The Quality of Art

I mentioned our class in this thread on ZBrushCentral. It could get interesting if this turns into a serious discussion.

http://www.pixolator.com/zbc/showthread.php?p=370914&posted=1#post370914

Capstone Breakthroughs

So I thought I was going to need a programmer, but I may not need one as much as I thought. I thought I was going to need a plug-in written for me to create some of the 3d features I've been envisioning, but I just found an already existing plug-in that seems to have all the features I need. I will still need somebody more knowledgeable to help me figure out some scripting, but I may already have a couple willing and able people for that.

So all I need now is a co-writer and a sound effects/music guy, and I will be good to go. I'm about to e-mail one of my parent's old friends from college who has already done some digital comic work.

I opened up Neobook for the first time today. I know I should have done this a long time ago, but ZBrush is so addictive! Neobook is an amazing program. I can literally drag and drop multimedia files onto a page and choose scripting commands from a pre-fabricated list. When finished, I hit compile, and it embeds the files into the project, compresses, and exports the whole package as a stand-alone .exe file that anybody can enjoy with a simple double-click. It's almost too good to be true. All I need to do is make art, drag-and-drop it onto a page, and do a bit of scripting work to accomplish all these lofty ideas that I've been so excited about.

I literally made the following file in about 30 seconds. http://rapidshare.com/files/37003486/Test.exe.html

Sugar Gliders Update

We made major strides tonight! They're really beginning to warm up to us. When they first woke up, they still crabbed at us and retreated from our hands. Now that I'm about to go to bed, they no longer crab at me or flee my hands. They curiously sniff and then nibble at my fingers. They even allow me to pet them a little bit. Towards the end, I had them coming to me almost by command. If I stood nearby in a convenient place and made some encouraging noises, and maybe held my hand out, I could get them to jump onto me.

They are so very playful and interesting, and incredible climbers. Today, they were climbing on a 7' tall lamp of ours made of smooth plastic. They could only reach about halfway around it and couldn't get any grip with their claws, but still managed to scurry up the thing without too much effort. The way they climb drapes or wires is incredibly human-like. They pull themselves along hand over hand with their front paws just like a soldier climbing a rope. When they're on the ground (which isn't often) they hop and skitter from place to place very much like chipmunks.

Their noises are really fascinating. I mentioned crabbing already. That's the "leave me alone" noise they make when they're upset. It's a really loud noise that sounds very much like one of those old pencil sharpeners where you turned the handle and it broke your pencil every time. Everybody jumps the first time they hear it. They bark like puppies when they're happy. They make a coarse chirping noise when they argue or play rough with eachother. I also heard a noise like air being released from a valve, but I have no idea what that one meant.

And they're so smart too. They want to explore and figure out everything around them. We have a bunch of baby toys in their cage, and they play with them the same ways an infant does. Tonight I watched them chase eachother around in an almost hide and seek fashion. For a little while, I played a game with them where I repeatedly surprised them by poking them from behind, and they seemed to love it.

Overall, I'm in love. I've never had such a fascinating pet, and I've had quite a few pets. They're only 8 weeks old. I wonder how they're going to develop over the next 10-15 years of their lives.

Sugar Gliders!!!!!!!

So a few weeks ago, my wife and I decided that a new pet would be good for us. Neither of us has as much time to spend with Hiro as we need to, and he doesn't get to see other kids much. We thought that a pet could be great for him in these circumstances.

We wanted something that can offer alot of playfulness, energy, and affection, but my wife and I both hate traditional pets. I love cats, but she's allergic. We both love reptiles, but they're not companions and they carry salmonella. Our snake has already made Hiro sick a couple times. Birds, dogs, fish, and rodents were all eliminated with little discussion. My wife did some research and discovered Sugar Gliders.

Sugar Gliders are little chipmunk sized marsupials native to Australia. They have flaps of skin along their sides like flying squirrels so they can glide (up to 300 yards, I hear). Their climbing ability is amazing, and beats out any other animal I've witnessed. They're nocturnal.

They're also born to be pets. In the wild, they only live 2 - 3 years. As pets, they often live 10 - 15 years. They love social interaction and bond well with humans. Glider owners are known to walk around in public with them simply perched on a shoulder or sleeping in a pocket because the owner is like home to them and they won't run away. They're extremely curious and playful. Their waking periods are 10 - 12 hours long, so there's tons of time to interact with them even if you sleep at night. They often learn their names and can be trained to respond to commands. They're even relatively clean. I've been pooped on several times, but it hasn't really bothered me. They poop little pea-sized dry pellets that don't really make much mess at all.

The only negatives I've seen so far with Sugar Glider pets? They're fragile, they're mischievous, and their diet requires alot of special attention. That's it. Otherwise they are perfect pets.

So my wife went looking for Sugar Glider offers online. They're a pretty rare find at a pet store. We managed to find a girl near Chicago who just had 2 baby sisters and was offering them for standard price. Perfect. As of now, they're about 8 weeks old and have only been weened for a week. Yesterday, we all piled into the car and went to pick them up, early in the morning. We spent the day exhausted as all hell preparing everything for when they woke up (carrying them around in a pouch hanging around our necks as we did so). Around 11:30 pm when they finally woke up, that exhausted just melted away.

They were frightened as all hell with the sudden change and seperation from their previous family, but we still had them eating out of our hands within 10 minutes. Within 30 minutes, they were both freely darting and climbing all over our computer room and having a blast exploring. They still need coaxing before they'll come to us, and they're still afraid of Hiro... but I am still amazed at how smoothly it went. I can't wait until they wake up again tonight, not long after I get back from class :)

I expect that they'll be bonded well enough by next week that I could take them to class. In the meantime, I'll have pictures and maybe a youtube video coming soon.

Oh ya. Their names are Ninja and Cherry.

What If...

I wasn't so sure about this exercise when I first started, but I ended up really liking it. I found that my What If's were kinda lame in the beginning and came to me really slowly, but as I continued they kept getting more creative, epic, and easier to conjure.

1. What If... ZBrush had a timeline?
2. What If... I had never discovered the internet?
3. What If... I had been a popular kid in school?
4. What If... You could record your dreams to watch again later?
5. What If... People listened to children?
6. What If... I had never discovered Pink Floyd?
7. What If... Syd Barrett had stayed with the band?
8. What If... Indoctrinating children was illegal?
9. What If... Walmart never happened?
10. What If... The earth was a hollow sphere, and we lived inside of it?
11. What If... I never had to sleep?
12. What If... The human sex drive disappeared?
13. What If... We all looked the same?
14. What If... Einstein never passed on the secret to the atom bomb?
15. What If... The ideals of Feudal Japan caught on in the modern world?
(I think America would have to commit one massive seppuku)
16. What If... Smoking cured cancer, but caused amnesia?
17. What If... We could work 24/7 and stay perfectly healthy?
How many people would live their lives in a cubicle?
18. What If... Superman was real? Would we work him to death?
19. What If... Empathy was a physical sixth sense, and we always felt the pain of those around us?
20. What If... Politicians faced real consequences for lies or recklessness?
21. What If... A zombie outbreak actually happened?
22. What If... We could all switch gender, just for a while?
23. What If... Making art was as easy as downloading thoughts?
Would art school be nothing but Seeing Sideways classes?
24. What If... All the possibilities of nanotechnology were realized, soon?
25. What If... I could ask god one question, but he could only answer with a number?
26. What If... God announced to the world that their is no meaning to life?
Would there be anarchy?
27. What If... I could do anything I wanted, just one time, and nobody could ever know what it was?
Would it be something bad?
28. What If... The human race had an infinite attention span?
29. What If... I could communicate or travel through a picture?
30. What If... We harvested, processed, and manufactured the entire earth?
Could we live on a planet made of junk?
Would it hold together or just disperse and disappear?
31. What If... I invented a new primary color?
32. What If... I could turn blood into gold?
33. What If... Insects waged war on humanity?
34. What If... Daylight was tinted red?
35. What If... I could smell music?
36. What If... By law, everybody had to say something nice at least twice a day?
37. What If... Violence disappeared from modern film?
38. What If... Guns didn't exist?
39. What If... The earth reversed its rotation & orbit today?
40. What If... Disputes were settled with games rather than violence?
41. What If... My third eye suddenly opened?
42. What If... Cannibalism turned mainstream?
43. What If... I was a prophet who found messages in the noses of perfect strangers?
44. What If... The entire world population slept through an entire day?
45. What If... Negative thoughts were an energy source?
46. What If... My child grew up to be a Buddha?
47. What If... The top 10 richest people in the world distributed their wealth to the poorest 10%?
48. What If... Caffiene ceased to exist?
49. What If... Every written record in the world vanished?
50. What If... I thought of something revolutionary for my 50th What If?

Now the Gimmicks

Now that I've told you about my story, here is how I want to tell my story.

I want to make a digital comic book incorporating motion and sound. I want to take advantage of every method to enhance immersion and turn my story into a personal experience.

It will still be sequential art. You will turn pages and recieve the story frame by frame. However, I will encourage the audience to follow their eyes with their mouse cursor because they will be able to trigger events on the page and visuals and audio will evolve as they progress through the story in ways that are slightly beyond the traditional frame-by-frame.

So before I get into specifics, let me explain the reasoning behind this. I don't know where this idea first came from. It just popped into my head when I was talking to a friend about capstones -- "I could try combining animation and comics" -- and I casually mentioned it to him. He told me it was a great idea that I really needed to hang onto, which kind of surprised me, so I thought about it a whole bunch more.

I started thinking about the strengths of comics and film, and found that they are wonderfully opposed. In my opinion, comics have their strength in pacing and dialogue. The reader can dwell on any frame of artwork or any line of text as long as they feel like, and absorb it as much as they need to before moving on. This allows them to fully appreciate a single piece of art which may introduce a setting or character or they can ponder the meaning of a single line of dialogue that would be gone in seconds if recited on film. I have also always personally found that dialogue is more powerful when read off a page and recited in your head, rather than heard from an actor. I think comics find their weakness in action. So many comics are so action oriented, but all we ever get to see is heroes and villains frozen in dynamic poses.

This is where film thrives. We get to see the motion and hear the sounds associated. Motion and sound can really make us feel the woosh of a flying object or the jar of an impact. When something's moving fast, we can really see how fast it moves. This makes a huge difference in the experience of a story.

Unfortunately, film does not allow us to experience a story at our own pace. Stories that deserve several hours are crammed into 2 hours. When an actor delivers a line, we don't have time to think about it. Something else is immediately happening. When we discover a new person or place, we don't get to just stop and stare and absorb the visual. We get a quick pan or zoom and then we're ushered along to something else. Plus, actors are only as good as they actually are, where a character on a page is as convincing as we can imagine them.

I attended Scott McCloud's presentation a while ago, and he gave me another angle. He criticized one existing attempt at a comic incorporating motion/sound. He called it a "self-presenting" comic. The problem with it was, it kept grabbing control away from the audience and then giving it back. It couldn't figure out if it was presenting itself or if the audience was exploring it by their own will.

So I want to take the best of both worlds. I have thought of several do's and don'ts and alot of possibilities and their implications for a story.

First, and most obvious, I will make use of minimal, looping background music. Music can set a mood/atmosphere, tell a story by itself, and generally increase immersion. Music is especially powerful when it's taken away from a story. When you have music, and then suddenly you don't have music, you know something important is happening. I want to take full advantage of this powerful tool of storytelling. Of course, I will give the audience as much control as possible, even over music. As the audience moves their mouse from point A to point B on the page, the music might evolve as the scene progresses. Layers can be added to or taken away from a musical loop as cued by the mouse cursor, it can be sped up/slowed down, or it can even be moved from speaker to speaker for spatial effects. There can even be buttons on the page relating to your typical stereo controls.

Next, I'm going to make use of alot of animated GIFs. This is where most of the motion in the comic will come into play. I'm especially imagining alot of looping GIFs. Imagine a picture looking up at a superhero standing at the top of a building with his cape flapping in the wind, or grass swaying in a field. I understand that this may be distracting and draw your eye to a frame you haven't reached yet, so most likely these looping animations will be triggered by mouse-over and halt when the mouse is removed. This is where following your eyes with the mouse cursor becomes very important.

Even more so with the next example. Imagine being able to trigger events on a page with motions or clicks of your mouse. Imagine that the final frame on a page depicts the protagonist's hand on a doorknob. Instead of turning the page to find out what's behind it, you click on the doorknob and see the door open to reveal what's behind. More immersion. More personal experience for the audience.

I have noticed that I always have a tendency to glance at the bottom of a page before I have actually gotten there. Or I just can't resist reading the very last sentence of a book before I'm even halfway through. I HATE having the ability to do that. It's so difficult to restrain my own eyes from that split second glance which can ruin a surprise. An animated GIF triggered by mouse-over can completely solve this problem.

You're reading a page in a comic book. It's a quiet scene in a restaurant, with two characters engaged in casual conversation. Looks pretty calm all the way down the page. You're following your eyes with the mouse cursor as you read and appreciate the artwork. Looping gifs show your common cafe activity with waitresses walking around and people entering and exiting. You move on to another frame about halfway down the page. Another looping gif much in the same style as those before it. A second or two into this frame, a character walking by in the background pulls out a gun and shoots somebody. Suddenly, everything beyond this point on the page transforms to reveal what's really happening. It catches you completely by surprise. The sound of the gunshot even makes you jump. Totally possible.

I wouldn't call this interactive. The audience has no control over the content of the story (though this could be done, it's not what I want to do). Instead, the audience has control over their experience of the story.

Also imagine how fun it would be to be presented with a 3d sculpture of an important object or character in the story, and be able to interactively rotate it on the digital comic page. Look at one of those superhero comics where they profile a character. They'll sometimes just give you a picture of the guy on a blank white background with a bunch of information about them. Same thing, except you get to move him around and look at him from any angle, zoom in/out, etc.

Finally, here's an idea that I cant claim. A friend offered this to me when I was talking to him about my idea after the Scott McCloud thing. I call it the zFrame. What if you had a static frame on a page, the same as any other. Except you can trigger this frame to become a free-floating camera in a 3d scene. You're reading down the page and you come to this frame. You click on it, and suddenly you can move around inside of it and explore it in full 3d. Imagine the details you could hide in such a scene for an audience to discover? I'm not dead set on any practical storytelling use for this device yet, but I'm sure it's there. I just haven't thought of it yet.

How am I going to make all of this happen? Well first I need help with writing the story, and I have very limited experience in sound production. This is also going to involve alot of scripting and a couple of plug-in applications which will require programming. I need help, and I need it from creative people -- people who can think sideways!

Otherwise, I will be creating all of my images and most of my animation with ZBrush. I would not be attempting this program at all without certain features that just became available in ZBrush 3. First, it's incredibly easy to create high-detail 3d images and render them quickly. Second, ZBrush 3 introduced something called transpose. Transpose allows me to fully pose and deform any 3d character without any rigging or preparation. Third, ZBrush 3 even introduced layers in 3d. You know how layers work in photoshop? It's the same thing as applied to 3d sculpture. This means I can make a base model of any character and quickly modify him and pose him for any scene and create high-quality 3d imagery frame by frame with very little effort.

Also, I discovered an application called Neobook, which describes itself as a tool for creating multimedia artwork, tools, and applications. With Neobook, I can arrange images, videos, and sounds on a digital page along with scripting and plug-ins written in several programming languages. It's a match made in heaven. It even exports your finished work as a stand-alone .exe file, so anybody who wants to read my digital comic will need nothing to do so. They just download and run the .exe file.

So there's my idea. I've put alot of thought into it, but I think I can push it even farther. However, I don't think I can do it without help. I need alot of input and discussion if I'm going to make this idea into everything it can be.

I also want to ask something of everybody who read this post. I am really trusting everybody in this class by openly discussing all of these ideas. I'm aiming to do some things that I think nobody has ever seen before. Please be careful about taking these ideas outside of the class, if you do so at all. People like me get taken advantage of all the time by others with a little ambition and alot more resources.

I am really looking forward to comments!

28 Weeks Later

*** Mild Spoilers!!! ***

Wow. They really saw sideways with this movie. It was fantastic and truly terrifying. I can sit through most media without flinching, but I had my hand clapped over my mouth through much of this movie. Before I get into plot, just let me say that the visuals, music, sound effects, acting, and EVERYTHING were just excellent.

Now here's what I think they did differently in this movie from any other zombie movie I've seen. If you haven't seen it, this gets kinda spoilerish.

People who have seen a few zombie movies (or survival oriented) movies should pick up on this very easily. Stop and think to yourself -- What causes shit to hit the fan every. single. time? Every time the survivors get something good going for themselves, who screws it up? How does it end? Usually one person in the group does something selfish and ends up screwing them all, right? Or an outside group enters the scene with malicious intent.

I cannot think of a single survival story at the moment that doesn't follow this trend. Human greed, selfishness, mistrust, competition, violent nature, etc always turns around on us right? Even 28 Days Later had very much the same idea.

28 Weeks Later seems to offer exactly the opposite message. Now I'm not saying that the entire cast of the movie is a bunch of saints. But every time one of the characters is faced with a decision to be either compassionate or practical, they choose compassionate. Plus, in general, everybody in the movie acts very believably and very intelligently. When forced to be practical, people choose practical. It's the seemingly innocent choices that always screw them.

And throughout the movie, every time somebody does something compassionate, it is punished in increasing numbers of lives.

Through the entire movie people are faced with seemingly harmless decisions. "There's a child survivor and no infected in sight, let's let him in the house. The infection is gone, let's allow children into the reconstruction colony. The infection is gone, I won't shoot these children when they sneak out of the colony. The infection is gone, this survivor couldn't possibly be a carrier. Let's delay the order to kill without discrimination until absolutely necessary. I've been ordered to kill without discrimination, but he's just a child and he's not infected. I should be protecting this kid. I've got a helicopter and these are just kids. They don't act like infected. There can't be any harm in giving them a ride out of the country, right?"

The most striking example is a common theme throughout the movie. This woman and her kids can carry the virus without getting violent. Her blood carries a partial immunity. This could be interpreted as a positive or negative thing. The negative thought is that this is a carrier who can infiltrate society without being identified. If allowed to live a normal life, they could be the source of another outbreak that nobody will be prepared for.

Almost everybody in the movie sees it the positive way. This is just a kid. I can't kill a kid, it's inhuman. They're a hope for humanity. Their blood could lead to a cure. People band together throughout the movie to save these kids and get them to safety. In the end, their compassionate decisions carry the infection over to mainland Europe.

Now that is a horror movie! A million times I've seen the message "People are shit and we're going to get eachother killed." It's kind of a downer, but no big news, right? Now I'm faced with the message "People are soft and we're going to get eachother killed. Sometimes practical safety for the greater good overrides humanity." And then they present a situation where several people should have looked a child in the face and realized that they were dealing with something bigger than the life of a child, bigger than their own feelings of humanity or goodwill, and bigger than their personal judgement.

Looking back on that movie, I realize I would have made all the same decisions and got those kids safely to the continent. Now I have to face the idea that those decisions would have led to global catastrophe. The entire movie had me rooting for those kids. Then it was incredible how the story spat in my face when it showed them flowing over the ocean. What a turnaround when I suddenly find myself thinking "Oh my god you should have killed them." That's real horror, and that's definitely Seeing Sideways.

I hope nobody hates me for spoiling the movie for them :P... if you haven't seen it and you can stomach some intense heart-wrenching terror, then it's a definite must-see.

My Story Synopsis

Alright so yesterday I introduced the driving force of my character which is producing this story that I want to be my capstone. Now I think it's time to actually introduce the story. This will probably be even longer than the last post... sorry :/

Then next time I get a chance to post, I will introduce the ideas I have for actually delivering this story. I honestly don't know which I'm more excited about :)

So first off, the purpose of this story will be as a vehicle for my own personal journey. I think this kind of approach always produces the best art. I want to put all the ideals I outlined before through a merciless gauntlet.

I'm not going to be out of control, though. I am going to be very ambitious, but I am trying to reign myself in to a few core themes.

The core of this story is I want to explore the idea of suffering as a form of learning. I personally don't believe that there is any good excuse for one human being to cause another suffering, but I can easily see how I could be wrong. I do think that suffering is an important part of the experience of life, I just cannot justify the willful act of inflicting it on another human being. Then there's another element. If we do not see suffering in the world, how do we learn to avoid it? Don't we recognize good when we see bad? If I never experience wrongful treatment at the hands of another, how likely am I to recognize when I wrong another? Even if it isn't consciously recognized, could this be the reason people hurt eachother?

I will introduce some other minor themes as I get to them in my synopsis.

The story begins in an eastern monastery. I'm not tying myself down to any specific geographic or religious setting, as I do not claim enough knowledge to do any true justice. I'm pretty sure I can pull off something vanilla, though, and suiting to the story. Just think eastern and zen-like. The main character (let's just call him Hero for now) is a spiritual student here. He is a quiet, peaceful, enlightened person. He's talented but humble. He's intelligent but has little desire for anything other than spiritual wisdom. You wouldn't know it watching him, but he's very passionate about life and soaks up every moment. He cannot fathom harming another person under any circumstances. When he is not busy developing himself in mind, body and spirit, he is seeking new and positive experiences with as varied a crowd as he can find, and engaging in charitable activities.

After introducing this Hero, Villain steps into the scene. Villain is a young westerner (yes I am also thinking of exploring the clash of east & west as a minor theme) who comes to reside here for reasons I haven't decided yet. Perhaps his parents are anthropologists or something. Villain is richly enladen with talent and genius. Hero is really interested in Villain and they hit it off at first. They have alot to learn from eachother, they're both very open in sharing their different ideas, they spend alot of time together.

However, Villain is a little more complex and a little more broken inside than Hero. Villain lacks emotional depth, especially compassion. He's not a psycho or a sadist or anything. He's not a cold, calculating killer or anything like that. Villain sees the world as a stage. As long as he has the power to make it happen, he's the director. All he needs to do is set the right forces in motion and enjoy the show. He's obsessed with extremes of human emotion. He recognizes a depth in others that he lacks in himself, so he strives to bring these things out in people whenever possible. Despite not being able to relate intimately, he does understand people, and is terrifyingly adept at pulling strings.

Something tragic will happen, which will bring all the passion out of Hero, right before Villain's eyes. Right here, Villain will fall in love with Hero as a subject for play. There is no greater performer for his stage. Villain begins pulling strings, coercing the naive and innocent Hero into more and more passionate performances. Hero is not dense, and will recognize this fairly quickly.

Of course, a confrontation follows. Hero cannot understand Villain or the events unfolding around him. He doesn't know how to approach this, but he knows he needs to do something. His peaceful nature still won't allow him to act violently. At a loss, all he can conjure is an intense verbal attack/inquiry.

"Don't you feel the pain you're bringing here?! Why did you come here?! Things used to be peaceful! Things used to be happy! You're ruining lives and it's senseless! Nobody deserves this!"

Villain serenely soaks up the spectacle, unhurt. He's a little lost and recognizes how close he is to breaking his favorite toy and losing the director's seat. At the same time, he's loving every minute of it. Eventually he will calmly interrupt the tirade with a couple smug lines.

"Ruining? Deserving? Dear Hero, I've come to understand something. You need me. The WORLD needs me! I will prove it to you."

At this point, Villain will deal Hero a swift and efficient death. End of first issue (tentitavely). What a cliffhanger, eh?

Here I am not sure if I will incorporate a mystical element to the story or not. I could keep it pure sci-fi or I could mix genres. I love defying genres, so I will probably incorporate some mysticism here and portray Hero passing on to an afterlife. I'm tempted to even incorporate a divine encounter where Hero is cryptically informed that his role in this life is not fulfilled, and that Villain still serves a purpose as well.

However, this will only be a fun, artistic scene. This will be me stretching my creative legs and preparing the audience for a wild ride.

The finality of Hero's rest is broken. He's summoned back into a new physical shell. He wakes up to find an old and barely human Villain watching over him in a very futuristic setting. His new body is that of an android.

Villain will explain that this new body is an extremely powerful weapon. It's decked out with weapons and extremely difficult to destroy, but its main function is the constant gathering of energy from its environment. This energy can only be stored up to a certain point, at which point the body will detonate in a global scale catastrophe.

There are also certain rules hard-coded into this machine body which take precedence over Hero's own control. First, the energy stored by this android can only be released through its built in weapons. Second, the android body's built-in functions must recognize a physical threat in order to trigger release of these weapons. Third, the body will block any action with self-destructive intent. This means that Hero is physically unable to cause himself direct physical harm, or to initiate a conflict with no intention to defend himself, and the machine will automatically flee on its own if it somehow ends up facing a danger Hiro fails to take action against. Somebody even proposed to me that there be a mechanism in place where if Hero dies, he is summoned again into another machine body.

At the end of this scene, Villain will say something smug and die. I haven't yet decided how, but this whole thing has been carefully orchestrated by Villain over many years. The goal of the whole thing (besides being a great show which will of course be recorded in its entirety), is to prove to Hero that Villain is a necessary component of the world and of Hero's own life. So just to be thorough, Villain temporarily ends himself here.

Hero doesn't have alot of time to contemplate his situation here. The only possible course of action he can come up with as a compassionate person is to direct his energies towards people who cause suffering. So Hero begins wandering the world in search of a powerful, wicked person capable of destroying him.

Hero faces many such people. They all fail. Hero begins to recognize that he has no equal in martial prowess, and he is becoming an unbalancing force in the world. In the absence of evil (using the term evil only for its convenience) he recognizes good people seemingly growing confused and performing evil acts. I imagine symbolizing this with the yin-yang. Imagine the black side shrinking and white spilling over and turning black to fill the void, the whole thing spinning more and more out of control.

People seem to forget the meaning of right and wrong when they're no longer presented with examples of wrong. He becomes ever more aware of a cultural pattern where people grow ignorant of eachother's suffering. Waves of seemingly innocent cruelty, almost like bullies at a playground, sweep through society and then subside as understanding returns. Of course, this stretches out over a long period of time -- generations.

Hero grows ever more desperate for a solution. There needs to be an equal opposite. The world needs a cruel influence just as strong as Hero's compassion. Hero returns to the place where he first awoke in his android shell. There he discovers a body just like his own, and the means to summon an occupant for it. He summons the most terrible and decadent spirit he can reach.

It turns out to be Villain, who tritely offers a well-recited "I told you so" and flees. They remain locked in conflict as perfect equals, with Villain always hiding and pulling strings from the shadows, stepping in directly only at the last second to keep Hero and himself from exploding and getting all the emotional performance from him that he can.

I have some more ideas, but this is the core of the story. I'd love any comments and criticisms I can get from anybody. Most of the reason I took this class is to launch this project with a brainstorm like this.

Also, I don't have much confidence in my writing skills. I'm actively seeking a co-writer. Somebody to help me with sound production would be fantastic as well. If anybody is interested, please tell me! I have 4 or 5 more classes left before I graduate, and all of them are lined up towards production of this project. My plan is to have the first issue, at least, of this story all planned and my storytelling methods well hammered out by the end of summer. Fall and Spring will be straightforward production. I want to release my first issue as a free download and as my capstone project about a year from now, and then I would love to continue the story in some commercial form if at all possible.

Spiderman 3

I saw it. I enjoyed it.... but they were definitely looking dead on straight forward when they were making that movie. It was good... just good... but not great. The first two were great.

No regrets. Still happy I saw it. But still just a little let down.

Me, Pacifist

My primary goal with this class is to develop some story and storytelling ideas that I have. These are going to translate into a finished capstone project a year from now, but I would actually love to continue this project beyond school. I'm hoping to get tons of feedback, inspiration, and ideas from this class, and I will absolutely plaster thanks and credit all over my work dedicated to whoever deserves it.

To get started, everybody really needs to know some things about myself.

I am an idealist to the core. First and foremost in this regard, I am a pacifist. I have naturally been a pacifist my entire life. I was constantly picked on through most of my public schooling, often facing genuinely malicious behavior from classmates and even teachers. Somehow, even before I had consciously decided I was a pacifist (around age 15) I had almost no urge to cause physical harm to anyone. I pushed somebody down once when I was around 8 years old. To this day, I still count that as the only time I've intentionally caused another person physical harm... not like I actually hurt him :P

This pacifist nature of mine is going to be absolutely central to the story I am writing for my capstone. I am not going to blindly promote my ideals through this story, either. I want to run my ideas through a gauntlet of obstacles and tests and see if they come out the other side intact. I've constantly sought to test my ideas at every opportunity ever since I started to seriously think about life around age 15. I engage in debates constantly, often getting myself in trouble with people who don't like their ideas contested as I do.

I will post a synopsis of my story concept and more aspects of myself later. For now, I think this is a good way to lead into things.

Let me expand on this by explaining my reasoning behind pacifism.

First off, I think that human experience itself is the most precious work of art in the world. I think any shortening or spoiling of human experience is the most terrible thing imagineable. That is not to say that I see death itself as terrible, but the intentional infliction of death or suffering.

I also do not believe in good and evil people. I honestly believe that people are people. The world thrusts countless different circumstances on everybody which make us different. Some people end up damaged by these circumstances, or obtain perspectives of other people which lead to violence. Thus, I often say that there are no evil people, only misled people.

I also believe that most of the violence in the world today is justified as being a means to end violence. Most people believe that the best course of action available towards creating a peaceful world is simply to remove violent people from it, even if by violent means. I'm starting to refer to this in my head as the soldier mentality. It is the cold, hard duty of reality that the soldier sees as being terrible and ironic, but inevitable truth.

Lately, I like to put these principles into numbers. The more I attempt to simplify these ideas, the more I realize that they really can be reduced to simple logic and almost even math.

I like to represent these ideas with simple 1's and 0's. Let's say that a violent person (that is any person who performs or is willing to perform a violent act) is represented by a 1. Any person who is consciously and devotedly non-violent is a 0. I know that there is alot more grey area in the real world, but for the purposes of abstract demonstration, it really gets the point across.

The soldier expects the world to operate as the following.

1 - 1 = 0

That is, violence removed via violence equals non-violence.

But in reality, it's violence + violence which does NOT = non-violence. It is a cause-and-effect system which only escalates.

if you want a more real-world relevant explanation, remember that there are billions of people in the world, and any person who commits a violent act can be seen as a 1 by any other person regardless of intent. So one person violently destroys another person because they're percieved as violent, but then that person is percieved as violent by any number of others. Soldier's duty kicks in and the cycle runs endlessly. In my experience, soldier's mentality is very prevalent in the world, and there is an endless supply of 1's to keep up the fight.

The only substantial step towards a peaceful world is the spread of 0's.

A peaceful world is a world without violence. The absence of violence in the world is only attained through the conscious decision of the individual to be non-violent. However, this is not an easy decision to make, if one takes their own ethical framework seriously. I still wrestle with it. There is a large element of fear to overcome, because the majority percieves the only alternative to violence as being victimization.

So I've had this image in my head for several years now. I often sum up my worldview in relation to violence with this image.

Imagine every person in the world is pointing a gun at somebody else's head, while somebody else points a gun at their own head. Everybody wishes they could put their gun down, but they're just too sure that if they let their guard down, they'll be shot.

I'll leave you now with one of my favorite images in the world. A real-life triumph of the human spirit and a prime example of non-violence protecting itself and enacting change in a violent world.

my egg is solidly reinforced, poor kid!