All through the composition process, I've been conscious of trying to keep each lay-out different and intriguing whilst obviously maintaining some visual consistency. In the earliest discussions of this project, the thought had been to use it as a vehicle for my more psychedelic leanings. In fact, as I've delved deeper and deeper into the crafting of a story, and the characters, I've been seduced back towards "reality", and perhaps a safer, more palatable style.
This page, where Squergil is transported from the window world and back to his own dimension, however, really offered me the opportunity to cut loose.
The image (minus Squergil here) is obviously somewhat reminiscent of Miro and similar artists, but the image I actually had in the back of my mind was this (artist unknown):
I've ended up contrasting pages with full "worldly" detail and colour with those with much simpler, starker colour schemes.. this is another example of that. I like the fact that leaving white spaces feels somehow "wrong" in the context of a story book too, as if the boundaries of the medium itself have come unstuck.
I need a sound effect for when Squergil Wergil lands in a tub of water in the circus, and this pineapple had been haunting my kitchen for a fortnight.. so the time came today to run a bath, and drop the pineapple into it (I'm sure I remember reading that The Orb did something similar with a melon on one of their early records.. at least, that's my excuse).
The audio side of this project is something which is not recorded in such minute detail as the visual development is, in sketch books and so forth, despite the large amount of time and effort that has inevitably gone into it. So I decided to film myself recording the splash sound effect.
It probably just looks like me aggressively bathing a pineapple though.
The music is from the circus scene, unmixed.
On an interesting side note, found this on Wikipedia, which neatly dovetails with the pine cone theme:
"The word pineapple in English was first recorded in 1398, when it was originally used to describe the reproductive organs of conifer trees (now termed pine cones). When European explorers discovered this tropical fruit, they called them pineapples (term first recorded in that sense in 1664) because of their resemblance to what is now known as the pine cone. The term pine cone was first recorded in 1694 and was used to replace the original meaning of pineapple."
Okay.. this is a very rough "sketch" of this page, done very quickly with Photostudio 5 to see how it would look.
I've been thinking for a while that the story was lacking a darker aspect. Which isn't to say that there aren't moments of peril in the story - there are, but I'm not convinced that they won't get lost in what is otherwise a fairly upbeat story (obviously, the music will help a lot there!).
One of the picture books I've been referencing a lot during this project, both for composition/page layout and tone, is Tove Jansson's "Who Will Confort Toffle?". This is simply due to the fact that it's a picture book that I much admire, and I think it strikes a fantastic balance of light and dark tones, both thematically and image-wise.
I think the most striking and memorable image in the book is probably the confrontation with the Groke, which provides a climax of sorts to the story (or certainly to Toffle's quest).
The book alternates between pages packed with detail and movement, and a page such as the Groke one, where suddenly there is just one crucial event being focussed on.
I've always considered that part of the reason that the Moomins stayed with me from my childhood is that I was very aware at the time, aged 7 or 8 and watching the animation, that there was something a bit weird and different about it. It was very dark in places, and it was partly this that caused it to make a big impression on me I think. The program felt like a window into a strange alien world, and I remember it felt strange to me that no other programs were telling me about this world.
Very recently, I was watching the Time Shift documentary "Oliver Postgate: A Life In Short Films". Having thought myself well-versed on all things Postgate, I was surprised to see things in the documentary that I recalled from my childhood, but hadn't known were to do with him. In particular, I was literally gobsmacked to see a (very short) clip from the series Tottie. It really felt like suddenly remembering something very familiar after a bout of amnesia - a door had been thrown open somewhere deep in my mind that led to a room that I had forgotten was even there, and yet was instantly familiar.
Upon further research, it transpired that the series had been infamous at the time as it featured a scene in which one of the characters is murdered by another. It's clear to me, looking back now, and given the intensity of sensation I felt upon first seeing the characters again, that this program had a great influence on me, and is in fact very likely the reason I am fascinated by dolls faces, and the work of Jan Svankmajer (to which one suspects it owes a debt).
I can only further conclude that the dark resolution to the story is the reason that it made such an impact.
So.. to try to get back to the point.. it's clear that it would be good to have a darker aspect to the story!
Risk of death-by-falling/cannibals aside, I've found a way to inject a little eeriness into the story (stopping short of squirrel murder for now) with this "looking house" notion.. sort of a CCTV lighthouse, I suppose. The single-page image will provide a segue from the light-hearted mood of the previous scene (in the boneyard) into the more perilous past of the journey that follows, while also breaking up the double-page spread layout.
It's meant to be ominous, and portentous, more than anything, and I think it succeeds in that. The significance of the house, and whether it is actually benevolent or threatening, is something which will remain unaddressed in the text, but the image is echoed in the first double-page spread which features a small bird-house looking-house eye. From this idea of the looking-house, an ambiguous subtext, created through the eye motif, and references in the text (ie. the Observation Cats), has emerged.
This is really the fun part of the story-writing process for me.. something that I was thankfully reminded of by Salvatore's workshop - it becomes like a game, to attempt to resolve all of the loose ends, and add little suggestive elements here and there to strengthen potential interpretations.
Cover of Matthew Thurber's "Sherlock Holmes and the Large Door" cassette, Pot Latch, I Gather Tapes.
As mentioned in the last post, I recently acquired a lo-fi homemade audio-book by my current favourite comic artist Matthew Thurber, called "Sherlock Holmes & The Large Door". I was going to link to his site (www.ambergriscomics.com/) but as of the time of writing, it seems to be down.
But they have more! Well, no more audio-books at first glance (I guess it is a niche within a niche, marketwise), but was very interested to see this. It's a tape of music, but it also includes a 16-page silk-screened comic. Looks really nice! And not totally dissimilar to what I'm doing (albeit with a reverse emphasis). Interesting!
Here's a review of the first release on Thurber's Pot Latch, I Gather label too, which explains it all much better than I could: Anti-Matter Alma Mater review.
It's been quite interesting to think about the balance of word and image in my audio story book. As far as I remember, all such tapes I had as a child had sufficient information in the audio that the book was not essential.
Of course, in a picture book, that is not always the case, quite the opposite may be true.. and that relationship hasn't disappeared just because I have a narration.. really that's little different to having written text next to the image. But I've perhaps become a little less aware of it as I've had in my head a (perhaps false) notion that the narration should tell the whole story. This is partly a consequence of not having written a story in some time, and getting carried away with it, but I think I need to wrestle some degree of control back to the images.
Off the top of my head, the only image I can think of that really has something substantial to say beyond the narration is the final page - Squergil and the trapeze artist sat side by side in the circus. The narration talks of finding new friends, but the image allows the viewer to infer a lot more.
Essentially, what I'm saying is.. I need to remember that what I'm making is not an audio play - more of an audio accompaniment.
This line of thinking has only been comlpicated by the fact that I've applied to have the audio broadcast online on May 1st. As mentioned before, my favourite internet radio station, Intergalactic FM, is hosting a one-day "streaming festival" where listeners get the chance to turn the tables and stream their audio to the station for half an hour. I'm massively excited to be taking part, but it raises some issues. Should simply ensure that all the images are available online somewhere for the duration of the broadcast (this would be my ideal scenario anyway).. or should I tweak the script so that the images are not essential?
On reflection, I think that if the book is to be at all interesting, I need to ensure that the images are as crucial, if not more so, than the narration.
On further reflection.. I suppose that as a rule, the less text there is, the greater burden the images take in communication.. which is what can make a good picture book so interesting, from an illustrator's point of view.
But then, the amount of text I've written for the story (at least 3000 words) is probably more suited to the type of book where images are presented as secondary to the text (or at least equal - one picture per page of text. Given the low cost of those web publishing sites, I'm very tempted to knock up a version of my book in that format if I have time towards the end of the project). Perhaps it would have been more interesting if I had done a picture book with very minimal text, and a muscially abstract soundtrack.. perhaps something a little closer to my original intention, but with less text?
I recently bought a cassette by the comic artist Matthew Thurber. It features an "original Sherlock Holmes story", called Sherlock Holmes and The Large Door. In this adventure, the narration leads the way, but much of the scene is left to be set by the (also rather surreal) audio. I suppose this is one of the strengths of a radio play, that the imagination is left (with prompts) to form its own image.
Am I trying to butt together two forms that work better exclusively, the picture book and the audio play?
But at the end of the day, I suppose that what is more or less interesting is a matter of debate, and I need to focus on simply doing the thing that I am doing as well as it can be done. So.. an audio book with non-exclusive illustrations.
My favourite radio station, Intergalactic FM, is hosting a one-day live streaming festival on May 1st. For 12 hours, listeners will be given a chance to stream their own audio on the station for half an hour. I'm pencilled in for a slot, in which I plan to broadcast my project.. a global premiere!
In the fortnight after hand-in, I will look into what would be the best way to host my images online in some sort of gallery, so that people can click to "turn the page when they hear the beep". Very exciting. A really great (and brave!) idea and amazing to have the chance to participate!
IFM is actually quite significant to this project in that it plays a lot of instrumental music I would listen to that has elements of implied narrative (something like Drexciya being a good example).
In particular, this past year I've really gotten into Legowelt through listening to this station, whose music is almost always narrative-led. He also has a show called Astro Unicorn Radio, which, amongst lots of amazing and obscure electronic music, has also broadcast existing radio plays, with his own music added.
I've listened to the Dreammachine channel a lot too, and been exposed to lots of soundtrack music.. all of which has definitely had an influence on me. During my 100 Days song project, back in December, I recorded several tracks to soundtrack an imaginary horror film, "Night Baboon". Last month I went to Scotland for five days, for the Homegame Festival, and so I recorded one more new song, drew some baboons, and made a 3" CD-R of the Baboon songs to sell. The songs on this CD are quite dark, compared to the current project, but the compositional methodology, thus far, is very similar.
A video of a nice cassette packaging/booklet design by the Darbolistic Rex label, for the compilation album A Pairing In Disorder (there's actually a slightly better video of the finished thing here.
Seeing this makes me wonder if I couldn't have been a bit more imaginative in the way I've chosen to package my tape. I think that having everything on a plate for me at Tapeline made that decision easier. To be truthful though, I'm sure that if I had tried to make some kind of book that formed a part of a box, it would have turned out looking very handmade (in spite of any attempts to the contrary) and I'm trying my best to make something slick and professional looking!
Okay, going to bring a couple of posts relevant to my EMP over from my main blog. Firstly, a drawing from my sketch book from early February. This is relevant as it's one of my first times using a Faber-Castell brush-tipped Pitt artist pen. I borrowed/stole a bunch from my girlfriend (now ex - for unrelated reasons!) and loved them. However, prior to that, during the last couple of projects, I'd been getting more and more interested in inking with a brush. When I say interested, what that really means is that I enjoy doing it! I've been quite pleased with some of the results, especially when scanned in and scaled down.
This is a brush drawing from my Negotiated Practice sketch book.. it looks okay (if imperfect) at normal size, but scanned and reduced I think it looks quite nice, whilst having a bit more "energy" than a drawing rendered with no line-width variation.
For that reason, I've been very tempted to render my final images for this project with a brush. In fact, that would be my ideal scenario, in terms of enjoyment gained from making the images. However, with time an issue, even when the deadline was still somewhat distant, I was conscious of the possibility that my dissatisfaction with anything "imperfect" could be a big stumbling block with the brush option - I could imagine drawing and redrawing images countless times. So, it is with a little sadness that I have done the sensible thing (and what I would do if this were a live professional brief with a deadline of less than a year!) and decided to render the images with the Pitt brush pens. To be honest, this is hardly a compromise on quality - the images I've created so far look very nice and professional once scanned in and coloured.. and Elaine even posted a comment on the above "Shell" image thinking that I had done it with a brush! I am happy to do the images in this way and have more time to concentrate on composition, layout, and the audio.. hopefully this will make for a better final product.
I am looking forward to doing more brush work in my spare time though, and reaching a stage where I can use it in my work without fear of causing delays. Here are some CDR covers that I doodled, with a relatively large brush, whilst in Scotland recently (the CDs are of songs from my 100 Days project, which interfered slightly with the last project!).. I did them very loosely and in a care-free manner, but some of them actually came out quite nicely.
Early on in this project, I had been thinking about producing a less traditional narrative, which toyed with the reader's anchorage, as a continuation of things I've explored in previous projects and in my dissertation. As time has gone on, and editing has been done, I've rediscovered my love for writing and Salvatore's workshop allowed me to see the writing of a more traditional narrative as a fun challenge at least equal to the writing of an experimental one.
In many ways, despite its audio-visual nature, this feels like one of the most "safe" projects I have done. The story has gotten simpler and simpler through the writing process and I'm left with something very close to the traditional story-book form. What does make it distinct is the seperation of the visual matter from the audio, and I would be very interested to see what people made of the story if it was presented to them without the audio ie. with no textual exposition.
I've recently been getting very interested in the music and art of Goodiepal. He has devised (amongst many other amazing things) a "compositional game play scenario" to challenge the rigidity of compositional practise as related to language ie. on a stave, or software sequencer, that reads from left to right. A lot of his ideas seem to be to do with context and its role as something which sets the human mind apart from any artificial intelligence in its ability to create subsets of complex information and therefore more easily find connections/meaning - for instance, in a book he has published for his composition project, the text is presented in an imaginary language, which is an amalgam of words from various Scandinavian language which are closest to other Latin-based languages (like English and French). The suggestion is that, even if you don't know the languages being used (including Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese) then there will be enough identifiable information for the reader to surmise the meaning according to association and context.
This is very similar to some of the ideas I touched on in my tarot/narrative projects and in my dissertation (and perhaps to ideas presented in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Kandinsky's writings) and I would be very interested to further explore this topic in the visual or audio-visual realm.
Whilst dealing with musical composition and aesthetics, Goodiepal's work also deals with notions of utopia in electronic music. Intriguingly, he sees hand-rendered text and imagery as essential to making notation "unscannable" by artificial intelligences (this idea of artificial intelligences reading music is really, I suspect, just a rhetorical device to focus attention on the unique capacities of human intelligence). It's very tempting to relate this to the recent turn towards the hand-made in illustration (and to the resurgence of folk-based music - something he seems to reference in his work).. it seems we have reached the top of the utopian curve and, with no hover cars appearing (and the best equivalents in technological advancement ironically being taken for granted now they have arrived) there has been a dip, a move back towards a notion of a retrotopia - a nostalgia for past times well exemplified in the music of artists like Boards Of Canada and the hauntology scene.
I've always seen a link between the exploitation of the human ability to reconfigure information (ie. in the work of Edward Gorey or any number of surrealists) and language (indeed, Breton refers to Surrealism as poetry). This is also the root of my interest in tarot cards and narrative, and, as mentioned, an important aspect of my dissertation (which analysed and compared the formal properties of the comic strip and screen-based graphical interfaces).
To me, this seems like an important part of the growth and evolution of a language - words (and contexts) being remoulded and reapplied. Of course, in a survival of the fittest, such explorations have little success due to their lack of functionality. But it's in literature and entertainment that such playful mutations can flourish - and occasionally, some odd figure, such as a fish on a bicycle, will enter the wider consciousness. The surreal comedy of Vic and Bob was a big influence on me as a teenager - they took quite extreme surreal and poetic language and placed it in a foreign context, with successful results. They would eventually follow this through to the mainstream success of the surreal game-show Shooting Stars. I think that humour is an important element in the success of such things.
The reason for this explanation is to highlight that what interests me is the question of what might come to be a new audio-visual format (assuming that in an increasingly multi-modal multi-sensory media world the future of music might in fact be in a new type of media container). What Paper Rad (scathingly?) call "The Future of Entertainment". It seems to me that something with a high level of humour might be the most likely to succeed in the first place. Comedy shows seem to have been the most succesful area in pushing these boundaries in popular culture - whether it be Vic & Bob, or Chris Morris' Jam, which combined hallucinatory film techniques with often unsettling electronica to great effect.
For now, I'm just drawing a squirrel thing in its pants, but, while combining audio and visual material, even in a relatively "safe" narrative, I'm finding it fascinating to think about what the future possibilities might be for such a form, and I'd definitely be interested in doing something more experimental in the future.
Also, I can't stop listening to Goodiepal!
See some of Goodiepal's Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra instructional/art objects here.
The Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra Walkthrough on Soundcloud.
This project will not be the first time I have made music to go with a narrative.. however it will be the most complex and developed piece of musical narrative I've attempted so far. I was really happy to be asked by Nozomi to do the music for her film City & Ghosts in February. It was a good reminder that these sort of things always take longer than you think, and a great opportunity to flex my musically-descriptive muscles (which have not been used for a while!). In particular, it made me think about how a sound can provide a non-literal representation of a mood or theme.. the music contains sounds of car horns and dogs barking.. but also more abstracted electronic beeps to represent the sound of a city at night, with the sound of a busy road floating up through still air to an apartment high above. I'm really pleased with how it came out, and looking forward to it being online so I can show all my friends!
So.. it might seem a bit odd to have set up a blog to write about my EMP this close to the deadline. But I've just been finding so much stuff online that is informing the development of the work.. and the final two weeks will involve a lot of digital compositing of what I've been drawing so far.. I'm intentionally drawing each page in parts, so that I can play around with the layout and composition in Photoshop, and that will obviously be easier to show here.
