Holiday Roundup

Happy New Year!

A new year is here, bringing with it a lot of other newness.

First of all, Santa was very good to me this year, bringing me a shiny new Nikon D5000. Hurrah!

Revel in the shininess!

And the weird meta-aspect of taking a photo of a camera...

Taking it on a brief trial-run, I quickly realized that there would be a considerable learning curve. So many buttons and settings!

It'll be a while before I'm able to do everything I'd like to do but with time, perusal of the shockingly thick guidebook, and slow weaning off of the automatic presets, I'm sure some really cool stuff will happen. Oh, the potential!

I took a few test shots of our totally awesome Christmas Tree but they don't really do it justice. It was hard to capture the aura which beckoned to us on the lot...

Our totally awesome Christmas tree

The holidays also brought along some new Sherlock Holmes goodness. No, not that Sherlock Holmes. This Sherlock Holmes: The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes. Specifically, The Case of the Stalking Death. The Misadventures (or MOSH as the folks involved like to call it), is the brainchild of Victor Alpha and follows the good detective on some of his sillier adventures. I've been lucky enough to be involved with MOSH on several occasions, both behind the scenes and in an acting capacity. The Case of the Stalking Death is a particularly special episode because it's one of the few episodes I was ever-so-slightly more involved with. (Mostly, I was allowed to sit in on a couple of production meetings and shared my thoughts when asked.) Plus, I played Queen Victoria. In all fairness, it's probably the worst Queen Victoria ever, but how often does one get to be a Queen for Christmas?

It's been a very promising start to the new year and I look forward to seeing what comes of it. I am hopeful that this year will bring more opportunities to engage in art and creative endeavors amid the madness and demands of academic life. In an effort to make this happen, as a sort of belated New Year's resolution, I've challenged myself to find (at least) 10 minutes every day to sketch, doodle or draw something, anything. It doesn't have to be good, but it has to happen. More on this in the next post... Bring on 2010!

Trick or Treat! (Coulrophobics Beware)

It's almost Halloween, so that means an extra-special holiday audio posting!

"Yuppo Knows" by MJ Cogburn & Robin Carlisle

A little background:
As much as I enjoy doing voice work, I don't often audition for things. This is because I know there are a great many actors out there who are better performers and better suited for the parts I'm eligible for. Quite honestly, I find it can be just as fun to listen to them perform (if not more so).

I am very lucky, however, to know some incredibly talented people who are occasionally willing to give me a little nudge and cast me in projects. MJ Cogburn is one of those people and "Yuppo Knows" is one of those projects.

"Yuppo Knows" was a somewhat scary prospect for me and not just because it was a Halloween story. My terror came from the number of departures it marked: It was the first time I'd recorded something for a group other that Dream Realm. It was the first time I'd played anything close to a main character (okay there are only five characters in the piece, but it was still a big deal for me!). On top of all, it was entirely out of my usual playground of sci-fi comedy, being dramatic and downright creepy. All this newness was well worth it, though - I think the final product came out quite well!

"Yuppo Knows" was released on October 18, 2007 by Brokensea Productions as part of their month of Halloween productions. The cast includes me as Bobby (an eight-year-old boy), Paul Mannering as Yuppo the Clown, MJ Cogburn as Olivia (Bobby's mother), Rick Rhoads as Newscaster Tom Alexander, and Jon Morss as Newscaster Michael Rosenbaum.

Fun fact: Google tells me that "Yuppo Knows" was nominated for a "Golden Icepick" award in 2008. I'm not really sure what that means, but it's nice to hear that it was nominated for something...

Sun, Still-Life, and San Diego

Okay, enough with the robots. For now. It's hard to believe that it's already practically July. JULY. Where is the summer going? Between work and the weather (rainy and gray for most of the last couple of weeks), I have to remind myself that there can be a summertime that is shiny and sunny and which exists outdoors. I keep thinking about my recent trip to San Diego. Never mind that I went in April - the weather there was so relentlessly gorgeous and bright that it just had to be seen as summery. We just don't get sunshine quite like that in NYC.

Cabrillo Park

While I was out there, I spent a lot of time with a family friend who has become very involved in photography. His specialty: photographing flowers. As a result, I learned three things: 1. I seriously need a new camera. My previous one died a sad and soggy death involving drum corps and a tornado, and my loaner camera (a Sony pocket Cybershot) just isn't cutting it. 2. A disproportionately large amount of my time in San Diego would be spent in and around gardens.

Botanical Gardens at Balboa Park Self-Realization Fellowship Meditation Gardens

3. California has some of the wildest plant life I have ever seen.

An Alien Plant?

Since I was spending so much time at the gardens, I decided to try my hand at some still-life flora-based photography. I've not done much of this before - my subjects are usually people, typically people running around a football field with flags and large noisy instruments. All things considered, I'm pretty happy with the results.

And here's a picture from the trip which has absolutely nothing to do with flowers:

Children's Beach, La Jolla

Why? Because seals are awesome.

Bots, Books, and Beginnings

For a while there were rumblings and rumors that DRE had notions of turning Robots of the Company into a book – a real book, a proper novel, even, with dialogue and descriptions and subplots and other such booky features. I’m not entirely sure where this idea originated but somehow the project wound up in the hands of my friend and frequent collaborator, Victor Alpha.

Victor is an incredibly talented writer who amazingly manages to juggle writing duties on a number of projects and audio series, including the wonderfully odd and silly Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes. Plus, I am led to believe he is actually James Bond when he is not writing a half-dozen scripts at the demand of his Whiteboard Taskmaster or catering to the imperious whims of his cat.

I could not and cannot think of anyone better suited to writing the ROTC novel.

Much of the book would be written in the madness that was NaNoWriMo of 2007 and I would not get to see it until it was completed. However, I jumped at the chance for a sneak preview when I learned that Victor had already completed a prologue for the novel, a short standalone story written to set the tone.

Reading this prologue, I was utterly charmed by the tale of the lonely little robot and was quickly inspired to do some scribbly sketches to accompany the text.

Before I knew it, I was illustrating the whole prologue. It was just too much fun adding extra layers of absurdity!

I’m not ashamed to admit that I particularly enjoyed drawing the scene below. I mean, how often does one get to draw a robot talking to a plus-sized space-suited social worker, surrounded by a sky of flames?

Not nearly often enough, I say.

I especially like the pearls.

One day, I hope that this prologue and/or the full novel actually gets published.

Until then, I am perfectly happy to keep doing goofy drawings to go along with the work of a writer who always manages to make me laugh.

Thanks for the inspiration, Victor!

On Radio and Robots

It would appear that my goal of updating this blog on a weekly basis was perhaps a bit overambitious.

Life-related craziness and technological fickleness seem to conspire against timely blogging. These last few weeks have been particularly marked by the demise of my main home computer – the machine on which I created and stored most of my projects from the last five years. Thankfully most if not all of my work has been backed up. However, thanks to the inexplicable way my computer area was set up, this now means that my scanner is inextricably hooked up to a large metal doorstop and will be inaccessible for the indeterminate future.

So, until things are back up and running, it looks like posts will have to be based on whatever I have saved to my laptop.

I suppose for now that means robots. People like robots, right?

Sometime around 2004-2005, I joined an online audio drama group called Dream Realm Enterprises. The flagship series for the group was a strange and silly science-fiction comedy program called Robotz of the Company, which was broadcast online and on a few independently-run radio stations in the U.S. and Canada. In the early days of the series (i.e. when I had more time), I wore many hats in the production process, acting as script editor and casting consultant, as well as occasionally penning an episode or voicing a character.

As the series wrapped up its second season, it seemed like it might be helpful for the writers and producers to have a shared mental image of what the different characters were like. Based on what I imagined from the performances, scripts, production notes, and chats with the production staff, I worked up some concept sketches for characters in the show (all robots) and ideas for other bots which might one day exist in the series’ universe.

These sketches include several miscellaneous designs, as well as ideas for featured characters and series regulars such as Boffin the cockney engineer, Maxi the walking, talking button of unknown purpose, Captain Jammer, and Shinwipe, the administrative bot.

In truth, no one ever asked for these drawings. I just wanted an excuse to doodle the characters.

Does it count as fan art if it’s based on a project you’re involved with?

More on these bots in future entries…