches like day zero patches and other patches, this being standard industry practise. The last stage is the new content stage where there are DLCs and a game with more content.

On March 12th 2020, the team gathered to review the DA4 story in the new office. Everyone was very excited. (They had spent over 10 years in their last building and had noticed that with the team growing they needed more space. In August 2019 they found the new studio in the city center.)

Anyway that evening, they got an email from the CEO which contained instructions and said that due to the pandemic, they should from now all start working remotely. They had known that this happening was a possibility so they had been planning on how to have all the devs working from home, but initially less than 50% of the devs were able to work from home successfully/efficiently due to various issues e.g. you need a VPN to be able to log in remotely to do your job normally, varying home office setups. The day after this, the office was basically deserted, except for Scylla, the IT infrastructure people and one or two odd devs.

Scylla was part of the team that was working on allowing the devs to work from home. They first started looking at the short-term changes they needed to make to allow this.

“First, take care of our developers”. 

When the pandemic first hit, their and Scylla’s [as Lead Producer] first priority was to look after the devs. Many of them are parents (schools and day-cares were shut, children were studying from home), others have relatives living with them, others have other personal circumstances which of course need to be taken into account when it comes to assessing what needs to be taken into consideration for this new scenario. So, they looked at each dev on a case-by-case basis in order to evaluate, speaking to each one and asking them what they could do to support them.

One of the first changes/adaptations they could implement was flexible working hours and flexibility around deadlines. Generally speaking the devs got a lot of support, EA was really good and really supported the devs especially in the first months of the pandemic (and they are still supporting them). Initially not all devs had suitable office spaces at home, some were working from the living room from laptops or at the kitchen table. The whole covid situation basically just happened over night and nobody was really ready to deal with that change. So their first step was to enable their devs to work remotely. As a producer, Scylla’s main task is to communicate with the team such as via a number of daily meetings. He doesn’t depend so much on powerful hardware.

“Enable developers to work remotely”.

This slide shows some of a BioWare audio team. Different teams have varying and specific needs in order to do their jobs and therefore in order to do them remotely. For example, the audio team need good-quality speakers and amplifiers, while the lighting and art teams need other specific equipment such as tablets and large screens. So there was a lot of work they had to do to go through each dev to understand their individual needs and what needed to be done for them. ‘Could they download the builds? Did they have the right performance [tech-wise]? Could they submit their changelists, their codes to the server?’

Some devs needed a more powerful internet connection as it would take 6-8 hours to download a build (some devs live rurally). Some needed a lot of cable, as they were working far away from their routers (sometimes up to 50m). As time went by things got better and better. 

The chair devs work from is also important; a kitchen able chair etc is not suitable to sit in for long-term desk work, possibly leading to health issues like back ache and blood circulation problems in the legs.

Every 3 months they had money given to help devs buy new mice, keyboards, monitors - anything they needed really in order for their office setting at home to be improved. For a while, because lots of people [generally, in society] were needing and buying them, it was quite hard to buy things like webcams and microphones.

On mid- and long-term changes:

In terms of DA, we have to look at this from 2 perspectives, the change in the personal and the professional environments. 

As a consequence of working from home, people tend to be less active during the day (even in an office, you go between meeting rooms, up and down stairs etc). Physical activity supports life quality and therefore work quality. Scylla noticed that he began to feel listless and such, and found that he needed to change his routine that he had initially developed when he started working from home, for example; having a normal start time (as in, have a semblance of structure in your day as if you were still working in the office site), get dressed at the normal time, not having meetings over lunch etc. This wasn’t just him, lots of other devs encountered this and had this experience too. Devs which adapted faster had better productivity and became more productive faster.

Scylla bought a stand-up desk which he can raise up and down, and at meetings he would be delivering a talk while standing or even while walking on a treadmill. Other devs also got stand-up desks. He tracked his body’s data on a Fitbit. These sorts of things helped improve physical and mental wellbeing. Other devs did similar things, like starting going out for jogs or began practising yoga. Essentially, everyone needed to make changes to their daily routine in comparison to what they had been doing prior to the pandemic. 

The pandemic has been a thing for over a year now. In their location, every couple of weeks a new restriction is put into place or a rule is changed, and every two weeks there’s a new thing that you can and can’t do. Scylla also started moving around his property. He worked on his desk, fixed it up and painted - taking up a new hobby. Other devs picked up new hobbies too. These are good ways to be active and also to be somewhere else, i.e. to break up the working day and not be spending it all in one home office-type location. Scylla found that when he made these sorts of changes to his routine to improve his lifestyle, the data output by his Fitbit as indicators of his health/wellbeing etc improved, e.g. number of steps taken in a day, heartbeats per minute while at rest. As stated many of the other devs went through a similar process.

On the professional side of things:

They had to improve remote delivery of builds. Accessing things from home as a dev requires a VPN. They need to download a build every day and then upload it to the server after making their changes to the game. They had to work with infrastructure and research other tech, such as streaming tech to allow remote console access, in order to better facilitate this process. For remote access, they also had to work on adapting communications channels.

“Adapting channels of communication.”

In this slide, the team are working on the storyboards. Before you can implement motion capture & performance capture, you have to ‘run the storyboards’ like this. These are small illustrating drawings which reflect the drafts and are meant to quickly reflect the intention of the scenes that are to be built. Before the pandemic, the team would go to meeting rooms like this, sit down, talk and interact in person. After the pandemic, the question became ‘How do you do this over Zoom?’ You can, but it’s not quite the same; it’s harder to see peoples’ expressions, some people are embarrassed speaking over Zoom etc. Therefore they had to adapt their communications systems, and unlearn the ways in which they developed before in order to relearn and learn new ways of communicating.

Slack was a tool that they adopted on this front. Communications channels can be confusing on Slack, so there was a need to develop structure. For example, how quickly should someone reply (as a recommended convention for the purposes of work)? They had to define the process/procedures for the channels so it was clear for the team as a whole how it would all flow (this is important especially if you have a team with say 30 people or as a whole hundreds of people). Before the pandemic, they had stand-up meetings where they’d go around in a circle every morning and talk about their activities - what they’re going to be working on, any roadblocks they had encountered etc. The question arose ‘How do you replace these?’ They ended up doing Slack messages at a certain time of day and updating their statuses with some details on what they’re working on and color-coding (green - fine, yellow - need help, red - busy/blocked out).

Another issue that they faced was unforeseen - the number of meetings that devs were having really shot through the roof. When there wasn’t a good structure of communications channels, any conversation would become a meeting. Everybody began scheduling meetings left and right, and at the end of the day they would have little time left in which to actually work on their to-do lists. Hence, they had to work with the team to really analyze and be very pragmatic. ‘Which meetings needed to happen? Which didn’t? Is a specific meeting really necessary? Which meetings should be recurring? What can be done over Slack?’ This guideline had to be given to the team to help, and it improved things a lot. The number of meetings decreased a lot and they got more effective. For example, by making sure to set an agenda for meetings beforehand, and by having meeting notes (then a dev who didn’t really need to be at a meeting could skip attending and just quickly review the notes output after instead). They also decreased the standard length of meeting times from the default Outlook blocks of 1 hour and 30 mins to 55 mins and 25 mins respectively. This 5 minute change gave devs time for things like bio breaks (also 4 hours in a row at a computer in a home office with one meeting after another just isn’t good for a person).

“Adapting p-cap and mocap”.

On content:

From a content point of view, the most difficult thing in terms of the pandemic was adapting p-cap and mocap (performance capture and motion capture). They hire actors and it’s a large studio. The pandemic meant big limits to what they could and couldn’t do. The actors had to be masked and 5 meters apart in distance (although it doesn’t look like it in some of these shots due to angles). Also there could be no other person around in the studio - only the actors. The directors instead would ‘patch’ in remotely on big screens (you can see this in the second photo in the top right). 

Before the pandemic, they felt that they wouldn’t be able to do p-cap or mocap properly remotely, as the directors would usually stand right next to actors giving guidance on their performance. The techs would also usually be near. But they adapted! The keyword is adapting, changing process. It’s harder and it’s different, but it is possible, and people start rethinking what is possible. What was said to be impossible before now is possible.

P-cap differs to mocap in that it also captures voice and facial expressions.

On the future of work after covid:

There will probably be more working from home and more flexibility for workers e.g. being able to work say 3 out of 5 days from home. It does depend on what a dev’s specific job is however. For example, the audio engineers require lots of specialist equipment and said equipment is of higher quality and quantity in the office. So, depending on role, devs might be working more often or less often from home.

Another development is that lots of devs are moving house. In lockdown etc people started reassessing what’s most important in life. Some are moving further away from the studio to get a cheaper rent or for example couples who both needed an office space to work from home from but their current place only had one area. Others are moving closer to nature for a better quality of life, and still others have other different reasons for doing so. Over 10 devs that he knows in fact have recently moved, including Scylla himself.

The pandemic changed certain skills being used by people on a daily basis. Scylla used as an example of this one of his soft skills, being able to tell from looking/interacting in-person with someone if they are stressed out. Obviously it’s less easy to tell if someone is stressed out when you’re remote, so you adapt different ways of checking in with people in the new situation. To continue carrying out his role as Lead Producer, he began checking in with his team pro-actively on the new comms channels and asking how they were doing.

Also, now that companies are more open to working remotely, there is going to be increased competition for hiring devs. They saw both sides of this coin at BioWare. They were able to hire devs from many places that they couldn’t hire from before e.g. Montreal, Vancouver, the US, as there’s less need for devs to relocate to Edmonton or Austin. This opens up opportunities to hire really intelligent and skilled people that they would not have had access to before.

Question and answer segment:

The pre-production phase has been concluded. They’re in the production phase.

They are not giving out a lot of details yet but Scylla is really excited as a big fan of the whole series. He thinks that with DA4, they will have the opportunity/possibility to launch the best story out of all DA games. He feels that the characters they’re making are amazing. He’s dying to say more but can’t. 

When you work from home you need to keep your team as productive as possible. During the pandemic, when people started working from home, they noticed that some people became more productive and some people became less productive. They were analyzing it on a case-by-case basis so as not to make assumptions. They were interested in seeing what they could do to help. At the beginning of the pandemic, they were looking at the devs as people and seeing what they needed.

Production of DA4 still needed to continue during the pandemic because they want to be able to launch the game.

This slide shows a writer. Writing is an example of a role which is more able to work from home easily.

Their productivity did go down in the first month of the pandemic. After adaptations, some people then became more productive than they were before (this was role and personal situation-dependent, examples of this being artists and coders who were able to art and code at home without being interrupted, thereby being able to produce more). Covid has affected productivity in general, but this is part of our new reality. They have adapted and adjusted some deadlines. They have enough data (Scylla LOVES data) now to understand how long it will take them/how long they’ll need to launch the game. They have always had historical data for this purpose, but they’re doing more of this sort of thing now to ensure that they are doing things at the right time.

Remote hiring opens up the door to more talent joining, so if someone has talent geography will hold them back less. Some companies though may choose not to hire people from other countries due to labor issues, cumbersome legal aspects, time zones. But even in such cases there are activities for example that can be carried out while the rest of the team is asleep such as testing or working on the build, or there are cases where those companies still will want to hire a specifically/highly talented person even in spite of the potential legal aspects and so on.

On mental health: People were affected. There is the mental, physical and social impacts of the pandemic situation on people. EA supported them during the pandemic in terms of their mental wellbeing, there are specific companies (services offered, speaking to a therapist) that they can contact if they need something or help. EA had always been good at supporting them with this sort of thing but this has improved further during the pandemic. Another change was that they could/can take a couple of days off if they needed/need to because of the pandemic e.g. to take care of children, who were obviously not at school at the time. As a producer he had to be very mindful of all of this. How much they were monitoring peoples’ wellbeing really went up during the pandemic.

A question that was asked - in terms of DA4′s storybeats, is there anything in there that they decided to change due to the pandemic as it wouldn’t be sensitive or appropriate to include anymore, for example a plague plotline or something? Scylla’s answer is that DA and ME are games in which they try to have narratives that are relatable, which include things which people will identify with, so that players understand what characters are going through etc. Nothing in DA4′s plotline/storybeats has been changed (in the frame of this question, relating to the pandemic), as it didn’t have anything in it that could be specifically or a directly connected to a pandemic-type situation or anything. Of course the DA story has Blights and the Taint, but these are different & fantastical things and existed long before the pandemic situation. So this wasn’t the case with DA4 and there was no need to change anything, but this has happened to other games where they decided to change a storyline due to a strong correlation with something in the real world.

There were then concluding/closing remarks. The message he wants to send is that a crisis will always spark opportunities. Look at a crisis and try to see how you can grow.

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[☕ found this post interesting or useful? my ko-fi is here if you feel inclined. thank you 🙏]

[arecomicsevengood]

Seeds

Before I read it, I had this idea I could write a review of Ann Nocenti and David Aja’s The Seeds for the Comics Journal, but the book just sucked too much. It had basically nothing going for it, or even decipherable as an advancing plot. One thing wrong with it is there’s this sort of conspiracy element, or this “no one believes the news” anymore element of it, but Nocenti didn’t want it to be about “fake news.” Donald Trump has rewired the narrative, so now entire types of subject matter feed into this propaganda machine simply by being addressed. Nocenti’s best work does not shy from topicality, addressing the currents in the cultural air, but this time the modern world feels too hot to handle.

I ordered the Daredevil: Typhoid’s Kiss trade paperback, reprinting a bunch of Nocenti’s work with the Typhoid Mary character from the nineties. The longest story in there is a miniseries with art by John Van Fleet. It’s partly about post-Tarantino video-store employees turned filmmakers kidnapping Typhoid Mary to use her as the subject of a documentary about serial killers and violent media. It’s also about Typhoid Mary working as a private detective trying to track down a killer of prostitutes, who the police don’t care about, and are maybe the actual killers of themselves. Storywise, it’s a pretty cool attempt to address real-world issues of the day within a pulp context.

Van Fleet’s art is pretty boring and bad in a way that’s distinctly ahead of its time. While the miniseries itself probably wouldn’t exist without the precedent of Elektra: Assassin a decade before, (a spinoff about a female Daredevil villain created by the writer during their run on Daredevil where that character defined their run) all the photoreference that’s probably actually just photo backgrounds run through filters sets a precedent for the Alex Maleev/Matt Hollingsworth Daredevil stuff to come a decade later. And it’s frequently annoying on a page design/panel background level. Like in terms of how the panel borders sort of default to grid shapes so there ends up being things that “read” as panels but that don’t actually do anything for pacing. It’s just fitting the narrative into regimented design choices.

This maybe only happens the once. But the art is also just super-stiff throughout, with a very chunky line that eliminates any real nuance. There’s a bunch of characters, but a lot of them are indistinguishable from one another, and that’s because the linework is about as muddy as the color palette — It kinda seems like he’s working with models and photo reference but also doesn’t have that many models to work with so he’s having them play multiple roles, but also his work basically seems more like photoshop filters than actual drawing? There’s a bunch of stuff that I think sucks, basically. But you can also draw a direct line from what Van Fleet is doing in Typhoid to what Aja does in The Seeds. All these choices that are meant to be classy and dignifed, a move away from the excess of superhero comics. The covers of Typhoid are just portraits of the main character, interchangeable from one issue to the next, which was a move that again, was ahead of its time: This is what so many Marvel covers in the 2000s looked like, the Tim Bradstreet Punisher covers probably being the go-to example. It’s pretty dull but it’s nice they’re not super-sexualized.

While the choices arguably suit the subject matter in Typhoid, which is at least partly about movies, in The Seeds, the story doesn’t really make any sense because the visuals seem so steeped in unreality. The premise is that a tabloid has photographed an alien, proving aliens are real. There is really nothing within the context of the story that explains why the news outlet would have enough gravitas to be convincing and have this be an actual news story. And the book is drawn in Photoshop, which is itself a photo-editing software, so the “reality” of the book is defined by the very medium that people recognize as why images can’t be trusted. This contributes a level of irony that could maybe be worked with if the book itself wasn’t so ugly and dull. The whole thing looks like some Banksy bullshit. Outside of word balloons, text appears in the large all-caps typeface of image macros. I don’t have scans of The Seeds because I gave my copy away on account of there not being any reason to keep it around.

The book is beyond dated at the time of its release. Partly this is due to the speed the cultural conversation has been moving for the past five years.  It’s been a difficult time period to work on a work of fiction about the news, certainly, and not only has the comic been a long time in the making, the writer has also been away from making comics for decades now. If the authors had been able to make this as a serialized monthly comic, it might’ve stumbled into timeliness, or the predictive, but as it is, the reading experience feels like a bunch of different, disparate ideas that do not really cohere into a narrative. Leaving aside how the book seems to emerge from a general cultural gestalt of the the 1990s, when The X-Files and Weekly World News were objects of discussion, every major plot point or news story chosen for thematic resonance is approximately fifteen years old. I believe 2005 was when I started to hear about colony collapse disorder. This bee metaphor has been lapped by a Honey Nut Cheerios campaign at this point. (A few years back, boxes of cereal came with seeds of wildflowers you/children could plant.)

Darin Morgan’s episode of The X-Files revival “The Mengele Effect” ably addresses all the issues with how cynicism and conspiracy theories feel different now, all the issues that Nocenti seems terrified of and hopes the audience doesn’t think of when reading her humorless X-Files throwback comic. That episode’s great.  Much of The Seeds seems like it was better done in the decidedly not-great Transmetropolitian. There’s something so dated and sad about this comic’s idea of a cool journalist protagonist: People barely smoke cigarettes anymore! I know no one wants to draw people vaping, but the imagery this book wishes meant “cool, urban, woman” reads as nostalgic affectation in 2021. That so much of the commercial landscapes of our cities has been replaced by vape shops was one of the biggest clues we were already living in a dystopia three years ago.

Nocenti, when she was working regularly, got to be a pretty effective writer for having a monthly deadline wherein she could speak on the issues of the day as they were happening. In the absence of a regular gig, this rare chance to speak her mind gets hampered by how much there is to talk about, and how complicated it all is. If it’s too complicated to address in an ongoing superhero comic, a one-off graphic novel with vaguely commercial ambitions turns out to be a worse space for it. It’s so much sadder than anything in this dream-of-the-nineties comic that the authors were given the grace to make something only under the conditions that doom it to failure. Real people made this work of fiction, and I don’t know what the fuck they’re even talking about, and that’s a more complicated narrative than the journalists in this comic who… stumble upon a story and then need to take to back because it’s too important or something? I don’t understand what this comic is about. It’s clearly gesturing at being about a bunch of different things, but what they get from being in juxtaposition with one another, I don’t know.

In interviews in advance of the release of The Seeds, Nocenti talked about how this was the first time she got to make a comic that didn’t have to have fight scenes or conflict in it. But reading Typhoid it’s clear how conflict ties the story’s disparate threads together. But also while reading Typhoid I kept on thinking about how visually, the Steve Lightle shit that preceded it is so much cooler! Here he is, bifurcating a page so two narrative threads can be told with different approaches to stoytelling:

People sometimes talk about how crazy it is that Nocenti started her Daredevil run immediately following up the Miller/Mazzucchelli Born Again run with a fill-in drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith. But I don’t think anyone has pointed out that, since these Typhoid Mary team-up comics appeared in Marvel Comics Presents, she’s basically following up Barry Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X, and Steve Lightle is totally capable of doing that! Even if these comics are kinda whatever narratively, Nocenti comes up with dense enough narratives to give him shit to do. She’s a good writer within the context of the harsh strictures of early nineties mainstream comics. Which I know seems like a harsh diss! But being a writer that makes work that consistently gives a comics artist something interesting to do is a difficult job that many people are just not interested in doing for various reasons, so it should be recognized when it’s attempted and accomplished.

It’s also interesting that the whole visual approach where both Steve Lightle and Barry Windsor-Smith shine is dependent on flat color. The changes in storytelling made to accommodate the shifts in visual language in full-color mainstream comics didn’t really benefit anyone, and now needs to be outsmarted. In The Seeds, we’ve got this pretty dull reading experience that superficially in its two-color print job and nine-panel grid, looks like it might be influenced by Mazzucchelli’s work in Rubber Blanket and City Of Glass. And we’ve got a black and white Barry Windsor-Smith comic coming out from Fantagraphics in a few weeks that I really hope blows it out of the water.

[skeksissquid]

Progress Blog: Year 2 Week 10 -10-29-2020

      Before I start this weeks blog, I want to apologize for being inconsistent with posts. I don’t have an excuse for it. 

     With that being said, over the past two weeks, I did a lot more focus on value structures with my traditional art, trying to take inspiration from Sin City’s art style by Frank Miller with results that I can say that I’m pretty happy with. In addition to this, finally I have been assigned with doing prop models and I got the chance to start working on the model for Alfraid himself! So that has been a huge relief for me since I was starting to get worried about not being much of an asset on the team thus far. On top of that, I might have another idea worth pitching for a team to be made, . . .

     To start things off, I’m going to go over the traditional pieces that I was really proud of over the past two weeks. Namely the pieces for inktober on Dune and armor as well as my product for an art challenge Mr. Compton put out where we were supposed to make a piece using only shading. For the first portion of this challenge, I ended up struggling hard since I was trying to go for an angular style showing only parts of the outline of a gargoyle, but I ended up accidentally creating lines again while doing this, and it was too much of an effort to really continue with it so I ended up starting over. After trying to find some references for an art style, I looked at some of the references that Compton posted, and say one of Frank Miller’s pieces. I wasn’t accustomed to the style, but it looked like an interesting challenge, so I tried working around that in order to see if it’d work or not. To my surprise, it worked wonders! After doing the original shading in pencil, I decided to go over it using a sharpie, and it really turned into something cool then. Once I was finished with that, the style really appealed for whatever reason to me, so the following day, I tried to make another piece using a similar style, and I think it looked pretty good as well, even if it took a couple hours of using markers.

Inktober: Armor (Yes, I know there’s supposed to be pens or marker but I didn’t have any at the time)

Inktober: Dune

Gargoyle Original Sketch

Gargoyle Final Product

Personal Piece Using Just Sharpies

     As for prop work, I have been pumping out tons and tons of stuff since Alfraid needs at least 30 prop models by the deadline and I have been making multiple a day, UVs and all. (Please note that some of these models have variations that will not be shown for the sake of efficiency)

Bedframe

Mattress High Poly

Mattress Low poly

Hanging Bat Decoration

Broken Crayon

Cup

Jar

Desk lamp

Damaged Pencil

Shelf

This Abomination of a Rat Plush Toy That I Will Be Redoing

Alfraid Front (WIP)

Alfraid Side (WIP)

Alfraid Head (WIP)

     And finally, the design work that I’ve been doing. To put it bluntly, there’s a game idea that I came up with for a design meeting, and apparently it was a really good idea, and simple enough for it to be executed within this year.

Design Document:

Self Preservation:

Don’t hide your eyes! Fossilize!

PLEASE NOTE: THIS DESIGN IS INCOMPLETE CURRENTLY

Premise:

You are a dinosaur. See that asteroid? You got a minute to find the best place to fossilize in; the best fossil wins. What’s that? Someone else in your spot? You can fight them to push them out of your spot! Just don’t get hurt or it’ll affect your preservation.

Base Gameplay:

You are in a top down procedurally generated environment where you are trying to find the best place to be preserved, ie; swamps, marsh flats, caves, etcetera and be at that location as the minute clock for the end of the round (the asteroid hitting). But there’s a catch: this is a multiplayer game, and each other player is also trying to get into these well preserving places as much as you are. When other players block your path, you can attack them, pushing them away and damaging their fossil and their final score. 

At the end of each round, you gain points equal to where you oh so graciously died, as well as based on how much damage you took ( damage penalizes your score) with the goal of the game being having the highest points in the end. This game would most likely be a mobile game due to its simplicity and fast paced nature.

Additional Information:

Due to the somewhat grim nature of this game, the art style for this game will be kid friendly, and likely will be 2.5D.

Chances are that there will be a “class system” where you get to play as different prehistoric creatures (ex: T-rex, Triceratops, Pterodactyl, etcetera) and each of these classes would excel in certain things and flounder in others. For example, an Ankylosaurus would be very slow, but wouldn’t take much damage from being attacked and wouldn’t be pushed away by attacks, while something like a velociraptor would take a lot of damage from attacks, but they would be incredibly fast and be able to deal a lot of damage.

What I hope to Accomplish next week:

- Work on more props

- Maybe finish on the Alfraid model

Problems that I might run into:

- Zbrush license issues

[canaryatlaw]

alright I really need to get to bed. I was set to write this like twenty minutes ago but then I realized I hadn’t taken my pills yet so I went to do that and then swallowed them all at once because I’m impatient when I usually due it in two batches and inevitably one got stuck in my throat because my esophagus occasionally tries to choke me to death randomly when I do things like swallow too many pills at much so then I felt like I was going to throw up and had to swallow like 4 spoonfuls of honey until it finally went away. and then I returned to my computer and then got distracted by the BTS performance video and watched half of that before returning to actually write this. so that was a playback of the last twenty minutes of my life, but we can get on to the rest of it now. I had set my alarm for 11 just so that I didn’t sleep in too much but when it went off I still wanted to sleep more so I slept for like another hour then got up and discovered bagels had already been obtained, which was helpful because I thought I was going to have to go obtain them myself, so that made my life easier. so I ate a bagel that was very good. We were gonna keep some for tomorrow morning but then I think it was decided that we’re gonna go out to breakfast so hopefully I can steal a few bagels and shove them into my bag before I leave, I had some space when I finished packing on the way here and I didn’t buy anything, so I should be able to fit a few. we kinda just chilled for a while after that until around 3 when we left to go to the movies since my mom wanted to see the mr rogers movie (”A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood”) so my parents, my brother, and I went to do that. It was a really good movie, Tom Hanks portrayal was phenomenal, he embodied him so well and the whole thing was just so well done it made me really happy to see. I also may have texted a bit during the movie (but with my phone brightness all the way down so nobody could actually see it, I’m not that much of an asshole) because the dude I went on a date with last week texted me back, and I asked if he wanted to go to the jingle bash concert next weekend because I had an extra ticket, but like he could definitely say no if it was too much, and he was basically like “so I really hate pop music” and I just laughed and was like that’s totally fine, I wouldn’t want to put you through a night of torture, especially since I hadn’t mentioned there was gonna be two kpop bands there that were the actual reasons I wanted to go, and I would probably inevitably thirst after them watching them perform and this probably was not a good dating activity lol. I’ll probably ask my roommate if she wants to go and if she can’t I may just sell the ticket on stubhub and be a loner for the night (which I don’t particularly want to do because I don’t like doing things by myself, but I might not really have a choice). but yeah, after the movie we dropped my brother off at home and then went to get italian food for dinner. I had previously googled fred rogers because I wanted to see when he had died (2003, in case you were wondering), and one of the articles that popped up first was a review of the movie that was like “Christian faith is the one thing that was missing from [movie]” and I was like huh that’s an interesting take (especially when there was definitely a scene where he was praying and it was mentioned that he was an ordained minister) and it was just like this review trashing the movie as being humanistic and secularist and how all of its hope and goodwill were empty and meaningless without an acknowledgement of his Christianity and I was just like.....what the fuck movie did you watch??? Both my parents had loved the movie and I told them about this and they were both like wtf too because that’s such a shallow and short sighted perspective to think that no good can come from a piece of media without an explicit gospel message coming through. and that was like, a huge part of my college Christian artist perspective with the idea being working on “redemptive” art that doesn’t necessarily have to focus on evangelizing (and tbh, the more explicitly gospel aimed productions were usually the weaker ones). and like, reading that just irritated me so much like...imagine thinking that any kindness you express is worthless unless you’re shoving Jesus down their throat at the same time and that’s just like....that makes no sense at all and is completely unrealistic. There’s a Christian song i’m partial to called Live Like That which contains the lyrics “people pass/and even if they don’t know my name/is there evidence that I’ve been changed/when they see me do they see You?” and that’s just always what I’m focusing on- spreading God’s love without the need for words even, just through action alone. I shouldn’t have to spout off the gospel to show love to someone, it doesn’t work like that. and I mean, I don’t automatically devalue any explicitly Christian productions as there have been a few that were actually very well done (though admittedly most of them are pretty crappy). there had been a trailer playing before the movie for the movie coming out about Jeremy Camp (who’s a fairly well known Christian singer) that has KJ Apa in the lead role and it actually looks like it could be really good, but the audience that’s actually going to see that movie is barely a fraction of the audience that would go to the mr rogers movie. This was such an awesome opportunity to share love and kindness and they did it so damn well, I just thought it was so callous and ignorant to totally dismiss the movie because it didn’t contain an explicit gospel message. I’m rambling now, I know, though before I totally get off the topic I did also want to mention we also saw a trailer for the movie adaptation of Just Mercy, which was a book written by Bryan Stevenson, the founder of Equal Justice Works, which is a huge public interest law group that provides a ton of fellowships funding new attorneys who want to work do public interest work, and I know several people who had such fellowships with them (I came very close to applying but I had gotten the info about it too close to the deadline to really come up with a good proposal so I decided against it). so I’m super pumped for that movie as well, I do have a copy of the book that I received from that pro bono training we did at the fancy law firm a few weeks ago, I might have to sit down and read through it (which isn’t something I’ve really done with physical books since law school, you just do so much reading for school it kinda kills reading for pleasure for you, though I do still read plenty of fanfiction, lol). but now, anyway. the italian food was good, though when we got home I had a got a pretty bad stomach ache, but I don’t really know if it was the food or some other random reason because my body is crappy like that. but yeah, for most of the rest of the night I just chilled on the couch with my parents and a heating pad which I still have on my stomach currently, though it’s mostly feeling better. and yeah, eventually people went to go to bed and I showered and then came back here to start writing and went through the sequence of events recounted at the beginning of this post, and now I’m here. It’s now 1:30 am and I do have to wake up at some point not too late in order to go to breakfast because the car is coming to take me to the airport at 2:30 (I know that sounds so pretentious and spoiled and every time I say something like that I feel the need to explain my dad is really good friends with the owner of a limo company and he gives us free airport rides whenever we want, which is very generous of him, and my parents hate laguardia airport more than anything so I tend to get driven by them fairly often) so we’d obviously have to go sometime before that, and henceforth, I should go to bed now, so that is what I’m going to do. Goodnight friends. Goodbye November, hello December. 

[comicteaparty]

November 23rd-November 29th, 2019 Creator Babble Archive

The archive for the Creator Babble chat that occurred from November 23rd, 2019 to November 29th, 2019.  The chat focused on the following question:

How do you personally deal with hiatuses, both in regards to planned and unplanned breaks?

carcarchu

I feel very guilty when I go on unplanned hiatuses and I avoid going to tapas and webtoons at all until I've got an update completed. i'm scared to see comments complaining about the lack of updates and how many people have unfollowed me in the meantime. i also find it very hard to bounce back from a hiatus. when i've got a groove going it's easier to keep the momentum than it is to start again after a prolonged absence

Deo101

Kinda a rough question haha. I don't go on any hiatuses other than unplanned ones. It's only out of necessity, in the past I did it if school/health got rough, and I'd try to be back the next week with a normal update!!! However.. I have a second comic which has been on hiatus for a year. I miss making it, but I lost the person who I was working with on it so it has been hard to start again. I'm kind of not really dealing with it, as the anxiety of starting again gets worse the longer it's been! But, I know that the only way to get out of it is to just do it, and I have to do it as soon as I can or it will never end. So, I just work my way through them to get back on schedule.

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

So far I've only taken one official hiatus, after I finished the second chapter of the comic - I worked on the next chapter's pages for the next two months, then came back and luckily haven't been off hiatus since.

I have another planned hiatus after the next chapter, and this time, I'll be accepting guest art to fill the space - it's not something I was aware was a thing until it was suggested to me. It'll be interesting to come up with a cool way to feature any art I receive. I like the idea of highlighting other artists' work while I'm taking a breather!

eli [a winged tale]

There’s such a huge mental barrier for me when it comes to announcing a hiatus but ultimately life and health come first. I have a comic on hiatus since 2015 (one day it’ll come back haha), and sometimes things happen to push my current one back for updates. I want to tell myself that since I’m producing free content, it should be for fun and not a source of stress (despite industry standards and what I want to achieve). It’s a balance. I think the readers who wait are the ones I am most grateful and treasure.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I have chronic health issues that can be very debilitating, so having hiatuses is something I have to deal with all the time. I might be able to update regularly for a few months, but eventually and inevitably, a sudden hiatus will come. It’s something that causes me a lot of stress on top of an already stressful situation. Readers leave, and then when I’m well enough to work, I don’t just have to churn out as many pages as I can while I can, I also have to rebuild my audience all over again. I hate going on hiatuses and having such an unstable update schedule, but there’s not much I can do about it.(edited)

Cronaj

Aw man... I also have been dealing with chronic health conditions, so I feel you. I finally got treatments that have been working, so I'm able to update consistently now. That being said, I was on hiatus for a year and a half until just recently. It really did destroy the momentum I was building up, and readers I had accumulated. Because of that, I am determined not to take long hiatuses anymore (a week-a month at most) and to announce it beforehand. I do find it important to prioritize health and mental well-being above my comic, but I find my mental health suffering every time I neglect to update my comic, so I find a middle ground by taking short breaks occasionally. Moral of the story: build up a buffer, kids. Don't be like me.

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

Yeah, same. I'm still trying to get a diagnosis, but I'm kind of an outlier in medicine- my body chemistry is very atypical. I build up those buffers whenever I can, but they always run out sooner or later. I love making comics so much that my mental health suffers, too. I get depressed if I'm not making progress on my comics. I'm really glad you've found a treatment that helps, though! I hope I can too, one of these years.

eli [a winged tale]

What is this mystical buffer everyone keeps talking about

I jest. Keep up the great work everyone! Everyone is trying their best and that’s most important

Capitania do Azar

I always take a small hiatus on the end of each chapter so I can rest and work on writing the next one, usually for a couple months.

sssfrs

I generally take my time with updates anyway. I've lost followers after hiatuses (strangely people only actually started unfollowing me after I came back with a new update) but I'm more focused on getting more of my comic done and progressing towards it being a finished work than keeping a consistent audience. Even though it would be nice...

DanitheCarutor

Fff coincidentally I'm going on a planned hiatus in December. At the end of every chapter I go on one to get feedback, and have some downtime to better plan the next chapter, as well as to get build some buffer. Usually during this time I either hold a Q&A, or do a call for guest art/comics, and I only ever plan to be on break for a month. I don't like being away for longer than that, and the intermission stuff (Q&A's, call for guest art) is announced a month or so beforehand, that way no one is scrambling when the scheduled break starts. As far as an unplanned hiatus, I don't usually have any with my current project. There have been times I've missed the posting deadline due to my fulltime job, but would post either once the page is done or the next week. With my old comic I took a lot of unannounced breaks, not so much because I was busy but I was going through a lot of crap, and morale was really low. It didn't help that it was my very first real attempt at making comics, so I had no idea what I was doing, the story was also hot garbage and became more of a chore to work as time went on. Eventually I just stopped, went on perma-hiatus totally unannounced to this day. I should have let my readers know, but I was really ashamed of myself for not wanting to work on the project (I promised I would complete it), and with a bunch of things suddenly happening in my life I forgot. I'll probably have to go in an unannounced break someday. A lot of things can happen, and being a traditional art only comic creator I'll probably end up running out of supplies eventually, needing to scrounge up some money for more. The nice thing is soooome, hopefully most, of my readers would understand? They know my comic is super time consuming, and that I've been working on it nonstop for 4-5 years now, so they should? Maybe? Hopefully that won't happen, though!

keii4ii

For those of you who take a break after each chapter, how many pages go in an average-length chapter?

🌈ERROR404 🌈

depends on how you're planning to set up your story, whether u want to prioritize to certain print sizes, but the general average chapter size is about 30 pages

Cronaj

I hadn't been planning to take a break between chapters, but we'll see what actually happens. I have chapters ranging from 35-50 pages in length(edited)

DanitheCarutor

Not sure how everyone else is, but I wing it with chapter length. The chapter I'm currently capping off will be 57 pages, although 30-45ish pages is preferred.

eli [a winged tale]

47 for me for this first chapter!

keii4ii

Cool! Was mostly asking a "so how frequently do you take scheduled post-chapter breaks" worded differently

sssfrs

I do 8-12.. I wish I could do more

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I am taking a short holiday break (that was actually planned this time) in between Eryl chapters. My Eryl chapters usually run 30-35 pages, and the break will be around..., 3 weeks I think? I can’t remember exactly. I’m probably going to have to put it back on hiatus partway through the chapter when my buffer runs out because of the aforementioned chronic health issues, though.

spacerocketbunny

I've only taken one hiatus and that was just while my site was being built! But even then we were able to have a short extra comic updating on an alternative site for that time being. We've been updating consistently for 5 years and that's thanks to the stability we've been lucky to have and the fact that there's two of us sharing the work. We've been able to work ahead enough so we've never ran out of a buffer, I'm pretty proud of that tbh(edited)

DanitheCarutor

@keii4ii Oh! So you were asking the time frame in which a chapter is finished? Correct me if I'm wrong. Normally each chapter takes about a year to complete, sometimes a couple months more than that. (for me, that is.)

spacerocketbunny

Nothing wrong with a hiatus though, especially after chapter breaks, I think those are pretty good to keep yourself from burning out!

Cronaj

I do 2-3 pages a week, so I finish a new chapter... about every 4-6 months

keii4ii

I appreciate the answers, everyone!

AntiBunny

I answered this one on Twitter, but I'll answer more at length here. FIrst of all I think a distinction should be made between a Hiatus, which is a planned break, and an extended delay, which is more missed updates compounding with each other.

The former is easier to deal with. Announce it with a clear return date.

The latter is rougher. The artist hasn't planned it, and feelings of guilt can make it harder and harder to return. The best thing to do in that case is to again, get out ahead of it. When you're delayed point people to your social media, and keep posting to make it clear you're still working, or if work has halted completely at least keep posting to let them know when you will be working on it again.

Either way I try to avoid even using the word "hiatus" because webcomic readers tend to read it as "abandoned." Sadly they're all too often right to do so.

Cronaj

Yeah, usually, when announcing a hiatus to my readers, I like to use the word "break" instead

It's a bit softer for some reason

You know, I am 95% certain that my readers thought I had abandoned the project—or died—when I disappeared for a year and a half

Because I know that I have gotten invested in a comic, only for the creator to go incognito

And I always wonder... Are they alright?

keii4ii

I usually figure either life got too busy, or the creator outgrew the project. Or both.

AntiBunny

I know. I stopped updating for almost a year because I wasn't happy with the planned ending of Nailbat. I lost readers I still haven't regained over that one.

In retrospect "waiting for inspiration" was not the ideal way to handle that.

Cronaj

Yeah, the fact that I returned at all is pretty crazy, from a reader's perspective(edited)

I've seen more abandoned projects than I have, "Hey sorry guys! Was dealing with stuff, but now I'm back!"

I mean, it happens

But very infrequently in comparison to the previous sadly(edited)

AntiBunny

Combine the fact that not updating is easier than updating, and the guilt of not updating making you feel like your return has to be even more awesome with every missed update, so you build for yourself a unsalable mountain of imagined expectation, and you have a recipe for abandonment.

Cronaj

Yep!

I'm still trying to regain my momentum

And I always feel so bad if I publish a less-than-stellar page

AntiBunny

There's also the fact that people grow and change. One problem with long form story webcomics is that an artist can outgrow their story.

Cronaj

That is so true

AntiBunny

The most successful tend to be the ones that can grow and change with the artist.

Cronaj

As a novelist as well, I can say that is incredibly accurate

I have dropped so many novels after writing 30k words or more

The only project I've stayed faithful to for over 5 years IS my current comic project

AntiBunny

Sluggy Freelance for example is very different today than when it began. Gunnerkrigg Court as well, and I like to think mine can too.

Though I'll admit I do have a character I've outgrown, and it bugs me people want to see her again.

Cronaj

I think that's just a desire for closure, and for things to come together in the end

AntiBunny

She was more of a comic relief character really. her sort of humor just isn't something I want to write anymore. That kind of edgelord "lol murder," humor isn't something I can write anymore. And unlike the core cast who've grown so that they don't have to come from the same place I was years ago, she hasn't.

I may be drifting off topic a bit there. Anyway I think it serves well as a reminder that for a long term story the characters need to grow with the artist to keep a comic going.

keii4ii

Not every story is meant to grow with the trends, and that's 100% fine. Just means you have to accept the risk of potentially outgrowing the project.

Using the word "trends" pretty broadly

Mine is not very adaptable, and I can't imagine making it more adaptable without altering its core. It doesn't make it less worthy as a story, just... yeah, bigger risk

seetherabbit

I always took breaks or "hiatus" way before I ran out of pages I could in theory add to the buffer

that way I could more easly relax

but also so I don't have to take an hiatus in the middle of a story

Pistashi

everyone needs a break sometimes

I've been updating and working constantly not only on my comic, but alto my yt channel and freelance jobs (because money is always welcomed, even tho I HATE FREELANCE WITH ALL MY CORE)

but I feel like I got momentum now and I dont wanna stop suddendly

sometimes I feel exhausted but then one day later or after 10h of sleep Im fine

I'll take a break later for sure, but rn I feel like this weight of responsibility is helping me build my work ethics

because we cant work just when we are inspired, we dont have that luxury :P

we cant overwork either, so we gotta be smart with our breaks and hiatuses

mathtans

I've been on hiatus more times than I want to count. One of those things where not having much of an audience helps... if no one's really saying much, they either continue not to say anything, or suddenly surface to wish you well.

I will say that I like concluding arcs. My first hiatus was when my wife went into hospital for a bit, I said I'd return but didn't know when. Most of my other hiatuses have been at the ends of arcs... and I'll add that while they were breaks from the comic, they weren't from content. I put up a few behind-the-scenes things, explaining backstory, and had a friend write a column for me too. I've seen other comics do similar, or use guest art.

And for those of you wondering "who's this guy", I've been on hiatus since my daughter was born. Meaning we're going on 17 months. (I may not return to comic work. I have another website I run where I do serials that I'm still maintaining.)

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

In most cases I take a hiatus at the end of a chapter. I have taken two official hiatuses and I think there were some shorter, inofficial ones that I had to take because of other obligations like my studies/family issues/freelance work or finishing books for print. Personally I have managed to not get myself too worked up about hiatuses. I'm doing comics for free and I can't live off of them, so it's inevitable to take breaks. Though I have to say I'm starting into a new chapter without having to go on hiatus, which is pretty neat C:

Pistashi

@Phin (Heirs of the Veil) thats niice! its like the more we work on comics the better (and faster) we get, so keeping the momentum between chapters without a hiatus is an awesome thing! Its the little things tbh

also, you're right. its inevitable to take breaks. specially when you're not working full time and can't live off of them. and like @mathtans said, responsibility shows up and sometimes we have to put things aside

like having a daugther! thats awesome dude! hope your family is doing well (and I know you said you might not get back to comics, but if its something you enjoy keep it up when you're free! making comics is fun) ahdksjnd

Neguri-Senpai-Author

I've actually never gone on a hiatus ever since I started really doing my comic. I can't really go on any hiatuses because I market mine as a weekly comic and additionally I have an oddly strong obsession over consistently in my life so I just feel really really weird if I'd do something like a break from my comic even if I needed it ^^; But currently it's not really that bad. I've been consistent with weekly uploads for a bit over a year now (I've started doing it weekly in September of 2018) and I don't plan on going on a hiatus any time soon. Maybe I'll work a bit in advance but I'm not gonna go on a hiatus to get a break

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

@Pistashi Yeah it's really nice when you finally get a little faster because you optimized your workflow

mathtans

@Pistashi Thanks! Family's doing great, but yeah, most of my free time goes to writing rather than drawing these days. We'll see how things play out.

Desnik

I didn't spotlight my hiatus, but when I finally return to acknowledge it, I'd like to have something to show for it, like a new project or 'this is where I am now' or 'This is what the comic meant to me' so that at least my readers get closure

[tessmontyart]

2018 Year In Review

Another year, another review 💕(I actually typed most of this up before 2019 and then got distracted, whoops)

To put things short, 2018 has been AWESOME :D Exhausting and fast, but awesome.

I started it off pretty uncertain how things were going to go, dreading it would be a repeat of 2017′s boring TAFE courses and endless job rejections. But the miracle happened - a 2D animation studio opened up near me, I applied, did an animation test and got the job!

The job was a contract from 1st of April - 21st of December, so I spent the majority of my year going to work to animate characters for a really crazy but hilarious new kids show called Spongo Fuzz and Jalapena, due to air mid 2019 :) 

It was honestly the most fun job I have ever had and I can’t wait for the next project! 🎉 I have never been this exhausted in my life, though. 😅I had already booked a whole bunch of conventions before I got the job, and didn’t want to cancel them so I was working nonstop - Animation during the day and intensive convention prep every night. 

I also had the bright idea of creating a full colour 26 page comic -with a tight deadline - so I was madly working to the point I didn’t even have time for dinner half the time :’) I am sort of happy with the comic, but also kind of wish I never had the idea in the first place. 😅

I tabled at a ton of conventions; Melbourne Supanova, Central Coast ComiCon, Other Worlds Zine Fair, Sydney Supanova, SMASH and Canberra Gamma Con. If next year doesn’t go so well on the job side of things I’m hoping to add a few more conventions to that list - Brisbane Supanova, Oz Comic Con and Animaga to name a few. I’ve already booked Sydney Madman Anime Festival!

2018 was the year my partner and I celebrated our 4th year together, and he never fails to amaze me with his continuous love and support. I was too sick to attend the first day of SMASH, so he set up and ran the whole stall for me while I stayed at home. Same with Sydney Supanova, I was too bogged down in animation work and couldn’t afford to take the Friday off, so he set up and ran the stall for me on Friday, then we ran the stall together on the weekend. He also tended to my every need when I broke my toe, cooked all my meals when I was busy with work and even packaged + posted all my Etsy orders every day because I was always working during post office hours. He listened to all the problems I was having with my stall setup and helped make shelves and decorations to make it look and function better. I was getting stressed because my desk space was too small, BAM he bought me a brand new desk with plenty of storage. I was getting stressed that I had so much on my convention to-do-list and couldn’t keep track of all my project ideas, BAM, he sets up a whiteboard and helps me brainstorm everything so I can keep track of all my thoughts and ideas and what to prioritise for future conventions. I didn’t even ask him to do any of this, he just loves to help me and make me happy and I am forever blissed and happy to be able to spend my life with such a wonderful human! 

(Home made High Tea I made for him on Valentines Day) 

Arsty Highlilghts / accomplishments:

🌸I designed 9 cute Houseki no Kuni acrylic charms which have been doing really well at conventions!

🌸I also drew a cute series of ‘Sleepy Gem’ Houseki no Kuni / Steven Universe holographic prints, which I’m quite proud of 😊

🌸I created my 2nd enamel pin design, which already needed 2 reorders because they were so popular! ;w; I never knew I could make something that so many people love *sob* I’ve already planned to make these into a series! (already designed some deer ones, and thinking of doing foxes next ^_^ )

🌸I also tried getting gold foil prints done for the first time, which was pretty cool! I got the american sizes mixed up though so I might try for the bigger size next time :) (grainy photo cause its a screenshot from a video)

🌸I’ve been taking steps to make my stall look more ‘professional’, and got a really neat wooden sign made for me by my friend as_sweet_as_jasmine!

🌸I’ve started revamping my favourite series of posters - the Eevee Gijinka girls :) I plan to have them all done and ready for 2019s conventions! 

🌸This was the year I got an iPad, so I could do digital art on-the-go. Honestly its helped me so much, and I can’t wait to be able to use it more (sorta didn’t get a chance to touch it while i was working!)

🌸I got Copic Markers for my birthday so I had a whole new medium to play with! These mixed with using a brush pen for inking really make my inktobers pop and I’m eager to draw more with them  :) 

🌸Speaking of Inktober, it was a huge accomplishment for me to put effort into a decent artwork every day this year! Usually theres a few dud ones when I lacked inspiration, but I somehow managed to make it work ;w; So when it came time to printing the books, theres 31 illustrations rather than 25 like the others :) Also the whole rainbow theme idea came from how cool I think it would look flipping through a rainbow book - so I managed to make that happen and couldn’t be happier!

🌸I passed 1000 sales on Etsy!! 😱As well as 1000 followers on instagram! Crazy right??

General 2018 highlights

🌸2018 was the year one of my best friends got married! I made cute little clay wedding cake toppers for her :)

🌸The year Owl City’s 7th album Cinematic came out!! All the tracks are so GOOD and exactly the sound all us hootowls were longing for. Also Be Brave is a tearjerker, in a good way. What an amazing human Abbey is to Adam <3 

🌸The year Spyro Reignited Trilogy came out!! It’s absolutely amazing, and I love every second of it. Every time I play it I just can’t help but stand there looking around at every detail because everything is just so gorgeous *_* And the nostalgia is so real.

🌸Not exactly a highlight but the year Tumblr went NSFW free, and lost hundreds of thousands of users 😂I’m still here though. Got a dumb tradition to keep up ya know.

🌸The year my work had a hilarious Christmas party where we had to dress up as a character from Spongo Fuzz and Jalapena. It was the first time I actually put effort into a cosplay by myself 😂(possibly the last) (wont put a photo up for embarrassing reasons)

🌸the year I broke my toe for the first time xD;; definitely not a highlight but a first! I couldn’t walk for weeks! it sucked!!! T__T

🌸The year my friend successfully funded his kickstarter for his own cartoon ‘Nurry Brothers Adventure World’ :D So proud of him. I’m gonna help him animate!

🌸The year Lano and Woodley reunited with their amazing show ‘Fly’!! I loved it so much I saw it twice :D 

🌸The year I tried doing Halloween for the first time - I bought a bunch of lollies and chocolates and decorations on my letterbox/door to let people know I was participating. I got 2 different groups of people at the door, 5 people all up 😂More than I expected tbh!

🌸I tried Ruby chocolate for the first time! It was ok .. just kinda tasted like berry yoghurt flavoured white chocolate though ;w; 

SO! What’s coming for 2019?

I’m not really sure at the moment, but I have high hopes for Cheeky Little Studios (the animation company I worked for) - so I guess I’ll just have to wait and see if any of their next projects get concrete start dates :) I’m not as terrified of the year as I usually am when its just one big question mark. I know I can make decent money through conventions and commissions in the meant time so I’ll just continue doing what I love! 

LAST YEAR I SAID:

“I am crossing my fingers for an animation job I applied for a while ago” - I GOT IT! :D

“I plan to do even more conventions. Hopefully I can get into Oz Comic Con!" - didn’t end up applying because I was busy with the job, but keen to try for 2019 :)

"I’m keen to apply for like Animaga in Melbourne, as well as Madman Anime Fest in Brisbane and Melbourne.” - didn’t end up doing so for the same reason above, but that might change this year :)

“I also want to make a lot more non-fandom things for market stalls, as well as a comic and zines!” - I made the comic, as well as 3 inktober zines and a cute ‘if I fits I sits’ cat zine! As well as a bunch of cute original enamel pin ideas and my whole inktober was original art :D 

“Hopefully I’ll hit 1k followers on fb/ig? :D that will make me feel important lol” - I hit 1k on instagram!! I felt very important xD

“I’m also hoping to go on a holiday this year." - I didn’t, for job reasons ... buuut I’m booked in for a cruise in Italy / Greece this September that I’m extremely excited for!

“PLEASE BE KIND 2018, I’M BEGGING YOU 😱” - You were very very kind to me, 2018. 2019, please follow suit! 

(man this is the 7th year of review I’ve done. Can’t believe I’ve been on tumblr this long 😅)

[2017] [2016] [2015] [2014] [2013] [2012]

[squaredev]

Update

Okay, I think it’s about time I give a small update on what I’ve been doing the past few weeks, what I’m doing now, and what I plan to do in the coming months. I said on Twitter I would make a post about it like a month ago and then of course I completely forgot to actually do it. Anyway, on to the important stuff:

What I’ve been doing:

After the second demo for Knight & Witch back in September I was feeling burned out and frustrated with the game and with myself. I rushed the demo out, in a very buggy and incomplete state, and had to go back to fix it many times before people could actually get to the end. I didn’t have enough time before the deadline, so I skipped playtesting almost completely, which led to a huge number of bugs and just things not working properly.

Even after fixing (almost) everything wrong with the demo from a technical standpoint, the feedback I received was very mixed, and worst of all, I agreed with it completely. Controlling the characters feels clunky and slow; attacks (especially the Witch’s spells) aren’t fun to perform; putting lots of enemies everywhere is not good; a certain puzzle can soft-lock the game if you leave the other character behind; ironically, leaving a character behind makes the game easier because you can stop worrying about them running into traps or getting killed; at the same time, the character you left behind might get attacked while off-screen... The list goes on (and on) but you get the idea.

So anyway, the rush for the demo didn’t pay off and I was feeling down. I needed a break, and I wanted to pursue other projects to kind of relax and take my mind off of it for a while. 

So I decided to pick and old project of mine back up: if you’ve been following me for a long time you might remember ColorFall, a mobile game I was working on around 2 years ago. Back then I was close to done but I stopped right before publishing (I’m not completely sure why, maybe I was just bored with it). Anyway, with the programming skills I acquired during this time, I managed to do some major upgrades to ColorFall, starting from refactoring the whole code base to be more efficient, performant and extensible. From there, I went ahead and added some new gameplay features such as special ball types, each with its own effect, implemented online leaderboards and greatly improved the UI design to feel more responsive and ‘juicy’. At this point the game was (and still is) ready to be published, both on PC and Android. The only thing still missing are the sound effects, which I’m waiting for from the same person who I commissioned for the music.

What I’m doing now:

As you can probably guess, working on ColorFall wasn’t really hard or taxing, and it was actually refreshing to get into a project where I could make quick and steady progress, something I had been missing for a while. So in the mean time, I also spent time thinking and thinking and thinking about how to fix the gameplay for Knight & Witch, how to make the combat deeper and more engaging, and just dumping every idea I had regarding the game on a paper notebook I have just for this purpose. Recently, after releasing a game for agdg’s Halloween Jam (SpooQuest), I finally decided to go back and resume work on K&W. Among my priorities, I wanted to finally let the Knight use his shield to guard himself and the Witch from enemy attacks. I don’t have much to show, and in the last few days I’ve been busy with other things so progress is slow, but I think I’m starting to see the path in front of me again.

Also in the last few months I’ve been coming back time and time again to the idea of asking for help to a programmer. But this time it’s different (sort of): now I’m not as non-confident in my coding skills as I used to be. I think I can code all the features I need for my game. However the thing is, I also want to work on the art. So like, I can, and want to, do both things, but obviously this means the game will take a long time to complete. Having a programmer by my side would mean that while he’s coding, I can make models, thus ‘doubling’ the pace of progress. 

Anyway you know how it goes, it’s not easy for me to just leave the code-side to somebody else so for now I’m just going to keep working by myself, asking for help only when I need.

What I plan to do next:

Now, what will I be doing in the future? Well, obviously I will keep working on Knight & Witch. I have quite a lot of features planned that I couldn’t implement in the past either due to time constraints or due to my lack of knowledge/skill. I’m feeling slightly more confident now, and the feedback I’ve received with the last demo put me in the right direction I think. As I said above, progress is going slow and the fact that I will be doing it alone, at least in the foreseeable future, means things will take time. A lot of it. 

I remember posting my New Year’s Resolutions around a year ago, and I planned to make a ‘real’ game by myself and publish it by the end of 2018. Well, I guess that’s not going to happen. But it’s for the best. A lot of things happened, the scope of the game grew a whole bunch while I was developing it, and for several weeks I had other matters keeping me away from gamedev.

Now with the wall of text out of the way, I will make a follow-up post with images and videos of ColorFall and Knight & Witch to kind of show what changed since my last post here.

There’s also another thing I should talk about, but I’l do so in a separate post to keep things more focused.

[deoffal-mp-adm7000-n-s1-2022]

Current Opportunities (Local and International)

This post is another grab from my recent presentation, this time giving you a simpler projection of upcoming things I am looking out for, and things that I can consider locally and internationally (membership platforms in particular). The main things to consider here are highlighted yellow, the bottom left being a residency opportunity at the BMAG for just after my studies, the top right being a Saatchi Gallery promoted prize, £10.000 cash pool with other goodies such as a show at the Saatchi Gallery in London in November 2022 etc. 

For the sake of proper context and documentation, here are the links to all the things I’ll discuss in this post:

IKON JOBs:

https://www.ikon-gallery.org/jobs

The New Art Gallery Walsall:

https://thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk/opportunities/

BMAG - We Are Birmingham:

https://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/blog/posts/we-are-birmingham-residencies-call-for-artists

Saatchi Gallery - Art Prize:

https://zealous.co/ukna/opportunity/Robert-Walters-Group-UK-New-Artist-of-the-Year-Award-2022/

AxisWeb:

https://www.axisweb.org/

Eastside Projects - EOP (Extra Ordinary People):

https://eastsideprojects.org/esp/product/eop-membership/

Firstly, the jobs on offer at the IKON are not closely followed interests of mine, but they seem to be open to all kinds of art and employees, and so if I wanted to get into curation, or presenting to an audience about other artists and about working with other artists then I don’t want to dismiss more formal arrangements, especially if they allow me to network with other contemporary artists as well as growing my professional curatorial and exhibition skills at the same time, a worthwhile thing to consider for sure If I want local enough employment that allows me to work for a fair wage while still working on my own career of course, even if it might be to get some kind of work experience in the future too. The New Art Gallery in Walsall is also considered here for the exact same reasons, yet it also allows for shows to be proposed, and so it’s considered here because it’s again close enough and professional enough to me and everyone else that it would be silly not to consider them for some professional or voluntary work experience, and maybe even once they open up for applications, applying to make a show them once I cut my teeth more in the industry. The more important opportunities for me now though are the current BMAG residency opportunity as listed already, wherein I would be able to work internally with the in exhibition space their offering and make work for 4 weeks in the space, wherein I may be able to have a more personable relationship with the average audience and set up a simple and dynamic studio space to work on my next project through, this is still a very young idea for me as none of my cover letters are currently written, but they want alternative and exciting midlands artists in their space, so hopefully I can contribute much to their idea and present work again to a more general and open audience, which would be a good challenge for such a narrow hermetical character such as myself. The last main opportunity featured here would be the Robert Walter Artist of the year 2022 art prize, this would be a great opportunity for funding for my next course of action and would get me into a show or atleast featured in some social media again, all I need to be able to do is write a couple cover letters and give them a reason to check out my portfolio, but due to this being an option which may involve talks about creating an installation I’ll need to wait until my final space in the art school is done before I can present them with more resolved and actual ideas to sell my proposal all the more, but the deadline line is over a month (31st August) from now so I have enough time so far, but it would be a really great opportunity to work with Saatchi Gallery given how huge and connected they are, maybe my work will strike a cord with them and stand out enough, but of course, only time will tell. 

The last two notes here are concerning membership schemes, firstly AxisWeb, they represent artists internationally and all you to receive frequent updates on opportunities and clients looking for commissions, as well as handling your public liability insurance and representation of work etc, this may be a good enough option for me to start considering, especially now I’m getting emails from organisations to feature my work in their shows, so some professional management and guidance outside of educational support may be a great course of action for me over the next 12 months once I get myself even more out there. The final opportunity is Eastside Projects and their EOP scheme, I don’t know if this is any different to their last artist support scheme from 2019 back when I did work experience with them, but it seems to have the same message. That message being that they want to integrate new artists into the contemporary landscape by personally taking them to live action seminars and exhibitions, offer crits and portfolio guidance, and just to generally help people put their feet right when they are stepping into the contemporary landscape, something that universities and the art school I am currently operating in attempt to do, but can’t often offer the same amount of support as actual professionals in their respective fields so it would make sense to consider this as a serious option too. But for now, I just want to build my CV either way, get into some shows and hopefully win some prizes and secure some funding and professional experience with the odd residency while I build up my public facing confidence and academic ability in later study or scholarships etc. 

[fyrapartnersearch]

OC, M/M, Buddies

Hello friends! It’s been awhile, but I’m biting the bullet and restarting my search for a writing buddy. Let me tell you a bit about myself first, and if I seem like your cup of tea, there’s a link below to a gdoc with the rest of this post.

  About Me

  Personal: I generally go by Fauxo. I’m female. I’m 17, 18 next month. (Do hope that doesn’t scare anyone away.)

Timezone: CST. Online pretty late into the night.

I've been roleplaying for 5-6 years, and writing before that. Unfortunately the one website I was comfortable on pittered out two years ago, and I switched to rping with one of my friends instead. When she stopped, I stopped, so I’ve been out of it for a year now. That doesn’t mean I stopped writing though!  

  Other Fun Facts

I’m a big consumer of media. Books, movies, musicals, manga, anime, korean dramas, podcasts, and a couple of games.

Art is my main hobby, and I often shunt other things to work on my projects. Oops? Upside to that is probable art of our characters!

Mama of eleven birds. Yeah, you didn’t misread that.

I’ve got a dirty mouth and a dirty mind. Beware of cursing and sin™.

I reference too many memes. I’m pretty sarcastic and kind of dark humored. Most of my friends are above 20.

  Style, Length, Frequency

I consider myself to be a literate writer. I like third person, past tense. My passion lies within detail, in pretty writing and good rhythm, in strong character voice. I would peg my general post length at a couple paragraphs, depending on setting and what I have to work with, but if I lack in quantity I make it up through quality.

  Due to just getting back into things, I’m not sure how I feel about reply times yet! My goal is at least once or twice a week, but I have school, work, and my other hobbies to get in the way. If you’re kind to my schedule, I’ll be kind with yours—we’re here to have fun, not worry about deadlines.

  OOC

In the meantime, I’m constantly up for a chat. I’m here to make friends! Come talk to me about characters and plots, memes, your day, or that one thing you saw that time. If you prefer to be strictly writing partners, just let me know, I can knock down my chattiness.

  Pairings, Settings, Genres

I like to get down and dirty with the gay. (Not really) My comfort is in writing M/M. I can do dominant or submissive characters, feminine or masculine personalities, tops or bottoms or switches, classic yaoi stereotypes, and many other fun traits. Although I indulge in many fandoms, I don’t like to roleplay in them. OC only gal right here.

  That being said, I adore world-building and dynamic characters. I’m a fan of psychology, and through that, personality and the inner-workings of people. Multi-faceted characters make me weak. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a deep love for tropes.

Not sure if it needs to be stated at this point, but I’m a sucker for romance and I like romance-based roleplays. I’m not talking love at first sight, instant relationship. Slow builds are a wonderful thing, developing our characters through the relationship is a wonderful thing, developing the relationship through solid plot is just...mmh. I’m up for any other genres my partner might want to get into, but the roses and sparkles have got to be there, my dudes.

The only genre I’m not into is smut. I’m too shy and gooey for it, despite my sinful disposition.  

  Faceclaims

All my characters are assigned a piece of artwork or anime character. Not really one for real people faceclaims. Despite my love for description, I enjoy having a reference for my imagination to accurately place a scene, or to draw fanart of our roleplay from. It also means we’re both thinking of the same person, and just description might not do that. (It also means finding adorable pictures to show the other person and geeking out over them.) If you’re the type of person for just description, or have a strong image of a character and can’t find a picture to match, I’m happy to draw them. :D

  Mediums

I can find a way to work with basically anything, but coming from a forum I haven’t used many mediums. I’d like to try gdoc, email, or discord!

To keep this post short, you can find what I’m looking for in a partner, and some recent ideas of mine in this Gdoc.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iZRPELN8yZJJoI4swdCt-sQuP7PFEdtOgxLVJrSDIBs/edit?usp=sharing

  I think that’s everything! If you have questions, ask em. Come talk to me @

Discord: Fauxoic #8466

Email: fauxo.writes@gmail.com

[lsmithart]

** ‘untitled’ Site-specfic Installation for Poltimore Art 2021.

I first heard of this opportunity through Paul Hillon. Paul emailed me the day before the deadline for the expression of interest form needed to be sent in so I made a quick decision about which work I would include in the form, keeping it quite broad with a view that I would be able to make a few changes later on if necessary. Carol Jobling, who was the main contact at Poltimore, was very keen to have me involved with the show and offered me the opportunity to take over an entire room (the Old Operating Theatre) to form a sculptural installation. I went to visit the site a few weeks before the exhibition so that I was able to start loosely planning the layout of the works. I was astonished and so excited about the space as I didn't realise how well preserved it was. With my increasing interest in the function of the ruined site within my work and the flexibility of the opportunity, it felt like a dream come true!

My initial visit to the space was very rich and once again it fed into my primary/visual research into the key signifiers of abandoned spaces. The image below demonstrates a very clear visual similarity to my ‘unearthed encounters’ final installation through the peeled away wallpaper and stripped back flooring. During the visit, my dad said that it reminded him a lot of my work and that he could really see how I had formulated the visual representation of an abandoned space within the installation.

As I didn't have much time to prepare new work due to only finding out about the opportunity so close to the deadline, I will be in a much better position next year to spend time making work in direct response to the site. I have managed to locate a few research sources that I will continue to engage with. I did conduct some research into the Old Operating Theatre prior to the set up of my exhibition. I found that "in the summer of 1945 the house was bought by two Exeter doctors who recognised the urgent need for new hospital bed spaces, and for a maternity hospital to cope with the post-war baby boom" (Poltimore.org, 2021). I also found a photograph on their website which shows an operation being carried out (see below). The photograph is undated, however from looking at the other photographs with captions it appears that it might have been taken in 1958.

After visiting the site, I started thinking about how I was going to engage with the space. I felt it was important for my work to accompany the relics that were already situated in the room, particularly as it is so well preserved. I thought about the extensive history of the house and the atmospheric nature of the Old Operating Theatre. I imagined all of the lives that could have been lost, or almost lost, there and how that room in particular was symbolic of human frailty and the body in pain. This notion tied in greatly with many of my material explorations from over the past year, including 'backbone' (2020), 'remember me' (2020) and 'scar tissue' (2021). I thought that this installation would provide me with a great opportunity to experiment with already existing work in order that it may be recontextualised through the history of the site. I have also recently started working with audio so I also starting thinking about how I could incorporate a sound element to make the installation more immersive. This opportunity gave me the chance to take aspects of my 303 work into a new environment, forcing me to test the narratives. One specific decision I made as part of this opportunity was to position the baby shoe cast in front of my ‘scar tissue’ sculpture to invoke the possible absence of a child (see below). Juxtaposed with the skin-like ‘remember me’ sculpture, this brought a new realm of possibility to the work.

The initial part of installing the work involved removing unwanted tables and other items that were placed in the room for storage. I then began experimenting with different layouts for my sculptures and objects in relation to the space and the objects that already inhabited it.

Statement for the work (written for my online portfolio):

Site-specific sculptural installation with audio (1:41 mins) featuring the following sculptures & objects: 'scar tissue' (2021) - child's fractured wooden chair, nails; 'sanctuary II' (2021) - bird cage, concrete; 'ghost' (2021) - cellular blanket, concrete; 'remember me' - latex, barbed wire, clay; 'backbone' (2020) - wax cast with pigment; jesmonite cast baby shoe & fragmented teddy bear from 'unearthed encounters' (2021) installation; mirror, oak table, magpie skull, dried butterfly, dried flowers.

A sculptural installation created in response to the preserved Old Operating Theatre at Poltimore House, Exeter, uk. Existing work was recontextualised through a process of experimental curation and engagement with the space. Through research it was discovered that Poltimore House was repurposed as a hospital in the summer of 1945, during which time the Operating Theatre was built on the grounds. Works which were chosen to be featured within this installation emphasised the experience of the fragile human body in pain, with thoughts about the many lives which would have teetered on the edge within this space heavily influencing the final presentation of the work. (Smith, 2021)

References:

Poltimore.org. (2021). [Online]. Available at https://poltimore.org/poltimore-hospital/. [Accessed on 11/08/2021]

Smith, L. (2021) Creative & Professional Folder: Live Project: untitled Site-Specific Installation for ‘Poltimore Art 2021′. p. 32.

[biopsychs]

What I Learned From University (1st Year)

FIRST YEAR

Everyone is super friendly, especially in the first few weeks → Introduce yourself to the people sitting near you for the first few weeks of lectures. Everyone is looking for a friend or at least someone to talk to!!

If you commute, make that time productive → My bus ride was an hour there and back each day. It sucks but I would try to be productive for at least half of the commute. I have a post about being productive on public transport here.

On that note, stay on campus as long as possible each day → As soon as I got back home I would procrastinate every little thing. Stay in an already productive environment for as long as possible.

Maybe don’t buy your textbooks used → I thought I was being smart by buying used textbooks (most schools will have a buy and sell facebook page for textbooks). I ended up having to pay for access codes in order to do my online homework – access codes that cost ~$70 separately and came included with new textbooks anyways. Email your prof or talk to someone who has recently taken the class to find out if you need an access code. If you do, your best bet is to buy a new version of the textbook (unless you can get a seriously cheap used textbook).

Print off your timetable and find all of your classes before the first day → This helped me so much! I found exactly where all my classes were before the first day of class. I wrote down little tricks to help me remember where everything was (i.e. my calc lecture is in the arts and science building which is also where the only subway on campus is).

Don’t knock living at home to save money → If you’re lucky enough to have a college or university close to home at least consider living at home. Getting your own place or living in dorms is expensive. (But if you have to find off campus housing on your own, don’t leave it too late or you might not find a place)

Figure out the best way to take notes for each class → You have to customize the way you study for each class, all depending on the prof and the content. I hand-wrote notes for some classes (chem, calc, and physics), but not others (psych and bio). If you’re writing by hand you can always just annotate your textbook notes or lecture slides (if they’re posted before class). If you fall behind while taking notes, just leave a gap and check out a friend’s notes after class.

Adjust your expectations → Don’t expect to get straight A’s, like you might have in high school. You can strive for straight A’s but be realistic as time goes on. For classes I struggled with, I expected to be near the class average. If I was a lot lower than the class average then I would know to invest more time.

Make time for physical activity → If we’re being honest I hardly exercised during uni. Go for at least a half hour walk each day and try to start a physical activity routine. Get a friend and join a sports team, go to a fitness class, or commit to some form of a daily workout with them! You’ll feel bad bailing on someone else, plus working out is more fun with other people.

Review content throughout the semester → Reviewing little bits of content will save you a massive content review right before finals! Look through old notes while you wait for your daily coffee or take 15 minutes to watch some khan academy videos on stuff you learned in the first month of classes.

Think seriously about how much you can handle → Don’t take on too many responsibilities at once and consider all of your options! I worked weekends and some week nights throughout the school year. Looking back I should have worked less because my stress levels were way too high. Also, quite a few people I talked to took 4 classes instead of 5, for their first semester of university. I don’t think I would have done it, in the end, but it’s always something to consider.

Have fun but be responsible at parties → Always go to parties with people you trust!! If you didn’t do much partying/drinking during high school (like me), remember to pace yourself when drinking! Eat before you go out and have some water between each drink, till you find your limit. Don’t let yourself be peer-pressured into anything but also don’t be afraid to have fun! And check out if your uni has a safe walk program (someone will come and walk you back to your dorm or your car if you feel unsafe or nervous for any reason)

When procrastination hits, aim to be productive in some way → The only reason my biology mark was so high was because I would study biology whenever I got sick of studying for physics and calculus. If you know you need to study but just can’t do it, start by being productive in some other way – study a subject you do like, do your laundry, organize your study area, etc. Get your brain to start thinking productively.

Labs are difficult so be prepared → I had so many labs first year. Some tips: eat and hydrate before labs, never assume you can finish your prelab last minute, be nice to your lab partner, always remember lab safety (don’t be the person trying to wear shorts in the lab, TAs will not hesitate to kick you out), don’t rush through an experiment but be efficient, and ask for help (even if you feel like you’re bothering your TA).

Please go to bed early. Sleep affects everything → I was so dumb and would never go to bed early even though I had to be up at 6 am almost every day to catch the bus. Lack of sleep will catch up to you eventually!! Also, all nighters are not necessary, unless you make them necessary. I prioritized and never had to stay awake too late. And never pull an all nighter the night before an exam (you’re better off getting sleep and resting your brain).

Bring a water bottle everywhere → Buy a decent water bottle and always carry it with you. Even though my uni is small there are still tons of spots around campus where I can refill my water bottle!! Stay hydrated my friends!

A practice problem a day keeps the F away → This saying probably works best for science classes, but I guess a reading a day will get you somewhere too. Do something for every class each day, even if it’s just a practice problem or a quick reading. Develop a routine!

You’ll have lots of midterms → I was under the impression that midterms happened just once a semester (I thought I would have one week where I had a midterm for each class). That was not my reality. I had 2 or 3 midterms for each of my classes scattered throughout the semester. Study really hard for your first set of midterms till you get used to the high expectations!

Don’t worry about what other people are doing or thinking → This is mostly in regards to social media. I was bummed when I looked back on my first year of university, because I felt like I hadn’t done anything fun compared to other people. You only see the image that other people want you to see. You don’t know how hard someone worked or how hard they didn’t work. Just focus on you and how you can affect positive results in your life.

Other people literally don’t care about your appearance → My friend’s little sister visited campus and asked us “Why is everyone wearing sweatpants?” People literally don’t care. Dress nice and put lots of makeup on one day, because you feel like it, and wear sweats the next day.

Start essays and reports as soon as possible → You never know what might come up so be prepared for the worst! Outline your essay or graph your data as soon as you can.

Eat healthy and do meal prep → You can eat healthy during university! Set aside a couple of nights each week to do meal prep. Cook food in bulk to save money and don’t eat out too much. Try to have at least 1 serving of fruits or veggies with each meal or snack you eat!

Find a good study spot on campus → Explore your campus and figure out your favourite places to study. I had a couple of spots where I would always meet my friends to study and quiet spots where no one would bother me. Studying outside or in an area with natural light is always good.

Don’t be afraid to talk to your profs and TAs → This is the number one thing I’m going to try to do more of in my second year. TAs are chill to talk to and they can tell you tons of useful information on what upper year classes are like, which professors are good, why they chose to go to grad school, etc. If you’re struggling in lectures or labs, talk to your prof or TA! Make an appointment and be sure you can tell them exactly which concepts you’re struggling with or at least where you got lost. One of my profs told us he just waits hopefully during office hours for someone to come in. (Also profs love it if you ask them about their research or any topics they seem passionate about during lectures.)

Explore all the resources your university has to offer → My university has a program that is basically people bringing their dogs around for students to pet, in order to relieve stress. It actually works and gave me something to look forward to! Just be aware of your options so that if something in your life changes you know where you can go to ask for help.

Get a planner and utilize it → There’s no excuse not to have a planner of some sort. Use your phone, get a bullet journal, or buy a cheap planner. Have somewhere where you can record important deadlines and make to do lists. I also recommend back planning all of your studying at the beginning of the semester. Write down your midterms and finals dates and write down how much you’re going to study each day leading up to the exam. This way you’ll be able to look ahead at each month and figure out what needs to be done (i.e. getting an essay done early because the due date falls during a busy week of midterms)

This post ended up being a lot longer than I expected whoops. Take the things I said into consideration but remember that everyone’s experience will be different. Good luck to everyone heading to university!

My Other Posts:

AP lit tips

high school biology

organization tips

physics doesn’t have to suck: how to enjoy and do well in your required physics classes

recommended reads

reminders for myself

using your time wisely on public transport

what i learned from high school

[skeksissquid]

Progress Blog: Weeks 9 -            11-21-19

     As of the last week, most of my work has primarily been on improving Terry and their model, and a 9 hour creative jam that ended as of today, hence why there was no post two days ago. Starting with Tuesday, I primarilly took the time from a weekly artist meet that we try to have, and was critiqued on Terry’s posture and proportions, and came to the conclusion that the hips would need to be more vertical, the tail further down, and the body to be slimmer than what it was. Wednesday started with me taking off Terry’s right arm and a chunk of their shoulder and chest to create a cavity for organs to exist within, as well as start the basic model for a liver, which would be scrapped due to it not being the proper shapes, and would take longer to fix it then to start over. With Thursday, I continued to work on organs and finished models for lungs and liver as well as made a simple spinal cord with ribs for the intention of adding it inside the model of Terry with a boolean to make the model feel real and closer to an actual carcass, which fortunately, worked wonders with creeping out Austen. Along with this, I finally started to work on the UVs on this model, which admittedly is a lot easier than I would have originally assumed, still was tedious, and carried into Friday. I’m personally not sure how they will turn out, considering the I haven’t had time to test the UVs and the mapping isn’t complete as of yet.

     Starting Monday began creative jam, nine hours for everyone in the idea department in groups of seven, to make a game in accordance to a theme, similar to the game jam, except everyone involved can make things outside of games. My group consisted of Noble, Austen, Max, Andrew, Mattie, and Oliver (Oliver is from Graphic Design). The prompt revealed was “what are you afraid of?”, which worked somewhat beautifully for Austen and I since the both of us work on Trespasser, and have done research on the topic, this was a good environment for us. After about 15-30 minutes of bouncing ideas and bickering, we came to the idea of a VR experience, where you are stuck mobile in a position with something horrifying around you, and drew to the conclusion of sleep paralysis, and the most common phobia we found to be insects or arachnids. So the idea was drawn to make a giant centipede with a human face and maybe a tick-hand-spider hybrid. After some talk and work, we scrapped the idea of the tick, and so I started to work on the centipede, Austen worked on a bed frame, Andrew started with a bit of textures, while Mattie, Noble, and Max started to work on the code for the piece. Using some of Oliver’s concept art, I finished most of the centipede model actually in one day, with a small bit of tweaking. Second day, I worked on some UV mapping for the centipede as well as the legs for the warped wood on the bed frame. After completing this, I exported the UV maps to Andrew and the model to Austen since he would position it. After a long bit of confusion revolving around bendy bones due to the suggestion of Riley, we decided to scrap the bendy bones, and instead moved to using the modifier deform in order to position the centipede, but at the cost of having to cause the objects that made the centipede to be merged together, so as a result, the textures that were being worked on would have to be scrapped (, sorry Andrew). As of yesterday, I had nothing much to do, so I ended up watching Austen position the centipede model that was made along with shade it to some degree. Unfortunately, a majority of planned content we had needed to be cut, for example, a sort of questionnaire that was longer than what Mattie ended up having the end and the player starting on the bed instead of being presented away from it. 

     So in summary:

-Tuesday: Edited Terry’s body positioning

-Wednesday: Removed Terry’s arm and worked on organs within the new chest cavity

-Thursday: Finished organs and started spinal cord and ribs. Started UV mapping

-Friday: Continued working on UV mapping Terry

-Monday: Creative Jam: Made concept, started to work on centipede

-Tuesday: Creative Jam: Finished up centipede model. UV mapped the centipede, was given the rest of the bed model to work on the stilt-like legs of it.

-Wednesday: Creative Jam: Honestly didn’t really do anything useful.

Models from this week:

Terry: Front

Terry: Side

Terry: Bottom

Centipede: Front

Centipede: Close up top

Centipede: Close up side

Bed: Side

Bed: Front

Bed: Top

     What I hope to accomplish next week:

- Finish UV mapping Terry

- Make a sconce since David needs one

- Detail the monster’s ace further so that other modifications are ready to be made. (I personally disagree with it physically changing too much if we want to keep the tight deadlines that we already have, but if we extend it, I think that it’d be doable)

- Remake the lighter model since so matter what I do, some of he faces are inverted, and it'd be easier for me to restart than try to repair the model

     Problems I may run into:

- UV mapping Terry might take longer then I expect (Very likely)

- Some of the props for Trespasser might be cut, aka ones I might be working on

- Might get distracted

[inky-thoughts]

hi! i was wondering, do u perhaps have any tips on what to pay attention to when applying for a zine instead of making one?

I actually planned to cover that a bit during a later post in the series where I also wanted to talk a bit about zine etiquette for contributors, but I definitely can give you some pointers already (also I love to procrastinate, soooooo this ask is more than welcome haha)

THIS GOT REALLY OUT OF HAND SO THERE’S A READ MORE NOW ^^;

First of all, find a zine for something that you actually feel passionate enough about so that you want to create for it. You don’t want to create something for something you actually hate. Zines are supposed to be fandom fun with this feeling of professionalism, not something you absolutely need to drag yourself to work on.

I also wouldn’t apply to too many at once, especially with similar/overlapping schedules. 2-3 is reasonable if you have a life outside of the arts, like a job or school, but if you’ve got both going on, maybe reduce it to a max. of 2 at a time. If you’re basically freelancing and the zines would be your next projects, apply to as many as you actually know you can handle. Always assume you get into all of them, and plan accordingly. If you don’t get in - more time for other stuff. But especially from the perspective of a zine mod, don’t take on too many if you can’t handle it.

Always, always, ALWAYS pay attention to the zine’s schedule. Check before you even open the tab for the application that you actually got time for the zine. Always be as pessimistic as possible (but still realistically so) because you never know when you’ll be in an art/writing block. If especially final drafts are due around major deadlines from school/uni/anything else important to your life, do yourself a favour and opt out of this zine. You’ll be endlessly stressed and the mods don’t know what to do with you.If you decide on applying to the zine and got in, write down all deadlines in your calendar of choice (I actually have two different calendars so I mark that in both), and if you know yourself as that person who is really forgetful about deadlines, please do everyone a favour and put yourself reminders on what works best for you (alarms, countdowns, reminders via phone, sticky notes in your room, etc.)

Check if you meet all of the zine applicant’s requirements, and if not all, can you work on them so you fit in time before applications close? It’s not worth getting your hopes up if you end up not even being able to participate because they look for certain people.

I would also always check out the zine’s mods/admins and what kind of reputation they have. If they aren’t publicly mentioned anywhere on the zine’s blog/whathaveyou, I would rather evade the zine.Same goes for any weird feeling you get, be it through the language they use (e.g. unprofessional tonality like My Immortal/2000s chat language seems like the mods don’t take it seriously enough unless it is actually the zine’s theme, the use of slurs or inappropriate/rude statements), or appearance of the blog/twitter account, … I personally also would steer around people who are self-acclaimed “antis” even if they support your OTP, this still can get ugly as the atmosphere might be tense/not very welcoming, or even downright hostile.Remember that if you participate, you will be associated with the zine and the zine with you.If it is not a free downloadable zine, what happens with the earned money? If they don’t state anything about it, it really looks shady. Same goes for a claimed Charity Zine where you can’t access any information to which organisation(s) they want to donate.

Here and here are some other really prominent red flags of how to spot possible scammers.

If you are just starting out with zines, it might be wise to rather look for smaller ones and see what comes out of it. An all-applicants-get-in zine is hard to find nowadays I believe, but is still a good opportunity to just get to know deadlines with creative works in a larger project.

Always tell in advance that you (possibly) can’t make a deadline if you got into a zine. Running after people 24/7 is exhausting and annoying and definitely triggers the will to strangle someone much more than you sending a small e-mail with “I’m sorry but I can’t make the deadline because [I’m sick/my dog died/my exams are more stressful than expected/I have to cover for a coworker/we have a big family celebration/…], can I please get an extension (of XX days)?” - please for God’s sake don’t be embarrassed or even scared to tell such things, it happens but it’s always better to know such things a few days or even a day in advance instead of … a week after the deadline actually was supposed to happen. I promise you, bascially all of the mods are very understanding and definitely will help you figure out a solution.

Be kind to other participants and try to get to know them a little better. Fan projects are such a great way to make new friends and actually find people to collaborate with as well, additionally everyone benefits from a good atmosphere on the team. The great thing about most zines having discord channels nowadays is that you can actually communicate with other participants instead of mainly just the mods. Also, if you happen to check out the other contributors you might find several hidden gems of artists/writers!

A bit on portfolios:

Depending a bit on the zine, it always is better for you to have a small compilation of fanworks that actually deal with the zine’s characters/the source material, even if it’s just a more detailed/polished sketch or a slightly longer drabble (between 500 and 1000 words). If it isn’t already required in the application form, it at least shows interest in the source material and the zine itself.

As an artist, have actually polished pieces with (preferrably full-body) characters and real backgrounds (physically interacting characters are always great btw). Think about what you enjoy about zine pieces yourself - you usually don’t discover everything at the first sight, or they just downright awe you so it’s actually worth it to look through the zine once more. Show pieces that are of the same quality because you want to get into a zine. If you apply as a merch artist, also have at least one or two pieces that show a style suited for the merch you apply for.

As a writer, it is good to have at least one solid one-shot between 1-5k words. Mods want to know how you deal with the rather small wordcount that is typical for zines. I really would recommend especially writers to have at least one piece from the source material the zine’s about.

Also, I wouldn’t include anything that is older than max. 3 years, however good and awesome it is. Whether you are an artist or a writer, I will guarantee you that you won’t create works the same way as you did back then. At some point, it’s just dated and you’ll have to say goodbye for good.Mods want to know what they can expect from your zine piece, so it’s also better to have a good average than an outstanding outlier that you are highly unlikely to ever recreate. Show what you usually do with a little bit of extra sprinkles of what they might get, as it is a zine entry.If you have already participated in zines, maybe include one of these pieces, that way they know you have ~experience~ and it gives them more realistic expectations.

Be honest with yourself: Are you actually ready to be in a zine, and is your art of choice, too? If your skill-level barely goes beyond middle-school art class/creative writing, and/or you don’t really have a portfolio to actually show people, maybe hone your skills a bit more as you create more pieces and challenge yourself.

I hate to be that person but I think especially artists are over-eager and just apply whether or not they are even skilled enough. I can guarantee you that just a poorly executed headshot of a character isn’t even close to enough to get into 99% of the zines out there, same goes for conveniently hiding hands behind the character’s back or other strategically placed objects. Know your skill-level, and know when it’s actually realistic to go semi-professional with it, because even if it is about a fun fan experience, mods also want to present a solid product in the end. This is not to discourage you but more as a sisterly advice because when I looked through the apps of our zine, I saw applications on a level where I would have never even dreamt of participating in a zine when I was at that stage.

That became more than expected (and sorry for the little rant at the end) - I hope that was somewhat helpful and what you had in mind, nonnie

[sonny-layton]

This is my sketchbook film detailing my role as producer on my group’s film ‘A Walk in the Park’.

I felt there was a lot to talk about in this film as I had done a lot of the work for in the project. However, due to the 3 minute time constraint I was unable to analyse every aspect I was involved in.

I wanted the sound quality of my narration to be a high as possible but unfortunately the audio suite was fully booked out during the week I wanted to use it. This meant I had to record my voice at home. Luckily there was almost no unwanted background noise and my voice was clear. As it was a narration I tried to enunciate my words properly unlike I do in everyday life. Listening back, this made my pronunciation of some sentences sound slightly odd.

Transcript of narration:

Title:  A Walk in the Park - A Sketchbook Film by Sonny Layton

Title: Pre - Production

I believe myself to have great organisational skills and a friendly personality, traits that make a good creative producer. I pitched myself as such and the team agreed to put me in this role. I was really looking forward to working in the producer position as it meant I got to oversee the project and help out each crew member with their individual duties.

The first thing I did after being decided as producer was to note down each crew member and actors’ availability over the month and add this to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. This was really helpful in helping me find a window of opportunity to shoot. It also allowed me to know how long we would have for pre production and I was able to start setting deadlines and work for each member of the crew straight away.

After we decided on an idea, I set up a shared document on Google drive which listed films that were similar to the dark comedy tone we were going for. This included films from the Coen Brother’s filmography which all have a very distinct style. I told Lucy, the Production Designer, to study the outfits they wear and recommended that Caitlin, our Cinematographer, look at how they frame their shots.

Next, I organised a whole day to spend running through Matt’s final draft of the script with the actors and then travelling to the location I had picked to film test shots and get a feel of the area. I think this was important and helped Matt and Caitlin better understand how and where they would be positioning the actors in shots.  

My intricate and careful planning worked and all necessary preparation was completed on time, ready for production.

Title: Production

Since we only had three days to film and under inconsistent weather, I knew it was important to plan everything so we would not run into any problems that might delay us. On the days before the first shoot, I created detailed schedules for each day that myself and everyone had to stick to. I also made sure we had a prop list, shot list, equipment list and a storyboard drawn by Caitlin that could be referred back to during filming.

On the first day of shooting we all met up at Plymouth College of Art, where I provided Keziah and Breagha with hard copies of the script and asked them to sign an actor’s release form. On the way to the location, I had the actors run through all the lines that we would be shooting that day. I also made sure Matt and Caitlin took a look at the detailed shot list I had created.

I was playing the dead body in the film and although this meant lying still most of the time, I tried to make sure I was doing something else too. I kept track of continuity, asking the crew to check before each new shot to make sure everything was in the same position.

While filming I realised it was important for me to take a step back in terms of involvement and allow the crew to do their jobs.

Title: Post - Production

Post production lasted four days in an edit suite I had booked out in the college. Although it would have been nice to have the whole crew around a computer, it ended up being just James and I. Once again, I scheduled the week and everything that needed to be done.

During the process, I designed original titles and credits for the film. I knew I wanted to create something that matched the overall tone so I tried to find the right balance between light hearted and dark. I found this mix by using horror font with warm friendly colours.

Title: Final Thoughts

I feel that I was a good producer overall and was effective in my role as problem solver, organiser and people-person.

Marc Platt, producer on films like Bridge of Spies, Drive and La La Land states that what makes a good producer is their ability to help everyone on the crew understand the vision of the film. I think I may have been unsuccessful in that aspect as there was confusion at times during the process about what the film was supposed to be.

Although the film has faults, I believe it is good especially considering we were a group of people who did not know each other and had differing styles. This situation is not something that would not arise in the film industry, and I believe the final outcome was satisfactory.