Dream - The Music and The Video

 After making 2 comics in our Terraform world, we have made a song inspired by the endeavor.

Dream is about building and entering a world, with the aim of improving the world.  It is one of the first tracks we have done with actual singing in it, and has the theme of "dreaming can set us free".

Dreaming to escape your daily drudgery most find ourselves in, but more importantly to Dream the solutions and then actually change the world for the better.

My vocals were recorded with a Audio Technica AT2020 condenser mic. These were processed with their own separate inline, compressor and reverb plugins.  It isn't your standard Verse Chorus repeat twice, bridge another Verse Chorus then finish.  Even though it has lots of guitar, I also didn't put a guitar solo in it and tried to move that to the synths and use "unusual" not pop synth  sounds.  Just trying to be different from what I would naturally do.....  even though someone I played it to immediately said something like ... another of my stuck in the 80s tracks. So be it. 😅

Along with the song we have made a video using our very old Android phone as a video camera with scenes of making the music track and the comic, and the short story after it. The video images are no where near as good as the still images though so haven't as yet uploaded it to our YouTube channel with the current edit.

The Reaper track and plugins...

The inked blue pencil panels that were scanned and colored...

The droid puppet used in the short story...

The black only A5 printed comic short...

The comics can be found at Art and Technology.

The song Dream, and others, can be found at Megacurve on SoundCloud

Imposition for Printing and a Small Rpi File Server

In our end of year break, we completed a couple of short comics and setup a small Rpi Samba file server with an Apache web server with php to help out.

We have been involved with Rpi development for some months but hadn't actually made an SD Card from scratch. So to have that complete Raspberry Pi experience we made a Raspbian-Jessie Lite SD Card. We wanted it to be headless, so we turned on SSH, then used the Advanced IP Scanner tool to find it on my local network, change the password, and set up the other tools.

The problem I'm very aware of is SD Card corruption. The way to stop  that is to execute the command  shutdown before removing power in a Rpi system. Means you need battery back up. SD Cards need to have power maintained for 4 seconds (it is in the SD Card spec no one has bothered to read but me) after a write to avoid corruption, and Linux is always writing log files for everything....all the time.

Doing anything with a Rpi involves Googling how to do it then follow the instructions.  It is an educational toy, so all the standards are covered.

For the comic I used a desktop system for the actual development, but to print it like a 'Zine', I used a laptop I have a Lazer printer connected to. The Samba directory just shows up on both machines in the Network, and dropping and dragging files is faster than using Web based Drive (and we hate the Drive tool that copies everything locally), or accessing the 'Public' folders on each machine which also duplicates the files.

The Rpi File Server was Fast and simple enough, but it isn't the master file copy in this case.... don't trust the SD Card it is on.

I do have an older WD 500MB drive I could use with the Rpi. The Rpi can support the NTFS file system and have Samba directories on it.  But it needs more power than the Rpi USB can provide, and getting a powered USB hub is a bit much.   The easiest solution for me would be to hack the short USB drive cable, so that the USB power isn't coming from the Rpi USB connector, but from the +5VDC and GND on the HAT connector.   Haven't bothered to do this yet.

Now the real technical issue is Imposition for Printing.  I designed these comics to be printed as A5 books. This is one of the larger Japanese styled formats.  So print double sided A4, so when the pages are folded in half and stapled,  you get the typical A5 'Zine' as in the photo above.

So I had to do the double sided printing manually, get the right A5 page number on the right section of each A4 sheet, and take into account the printers boarder, and that we would not be using the bleed and printing to the page edges. 

A small dummy 1/4 size book cut from a single sheet of A4 with all the file numbers on each page helped to get everything in the right place for the 16 page Terraform main story.

So for the 16 page Terraform, we made 8, A4 pages, each containing the correct 2 A5 pages, so that when we printed the first 4 pages, put them back in the paper tray, then printed the last 4 pages, we had everything printed double sided and in the correct order for folding and stapling.   

But the reason for doing it at all, is thinking there is something worth saying..... on issues that impact us all.

The online versions on these comics can be found at Art and Technology.

Our Comic is now online..

As I wrote about in a previous blog, doing a short comic was one of those things we have wanted to do for a long time.

And this is a short "Movie" Trailer for it.

One of the other things about it is that we had to FINISH it once we started, and we have.  Or at least finished enough to be stand alone but allow things to be continued and expanded.

We set a goal of 16 A5 pages and we have done that in under 18 weeks, as something we did on the weekends. 

Like all projects I've ever been involved with, at the end, all I ever see is the bits that can be improved, and this is no exception.  But generally I think it has been a success.

Here is the About Section explains how and why, that links to the comic itself.

I have learnt a few new things, including that Clip Studio Paint Pro/Ex is better for painting than Photoshop is, and MUCH more affordable, even if it cannot replace it.  I could have used that A story thread, B story thread, C story thread approach, but didn't.  I found keeping a small A5 notebook with me very valuable for jotting down ideas, news items, concepts and solutions. I have 52 pages of notes and sketches for this in it. And the next one will use different fonts I have bought from Blambot as they take up less effective panel space.  A few other things too... but enough for now.

If I want to print it on paper, I need a 5mm bleed, and keep things in the safe area and that isn't consistent in the current layouts. Nothing spending an hour in the CorelDraw file wouldn't fix though. I have made .cbr and a Kindle version too, and may or may not release these later.

Remix - Cara Delevingne

I picked up the REMIX issue of Computer Music, not a magazine I normally buy, and have been inspired to play around with some of the REMIX techniques it contains.  It mentions classic remixes and I confess I have never heard of any of them. I have moved in a completely different music world.

I have taken the track from Cara Delevingne - I Feel Everything. And taken a few samples from it

for a private experiment.

The original is a slow 84BPM in 7/8 time. Well that is what I've worked out and based my stuff on.

I use Reaper and that has a feature to speed an audio clip up while maintaining the original pitch.  So in my 35second test above, it starts at 84BPM, then changes to 130BPM where I've added Simmons SDS5 drums and a few other remix things.

There are people that work this way with samples as their normal production process.  Interesting, but picking up a guitar and keyboard seems more musical to me, but currently that isn't resulting in anything new, hence learning these new techniques to apply.  I rarely do anything with vocals , and that is a nice change too.

We have a collection of Megacurve tracks on Soundcloud if your interested.

And I just love Valerian.....  and "Valérian and Laureline" comic even more.

An interest in Sequential Art

The last 6 months have been a time of reflection and recovery and I have done little creative work outside existing work commitments. Have done no airbrushing or music production or the other things I would normally be doing. Haven't even picked up the guitar. I have thought about a few other things though.

We have an interest in the art of comics and above is a few of the books I have on the subject.

Also managed to be in the right place and the right time to get the very short lived OzComics "fanzine" about and for those making comics.

Drawing is something I've always done and have been studying it and Sequential Art for many years. I've also done  my share of professional technical illustrations and know they make a big difference to documentation.

You may have seen the web comics I tried my hand at:

or this:

or one of the 40+ others, but these single panel cartoons aren't Sequential Art. The usual Car Cartoon logos aren't either.

Or this either.....

Decades before these I tried my hand at Desktop Movie Production using puppets, models and Animation (and doing the sculpting, modeling, matte painting, music, audio design and voice acting)  and came to the conclusion that a far more practical thing to do, with a greater possibility of finishing something worthwhile as a part time activity was storyboards and comics. A single panel cartoon is the simplest form, and storyboards the more advanced sequential art.

Now I have recently read all of Valerian and Laureline, and years before that a few Moebius , all the Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed books and some others.  However  I could never finish Watchmen, an American classic that just bored me.  So it seems my interest in comics isn't American Mainstream.

So the point of this is I'm still thinking about creating real multi-panel multi-page comics. Probably start with a 1 page, car cartoon centered comic. The technical and drawing part isn't the hold up though. Always the story or joke to make it all worthwhile.

I'm currently "reading" the recent hardcover Moebius's The Worlds of Edena , and that the art is bold and simple compared to his other work gives me hope. Art that takes less hours to finish helps getting anything finished at all.  The problem you see with Moebius is that his art is great but his stories aren't.  Just because you can draw has no relationship to being a story teller.

In the world of Car cartooning, Dave Deal had a great influence on our own style. If you look at his output though, the only actual multi-page comic he did was on the History of Hot Rodding in CARtoons magazine.  And it wasn't really a story, but a series of illustrations with a few jokes on the development of hot rods.  The instructions for his Revell model car kits were similar. A lot like a few Japanese Owners guides I've seen.

I assume that comic story telling wasn't something that came to him naturally , and he couldn't make any money out of it anyway. Doing corporate logo work actually pays, most comics don't.

Japan must be one of the few places that comics have a wide enough market to be a normal business. Also note that manga are mostly just black and white.

The one man show thing is something of a trap, and why I guess the illustrator isn't usually the script writer, but doing it all is what is attractive to me.

Another one of those things on my todo list.