Earth Day 2000 - 2010

So, it's been a while! A proper catch-up post is on the way. However, given that today is Earth Day, it seems appropriate to dig into the archives and recycle some old material. (Ha!)

Way back at the turn of the millennium, having successfully negotiated Y2K and the mass panic that technology would fail and civilization would fall, I was enrolled in my high school’s computer graphics class. Two sections of the class existed, using our “state of the art” computer graphics lab – one section focusing on CAD, the other focusing on Photoshop (5!). Identifying myself as more of an “artsy” type (I guess some things haven’t changed so much) I opted for the latter, which meant an hour and a half a week each week to mess around with whatever images we could unearth off of Lycos or Altavista Picture Search. (Sidebar: I can’t imagine kids today being given the same freedom to explore the Internet wilds – if I recall correctly, there were hardly any filters or rules!)

One of the few mandatory assignments in the class was to develop an entry for the Earth Day 2000 campaign. I’ve long since forgotten what the actual prize of the contest was, though I imagine it had something to do with advertising and posters and random merchandise. I was simply excited to enter a real art contest. I may have even created my first e-mail account to enter.

Below is what I submitted:

I was so proud of it. It had taken me the better part of a month to put together and really reflected my Photoshop philosophy at the time: blurry equals better (no crunchy pixilated edges). I loved how the dolphin and eagle traced the edge of the nebula and the way that the (very obvious) paint daub filters made the colors blend and glow…

I was even prouder when I learned that it had made it through the first round of competition.

For weeks I tracked the contest - only to learn that the entries that had made it through to the final round were all crayon drawings by elementary school children!

It turns out that the “youth” category included everyone under the age of 18, and, really, who was going to vote down the little kids? Oh well.

Ten years on, I’m fairly amazed that I still have a copy of this piece (saved through progression from floppy to ZIP disc to email and USB). I know it’s not that great - it’s actually pretty cheesy and kind of screams "high school girl," but the fact that it was one of the first pieces I ever made on a computer, that it “nearly” won a contest, and the sheer earnestness of it all... I can’t help but have a certain affection for it.

Happy Earth Day Everyone!

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…

We Begin

Let's start with something from the archives, shall we?

When I was fifteen or so, I decided that comedic science fiction was the best. thing. ever.

I was absolutely crazy about “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and “Red Dwarf” and really wanted to create something that would follow on in that legacy. Heck, I would have been happy to have created something as campy and ridiculous as “Galaxy High”.

After a few false starts, I started work on a project I called “Bottom of the Barrel” which was, quite honestly, a not-very-good variation on the bottled sitcom-in-a-spaceship dynamic of “Red Dwarf”. I had a bunch of characters that couldn’t stand each other, a planet that was destroyed due to highly improbable means, and a spaceship that was fueled by stupidity (inspired by Harlan Ellison’s assertion that hydrogen and stupidity are the two most common elements in the universe). Beyond that, I didn’t have a clue.

Much like HHGTG, I found it hard to contain this project to one format. At various points, it has taken the form of a novella, a radio script, and (of course) a comic book...none of which quite made it to completion.

The comic book version especially caught my imagination and for some time I could usually be found working on panels between classes. At one point I even convinced the computer graphics teacher to let me use the then-newfangled scanning technology to upload the pages so I could try to ink and color them on Photoshop (5!) Sadly, most of the original scans were lost in the Great Computer Crash of 1999, but a few low-res panels remain:

Every now and again I still like to pull this project from the files and give it another try.

I can’t say I have a better idea now as to what it’s meant to be – as always, there are just the characters and the setting, and the characters simply do whatever they want.

It never gets finished, but it’s always fun and it’s always slightly different.