#because again: i need to focus on canon-palatable creativity more

[katyspersonal]

Ogay now your turn, who was your blorbo(s) before???

Damn... This is a harder question than it seems, because it is... hard to remember? My brain got SO rotted with Soulsborne world that I legit am forgetting how things used to be before that? It doesn't help that my feelings about the character and how much I talk about them / do for them do not always match! As a result, I have three types of blorbos:

1) The 'real' blorbo: The one that evokes the most feelings and I actively fantasize about being with, one that sparks yearning and attraction and consumes the most of my thoughts, but I won't do enough with

2) The 'productive' blorbo: The one which I practically breathe life in and create entire story and world for when canon didn't provide much and/or this character is unpopular. They often become crucial part of my online identity, or JUST my identity o_o'

3) The 'fanmade' blorbo: It is either an AU version of the character, an interpretation so unfitting and far from canon vibe that it almost works as an OC, or JUST an OC. I actually love/hate this one, because this is the asshole that will always make me stray from working on canon!! They will make me focus so much on them that depending on the nature of the character, I will forget the canon vibe in my love for this version or will forsaken general source material to join an AU/RP where this character is. Let me focus on canon-palatable creativity and stop wasting my time, dipshits!!

So, to give you the idea, in Bloodborne, type one would be, of course, Micolash, Edgar and Maria (but mostly Micolash)! Type two would be Rom and Izzy. And since recently my Laurence is between 1 and 2 because he is really S E X Y but also I have to create everything for him xD. Type three would be... uh...

My previous "fandom" was UTDR, but that stay was a little short-lasting, since Deltarune is work in progress and Undertale did not have the same grip on me. In there, my type one blorbo were Rouxls Kaard and Mettaton! You can tell I love the flamboyant sexy man with fake depth, fair level of depravity but not evilness, and intelligence of a brick dshhfdsdds My art never felt good enough to capture Mettaton's confident energy, however, I'd like to show this fanart of Rouxls:

Type two blorbo were Mad MewMew, Catti, and Diamond King! The latter two were sort of underdeveloped in canon at the time, and for MewMew I actually had a bunch of things, and even RPed as her for some time! Developing Diamond King was quite fun, though he was dangerously close to type 3 because of AU stuff where HE was the bad guy and not Spade King (and Catti was the 'monster' of the prophesy). Besides, we did give him a wife who is not getting used in canon but exists in the cards deck that WAS used for the 'cards'.

(EDIT: I made these sprites and I forgot that I made them and not Val o_o" Because it's been a few years ago + I am scatter-brained. Oh jeez)

And type three happened when I delved into helping to work on an AU for Deltarune, a project a passionate person started in hunger for completion of Deltarune, following after Chapter 1 and ignoring everything. Basically, attempt to finish the game that had AMAZING story and characters! I lended many designs, ideas and characters for it, improving it very significantly. I no longer work on that project and gave all rights to my designs and creative solutions to the developer, but it was FUN. And like I said, distracted me from the canon-palatable creativity. And helped me to finally come to terms with the fact that I am way better at nurturing, supporting, editing and improving someone else's projects than creating my own. It was a long time coming realisation considering how half of my drawings for any fandom used to be fanart of other people's ideas and OCs or fanart for our RP plots. Not something that can happen in this fandom because... you know. But yeah, I've always been the guy that would draw a pile of everyone's OCs/interpretations in the community, or help someone with no coherent design idea to GET that design down!

...ak-hem, where was I? Right, blorbos. So, the 'fanmade' blorbos were, of course, our version of Diamond Queen and... this BITCH:

This is Ace of Hearts! And Insight joke is actually something I just made up, since I made this guy before I knew anything about Bloodborne! It aged like fucking milk, hahahahaha!! To give you the idea of what I had to do to design the Aces, here are the cards by Kanotynes that Toby was using:

These are the face cards ( x )! If you saw Deltarune's chapter one, you can see how and which designs were used, and which changed.

And this is the only image of all cards I can reliably find ( x ). You can see that number cards were de-personalised and are just various things. So what I did was combining the face card look and find a way to "fuck it up", since Aces learned A LOT of 'Chaos' and not only part of it like Jevil (and now Spamton)! Here are the rest of them:

You can tell, even in healthy forms, they'd still be a bit... 'strange' compared with face cards. Ace of Clubs in healthy form would have only one head and one horn, and his 99 Insight Chaos version has 11 heads each with one peace of their body or face... And Ace of Diamonds would be a snake with 'umbrella' skin, which is nothing like other Diamond suits!

I was the one to insist that we have Aces in the project, conceptualised them, designed them, wrote them lore etc. And Ace of Hearts was my favourite, and also the scariest one. (of course I like the most creepy one -_-) It was also the first situation where I got obsessed with my OWN non-canon stuff... although, technically, they are no longer mine, since I passed the designs and right to write and use to the owner completely. Maybe it is to the better, as I moved closer towards enjoying my own content more!

(Idle sprites I've made back then!)

___________

Thank you for listening and giving me nostalgia, lol xD

[paintingraves]

Crimes of Grindelwald info dump

CAREFUL : SPOILERS ! There’s no structure to this I’m sorry 

the humor is still very present. from newt’s awkward flirting skills to Jacob’s tell-tale high-pitched screams, it’s all here and guaranteed to bring a smile to your face.

seeing Hogwarts again was a great plus as well. Dumbledore as a teacher is a great thing.

Speaking of which Jude Law makes a perfect young Dumbledore. His performance is great, and I wish he’d had more screentime. I’m looking forward to seeing his role grow in further movies.

Credence is GROWING and that’s GREAT even if he MAKES MISTAKES

the baby nifflers - and as a matter of fact, all creatures - are delightful. the CGI is very well-done, and the creativity behind each of them is palatable. I love those guys so much.

Newt and Tina are actually adorable as fuck

Dan Fogler is great. Scratch that, he steals the show. He’s brilliant.

The cinematography, costumes, etc - all that is great as well. it’s believable.

in terms of acting… none of the actors get much screentime. Queenie & Jacob do get some emotional scenes. Credence is very busy making angry murder faces at the camera. I liked Tina as well, but again - not enough screentime.

there’s a lot of new characters being introduced, some who get no more than perhaps ten minutes of screentime as a whole (looking at you Nagini.) We get this whole building plot about Credence being Leta’s long-lost brother, thought dead, only to have it crumble in the last minutes - the same as it was with Credence’s sister Modesty in the first movie who we thought was the Obscurus. Now that worked actually well in FB1 but here it feels… kind of anticlimactic? Leaving you to wonder the whys and the hows because nothing led up to it.

I’d like to know how Credence came to know Nagini and how he found himself working in a circus, as well as how he survived. How?!

Nagini and Credence seem to be close friends, nothing more. Which is good - he could use some good friends, especially given the direction he’s taking. Just wish Nagini had more screentime to really show up the mechanics of their relationship and how close they are, because it really isn’t clear. We’re just supposed to take at face value that they know each other and that’s it.

How did Credence even find his adoption papers? Isn’t he being wanted by every government in the world? How does his status work?

They’re literally sending assassins after him because he’s supposedly Grindelwald’s greatest weapon, which like… chill a bit guys maybe. Rethink this through???

Oh, Grindelwald. Grindelwald is grooming Credence like hell, calling him “my boy” again and again and hugging him and touching him and making promises and Credence is falling for it hook, line and sinker. Someone help him holy shit.

One of the characters that actually does make sense is actually Abernathy. His role is minimal but he does help Grindelwald escape and seems to be given tasks of importance - which seems to be a great deal for a man who, like him, appeared to be no one before. It’s easy to see how he could have been seduced to Grindelwald’s side.

We don’t know much about Rosier yet. She’s just here. Looking pretty and threatening and hinting at her ‘close relationship’ with Grindelwald, whatever that means (I don’t want to think about it.) She seems to be his second-in-command.

I liked the fact that at the end Grindelwald and Queenie are like bros. Bitch bros. That’s wonderful and terrifying.

I didn’t say it enough, but the grooming

There were so many times. So many times where they could have mentioned Percival Graves and what happened to him in passing but not only once. NoT OnLy oNcE

but that’s a whole other headache SO. moving on

Hmmm Leta. What to say about Leta? She’s great. She seems like a good person, and Zoé did a great job portraying her. She’s the one who gets the most emotional scenes, next to Jacob and Queenie. There’s a whole family drama unfolding here (which oooh boi is it complicated) and it’s kind of easy to see how she became the woman she is?

She and Theseus seem to love each other very much. I’m wishing they had had more screentime, the two of them.

Nicolas Flamel is here for comic value.

I loved the relationship between Theseus and Newt. There’s some real brotherly love and character growth in there, and it felt good to see it depicted well.

I’m wondering how powerful that assassin sent by the british minister needed to be to resist the full-blown assault of a grown obscurus. even Grindelwald had trouble doing that. where’s the logic ???

also how did they obliviate the entire city of Paris following that little trick with the dark cloaks inviting people to Grindelwald’s little rendez-vous? Unless it was visible only to wizards, but since they show us an old intrigued man looking out the window I don’t think it was the case. So?

Same thing with the blue fires and red fires in the cemetery - how’re they gonna explain that to the muggle police and fire brigade should they come running?

Bunty is here for comic value.

Newt literally isn’t aware of his own appeal. I’m afraid oblivious!Newt from the fics is sorta canon now.

TINA DOESN’T GET ENOUGH SCREENTIME. She’s one of the characters who, along with Jacob, seems to have her shit together and seems eager to get shit done but we don’t see her progress. The movie prefers to focus on her relationship with Newt - which, don’t get me wrong, they’re adorable as fuck - instead of the much more interesting investigation plot line she has got going on. She’s an Auror; let her be an Auror ! Show us that side of her !

Queenie was certainly… something in this movie. I get the feeling she’s suffering a lot and Grindelwald is the only one, unfortunately, who listens.

Jacob the poor guy goes through a lot in this one too. I don’t know how he’s expected to survive in a world he really shouldn’t be in, and I think he’s starting to realize that. At the end of the movie he looks to be on the verge of a breakdown.

Leta dies sacrificing herself so the others can escape. Which is very noble but… I don’t know how I feel about that one just yet.

Grindelwald and Dumbledore… Hmm. Dumbledore shows us his suffering intimately. It’s a short but intense scene that goes one with him in front of that mirror and it’s a great piece of acting. Seeing Johnny Depp in front of him stiiiiill doesn’t cut it but oH WELL

Seeing Jamie morph into JD was about as bad as seeing Colin Farrell morph into him tbh. It’s unbelievable.

Now Grindelwald… Grindelwald is… He is Grindelwald. He is busy being Grindelwald. He’s not particularly striking but he gets the job done. That’s it.

Sometimes he looks terrifying and sometimes he looks ridiculous. The character design is still a hard pill to swallow.

I got the feeling at some points that Grindelwald worked well when he was doing some Johnny Depp. Like when he asks Queenie if Credence trusts him or when he says “I hate Paris” after killing a dozen people at the end of his rally - that was funny. Unexpected. And it worked well.

For someone who claims they are the non-violent ones he does seems very prone to like, drowning people, killing children and burning people with fire lol - but all that away from the public eye, which is clever. I’d say in Grindelwald’s and his followers’ opinion that rally worked very well. It did what it was meant to - give them an insight into his hopes and beliefs and then scare them into joining his side.

They introduced World War II which, oh boi. Wonder how they’re gonna weave the muggle history and wizarding world plotline together.

Credence joining him also makes sense for his character. He wants to know who he is and Grindelwald offers him that. But Grindelwald plays him so well it’s also very sad to watch it unfold.

Credence is gonna be so powerful growing under his tutelage though.

The actors playing young Newt and Leta were awesome! Very good casting, very believable. Young Newt’s got Eddie Redmayne’s trademark Newt mannerisms down to a point - congrats to them both!

Newt the adult… well he is busy being Newt. He’s quite cute and clumsy, but he still has some growth to do as a protagonist. I like him being the main character though. He’s caring.

Yusuf Kama doesn’t get much screentime either. He’s part of the whole Lestrange family drama plotline. We don’t have time to get attached to the character.

We don’t relate much to any character, actually. Not to Credence, not to Dumbledore, not to any minor new character either. We might relate slightly to Newt’s rivalry with his brother or his difficulties in approaching the woman he likes as well as the difficulties Jacob and Queenie are facing as a couple buuuut that’s pretty much it.

There’s a scene at the beginning when we’re in the carriage and Grindelwald gets illuminated by lightning - he looks properly terrifying. My heart skipped a beat.

Newt and Leta’s relationship is really touching. It’s easy to see how they could have become close friends.

The Ministry trying to recruit Newt into the auror department like you seriously thought that was gonna work ? lmao

Jacob being charmed by Queenie is problematic…. but it’s interesting to see how Queenie evolves, how she could be driven to such desperations. In my opinion Jacob is a bit too quick to forgive something like this lol but yK

Newt just wants to get to Tina and that’s cute

God these two are just terribly awkward

I genuinely thought they were gonna kiss at one point though.

I felt bad for Credence seeing the servant who was a link to his family (or maybe not ahaa SPOILER) die like minutes after he met her. the poor dude.

So Credence is a Dumbledore uh. Wonder how that one skipped past Rita Skeeter’s sharp quill.

Credence blasting that hole in the mountain like YEAH BABY THERE YOU GO !!!!!

The niffler steals the blood pact Grindelwald keeps on him at all times and im like YES BABY THERE YOU GO TOO !!! GOOD BOY !

and idk there’s probably more to say but here you go

Now I’m saying all this but personally I have a really hard time caring about anything I’m saying or any of the characters. But that’s personal. 

[jk-snoddy]

“DAMN IT, ICARUS!” Stories of Flying Too Close to the Sun.

Theme: RISK (...but mostly failure)

When I think about the creative risks I’ve taken in the past few years the first thing that comes to mind are the failures. In my eyes, the word “RISK” paints pictures of potential danger, humiliation, and disappointment. It’s like streaking naked across a college campus, in the day, at lunchtime. But it also paints the slim opportunity of being an outlier in that wide margin of likely failure. I faced this predicament when I decided to make my first narrative film in college. It was garbage, it pissed me off every step of the way.

Me and my friends, Denny and Joe, had banded together in the spring of 2012 and decided to start a film production team at our college. We made two mediocre music videos, did video documentation for hire, and thanks to Denny's big mouth telling any and every one that "WE HAVE A COMPANY!" we became known as "those video guys". I don't know where we got the gall to think that we were official in any way, but for some reason, we had our heads puffed up by our third gig. We felt like hot shit.

Fast forward to December 2012, it was near the end of the semester and Denny just kept talking about how he wanted to make this movie he’s had in mind for the past seven months. The idea had to do with a young male coming out of the closet to his father.  He was super gung-ho about shooting it and creating a story about LBGTQ characters. Although I didn’t connect with the story, the last time I made a narrative film was in high school. I felt this urgency to get behind the camera again and direct something that wasn’t a music video or someone's band in a basement. So I figured with a little common writing sense and empathy I could tell this story. So I told him “Fuck it, I’d be down. Let’s make a movie.” On the last day before Christmas break, I was called in for a production meeting in the school atrium. Before I could even blink, Denny had arranged a small quasi-core production team consisting of a screenwriter, David (who eventually became one of our main actors), our sound guy, Mitchell, and Georgina, our production assistant, Denny who acted as producer, and me as the director. Joe went MIA before the production began. Before the end of that day, I was sent a potential draft of the “screenplay” David had written. The ball was starting to roll a little bit faster than I was used to; this wasn’t all talk anymore. But I had to keep up. Don’t even get me started on the title the producer had in mind.

January was dedicated to editing the script that was written in less than a week. For some stupid reason, I decided to take part in some of the writing duties. For the entire month, I had my stale revisions shat upon by the team who would constantly go back and forth on what it should be and what it shouldn’t. February came and we were casting for each role, finding a cinematographer, setting up our Kickstarter page (we didn’t reach our goal), and trying to deal with our own classes/lives which were crumbling right at our feet due to mounting stress.  March arrived. The semester was halfway done; my personal work and my grades were suffering. The cast was finalized, and we were set to shoot during the week of spring break. I felt nothing but tension as the first shooting day drew closer. I didn’t have a decent night’s sleep since January. We reserved every Canon MK II and light kit that the film/animation department had to offer, along with sound equipment, batteries, and CF and SD cards. We had to keep track of all of this stuff. Every employee at my school’s equipment stockroom loathed us.

The first day of spring break arrived, principal photography was a complete nightmare. We had the police called on us for shooting near a restaurant, that wasn’t even on screen. It turns out that you can’t trust a fine art photographer to do the job of an actual cinematographer just because the camera has a video button. It was the first time I ever had to fire someone. The first week passed and we were missing so many scenes, the production dragged on for the remainder of March into April. After the first week, we lost our half of our core team. Our sound guy, Mitchell, was a Berklee student at the time and had to focus on finals (along with arranging our score and doing ADR). Our PA had to continue her own classes and studio work. We were down to a skeleton crew and we had to recruit our other friends who were willing to help out. Because we were using school equipment at the time, we had to keep checking out (and extending, and returning) cameras, lighting, and sound gear constantly. Everyone at the stockroom wanted to kill me.

Because we didn’t have a budget, we poured our non-existent cash into coffee and donuts for every set. Turns out you can’t expect an entire cast and crew to run off of Boston cremes. Nor can a 20-year-old subsist on junk food for a month straight and be a good communicator and college student. My diet for the majority of the semester consisted of Dunkin Donuts, black coffee, vending machine pastries, and Adderall. 

(There are only plain donuts left.)

This film was no longer a labor of love and enthusiasm, but a chore. We started off cock-sure of our abilities to make this movie, but the moment we got started we were hit with reality. Each day brought a new plateau of pressure and it was far too late to back out.

Being on set wasn’t an exclusively negative experience. Each day of shooting was a healthy learning experience that helped us understand what it takes to be a make a film. I was learning how to effectively express my needs to the performers and how to really direct a story through enforcing subtle undertones to their roles. Directing for me was becoming an intuitive process that became easier to tap into. Because we let our cinematographer go I took on the role of DP myself. It was rewarding because I was able to achieve the shots I was trying to capture in terms of the look and feel. It was hard, but it felt better shooting it than trying to relay shot ideas to someone who was always in their own head. But figuring out how to properly light a scene was more experimental, which meant using more time on set figuring out the composition. We powered through the month of April to get the final pick up shots that we needed and we completely wrapped by the end of the month.

As soon as the school year ended we were trying to set a hard deadline for the final cut before the screening date. FUN FACT: just because your producer is enthusiastic about being an editor, doesn’t give them the chops to actually cut together a movie. We screened the “final” cut to all of our friends, classmates, crew members, actors, and co-workers at the Fenway Health Clinic screening room. It was the biggest disappointment I ever had to sit and watch. There was audio out of sync, a lot of areas where my experimental cinematography style justed looked tacky and wrong, the stale writing was really prominent. It was a shit-show. Most of my classmates, friends, and other creative contemporaries had to sit through that film and I knew that they felt embarrassed for me. From the time that I saw the first rough cut, I knew that it wasn’t going to be the best thing ever. I was honestly hoping Denny could’ve made my stale shooting into something palatable, I was wrong.

The director is supposed to be the calm face of the production. Every day I brought my anxieties, neuroses, and vulnerabilities with me on set. My fragile ego at the time couldn’t handle outside ideas and criticisms from my producer (or anyone on set) because I felt I was CONSTANTLY RIGHT. The fear of not knowing what I was doing balanced the sting of being told I was wrong. I was like an open nerve of my own exposing. To this day I still think about this project and how I handled myself with the crew and actors. I was struggling to manage as a leader alongside everyone else’s opinion and hurrying the fuck up.  A bad day on set is pretty discouraging. But three bad days in a row, including class the very next day, then more filming immediately after, was like shooting my motivation in the face in broad daylight. 

It’s been a while since I made something of that scope. Mostly fearing to make the same mistakes I made the last time. But the fear of failure will never justify your losses when you never continued moving onward. That’s a big failing on my part as an artist and storyteller. Virgil Abloh (Founder of Off-White, Creative Director at DONDA, friends with Kanye West) said “Find the domino effect. Create the project that’s latent with intention and see what comes after it”. This slightly justifies the artistic risk in making bad work, learning from it, and continuing forward. Looking back, all I did was think about this project and see it as a critical failure on my end as a storyteller. When what I really should've done is embraced it as a part of the process. All this time I hated myself for how it came out, that I forgot that we, a group of early 20 something's, actually had the audacity to finish an entire movie.

I could go on and on about how the resources were bogus, or the lack of money and manpower held us down. But it’s inaccurate. There was no amount of cash or gear that could’ve saved us from ourselves. We took on way more than we should’ve, didn’t plan each step well, and we failed as a result. I think about the unnecessary urgency we had put on ourselves to get this film made instead of slowing down and using the standard process. The heartbreaking part was the toll it took on my personal relationships with everyone in the project. I wouldn’t have guessed how much the tension would fracture my friendships. If I ever get the chance to make a movie soon (god willing) I’ll walk onto the project with my battle scars from the last time. I’ll use paranoid due diligence to make sure I'm not creating a product that I'll look back onto 8 years and cringe about its inception.