Quality Content
I'm starting to get to grips with this whole blog and website thing so here are two new things! Or.. not NEW new, but new, higher resolution versions of things that were already on the site.
First, a better version of my comic, A Graphic Biography, I posted a couple of weeks ago (for anyone that cares/knows what I'm talking about, I didn't get into the residency but I'm cool with it). There's not much more to say about that except you can see it here.
The one I'm more excited about is a short film I made, completed in 2008, called That's My Name. I've always had a page on this site about it but the only version I could link to was a really shitty quality YouTube upload from 10 years ago and I made a point of telling people they shouldn't watch it. I've managed to find and upload a much better version (thanks to living in the future), and in reality it's still pretty shit quality but it's as good as it ever will be. There are definitely some flaws in there but overall I'm still pretty proud of.
Dan, one of the stars of the film, is an ace artist. I've been trying to persuade him for ages to draw some comics for me but he won't. Because he can be a dick that way. You should look at his work, and maybe even buy some of it. I'm not sure how exactly you can do that but you can ask him that yourself. In his spare time he flips burgers for money.
Amy, the other star, keeps chickens but not to sell, especially not to the likes of you, so don't bother asking.
You can read a bit more about how it was made below the video, but if you're not interested in any of that then just watch it and fuck off.
I once spent a year living in Canada, and I'll post more stuff about that in the future (if I keep doing a post every week I'm going to have to start scraping the barrel for subject matter at some point). One of the things I did was spend May and June of 2006 living on a tiny island called Saturna. I was about to talk more about the island itself but I just realised that could stand as a blog post all of its own (so I'll just put those particular scrapings back in my metaphorical barrel). Anyway, while I was there I came up with an idea for a film and persuaded a anyone that was around to act in it for me.
Dan had a little camera that could shoot video. I want to say he'd got it cheap through some sort of 'Collect 100 ring-pulls' type offer, but that might be completely made up. Needless to say it wasn't a great camera if you wanted to be serious about making a film, but being serious about stuff has never been something I've bothered much about. I didn't bother writing a script, and the dialogue and action was mostly improvised during filming. I started filming while on Saturna, conscripted more people to get involved and filmed more after moving to Vancouver, and then lost a bunch of footage and had to recast (sorry Amanda) and re-shoot a whole scene back in the UK, specifically in Glastonbury with Shirley, Dan's mum.
I spent a lot of hours over the next couple of years editing it all together, trying to persuade people to record some music for it (eventually I used some songs by a band called The Vanity Project, an excellent band made up of some fannies I went to uni with, they all have proper jobs now, more fool them), and learning how much tedious and difficult work is involved in making any sort of film. At one point I even got in touch with Lucasfilm, I wanted to use a sound effect of the Millennium Falcon in one scene and, since I still had ambitions of entering it into film festivals, I figured I should try and do that whole thing legally (they told me to go and poke it into the brown).
I eventually finished it in 2008, just in time to... burn it on to some DVDs and show it to pretty much no-one for nearly a decade, because I've always been shit at self-promotion and the making stuff bit is the only bit I actually enjoy. All of the telling people how big your balls are and how well you can swing them stuff never really interested me much.
In retrospect, it seems like a lot of work and planning just so that I had something to post about this week.