Easter and the Onslaught of April Showers

I don’t like talking about the weather, but I also don’t like the weather being indecisive, and as far as the forecast for the coming week goes, mother nature’s going all out on not knowing quite what to do. Still, its April, and I know not to expect any better, so this is where I stop complaining about what I cannot change.

Its also Easter, which means as much to me as the 4th July means to the Native Americans. That’s probably how most people are feeling these days, unless they’re still into collecting eggs. Don’t get me wrong,  if it was traditional to give out real eggs at Easter I’d be all over it. Its not that I want to collect them; I’d just enjoy a break from buying them myself. How about whole live chickens? Then I’ll have eggs all year round, after building a small fortress necessary to keep out the urban foxes. Still, I’m falling into my own trap as I’m quite sure religious holidays are another thing I cant change…

I was enjoying the sun this weekend so I haven’t been particularly productive; the closest I’ve got is watching MAJ1CK cleaning up his second animation which should, fingers crossed, be released in the coming week. He’s been egging me into animating myself, which I certainly have an interest in. Having the ability to build a visible world for my music and writing to co-exist within would be an excellent self-propelled platform to launch my ideas from, and would definitely give me the freedom that low-budget film always lacks. So its my intention to buy a Wacom tablet and Adobe Flash at the beginning of May.

I used to be a dab hand when it came to drawing so I have that, but the basic skills will need a lot of refinement. The first pieces I do will probably be narrated storyboards, then I’m hoping I’ll be able to create a music video for an old song Now & Here by the end of summer. The song already had a strong concept planned for the video that would’ve involved a combination of green screen filming and animation, but, in the hope of completing the task alone, I’ve decided to go all-out animation. Its an electronic song with a fairly bouncy rhythm so I wanted to personify a bouncing rubber ball, and have it exist in a world of whirring cogs and machinations, contrasting the methodical, rigid movement of machinery with the fluency of a rubber ball. I was also playing with the idea of giving the ball eyebrows, to allow the ball to appear to be looking at things.

This probably doesn’t make much sense right now but stick around and I might be able to find a better way of putting the idea into words. Also, if you have any suggestions for a decent, budget tablet or animating/graphic design software then please comment below. The advice would be greatly appreciated.

Chow.

Ickie Ickie

Ickie Ickie is a song that I never expected to be writing. It started on a rail replacement bus I was bundled onto with some other harrassed train passengers. I knew I had an hour to kill and a Twitter account that I never use, so I tried writing a tweet. It took me the whole hour and I used every character I’d been rationed with. It was a rhyme of sorts; a kind of tongue twister to test my wordplay. It was lude, unformulaic and, above all, silly (remember that if you hear it).

Anywho when I’d made it home I had already decided to write some sort of music (Since moving house I’ve suffered something of an involuntary musical drought and it needs to end). My laptop has rejected Reason so I’ve been doing most of my programming through Logic and Native Instruments, which is fairly new to me. Native Instruments definitely has a more interesting soundbank, and being able to build beats on the MPC style hardware is my jam, but Logic is still pretty self explanatory, and has a huge bank of effects for audio recording. Now if I had Reason 7 the world would be a different place…but I don’t, so I best not excite myself.

Having a basic progression complete I hoped to come up with something I could lay some lyrics onto, and it seemed I was successful when my housemate, the frontman of Dizzy Tales, suggested, perhaps jokingly, that I should use the tweet. I humoured the idea, and found I enjoyed the flow it created, leading me to record an amusing whisper rap that, whilst funny, also compliments the composition. A friend of mine, the bassist and backing singer of Ornament Tournaments, has politely agreed to collaborate so who knows how this one is gonna end.

It’s a healthy bit of practise with an unfamiliar genre before my collaboration with Krelle from Scram Scram. Take a peak at the video for their song, Blankets, directed and produced by Tom O’Dwyer, whose current project I’m taking a minor role in, helping out with sound and what not, but ya’ll hear about that some other time.

Now I’m gonna get back to doing whatever it is I do, chow.

257

Thats how many months I’ve seen, give or take a couple of days. I can’t actually remember two thirds of those months in any great detail, nevertheless, I’m sure my subconscious has got it all locked away somewhere; ready to be extracted were the memory ever triggered.

I haven’t managed to travel much in all that time, albeit outside of the country, or even up north come to think of it. I’ve been to Ireland a lot, but that couldn’t be called a holiday as the culture, although different, still originated in about the same place. My trips into mainland Europe only stretched as far as France, Belgium and Holland, and they were brief school holidays and touring with a local drum core (dont ask). This all means that I can’t really call myself a worldly human being. If anything it should make me quite a small minded and, perhaps, patriotic person; fortunately that hasn’t occurred. For whatever reason, I have found a curious interest in most of the things I’ve come across in life and gained insight through that curiosity, even if its been limited to a few hundred miles of the earth’s surface.

Television documentaries covering every subject and place on the globe mean that I have a reasonable geographic knowledge, just without the experience or understanding of having been there. I’m okay with that, seeing as there’s enough going on in England to keep me busy for a few more years. At the beginning of the 21st century the local music scene consumed my extra curricular hours, and has continued to keep me in a chokehold since. So I’d rather buy a decent valve compressor than spend a few hundred to stand on a different lump of earth.

Anyway, I’m not talking to you about that.

My work at the moment is with a couple of animators, although they will be working together collaboratively, at this stage they are working on seperate projects. One of them has delved into coding and is currently creating something akin to the tone matrix, using twelve samples on a grid covering sixteen beats, like a small flash based launchpad, though with limited capabilities. Still, having used a couple of prototypes and discussed what could be added to the user interface to provide more variation, it could set itself apart from other similar products.

The other is of a more artistic bent and has put his hand to cartoon animation on the popular flash website newgrounds.com, under the pseudonym MAJ1CK, you can follow the link ahead to his first animated short Do you?. Since he put that video out he’s moved on to a couple more shorts which I’ve dropped in to record the audio for, relying on friends with an eclectic range of accents for the voice acting and developing the scenes mainly through structured improvisation.

So I’ll be talking about these projects and whatever I’m doing really.

Yours, relatively speaking,

Sean