What an awkward looking face. I kind of like it though. Reference for exchange. 

Julian Liu. 20. Doesn’t speak (possible mute). Efficient, and totally loyal to his ‘mother’ Jacqueline. Not very emotional, but gets annoyed when things don’t go smoothly/according to plan. Probably because he fears becoming unwanted by his ‘mother’.

Character Vs. Self

I’d been meaning to type of this blog post since the paperwings podcast post this week raised the issue of “Man vs. Self”. I’ve started writing, re-planned, wrote again, re-planned again, wrote some more, and only then realised that I hadn’t understood the issue of “Man vs Self”. Characters, and not least the protagonist, all have internal conflict. But the word self in the refrain is quite key, because it specifies a particular angle to approach the characters’ conflict. “Man Vs. Self” (I prefer “Character vs Self” as a broader label*) is the character’s internal conflict with his or herself, and the decisions they must make. A or B? X or Y?

And once put this way, I realised that I need to articulate this more clearly for my protagonist. Her quest is set in front of her from the onset of the story (deliver the mystery object entrusted to her by her parents to a mystery man Mr. E), the obstacles are there (she doesn’t know who or where this Mr. E is, she is only a child, she needs to evade the power and potential violence of the Marrow Syndicate who want to stop her), and the theme of her journey is more or less evident in my mind (to make sense of and negotiate your place in a global world). But what decisions must she make in the course of this? What is her internal obstacle? What is the ultimate decision she has to make? I’m a little embarrassed to say that I feel caught out… At this point in time, I need to do some more thinking. I need to be able to articulate this clearer.

But for my secondary protagonist (is that even a word?), these answers came more easily. Her quest is intricately tied to the protagonists, though both don’t realise how much so until further in the story. The secondary protagonist needs to understand events in her past to find peace in the present. But in order to see the past, she needs to look in the present and engage with people in the here and now. Is she able to do that? Will she see, engage, and support the protagonist, or will she continue to look over her and be trapped by the past? I suppose this is my understanding of what is meant by “Character vs. Self”. It’s the concept of internal struggle but a specific facet of that struggle which can be articulated as making a decision: A or B?

Slightly unrelated, but a pocket of discussion in the comments to the original post was about drawing parallels between the characters’ internal struggles and the external struggles (actions and events). Two things came to mind here. 1) The internal struggle can be symbolically represented in scenes of all levels (from the final show down to the mundane moving from A to Be scenes) and 2) that the internal struggle is not limited to the protagonist alone, so the symbolic representation of any character’s struggle can be expressed.  I have a few core characters and a few more peripheral ones that go through the entire story, and all of them have their struggles. These characters’ struggles are more diluted forms of the protagonist’s one. And I love the idea that mundane scenes can actually be a micro level representation of the big, lofty theme and quest. The final showdown in movies is often the scene where the characters’ internal struggle is symbolically represented in the style of a battle (Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi comes to mind), but what about the smaller scenes along the way? I guess there’s no need to be overly tricky about it, but I think that if you’re going to write/draw a scene, and you’re going to put in your time and effort, you should try and make it as relevant as possible, not only in terms of fulfilling the external quest progression, but also by symbolically reiterating the internal struggle. (Easier said than done, huh.)

I think in the next few months I’ll actually do some proper posts that introduce these characters. It feels so distancing calling them ‘protagonist’ and ‘secondary protagonist’. Eck. We’ll work on that once my wave of assignments have been dealt with.

*The label “Man Vs. Self” strikes me as a bit of a narrow one. It instantly conjured up certain types of conflict. The first thing I thought when I read the words “Man vs. Self” were images of Classical heroes, the kind that struggle against Fate, are on a quest to prove their honour, worthiness etc. etc. In the original post over at Paperwings, the figures of Batman and Wolverine were used as exemplars of how this kind of internal conflict has sustained a franchise for decades.  These two heros are also great examples because very clearly struggle with their nature and the elements of their power. In other words, the label “Man vs. Self” conjure up a very specific kinds of internal struggle, and tend to err on the grandoise side. There is nothing wrong with this, and perhaps it’s just me who’s drawing parallels with other epic expressions like “Man vs. Nature”, “Man vs. Beast”. But I feel the term ‘Character vs Self’ is a bit more neutral, if not broader in its connotations. ‘Character’ can incorporate animal characters, children, women, and things like semi-sentient machines.

Their Fears

The past few days I’ve been thinking about writing. I’m only a writer of university essays and the occasional blog post, but I think all writing (read: method of communication) has basic commonalities. The final goal is to communicate your point clearly to your intended audience. So to my mind, essay writing, journalism, story writing… they all have very common foundations. Of course they are all different forms of writing, and their functions are different too, but the point is that you have to articulate your point clearly, concisely, and engagingly.

I’ve been slowly working on a pet project of mine, and part of that has been the very unglamorous but fun tinkering with story structure and character development. Unglamorous because all I have to show are tables in word documents and half filled notebooks with jot-down ramblings. Very few pictures at this stage (this process in fact feels a bit like essay planning and the stage where you do a lot of research and reading but have no concrete bits of writing to show that you’ve actually done stuff). Which is fine, since I’m having a ball. It’s a pretty slow-moving process since it’s ultimately a problem solving process, and I’ve had to stall and think, put things on hold as other commitments demand attention, but I feel I’ve come a long way even compared to the start of this year. Still a lot of work to go. (The Paperwings Podcast series has been an immense help, as well as my partner and friends who are sport enough to hear me ramble and tease things out).

The recent knot I’m trying to work out is the issue of fear. What is it that my characters fear? It may not sound like much of a question, or it may sound like a really obvious question to ask… And it is odd, because in all honesty, I hadn’t consciously thought about this question, or the answers to it. If a story is a re/telling of events that are meant to be interesting and meaningful to an audience, there needs to be tension. One of the ways to create tension is to up the stakes for the characters involved. I’d thought about characters’ goals, motivations, obstacles etc… but hadn’t thought of the flip-side of all of this; the fear factor for the characters, and what it is that they want to avoid. I haven’t thought about it in too much depth, but I’m guessing character fear is more evident and important in some stories than others. I need to think about how important it is for mine. I have a sneaking suspicion it actually is very important. I thought about my protagonist’s main fear, and this was easy to identify… but it kind of re-arranged my brain and re-focused it in a way that’s refreshing and insightful. But the fear of my other two major characters… It’s really interesting when you have that moment, where you thought you knew your characters, but you really don’t. It’s kind of fun in a way, getting to know them all over again. Fun in a puzzle solving kind of way.

Brandon Generator: ‘Interesting’, but not.

I’ve been more or less diligently studenting for the past few months, but my partner drew my attention to this, The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator (official website is here). The BBC segment which I’ve linked to explains it very succinctly so I shan’t repeat it here. I had a look at the actual site last night, and the visual sequence created by the team. It’s a visually engaging and stunning piece of work, as you’d expect from a team of professionals. But I was left with some pretty strong feelings and opinions about this entire project, and wanted to jot them out.

Collective art seems to be a really big thing at the moment. I’ve participated in two such projects (the Art House Co-Op’s Sketchbook Project series and Pop M’Art’s painting participation), and I’m sure there are other such endeavours going on in the wider world. The message, to me, from such projects is that ‘everyone can be creative’ and ‘small efforts combined can create something bigger’. Such themes are the ‘point’ of the project as an art form: part performance, part reflection of contemporary social practices, and part visual engagement. It’s personally satisfying in a very quiet kind of way, to think you took a bit of time to work on something that’s part of a larger social activity. The Brandon project strikes me as belonging to this kind of creative movement. What’s different is that it has some major corporate backing (M!cr0s0ft no less!), and has a team comprising of quite well known creatives (hence the publicity). But ultimately, this project seems a bit gimmicky and lacks creative spark. It looks absolutely stunning, and there’s nothing I can fault regarding the visual richness, but as a concept, and as a story, it lacks creativity.

Firstly, the pitch of ‘you can engage and influence the course of the narrative and shape the final product’, ‘you can contribute via the web and social networking’ is a little bit embarrassing. Part of it is because, as I’ve been alluding, such projects are being done all over the place, so ceases to be an engaging or appealing idea in and of itself. The publicity surrounding this project, however, is trying to make it seem fresh and interesting. And this incessant ‘you’ endorsement that’s rampant in our culture strikes me as a shallow pitch. This may just be me, but the whole ‘i’ prefix on Apple products, ‘my’ prefix on Australian government items is trend-mongering that’s really crass in its blatant idolization of the individual ego. I find it disheartening when one can see the motivations of a creative project; it seems shallow, and strikes me as failing in its endeavour of being entertaining, never mind engaging, inspiring, beautiful, or exciting. 

My other gripe is that the setting and premise of this story is uninteresting. It’s a good setting for this kind of a project (that is, trying to engage people to send in images, text, audio etc. to collate and embed in the production), but it’s a poor way to start a story. An artsy man with a creative block who likes to daydream is a setting that sends me into a fit of rage because it strikes me so hard as a self-indulgent self-insertion by the creator(s). It’s a great setting to trundle through developments, meander through events, but it’s a structure that doesn’t allow for a very strong emotional driving force to pull audiences through. Granted, this could be achieved if the director has a very strong direction in mind, or is able to weave a convincing story with direction rather than just a collection of random contributions (but then this would make the claim that ‘you’ are contributing to the story a farce). It seems like the pull is to be generated by the audience wanting to see how the project unfolds. This is something that belongs to another write-up (story as distraction-like entertainment, or story as emotionally engaging and driven entertainment), but it seems such a shame that there was no real quirky surprises in the setting of this project. I watched the whole thing, but was itchy all over.

The idea of audience participation in the project is very ‘now’. What makes the Brandon project ‘interesting’ for me is that it’s using a combination of illustration, animation, movie, and comic techniques to create a visually beautiful piece. The less interesting aspects are the premise and setting of the story, and how ‘audience interaction’ is meant to be a fresh approach to story telling. I think this project will have a very high production standard, and will have a large audience, but I don’t think it will really be moving, or revolutionary. It seems that the concept of the project (audience participation in aspects of the creative production) is meant to be revolutionary/new/engaging, but whether the actual end product will be something to remember is something we’ll have to wait and see. I’ll reserve my final judgement of this project until I’ve seen the entire thing, but so far, I’m not holding my breath. I’ll keep track of its progress regardless, and I hope I am pleasantly proven wrong on all accounts.

brianne333:

milkteef:

A few racists on Facebook felt the need to share their opinion, reblog so future employers can find this post when searching their names in google.
Transcript | Link

TRAVIS HALL

Works at United States Marine Corp
Studied at Wake Forest University
Lives in Norwood, North Carolina

OLIVIA NICOLE THOMAS

Went to West Stanley High School
Studied at Stanly Community College
Lives in Midland, North Carolina

Lynda Scott

Lives in North Carolina

Snezhanna Granados Black (what is her real name?

Went to West Stanly High
Lives in Midland, North Carolina

This is fucking shameful, I couldn’t even get through all of the posts, it makes me sick.

Shame on this guy too.  A US Marine?  Marines are supposed to be better than that.  You can’t fight for freedom when you obviously don’t believe in it.

(Source: alpacas-are-not-llamas)

kerosenekate asked: White!

White: 3 facts about my personality.

1. I am a generalist through and through. I am good at multitasking and managing things, but very poor at focusing on one task, or focusing on any one thing for a very long time.
2. The above relates to interests. I can’t obsess over anything. I’m interested in everything and anything, but would never want to know everything about it.
3. I’m easy on others, but hard on myself.

vegizogizo asked: Yellow? :D

Yellow: 7 facts about my childhood!

1. I was born in Illinois, USA, but spent my childhood in Brisbane and Melbourne, Australia. And stayed in this country ever since!
2. I spent everyday of my childhood studying Japanese. As a result, I am fluent in speech and reading, my typing of Japanese is pretty awesome too.
3. A lot of my childhood was spent travelling overseas for my parents’ work. Lived in Japan for a month and a bit, in the States for about 5 months too.
4. I didn’t have any pets :( (Have never had one, actually.) I really wanted a cat, but dad’s allergic boo.
5. I didn’t have any kids living on my street, so never had any friends in the neighbourhood. My school friends lived a bit too far for me to just drop in.
6. My father used to read me Japanese history comic books (even though I could read it). As a result, I smashed the history test when I was guest staying at a Japanese primary school >:D
7. I read Sailor Moon in Japanese, pretty much as soon as the volumes were published and my grandma sent them to me in Australia :D

Was studying, but have been itching to muck around on ph0t0sh0p the whole weekend…Just to get the urge out. But now I want to embark on an epic pic, but don’t have the time. FUUUUUUUU.

Her arms are a little long. Derp.

Still not much to show in terms of art. This uni week is finally over, I may actually have some time to draw, and work on characters. Started this one a few days ago, and here it is now~ :)

Unglamorous Essentials

Recently I’ve been doing the unglamorous work of planning my story. Unglamorous, because I have absolutely nothing pretty to show for it save a half-filled (and still filling) notebook, and some tables marking out psychological landmarks in conjunction with major events for key characters. Working on it bit by bit, and it has actually accumulated into something. I’ve been spending my ‘creative time’ working on it, hence the lack of pictures and posting online. Not even some half-way decent sketches to show!

I was thinking of documenting the process online, but decided against it. It wouldn’t be of particular interest to anyone, since it’d really only make sense to me. But I’m excited about it. The feeling of real progress! It’s only the skeleton of the skeleton, but themes are surfacing, characters are moving and doing things more-or-less of their own accord.

You may not believe it, but essay writing and story planning have loads in common. And funnily, I get loads of satisfaction from doing both. *so goes back to planning plan of semester final major essay number 1*

I was very kindly invited along to Pop M’Art by Truccie this weekend. Pop M’Art is a ‘pop-up art studio’ that appears across various venues in Melbourne’s CBD. Truccie signed up on our behalf, we were notified of the location, and we rocked up. It was $30 to participate, and we got our own little canvas, unlimited access to paints, and had a great time. What you see here is my two hours of paint, affectionately dubbed (Alien) Milk Flower: The Struggle of Humanity’. Continue reading over at my Wordpress.

gg-al asked: Blue!

Blue: 9 facts about my family.

1. My parents are both Japanese. A lot of people seem surprised by this because I don’t look/come across as Japanese. How rude!
2. My extend family are all in Japan. So I grew up not having any familial obligations. Christmas and all that was a very intimate nuclear family event.
3. I am the oldest out of my cousins. You know. All three of them.
4. Anyone with my family name, with the specific set of characters we use, is a blood relative of mine. No other family on that island of 128 million people have this family name.
5. My family name is, legend has it, based on the word’ Smith’.  We like to fantasize that our ancestors were sword smiths :P
6. My parents are the same age.
7. My parents are kind of nerdy, and we watched all of Avatar: The Last Airbender last year together. 
8. My great-grandfather was, apparently, mute (or didn’t speak very well).
9. My only brother is one of my best friends.

Bored

vegizogizo:

temiel:

Purple: 10 facts about my room.
Blue: 9 facts about my family.
Green: 8 facts about my body
Yellow: 7 facts about my childhood
Orange: 6 facts about my home town.
Red: 5 facts about my bestfriend(s).
Pink: 4 facts about my parents.
White: 3 facts about my personality.
Grey: 2 facts about my favourite things
Black: 1 fact about the person you like

Yeaaaah going to join this bandwagon too. :| Ask away!

i’ll give it a try, too. why not?? ask !

Me too!