Wednesday, October 22, 2014

THUNDER BABIES: DAY 3: Elements Of Surprise

“Although its core was dying before being impregnated by Zeus’ inebriated sperm, the planet Oo’tarus still contained one of the largest varieties of elements in the universe. The number is in the thousands, which, in comparison to Earth’s 115 elements, is incredible.
As Zeus’ millions of sperms bored their way through the planet’s inner layers en route to its core, they mixed with the multiple elements of Oo’tarus, each sperm melding with these different elements before they reached the planetary womb, thus making each embryo a completely unique little baby snowflake, their genetic makeup dictated by what element (or elements) the celestial sperm combined with. This, I mean, is according to legend…”

I spent all day researching, making and re-making a periodic chart of the elements of the dying planet of Oo’tarus. I did this for 3 reasons:

Number 1: This whole project is about challenging myself, as well as directing myself. I want to give myself as much possible ammo and information and mythology as I can in order to guide the art aspect of the world. Without context, there’s no direction, and without direction, there’s total freedom, which, in some cases is good, but because I’ve felt stagnant lately and repetitive with my art, giving myself “total freedom” could just mean that there’s TOO many options and therefore I would get overwhelmed and I might default to designing the same stuff I’ve been creating that’s making me feel stuck.

Number 2: All babies need formula. And in the case of Thunder Babies, I NEEDED a formula. A creation-formula.

Which leads me to Number 3: The documentary “American Movie” is about Mark Borschardt, one of the most passionate filmmakers ever, and his 6-year LONG quest to make a SHORT film. There are a million amazing quotes in it, but one of them revolves around the crew erecting scarecrows onto a set that they aren’t even shooting on. When asked why Mark is having them do that, he assertively says “to keep the troops motivated”. That’s why I made this. I need to stay motivated while I figured things out. I woke up, and was stuck on trying to figure out how to explain what these “Thunder Babies” would look like. More importantly, I was stuck on trying to create a solid direction while at the same time giving myself a blank-enough canvas for me to explore different art techniques and an open-enough subject matter for me to experiment with different visuals. I needed to make a “controlled-but-unlimited-foundation” to build off of. Does that make sense? Or am I an asshole? I guess either way it doesn’t matter at this point. So I came up with a formula, and while I am dwelling on the visual aspects of the Thunder Babies, I made a chart to go along with the formula just “to keep me motivated.”

Here is the formula:



And here is a partial sampling of the periodic table of elements found within the planet of Oo’tarus, from which all of the Thunder Babies will be genetically forged from (in addition to the unarguable power of god-sperm).




Now, on to making babies…

Missed the previous days? Catch up here: