Alas, it wasn't meant to be. Much like Battlestar Galactica - which was anywhere from good to mindblowing in the first season (read: episode 12 and the tail end of 13), consistently good in the second season, and became largely unwatchable in the third and fourth seasons - oh and let's not forget Lost, which took a huge hit in quality after the first season and jettisons all pretense of internal coherence (and for me watchability) after the second - the writers on Avatar apparently caved to network pressure early on and the show loses much of its appeal after the first 5-8 episodes. The why of this is very simple - the show, which borrowed much from the storytelling and character building techniques of quality, epic anime, was reduced to almost entirely self-contained filler episodes with no real impact on the story, making it essentially a children's sitcom with shades of epic. I bore through it to the season finale and even partway through the second season's first episode, but the season finale - where there was finally some story content - showed none of the promise of the early episodes. I think a turning point for the series for me was *MINOR SPOILER* when Aang leaves his staff behind in the episode where Sokka and Kitara are sick. Though the ostensible reason behind this is that the weather is too bad for him to use it as a glider, there is absolutely no reason for him to leave behind his only weapon when venturing out alone - if he needs unencumbered movement to travel faster on foot, he can strap it to his back. The only purpose to this inexplicable lapse in judgment is to serve as a device for his capture later in the episode, and thus the development of Aang and Zuko's relationship through his rescue - which, by the way *SPOILER* is made almost completely redundant by the fact that Aang saves Zuko again in the season finale and I'm pretty sure Shao and Zuko would have fought regardless of the prince's intervention. *END SPOILERS* This and many other things made me realize that the writers had stopped thinking outside their primary demographic - or more likely, were under pressure from the network to infantilize the show. Disappointing to say the least given the show's early promise.
I'm meeting with DCB this afternoon who is in town (hooray!) this weekend. We're on track for a release of the first episode of our minecraft radio show on Dec. 1st. It may be bare bones (minimal music and sound effects, voicing using a not-ideal mic setup) but it will be entertaining. I'll post a link once it's up.
-R
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Avatar: TLA. Kind of a little bit rocking my face off. Alot.
I GOT A JOB. Completely unrelated to the fact that Appa, Aang's flying bison, bears a striking resemblance to the mythical Alot, is the fact that Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender has been showing me an astonishingly good time. I never would have expected anything from the show - and I certainly wouldn't have watched it - had it not been for my girlfriend and I recently watching M. Night Shyamalan's abysmally acted take on it, which despite its shortcomings I enjoyed in a fairly extreme fashion that extends quite a bit beyond the quality of the film. This prompted her to tell me that it's a shame the film didn't do well enough to merit another two movies, since it's such a great story. Less than a week later I'm tearing through the series and having a great time of it - my only concern is my predictable inability to space them out and the episodes running out too soon.
The show takes potentially very dark material and gives it a very light, comedic treatment - sometimes too light if I'm being completely honest, but that's more of a matter of taste. It's done quite masterfully, making the show epic in scope while pedestrian in pacing and presentation. This is one of the big things that gets lost in translation to the big screen, where Shyamalan has given it an epic and frantically paced treatment that is frankly inappropriate. The show, on the other hand, feels VERY reminiscent at times of One Piece, which is possibly/probably my favorite manga and has always been an epic story couched in simple, in some ways even childish terms. Avatar obviously borrows very heavily on the oriental side of things, but it doesn't feel derivative, or like misinterpreted eastern sentiments snatched up by the creators are being even further misinterpreted by the writers and actors. It waxes a bit cheesy from time to time, but mostly sparingly enough that I can dig it.
Oh and I heard 'Splosion Man is on sale for $2 tomorrow. Sweet.
-R
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Teasers of upcoming projects
So DCB and I are still working on some secret projects. To let slip a little bit, it'd be fair to call them radio plays/shows. Our collaboration - which may or may not involve further talent depending on the project - is currently covering the writing, voice acting, sound effects, and music for these plays. The first episode for one of them ought to be out by the first of September because I have a time machine. By which I mean the first of December. One of them is based on a very popular computer game (*cough* last post *cough*), the other on a nearly unknown - but quite popular in our circle of friends - hardwareless game that Daniel created and for which he has been consistently fleshing out the world system, rules, and mythology of the universe ever since; by that it should be clear that "hardwareless" is hopefully a less staggeringly nerdy proxy for "tabletop."
Now for a few words about what Cletus the Dark Mage is NOT:
Cletus is not Brokeback Potter.
Cletus is not a spoof on Harry Potter set in the American South.
To finish this particular line of thought and move on, Cletus is not any derivative incarnation of Harry Potter and actually has relatively few similarities, such as: magic playing a central role in the story, a plot which starts quite a bit more innocent with shades of black and that becomes significantly darker as the narrative progresses, and a gradual exposition of backstory pivotal to the coherence of the plot. While epic in scope and with plenty of room for sequels, prequels, and all manner of alternate narratives set in the same world, it is not nor is it meant to be a seven-book epic.
Cletus is not PR for dabblers in the dark arts and does not make the audacious claim that dark wizards just need to be loved.
Cletus is not high-browed social commentary meant to show that the right circumstances will turn anyone into a monster. Nor, on the contrary, is it meant to show that people are born with a certain unavoidable destiny. Nor is it meant to show that it is a bewilderingly complex interaction of innate traits and acquired experiences that ultimately determines each person's destiny, although you might get that from hearing it. It also does not endorse the fluffy and vaguely Macguyverian idea that anyone can accomplish anything with whatever they happen to have on hand.
Cha cha (japanese pronunciation, not the dance)!
-R
Now for a few words about what Cletus the Dark Mage is NOT:
Cletus is not Brokeback Potter.
Cletus is not a spoof on Harry Potter set in the American South.
To finish this particular line of thought and move on, Cletus is not any derivative incarnation of Harry Potter and actually has relatively few similarities, such as: magic playing a central role in the story, a plot which starts quite a bit more innocent with shades of black and that becomes significantly darker as the narrative progresses, and a gradual exposition of backstory pivotal to the coherence of the plot. While epic in scope and with plenty of room for sequels, prequels, and all manner of alternate narratives set in the same world, it is not nor is it meant to be a seven-book epic.
Cletus is not PR for dabblers in the dark arts and does not make the audacious claim that dark wizards just need to be loved.
Cletus is not high-browed social commentary meant to show that the right circumstances will turn anyone into a monster. Nor, on the contrary, is it meant to show that people are born with a certain unavoidable destiny. Nor is it meant to show that it is a bewilderingly complex interaction of innate traits and acquired experiences that ultimately determines each person's destiny, although you might get that from hearing it. It also does not endorse the fluffy and vaguely Macguyverian idea that anyone can accomplish anything with whatever they happen to have on hand.
Cha cha (japanese pronunciation, not the dance)!
-R
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
How to propose to your fiance on Minecraft in five [easy] steps
1. Find a mountain.
2. Sheer half of it off so that you get a cliff.
3. Flatten and block-swap the land below the cliff as necessary, so that it is completely flat grassland (you will need to wait for grass to grow on any placed earth blocks)
4. Spell "Will you marry me, X/Y (name of woman/man) in torches and wait for a starry night.
5. Find a girl. Hit it off. Have a date that goes well. Have a fight - OK, have a lot of fights. Actually it's a million times better to fight a lot this early on than saving it for later, this will also help you two see if you are on the same page in terms of your VALUES and TRAJECTORY which are crucial in any long-term relationship. Be faithful and considerate to your partner. Try not only to make sure and put his/her needs before your own, but also that you've found a person with values similar to your own so that this isn't too much of a stretch for you, and also a similar life trajectory so that you reduce the possibility of running into big problems down the road. Make sure she thinks Minecraft is the sexiest thing ever. If she does not think Minecraft is the sexiest thing ever, see step 1 and repeat as necessary. Have her start playing your world a short distance from the cliff and "find her way" to the top - also make sure she doesn't actually FALL off the cliff to her death, as this will leave everyone with an ominous sense of foreboding.
Congratulations! You've proposed to your fiance in Minecraft in five easy steps!!
So no, I haven't done this yet, but I HAVE been playing a lot of Minecraft since DCB bought it for me - YESTERDAY. Did I mention that I am waiting to hear back on a really important interview and ought to be continuing my rigorous job search as per usual in case it doesn't pan out? Yah.
Rather than do that I think I'll build a series of interconnected sand colonies with defensively sealed sand tubes providing a monster-free pathway from colony to colony and glass viewports, preferibly surrounded by fast flowing water that snags monsters and drags them into the lava or into electric plates or fire surrounding the tubes. Safety and entertainment - all in one! Oh and I'd like it if you had periodic hatches (ok, doors) in the tube where you could accidentally let the lava in and destroy the entire network. It lends a sense of fragility and ephemeral je ne sais quois to the whole enterprise - very very artsy.
It's the future Watson.
Oh, and on the music of course - Minecraft has some decent tunes. I will admit that a great deal of the calmness and sweet, distant feel of it is achieved by passing the instruments through a low-pass filter so it sounds like they're being playing underwater. This in itself is extremely easy to do, but I admire the soundtrack for it's NON-INTRUSIVENESS and its SIMPLICITY. These are difficult things to pull off in a game soundtrack, where we as composers more often than not want to pull out all the stops and showcase everything we are capable of. So hats off to C418, and I look forward to hearing all of the game's music in the completed version.
Oh and now that I know about it, I want to get to the nether as soon as possible. My netbook STRUGGLES to run minecraft at anything resembling a smooth framerate, with framerate locked, fast graphics, and tiny rendering, so I have no idea how that would work in the hardware realm...but we'll see.
-R
2. Sheer half of it off so that you get a cliff.
3. Flatten and block-swap the land below the cliff as necessary, so that it is completely flat grassland (you will need to wait for grass to grow on any placed earth blocks)
4. Spell "Will you marry me, X/Y (name of woman/man) in torches and wait for a starry night.
5. Find a girl. Hit it off. Have a date that goes well. Have a fight - OK, have a lot of fights. Actually it's a million times better to fight a lot this early on than saving it for later, this will also help you two see if you are on the same page in terms of your VALUES and TRAJECTORY which are crucial in any long-term relationship. Be faithful and considerate to your partner. Try not only to make sure and put his/her needs before your own, but also that you've found a person with values similar to your own so that this isn't too much of a stretch for you, and also a similar life trajectory so that you reduce the possibility of running into big problems down the road. Make sure she thinks Minecraft is the sexiest thing ever. If she does not think Minecraft is the sexiest thing ever, see step 1 and repeat as necessary. Have her start playing your world a short distance from the cliff and "find her way" to the top - also make sure she doesn't actually FALL off the cliff to her death, as this will leave everyone with an ominous sense of foreboding.
Congratulations! You've proposed to your fiance in Minecraft in five easy steps!!
So no, I haven't done this yet, but I HAVE been playing a lot of Minecraft since DCB bought it for me - YESTERDAY. Did I mention that I am waiting to hear back on a really important interview and ought to be continuing my rigorous job search as per usual in case it doesn't pan out? Yah.
Rather than do that I think I'll build a series of interconnected sand colonies with defensively sealed sand tubes providing a monster-free pathway from colony to colony and glass viewports, preferibly surrounded by fast flowing water that snags monsters and drags them into the lava or into electric plates or fire surrounding the tubes. Safety and entertainment - all in one! Oh and I'd like it if you had periodic hatches (ok, doors) in the tube where you could accidentally let the lava in and destroy the entire network. It lends a sense of fragility and ephemeral je ne sais quois to the whole enterprise - very very artsy.
It's the future Watson.
Oh, and on the music of course - Minecraft has some decent tunes. I will admit that a great deal of the calmness and sweet, distant feel of it is achieved by passing the instruments through a low-pass filter so it sounds like they're being playing underwater. This in itself is extremely easy to do, but I admire the soundtrack for it's NON-INTRUSIVENESS and its SIMPLICITY. These are difficult things to pull off in a game soundtrack, where we as composers more often than not want to pull out all the stops and showcase everything we are capable of. So hats off to C418, and I look forward to hearing all of the game's music in the completed version.
Oh and now that I know about it, I want to get to the nether as soon as possible. My netbook STRUGGLES to run minecraft at anything resembling a smooth framerate, with framerate locked, fast graphics, and tiny rendering, so I have no idea how that would work in the hardware realm...but we'll see.
-R
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Cletuuuuuus Cletus Butter! And Jelly!
Check da reverb (www.reverbnation.com/wryder), I've put up some new tracks from Cletus: The Dark Mage, including the narrated introduction (you should imagine a crowd is there).
DCBSupafly and myself are in cahoots (cahoots I tell you!) with some upcoming creative work. Keep your heads peeled and your eyes googly. Googly shmoogly. He is also helping me with the audio editing for Cletus.
Without revealing anything of the story, Cletus is something I started working on specifically for the next Speed of Sound event I'd perform at. Speed of Sound is a monthly showcase of electronic artists that takes place in Bloomington IN. The original plan was to tell it like a traditional epic storyteller with my original soundtrack playing constantly in the background, and with the story being divided into three 20-minute acts. In the interests of maybe actually finishing it one day, while it will be very music-heavy I don't think I should force myself to either always have music playing in the background, or to always avoid situations in which the music merely loops. This is my first time bringing these two crafts together (music and storytelling) and while I'm a decent enough informal storyteller and composer, I want this project to be enjoyable for myself as well, not just my audience. There is really no reason to turn it into unpleasantness by setting the bar too high. I am CONSIDERING the possibility of breaking the story down into five minute episodes which I could finish about one a month. At that rate it would take me a year to tell the story, but it wouldn't stress me out too much and at least it would get told.
Part of the problem(?) is that I've been much less interested in working on Cletus since meeting my current girlfriend in July, despite her encouragement to work on it and my own desire to do so. Anybody else had this problem before? I'm slowly getting back to it but I wish I hadn't let it languish so long.
I am looking for some old bad sci-fi music for inspiration for a project DCB and I are working on. Open to suggestions.
DCBSupafly and myself are in cahoots (cahoots I tell you!) with some upcoming creative work. Keep your heads peeled and your eyes googly. Googly shmoogly. He is also helping me with the audio editing for Cletus.
Without revealing anything of the story, Cletus is something I started working on specifically for the next Speed of Sound event I'd perform at. Speed of Sound is a monthly showcase of electronic artists that takes place in Bloomington IN. The original plan was to tell it like a traditional epic storyteller with my original soundtrack playing constantly in the background, and with the story being divided into three 20-minute acts. In the interests of maybe actually finishing it one day, while it will be very music-heavy I don't think I should force myself to either always have music playing in the background, or to always avoid situations in which the music merely loops. This is my first time bringing these two crafts together (music and storytelling) and while I'm a decent enough informal storyteller and composer, I want this project to be enjoyable for myself as well, not just my audience. There is really no reason to turn it into unpleasantness by setting the bar too high. I am CONSIDERING the possibility of breaking the story down into five minute episodes which I could finish about one a month. At that rate it would take me a year to tell the story, but it wouldn't stress me out too much and at least it would get told.
Part of the problem(?) is that I've been much less interested in working on Cletus since meeting my current girlfriend in July, despite her encouragement to work on it and my own desire to do so. Anybody else had this problem before? I'm slowly getting back to it but I wish I hadn't let it languish so long.
I am looking for some old bad sci-fi music for inspiration for a project DCB and I are working on. Open to suggestions.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Inception stole my thunder!!!
So I was watching another video review of Halo Reach today (this one on ign.com) and decided that, as alluded to in my last post, I should reserve judgment a little bit on the soundtrack. While one of the tracks in the background sounded like pretty standard fare for O'Donnell and Salvatori - and in fact sounded remarkably like a jazzed up version of the empire theme from Final Fantasy VI - some of the rest of it gave me some pause. Not a huge steaming plate of pause mind you, but not a small room temperature bowl of pause either. Maybe like a miso soup appetizer pause. So while I scoff at the reviewers assessment that these guys turn out some of the most compelling soundtracks in videogames (Have you never listened to Symphony of the Night? Gears of War? And I sort of hate to say this since I think John Williams while he's done some mindblowing work is extremely overrated, but any of the fifty million Star Wars games? I mean damn, I wouldn't go so far as to call the two Modern Warfare soundtracks mind-blowing, and I definitely don't count MW2 among Hans Zimmer's most impressive efforts, but they are excellent in their own right and certainly beat the stuffing out of Halo), I'm anxious to hear the soundtrack now (and let's face it, play the game.) I'm going in expecting to be underwhelmed, so we'll see (I went into Avatar having read enough criticism that my expectations were very low, and it blew my mind).
Okay, briefly. Inception. The dungchen. I did it first (and to be clear, Philip Glass did it before me in the awesome soundtrack to Kundun and Tibetan Buddhists did it at least a millenium before that.) The dungchen is that massive trumpet used overwhelmingly (as in primarily, not way-too-much) in Tibetan Buddhist religious ceremonies that possesses that deep and booming (and badass) voice. Now apparently (not sure, one guy says it and I haven't researched the claim) Zimmer, unlike Glass, slowed down a recording of actual trumpets to produce the sound rather than using an actual dungchen for the Inception soundtrack. The result sounds really good and fits the mood of the movie very well. While I'm infinitely less skilled and experienced as a composer, I simply want to indicate that I finished Cloudbreaker, the final boss theme to Give me Your Lunch Money which also makes use of a doctored sample to replicate a Dungchen, back in I believe April, when the..well balls. Apparently a preview aired on the superbowl in February. Anyway, I just want to make clear that I wasn't aping Zimmer (though I probably will soon, Sherlock Holmes' soundtrack was sweeeeet!) in that particular aesthetic choice. Far from it, at the time I made it, I felt quite clever and innovative (and LUCKY, I'm not good at doctoring samples and it's not something I do often) for hitting on a combination of distortion and dynamic variance on a guitar string patch in Reason that made for a convincing dungchen, which is exactly what I was going for. Anyway!
I will confess that one of the reasons I don't go crazy over the Halo soundtracks is simply a matter of aesthetics. It's like when Yasunori Mitsuda went crazy after doing the Chrono Trigger soundtrack and decided to go all Celtic with everything from there on out (But Yasunori, we don't LIKE Celtic! Too damn bad!!!) Okay, that's not really fair. It's always fun to listen to people you admire and strive to emulate to one degree or another evolve as composers, but sometimes they evolve in the wrong directions. Of course it's a natural process for them, but you don't like it, so it must be wrong, yeah? Yeah exactly. Anyway, I'm pretty lukewarm about what they tend to go for in their tracks stylistically which in and of itself is difficult to fault them for. Also, they used the exact some soundtrack from Halo to Halo 3. That is one of my biggest complaints. If there were any new tracks at all (which OK, come on, I know there were) they were thoroughly underwhelming. This wasn't thematic renovation, it was downright self-plagiarism and quite frankly it's insulting to the audience.
-R
Okay, briefly. Inception. The dungchen. I did it first (and to be clear, Philip Glass did it before me in the awesome soundtrack to Kundun and Tibetan Buddhists did it at least a millenium before that.) The dungchen is that massive trumpet used overwhelmingly (as in primarily, not way-too-much) in Tibetan Buddhist religious ceremonies that possesses that deep and booming (and badass) voice. Now apparently (not sure, one guy says it and I haven't researched the claim) Zimmer, unlike Glass, slowed down a recording of actual trumpets to produce the sound rather than using an actual dungchen for the Inception soundtrack. The result sounds really good and fits the mood of the movie very well. While I'm infinitely less skilled and experienced as a composer, I simply want to indicate that I finished Cloudbreaker, the final boss theme to Give me Your Lunch Money which also makes use of a doctored sample to replicate a Dungchen, back in I believe April, when the..well balls. Apparently a preview aired on the superbowl in February. Anyway, I just want to make clear that I wasn't aping Zimmer (though I probably will soon, Sherlock Holmes' soundtrack was sweeeeet!) in that particular aesthetic choice. Far from it, at the time I made it, I felt quite clever and innovative (and LUCKY, I'm not good at doctoring samples and it's not something I do often) for hitting on a combination of distortion and dynamic variance on a guitar string patch in Reason that made for a convincing dungchen, which is exactly what I was going for. Anyway!
I will confess that one of the reasons I don't go crazy over the Halo soundtracks is simply a matter of aesthetics. It's like when Yasunori Mitsuda went crazy after doing the Chrono Trigger soundtrack and decided to go all Celtic with everything from there on out (But Yasunori, we don't LIKE Celtic! Too damn bad!!!) Okay, that's not really fair. It's always fun to listen to people you admire and strive to emulate to one degree or another evolve as composers, but sometimes they evolve in the wrong directions. Of course it's a natural process for them, but you don't like it, so it must be wrong, yeah? Yeah exactly. Anyway, I'm pretty lukewarm about what they tend to go for in their tracks stylistically which in and of itself is difficult to fault them for. Also, they used the exact some soundtrack from Halo to Halo 3. That is one of my biggest complaints. If there were any new tracks at all (which OK, come on, I know there were) they were thoroughly underwhelming. This wasn't thematic renovation, it was downright self-plagiarism and quite frankly it's insulting to the audience.
-R
Monday, November 8, 2010
Doomed Heretic Seeks Country-Born Dark Mage for Companionship, Maybe More
FIRST POST!!!
Not really. [ed. - except yes]. I suppose there should be an explanation about the lack of posts.
Anyway, I've been playing a lot of Doom II and Heretic lately. Meanwhile, my latest and most massivest creative project to date (OK, maybe not really, but this one I actually thought I stood a chance of finishing until more recently), Cletus the Dark Mage, has been languishing. Simply put, I ran out of gas. A friend of a friend of mine had said by way of said friend that he might be interested in doing some voicework, as was potentially said friend. With me? Good. I love being obnoxious. Anyway, this led me to conceive of two different versions of Cletus, the "live" or narrated version that I would tell like a bard or traditional epic story-teller, complete with a largely automated set of original music, and the "radio" version, complete with different voices for different characters and that could be distributed on the internet or a CD or something. Well let me just tell you the radio version is dead. My friend and friend's friend appear to have forgotten or lost interest (forgotten, just verified by gmail chat so maybe we'll see some developments?). Anyway I'm treating the radio version as dead until proven live.
Cletus the Dark Mage, since this is the first time you've probably all heard about it, is an epic tale. Of what exactly I don't want to reveal at this point. I hope to have at least sample versions of some of the music tracks I plan on using for it up soon on the web site; I have one or two tracks which are actually in pretty advanced stages of development, I just haven't messed with them in ages.
In the mean time, you should really download the Adrift text adventure runner and my friend Dan Berlin's game "Give me Your Lunch Money", a tale of an eight-year old inventor's fight against the most heinous of schoolyard injustices. I did the music for it, some of which you can hear on the site, but it was all tailored specifically for this game and most of it from the ground up (although the "flawless victory" chord progression - the first track i worked on, which became minorfied for "a boy's need to set things right" and for the thematic medley to cloudbreaker, the final boss theme, was something i had already been tinkering with on the piano when i started working on the game's score). So you should really experience the music in its native context, is all I'm saying. It really is an engaging and amusing game and can be beaten in anywhere from an hour (if you take your time and maybe get stuck some) to five minutes if you know exactly what you're doing and tear through the thing without experiencing the immersive elementary school atmosphere or listening to the soundtrack (boo!) (Note: this is all assuming you've played a text adventure before! Results may vary for noobs!)
Daniel also recently turned out a halloween-themed game for a contest with a three-hour time-limit, and frankly I'm floored by the quality given the constraints. Now that the contest is over he'll be cleaning it up and reworking it some, and I'll likely be scoring it so keep your heads peeled.
I want to say a little bit more about the music for Doom II and Heretic. Although on the whole I dig Heretic's soundtrack more, one thing I really like about the soundtrack to Doom II is how thematic it is. Not that the composer does much from track to track in terms of weaving them together, but very often tracks will take the form of: Opening statement of theme. Restate theme with different instruments. Modulation of theme optional. Restate theme with different instruments. Restate them with different instruments [[and dynamics]]. Rinse and repeat. Below is a classic example:
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