Karma Pirates

Just a little breakdown, here.

Hello! I’d love to be able to keep a full production diary, but I’ve never been much of a blogger. I never really know what my “voice” is, and until I make everything really meta (ta-da!), I just kinda flounder around awkwardly.

So! Now that we have a little meta opener, let me get you caught up!

When I was over in France, I couldn’t believe how much I was going to get done in the first month after I got back. It was going to blow people’s minds! We were going to be releasing episodes every few weeks! Unending supplementary material! Tutorials, soundtracks, shorts, revamped website! It was going to be wild!

It’s been almost a month and a half since I’ve gotten back, and all we’ve released is a little “We’re back!” blogpost. So what’s going on? It’s not that we haven’t been doing stuff- we’ve had a half dozen shoot days, which is pretty darn good! And for most of the rest of the time we’ve been working pretty steadfastly on CG. We’ve built complex sets, we’ve torn them back down, we’ve tried to awkwardly recycle them. We’ve gone location scouting, we’ve had rehearsals, and V.O. sessions. We’ve done a lot! I’m really all about the final product, and typically don’t worry so much about the process- but I think a time comes when it really makes sense to break things down to see if there are any big things I could be doing to get these episodes out faster.

So what are the things keeping this episode from already being out?

ABSURD SENSE OF EXISTENTIAL URGENCY: So for a while I was living the freelance life basically 24/7, and it was fantastic, and with a bunch of fun folks, but I really couldn’t wait to get back and work on “my” stuff. After going to bed every night, I would become almost intoxicated with the notion that almost anything could happen if you just sent out the right emails. Wanna go camping? Pick a date, and email folks inviting them to come along! Wanna shoot a scene? Just send some emails! Wanna start a band? Send some emails, and set up a jam date! And the thing is: it was basically entirely true! I filled my first few weeks back with so many meetings with incredible folks, and jam sessions, and film shoots, and just great stuff. If I could maintain this all the time, so much would get done! But I can’t! Because unfortunately, this lifestyle very quickly lead to…

EMOTIONAL DRAINAGE: This is a crazy huge factor! For me, anyway. I’d scheduled so much crazy stuff for when I got back from France that I didn’t have a single day to breathe for the first couple weeks. I found myself getting sarcastic and snappish, and even though I was surrounded by my favorite people in the world, I really just wanted to take a few steps back for a few days. And I wasn’t the only one feeling it. There was a night where we were standing around and realized, “Hey- we have all of the equipment rented and actors- we could shoot those final few shots!” And even though it would have meant we were basically done filming the episode, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to do it. WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT: I dunno! Sometimes I drink a coke to replenish glucose and combat ego depletion (cause it talked about that in this book I bought at an airport once. It seems like it maybe works, actually?), and caffeine can be a wonder as well. Still though, there’s a part of me that wishes I didn’t have to chemically wrangle my brain when I need an extra little bit of emotional “oomph”. There are a few shoots I haven’t tackled yet because I literally can’t summon up the emotional energy needed to get in contact with everyone and balance the schedules. We have Paige Day, who’s brilliant at coordinating and organization and emails and other such fantastic things, but for some reason the idea of putting all of the contacts in her hands so she can do the thing she’s good at fills me with exhaustion. I think I’m worried I’d put the same amount of concern into the process, but without having direct control, it’d just fry my brain or something? Anyways, it’s mostly stupid, and I should get her all that contact info!!!*

SCOPE CREEK: Hahaha, yesssss! This is a big one. We took a look at our 5 minute space opera scene at the beginning of the episode, realized it didn’t have enough context to be as emotionally relatable as it could be, so we shot a whole other scene. Another minute and a half of greenscreen, which will need an entire new collection of 3d environments and props modeled. I say it’s totally worth it, cause otherwise it’s just a bunch of crazy CG where you go, “Yeah, that’s a lot of CG, but what’s-a-goin’-on?” And as the scene gets more and more polished, the bar for what we’re willing to do to make the scene as good as possible keeps shifting. I’m going back and fixing things that I thought were absolutely good enough a few months ago. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle: once you spend enough time on something, you feel compelled to spend more time fixing all of the things that you perceive might have invalidated that initial time investment. You do this for ever.

EQUIPMENT: Okay. I didn’t even want to put this one in here, but it is relevant. Cause man, I have a bunch of conversations with folks, and so many times it ends with them saying “I’m going to make my amazing film, but I just have to wait until _________”. And as often as not, that blank has to do with equipment. Here’s the thing: it’s not true. It really isn’t. Probably. If you’re not filming on your DSLR, getting the new Blackmagic Cinemathingamagig isn’t going to suddenly make all the chips fall into place and turn you into [some witty pop culture reference for "somebody who's going around filming great stuff all the time"]. Because, to my eye, the camera is one of the easier parts. Getting folks together, coordinating shoot days, and having a good idea of what you want to do with the camera, all strike me as significantly more difficult (you wanna see an incredible example of working within your immediate means?). That said, I’ve let equipment get in the way for the past few weeks. There’s a lens we want to buy, and I haven’t bought it yet. But I don’t want to run down to Glazer’s and rent it, because then that’s wasting money if we’re just going to be buying it anyway- but we haven’t bought it yet (because I’m waiting to see if it goes on sale, or something. I dunno.) The end result is that we’re all not shooting things, because we don’t have the lens we want. That’s dumb! Do we need the lens? Errrr-wellll…. no? Yes? It’ll make the scene look significantly better. But eventually you have to ask, “is my quest for perfection impeding my ability to actually do anything?” I dunno!

ORGANIZATION: Organization!!! Organization is fantastic, and tricky. I’ve been on projects where everything is tracked and laid out and bullet pointed and spreadsheetified, and we sit back and go, “Ah, this is so great! Look at all these checkboxes!” and we wait. And we wait. Because even though we have every possible facility for organizing our progress, it’s all moot if we don’t have any progress to organize. So I have mixed feelings about the total value of organization. That said, there’s one question I love to have answered by a spreadsheet, and that’s, “What makes the most sense for me to be working on right now?” What, if handled today, would eliminate the most roadblocks in the future and empower the most people to keep working on their respective stuffs?  Or, “Why can’t we shoot that scene tomorrow?!?!” But organization in and of itself is no method of progress, unless you’re able to use it to streamline the workflow (or make people happy. Lots of people are happier when things are well organized, and I can appreciate that).

SLEEP SCHEDULE: My schedule is pretty nasty. Our whole house here generally gets up anywhere between noon and two in the afternoon, and we stay up till the wee wee weeeee hours of the morning. There are pros and cons to that; when you’re working at night, you can get into a great groove, and get a whole bunch done, but more and more often I’m looking at the time, going, “oh! It’s 9pm! Time to relax!” without realizing that if I were on “normal person time”, it would only be lunchtime. Then we spend the next 7 hours chilling at the bar down the street, having a jam session, watchin’ weird movies, and going on walks. Which is nice! But not always the most productive. The one good thing about it though: when I wake up that late in the afternoon, I definitely get a charge of guilt energy for a while, where I feel like I have to make up for the time I lost sleeping- the downside being that the more productive those first few hours are, the earlier I’m likely to be all, “time to veg out!”

IT JUST TAKES A WHILE: Yeah, I said it! 115+ of the most complex shots we’ve ever done, featuring full CG environments and ships and digital doubles and animated characters. Like, I know I’m talking a lot about how I wish things were going faster, but once you see this episode, you’ll probably be all, “Ah, well yes. That makes sense.” At least this is what I hope you’ll be like.

All that said, I’ve just spent an hour typing up a blog post I could have spent getting final picture lock, so I’m gonna get back to it!!!

*Okay. Here’s what I think it really comes down to. If you’re making a project like this, just for fun, the line between “doing a thing we’re all enjoying/benefiting from, haha, isn’t this great!” and “exploiting your friends” is a very blurry one, and primarily comes down to expectations and attitudes. A lot of times these expectations aren’t said outright (because lots of times, we don’t even consciously acknowledge them), so in order to make sure everybody’s having a good time, I have to constantly be taking readings- checking out folks faces and body language (which is why phone calls are infinitely preferable to texts, and real life is infinitely preferable to phone calls). You can usually tell when somebody’s enjoying themselves, and if they’re not, it’s a very short road to them feeling like you’re taking advantage of them, which is one of the worst things I can think of. The tricky part is that when we’re at a shoot, it’s very easy for me to overlook someone’s signals, because I’m worrying about tracking focus, or amount of daylight left, or performances, or any number of a hundred variables, and when I’m already that close to the wire it only takes one offhand comment from someone to totally derail me for the rest of the day- heck, a whole week. So in the end it’s not that I’m an empathetic person by any means- it’s just that I literally stop functioning if I think somebody’s angry at me. I’m terrified of that. And the most difficult part of filmmaking for me, actually, is trying to balance all of those expectations, and make sure everyone feels they’re getting stuff out of it. Continually doing this gamble with people I care about, and hoping I don’t get it wrong. If there’s a part of me that ever burns out, it’ll be that part first.

HELLO! So! Alot of exciting stuff is happening. How much exciting stuff? Significant quantities!

Dr. Lemur’s Fine Brew. The ultimate spring break.

I flew back into Seattle last Saturday, and have been meeting up with various folks since then. Our current goal is to try to get an episode out every month- haha! We’ll see how it goes! I’ve been gone over in Europe most of the time since the first episode was released, and it’s hard to get the momentum up when everyone is busy and spread all over, so I’m curious to see what we can do now. I have a wee bit of money saved up, so I’m gonna throw as much time into this as possible. Here’s what’s gone down in the past month:

1. —A NEW SPACE? We’ve been working out of our house, and recently we moved from a house to a much-smaller apartment. It’s delightfully urban, but not much in the way of a workspace (we have a pile of stuff called “The pile of stuff that would be in a closet if we actually had a closet”). Charlie Daugherty just told us about a rad space just a few blocks from us we may be able to make use of. It’s a delightful space, full of great people- we’ll see how that goes! I’ll let you know.
2. —NATE TAYLOR is in Seattle! He came here from across the country for many reasons- but the big one is to work on Dynamo with us! I’ve been collaborating on things with Nate for 5 years or so via the internet (he did a bunch of work on Project London, and has already helped out a ton on Dynamo via the internet), and it’s so crazy fantastic to finally be living with him in person. He’s a great conceptual artist, 3d modeler, rigger, animator, musician, and just all around staggeringly pleasant guy.
   

   Paige Day and also Nate Taylor

3. —PAIGE DAY came across the country with Nate! They are a unit! The best unit! Holy cow.  I’d never met her before, but holy cow- she’s fantastic. She has actual training on film sets, and is all set to take on organizing the show- from setting up shoot dates, to tracking the progress of VFX shots. She’s also an absurdly talented animator/artist in her own right. We all went down to Gasworks last night and Paige explained some of the organizational techniques we could implement.
   

   There were laptops with spreadsheets. And there was also wine.

4. —PAUL SPOONER is another CG guy I’ve worked with in the past. He’s an absolute genius, modeling machine, and inspiration as a human being. Also he builds robots. As his job.
5. —THE TIME-OFFSET SCRIPT, created by Gert De Roost! I’m gonna be writing up a whole post about that, pretty quick- but it was a lifesaver for the airship scene.
   

   This picture doesn’t show off the muzzle flashes well, because it’s not like they’re all muzzleflashing at the same time- cause- I mean that’s exactly the point.

6. —A LOT MORE WORK ON THE SPACE OPERA SCENE. Between Nate, Paul, Gert and myself, we’re hoping to smash out a whole bunch of stuff super quick and get this locked down. We’re already allllmost done.
7. —SOREN’S SOUNDTRACK. Soren has been working on a soundtrack for the space opera scene- he just really needs picture lock.
8. —A MEETING! A bunch of folks are meeting up for a BBQ soon, so we can really get all of our ducks in a row and counted before they hatch in a basket. We’ll really know what’s what after that.
9. —SHOOTS! Lots of shoots! We’re going to try to post tons of little updates and tutorials and things, so you’ll know we’re still alive (though not so many that it slows down Dynamo production, cause that could be a thing).

Anyway! Good talking to you, and join us for a very exciting couple months!

-Ian

For anyone who hasn’t noticed, we’ve added a new page up at the top that links to the Karmapirates soundcloud page. It’s a pretty rad playlist, since we’re able to link in all of the music from the individual artists who wrote the pieces, it’s really easy to click through and hear more, if you’re enjoying a particular artist. Still have a few pieces that need to get up there, but if you’re ever looking for electronic/postrocky goodness- I highly recommend it!

Oh man did I forget to put the weinerphone piece up there? I think I may have!

SO! Yeah. Things are taking a while. And we had a bunch of shorts we were going to be posting in the meantime, but life and all that.

BUT! We do have a teaser! Normally I’m like, “Psh- a teaser for a thing that’s only 15 minutes anyways? Just release the actual thing!” Except that this is taking us 6 months. That said, two of those months are doing contract work that should supply enough money so that we can work on Dynamo full time for a while. Which is basically the most fun thing I can imagine.

ALSO! Here it is!

SHOOTING

So! We were all on the same continent, had a slew of fantastic Lastwear costumes, and a rough plan. But what we didn’t have for sure was a place. Initially, the plan was to film everybody one or two at a a time on a tiny 4′x8” greenscreen. I- how did I even think that would work? I mean, we would have figured something out. But that’s just not much space.

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Here is a quick tip: if you want to release your web series on any sort of schedule, don’t start it with a friggin’ five minute sci-fi war scene intro. It’s possible the kids at school will say “yeah, that’s pretty cool”, but gosh darn, it takes a long time. And goodness knows that I am ethically bound to release to you, dear reader, regular updates.

So how does one reconcile the desire to release some sort of regular content with a wildly erratic episode release schedule? After many sleepless nights stressing over the well-being of your media appetite, I’ve finally settled on a suitable resolution: some sort of frequent production updates! A token! A gesture! But one which I hope will satiate your disconcerting lust for distraction.

So at the risk of showing a bit too much (read as: “*spoilers*”), over the next few weeks we’re going to break down how we’re going about making a (scene from a) crazy trans-dimensional airship/space opera using freely available tools and almost no budget.

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Just a couple weeks! And crazy progress is being made on episode 5! Ian is back from working on Tears of Steel now, so things are going faster!

Here’s a wallpaper, if you like such things! A frame from the ‘spisode.

cheers!