#artist: interstitial

[iraprince]

now that it's been officially posted in the updates, i can proudly announce that i'll be doing playbook art for Interstitial 2E, an extremely cool fucking game that i am SO excited about!!

the campaign on kickstarter pitches itself better than whatever i could cobble together for a post here, so i urge you to just go check it out, but i'm just really stoked about it so i wanted to throw my head back and howl a little bit. but basically like, do u want to play a sprawling campaign where u and ur friends play all your favorite characters in one big splashy crossover fanfic extravaganza? then you want interstitial!!

[ringosnoop]

he's working on it (based on this)

[summerisformovies]

I’m really fucking pissed that I saw Late Night With the Devil before I found out about the usage of AI. I guess that’s what I get for not reading the reviews beforehand.

I hate that I gave them money and I hate that this idea could’ve been a perfectly good movie and they ruined it by not paying an artist.

I also hate how people are trying to give them a pass because it’s an indie movie. Plenty of indie movies have been made before without AI art.

Either figure it out, or don’t make the movie.

Don’t go see this! Hold the line against generative AI!

[resolveap]

Alraune avec la Lune

Resolve's Socials

[themostfinalofpams]

Desperately want to play a TTRPG campaign where the party are a traveling troupe or circus of magical drag queens and kings

[beetlepollen-blog]

Any other artists out there struggling with their creativity and energy since developing chronic pain? I am stuck in a cycle of working full time to pay bills, having no energy left for art, getting burnt out, having a flare up, and restarting the cycle again.

[rhysstrongforksfagswag]

I need to scream about the brilliant thematic juxtaposition between hbomberguy’s “ROBLOX_OOF.mp3” and Kevin Perjurer/Defunctland’s “Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery”, which came out within 3 days of each other in November 2022 and both concern artistic credit and legacy. Here they are linked for those who haven’t watched one or both:

While both are very different stylistically (with hbomberguy maintaining his signature edge of unhinged video essayist humor while Defunctland is produced in a more traditional documentary style), they are both very well made with a strong narrative through-line— something I consider to be very important in a good documentary. They also have strikingly similar subject matter, but very different “protagonists”, so to speak.

Tommy Tallarico, the center of hbomberguy’s doc, is a well-known and successful video game composer who, over the course of the video, is revealed to be a grifter and seemingly compulsive liar. Perjurer’s doc, by contrast, spends most of its runtime trying to uncover the composer behind Disney Channel’s well known auditory channel theme; eventually this is revealed to be Alex Lasarenko, a composer who wrote a lot of music for brands and sadly passed away in 2020 without much fame to his name. While Lasarenko was obviously unable to be interviewed for the documentary, Perjurer manages to get into contact with many of his collaborators and they have nothing but nice things to say about him. Contrast this with Tallarico, who is far more successful than Lasarenko, but is also a total dick who takes credit for the work of those who work under him (among many many other issues).

To me, the idea at the center of these docs is artistic legacy. When you die, what will you be remembered for? What art that you have created is inherently connected to you as a person? And, does it matter if those who personally know you actually like you as long as your art is loved? Is it better to be famous and despised or unknown and beloved? They also both have commentary to make on media preservation, with Perjurer’s doc being made possible through the tireless work of online archivists who catalog tv bumpers and interstitial content, while hbomberguy’s doc shows how Tallarico actively seeks to rewrite history in service of his own fame.

Basically, I love YouTube documentaries and there were a ton of great ones made in 2022.

[bowelfly]

Wait how does your artist telephone game work? Is it one piece of art after the other or is it art to word to art like telestrations?

answering these together since they're asking more or less the same thing. the process for art telephone is basically this:

as the gamemaster i get together a list of participating artists, randomize the order, though reserving the right to move participants around in ways i think would be interesting based on complimentary or contrasting art styles, and also try and be as accommodating to everyone's schedules as possible.

someone makes the first drawing and sends it to me in a private message. i then privately forward it on to the next artist in line. when that artist finishes their piece, they send it to me and i send it along to the next person and so on. this way every artist only sees the piece directly before them and nothing else until the big reveal at the end.

the important part is each artist is essentially tasked with recreating the piece they receive and can take as much or as little liberty with the contents as they wish. as you can see in the game i just posted some people do pretty faithful recreations of their prompt just in their own style and medium, while others just go hog wild and do a very loose adaptation.

i have seen versions where there are interstitial text steps, like going 'drawing > description > drawing > description, which would be a way of incorporating non-artists into the game but i like doing it all art.

@ragsy gonna answer this here while i'm on the subject because that is the one big thing with these games is that it's literally like herding cats and especially with large artist rosters it is inevitable that things get snagged up. to that end i implemented a couple rules this time around that at least helped prevent a lot of major delays.

the first thing is that i gave each participant a 5-day limit to at least send me a rough draft of their piece that was far along enough to send to the next artist while they finished it at their own pace. of course this did result in me having to chase down like 30 stragglers near the end of the game but it wasn't unexpected.

the other thing that helped was just contacting people several days before their turn comes up to confirm that they're free to draw during the time they're up during and if not i'll just shuffle them further down the line.

inevitably art block or irl shit will hit an artist harder than they expect and it's a delicate balancing act to try to keep the game moving without being pushy or annoying but i think for the most part i was successful. i probably pissed a couple people off but if so they were nice enough to not yell at me. we only had a few major delays and most of those were due to holidays fucking everyone's schedules up and multiple people in a row having to reschedule or drop out.

also yes there is literally nothing i won't turn into a color coded excel sheet. this is what grad school did to my brain.

[arsenic-kneecaps]

Howdy do! I’m Raine/Ars/Arsenic Kneecaps and I have an idea!

I’m a librarian with a lot of free time at my desk so I do a lot coloring books. I’m also a big fan of RadioTV Solutions and so I’ve been pondering the idea of combining RTVS and coloring books.

How would this be done?

1) I want to trace screen caps from live action RTVS bits (Fax Hell/mass, Seance of Joshua, Spamton Value Network, Congress, Homer, GameClam,etc.) and slap ‘em all into a printable PDF “book” for fans to color however they see fit. Since some members of RTVS prefer to appear in virtual form-for example in the Congress stream where there are talk sprites (that I think were made by Mike? I don’t quite remember, please correct me if not.) for members such as Gir, Holly, Trog and Mira. Credit to the artists of these sprites would of course be provided.

2) I’ve also been thinking about making the coloring book a Zine of some sort. Where we’d all get together in a big Discord server, create and compile lineart fanart of RTVS and interstitially mix it in with the traced screen caps. Ensuring that no art would go without credit as a coloring piece can have the artists info paired with it.

I’ve never organized a zine before. And I’ve never made a coloring book- so I just wanted to gage interest and see what y’all think! Feel free to hit me with any ideas. I’d love to hear ‘em.

[do-you-have-a-flag]

was watching late night with the devil yesterday and got so annoyed by the use of ai interstitials

is that supposed to be a pumpkin or a wood carving of an owl? a painting?

i was like okay, lets see what i can throw together in an hour as a non professional (who doesn't work in this style) without diverging too much from what they were going for (as i assume any artist they hire would be able to do a more polished job than me in a similarly short amount of time)

imagine how good it would look if i were working with the same graphic assets or put more time in or a more established artist made it or if an artist who could make a real 3d object irl or in blender were doing this

ultimately it's not just that at the moment a lot of ai art is actively worse than a real person. it's that there is no intentionality behind the placement of pixels, that the image generation relies on art theft where even if you asked you have no way of finding out exactly what was taken from, and that opportunities for real people are being taken away which is absurd in a creative and collaborative medium like film especially cause why make films if not to be creative with other people why engage with art if not to have someone tell you a story what benefit is there from the computer element if it is substituted in to such a large extent.

and yes the 3 interstitials that only show up for seconds a handful of times IS to a large extent not in screentime but because the filmmakers are paying homage to tv station custom images, which would have used a mix of original work and stock resources, which would mean either hours of original work or the reuse of art which was made decades sometimes even centuries before and lives on in the public domain, which would have been put togethere for only a few seconds of screentime a year. the ephemera of station idents is so cool because artists and graphic designers make these cohesive bits of corporate art that become so familiar to so many households yet are almost never noticed. that are so powerfully nostalgic they were deliberately included in the world building and atmosphere of this film

so what is the benefit that it's ai? because it's fast? (irrelevant to the audience and they had to manually tweak the results so the time saved was negligible) it's cheap? (irrelevant to the film and the audience) it's an empty use of corner cutting creatively that is NOTICABLE and will stay noticeable since it's unlikely to be updated with a better rendering. a corner they didn't cut with any of the other elements of the film, so it stands out even more starkly.

[ghostinthegallery]

Hey there!! I really enjoyed your insight the other day about how writing a serial differs from a plotted-out-and-written-in-advance novel! As someone who's just dipping my toes into posting as I write, any chance you could give some advice or tips you've learned about that style of writing specifically? 💚

(from @inquisitor-gayfax)

Why yes! I'd love to (thank you for giving me the excuse XD)

The main thing I have realized is that experience with traditional, "complete on arrival" novels is actually super helpful for serial writing. The principles of character writing, world building, and all that still apply, but even more importantly the beats you want your story to hit are all pretty much the same. You want that into, the inciting incident, the midpoint turn, etc. Those are all vital to keeping your story on track. Especially as serials are prone to meandering. It is so easy to get lost and lose sight of the forest for the trees. For me, always checking with myself that I am hitting or actively working towards those major beats helps to keep me on track.

Also note that one big thing will be different is the length. Serials tend to get much longer and thus the beats are stretched out. The length is because each chapter essentially functions as a short story in and of itself. It has to be a satisfying reading experience on its own as well as in the context of the larger work. This oftentimes means fleshing things out more than you otherwise would and bam, longer work. (not necessarily as long as I often go! but the tendency is there). FWIW, I find editing these chapters as I got to be much easier than editing a whole novel. I do miss being able to move big chunks and scenes around (cut and paste, my beloved), but it is worth the tradeoff to me.

The nature of the chapters functioning as short stories (minus a definitive ending of course) is probably going to be the biggest difference if you are someone who writes the entire thing ahead of time and then posts chapter by chapter, as opposed to posting as you write or posting with a backlog but not a finished novel.

Now, the other biggest difference if you are posting as you go is that you will not have the chance to revise the entire story the way you do with a traditional novel. You cannot go back and change things, add foreshadowing or a character beat or anything. Once you publish that chapter, the events are set in stone.

I actually enjoy this! It is a fun challenge to work with what I have established. But...I also cheat. I have a tendency to drop little things here and there that could be hints at larger plot points or things that are setting up things later on, but they are vague enough that I am not fully locked into anything.

The secret is that your readers are unlikely to remember a small detail in chapter 3 that didn't really go anywhere. But they will remember that detail in chapter 4 that got paid off in chapter 35 and you will look like a super genius (I am 99% sure Eiichiro Oda, possibly the greatest serial fantasy writer/artist of all time has done this writing One Piece, alongside his legit 5-D chess long game reveals)

To call myself out, here is an interaction from chapter 5 of The Silence & the Storm (poster child of fics that got too long)

Before he turned to go, he placed a hand on Anrakyr’s shoulder. Anrakyr tried to shake him off, but his grip was as strong as his bulky build would imply. Through an interstitial message he said, “If you ever wish to hear of Pyrrhia, you need only ask. Perhaps you still have friends there? Perhaps not. But would you not like to know?” “What are you—” Zultanekh broke the connection. He started back down the corridor, and Anrakyr had to choose whether to chase him, or remain with this stranger.

I had no idea what had actually happened on Pyrrhia when I wrote that. I just knew I wanted to address Anrakyr's backstory and why he left his home planet, so I left myself that set up figuring I would pay it off later. And then in chapter 48 we got this:

“Do you remember back when the mot was called,” Anrakyr said. “You told me that if I wished to know about Pyrrhia I need only ask. That I might still have friends there. Was that true?” “Would I lie about such a thing? Never,” Zultanekh replied, surprisingly softly. “Did my own wanderings take me to Pyrrhia? Yes, they did. An unlucky clash with some orks left this ship in need of repairs—although make no mistake the orks were far worse off! Space debris after we were done with them.” Anrakyr flashed a glyph of impatience.  “In any case,” Zultanekh continued. “We landed, declaring our intentions to repair and leave. Had we heard rumors of lost Pyrrhia? We had, however the planet itself was quite…orderly. Calm.”

The conversation goes on as Zultanekh describes more of what he saw because 33 chapters later I, the author, now know what happened and can start giving that pay off. Sometimes I will get really lucky and find something I didn't intend as foreshadowing but that happens to work! Those are good days.

Now this is a risky strategy. You can limit your options when you do this, and you have to make the pay off make sense given whatever you set up. I've definitely wished for the power to go back and edit some of my vague hints in the past. But that is the challenge! True you could actually be good at planning and meticulously plant all your little seeds and reveals. Or you can be me, a creature of vibes and chaos.

Speaking of vibes, I think it is important to talk about the audience. And how they will influence you. When you present a finished story, that is it. It is done. The audience can talk about the story all they want, but it cannot retroactively influence how you wrote the book. With serial writing 99% of the time readers will be able to comment. And I think we writers have to be very careful about how we let that affect our writing.

The Game of Thrones writing team apparently at some point decided that "fooling the audience" and being unpredictable was more important than telling a good story, so they changed plot points when too many audience members predicted certain outcomes. This is bad. However, sometimes audience feedback is good! I personally unlocked a whole subplot because a commenter asked about a character I had included totally at random. It was a filler name! I did not realize this character was in a game, but realizing that gave me incredible stuff to work with. I'm glad I listened to them! Not to mention the incredible kindness and support that has kept me going through some rough patches in my life. By that same token, negative comments can feel awful. I have not found that to be an issue in my corner of the 40k fandom, but it is absolutely a consideration in other spaces (especially outside of fanfic) so just be aware.

I hope that answered your question! Probably too much, but as we have firmly established, I am verbose ☺️

[racefortheironthrone]

I have come to realize, I don't quite understand what a back-up story is? Like, do some comic issues just sometimes have too much space for the main story so they include another, smaller comic at the back?

No, it's usually the reverse: the creators have a story they like, but that's too short to make up a full comic, so they attach it as a bonus feature after the A-story.

To me, the acme of how to do backup stories are Chris Claremont's Classic X-Men. In an era before trade paperback and omnibus collections were common, in an era before there were digital comics libraries where you could access the entire back catalogue of entire companies on demand, Classic X-Men reprinted everything from the Roy Thomas/Neal Adams Silver Age through to the big hits of the first hundred or so issues of the Claremont run with edited captions and dialogue and interstitial panels and pages of new art.

However, Chris Claremont wasn't satisfied with tinkering around the edges, so the first 44 issues of Classic X-Men included backup stories by him and Ann Nocenti. These short (usually ~8 page) stories included a lot of "deleted scenes" - so you get to see how things that are alluded to but not shown in the main narrative, like the beginning of Logan and Jean's attraction in the immediate wake of Giant-Size #1, or Emma Frost's Hellfire Club scheming against Jason Wyngarde or Selene during the Dark Phoenix Saga, or Jean Grey wrestling with what it means to be the Phoenix with the help of Storm and Misty Knight, or why Nightcrawler stopped using his image inducer and came out of the closet as a mutant, etc. These scenes "danced between the raindrops" of canon, where they added richness and flavor to the main story without being essential reading.

But more and more, Claremont and Nocenti used these backup stories to fill out backstories through "period pieces." It is in these stories that we see Max Eisenhardt escape Auschwitz and tragically lose his daughter Anya, or go from being a Nazi hunter in South America to a mutant separatist terrorist when he learns the truth about Operation Paperclip. It is in these stories that we see Jean Grey's psychic powers awaken when she experiences the tragic death of her childhood friend Annie Richardson from inside Annie's mind, and how that shaped her understanding of life and death and what it means to be a mutant.

I would argue that these stories are essential reading, because they're often where Claremont (and Nocenti) found the emotional core of his characters, the motivational drives that make them who they are.

Alternatively, backup stories are where creators could take advantage of free "real estate" in anthology books, team-up books, and annuals to tell more fantastical and imaginative B-stories that wouldn't have fit within an overarching narrative. So we get weird stuff like Margali Szardos casting her adopted son Kurt Wagner into the literal Inferno of Dante Alighieri, or straight-edge Harlan County miner's son Sam Guthrie romantically abducted by an intergalactic cat burglar who also happens to be a cockney Joan Jett, and so on.

And that's what I like about backup stories - they're like miniature paintings, where the artists get to stretch their creative muscles free of the burden and pressure of the magnum opus.

[ringosnoop]

oh right!

now that we've reached atlantis in our kh tabletop i can finally show off these!

[stylesnews]

silentpartnersstudio: Harry Styles’ 2023 Love On Tour started on May 13 and will travel in Europe until the end of July. Congratulations to all the teams and collaborators! Artist: Harry Styles Creative Director: Molly Hawkins @mollyjane_x Producer: Baz Halpin @thebazhalpin Production Design: Silent House @silenthousegroup Content Producers: Silent Partners Studio @silentpartnersstudio _ SPS Team Leaders Creative Producers / Creative Directors: David Emmanuel Fafard @davidemmanuelfafard & Gabriel Coutu-Dumont @gabrielcoutudumont Content Project Manager: Leah Younesi @leahyounesi Lead Notch Designer : Heath Saunders @pureriphery Additional Notch Design : Rowan Glenn @rowanglenn _ Show Team Lighting Design: Silent House @silenthousegroup Lighting Director: Eric Marchwinski @emarchwinski Lighting Programmer: Tyler Santangelo @tylersantangelo Screens Programmer: Josh Key @joshkey28 Technical Direction: Earlybird @earlybirdvisual Video Director: Larn Poland @LarnPoland _ Interstitials AnimationWriter : Adam Tetreault @atetreault Writer, Art Director, Illustrator : Nick Stokes @nick___stokes Animation Studio: Open the Portal @opentheportal Producers : Silent Partners Studio @silentpartnersstudio

[resolveap]

Hope everyone had a great #mermay! Isiri definitely did.

#podcast #ttrpg

linktr.ee/ResolveAP

[genloss-confessions]

brecht anon here so german playwright bertolt brecht thought that generally people who watched plays would engage only in the emotional aspect of the play and the characters and not interact with the political or artistic statement s that the writer was actually trying to communicate. he founded the concept of epic theater around using the medium of the play and the theater to estrange audiences from their empathetic reactions to characters and instead make them have an objective reflection on the play's contents and allegories for real world issues. this would appear as deliberately low-budget scenery, printing stage directions on the scenery, having actors speak directly to the audience, perform musical numbers, or play multiple parts in the same show, essentially always reminding the audience that they are watching a play, removing their ability to become immersed in its reality. this estrangement or alienation effect is what the word Verfremdunseffekt refers to. (real brecht-heads, feel free to yell at me for being reductive)

for episodes one and two, tse uses these same ideas to create a barrier between the audience and its characters: the linear cabin set that doesn't resemble a house, the fight scenes, the moment where you can see the aluminum baking dish the patient's slime-guts are being kept in. in the very creation of these scenes, we as an audience are primed to not care about anyone in them, since we are reminded all times of the falsity of the reality we are being presented. we are separated from the characters (especially the carousel actors!) as whole empathetic beings by the fact that we are not shown the characters as whole three-dimensional beings, but as tools to serve an allegorical frame work.

arguably this also appears in episode three, in the scenes where we are shown the camera operators, and especially in the founders cut with its use of adr for hetch and the interstitial cuts to the in universe slmccl stream. even in these moments of purported reality, the bones of the show itself estrange us from the characters.

until the final scene, where we see the truth for the only time.

of course, tse is definitiely not intentionally brechtian, since the finale centers around our empathy for the blight of the main character. additionally, brecht's theories were often not successful in their execution, as playwatchers still found the plights of the characters emotionally moving despite this efforts to distance them from the audience. still, tse's focus on the space between the audience and the characters, use of "flat" characters in service of its larger allegorical message and deliberately low-quality set design in service of alienation mean that i can say with confidence it's at least a bit brechtian. now if you'll excuse me the pretentious police are putting out extradition orders.

.