Thinking about Drive and Flow

This Christmas my uncle was stuck for something to get me, but he remembered I loved anime so he visited a comic shop in the hope of finding something suitably japanified. But oh ho was he surprised to find all manga in the store gone. Sold. Every last Bleach, One Piece and Naruto, Death Note, Fist of the North Star, just evaporated into the stockings of thousands of manga lovers everywhere. He asks the till guy if there's anything left to salvage? Not even one manga left. A pause. He was handed this:

Bakuman - two lads follow their dreams to become mangaka (manga artists). No homo, surprisingly!

Meet Saiko and Shuujin, the middle school students determined to make it into Shonen Jack (a parody of the biggest name in manga magazines, Shonen Jump) as the greatest mangaka ever. Their goal is often intertwined with other emotional heart tugs (Saiko promises to marry his childhood sweetheart only when they both achieve their dreams) and the comedy is effectively sourced from these devices. 

Okay, so he bought me the 15th in the series and I'd never even heard of it before. I had to laugh, especially because it's not the first time it's happened. (I've got precisely volumes 1-4, 37, 38 of Ranma 1/2, thanks Mam!) But what a lucky choice it turned out to be.

My creative mojo had been all but drained over the period before holidays, working solidly on Forgotten Futures and getting stressed about my financial situation. But here comes Bakuman delivering a jolt of inspiration in swift, touching, even frank instalments about the nature of mastering one's craft. I could expect nothing less from the guys who created Death Note. They could do this without me even having to read all 14 earlier tomes. Just a few black and white pages infused me with the same red-hearted drive of these newcomers going for the big time.

What struck me full-force was a particular scene in which Saiko goes to a middle-school class reunion; with his serialisation in Shonen Jack everybody flocks around him in awe at his critical rise to fame. Of course Saiko has never seen any of his journey in the context of fame. His coy and modest replies quickly dispel the hype generated by his classmates. It's always been like that for him, apart from the crowd as he pursues the uncatchable. Yet success comes to him through hard work, and he accepts that his passion makes him truly happy at the expense of other happinesses that he could possess. I feel it all the time. It's an articulation of artistic struggle, and is one I'm glad to be able to draw from.

He's even got the chin!

Traipsing back through the memories of my teen years (to a similar age to Saiko and Shuujin - btw do I look like this Shuujin guy or what??) I was I'm aware of the breadcrumb trail of short-term goals, those that got lost between the floorboards once I'd either satisfied myself with the arrangement of things in general, or had given up. Granted some of these pieces aren't even worth inspecting, barely worth the time reflecting upon. But one I think should be examined was the huge energy I put into roleplaying forums during high school where I began constructing more than just fantasy worlds and intricate gaming mechanics.

The social interplay between other writers of magical sagas provided the perfect incubation for me to stretch my own writing and story construction in ways that went against the grain. I was learning how to be passionate, diligent, and punctual with my verse and prose. I had a target to become an Advanced Roleplayer, a title bestowed upon the committed roleplayers with a tonne of text under their belt and a community. Ultimately the medal of recognition was decided by a few inhabitants aloft in their ivory-tower. It didn't have value to anyone outside this tiny circle of keyboard jockeys. Still, when I got the title it was the most exciting thing to have happened to me in months! Off the back of the ARPer status came a few really good pieces of writing that I'm still very proud of to this day.

As the NFTS course fast approaches, can I hope to find that same feeling of flow and drive with games design? What Bakuman and RPing has taught me is that it's all about focus. Never see the things pushing you towards dream (and away from distractions) as sacrifices. Dealing with the turbulence when you can't avoid changing course in the wake of that force, that's pretty important too.

The Year of the Horse!!

All the faces shall be eaten with glee!

Happy New Year!! Wait, wow this place is sparser than my football knowledge and common sense combined, there's hardly any substantial bodies here to direct my yuletide cordialities! Something must be done.

This calls for a New Year's resolution. From this moment hence I will be keeping this blog up and running, spick and span, with all the brass grubnuts and dolphin pipertublets polished weekly to an immaculate sheen. This machine is going to run like a dream! This is how it should have begun in the first place.

Spurring this action is not only the need to document my zany ideas and schemes, but also to keep any interested peeps abreast of my activities. The next change in my life will happen in just over 3 weeks time. I will be starting a second Masters degree on Jan 27th, but this time slightly removed from the realms of Physics. Instead I'm taking a large leap towards the games industry by enrolling on the National Film and Television School's course in Games Design and Development.

I'm still amazed that I've journeyed so far from my original goal of living in Japan. Remembering my absent minded approach to it all - never really making the effort to learn Japanese, dodging the JET program applications etc - makes me realise I was submerging myself in a glass bowl that I couldn't see or define. Being a goldfish is fine if you're okay with that lifestyle. But it was depleting me, causing me to fade in and out of poor decisions, watery words and aimless wandering.

Without wanting to drag out the dramatics too much longer, I have to admit that the NFTS course may well be a personal miracle for me. As soon as I found out about the narrative-focused, cinematographic influenced degree I couldn't help but feel a tug at those long suppressed creative cords wrapped up within me. Something felt right, even if the financial situation didn't. I'd just lost a job after moving to Leeds and was feeling broken and bewildered. I was back to barwork and being completely misplaced. However two magnificent creatures emerged from the wilds. One was the NFTS course, an elusive beast that sent me hunting far and wide for the necessary skills to capture it. Suddenly confronted with tools like ZBrush, Unity3D, Blender, C#, and a myriad of other essentials the going got tough fast. Still I managed to reel in an interview with the school after submitting a hastily constructed portfolio. Getting accepted on the course couldn't have made me happier!
The other animal was a job with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe back in good old Liverpool. I've been riding this one for the last 7 months now, and that will soon come to an end when I move to Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire.

I was given an incredible window of opportunity to fly headfirst into the career I'd only ever dreamt of - that of a games designer. I'm so grateful for the nudges, encouragement and support along the way. How impossible it would be to do anything like this alone.

From here, I shall be posting about my time at the school. I'll also be discussing my other projects, one of which is an augmented reality app game called Forgotten Futures. With just four months to go before it kicks off at the Threshold Festival of Music and Arts, I'll be attempting to document the monumental changes I undergo as I try balancing a new university course with running a Kickstarter and delivering an app game to the general public! Also stay tuned for some tips and advice on applying for the course and for funding, and know that you are not alone in struggling to reach those lofty goals.

2014 looks set to be made of something special!

~Peace

[SHINNICHI] Rakugo storytelling

~ to be edited ~

[MISC] Facecrook?? [9th of Jan 2012]

I've been avoiding revision yet again, although my calender did plan for it so I reckon that makes Father Time and I squits.
In the very act of procrastination, I must ponder over why distractions are taking hold so easily? Is it the silky caress of a facebook notification bubble, chortling in the pixie language of digital recognition, that lures me away from the flatulent bloaters of study and strict diet. Well I ate most of the Mingles okay, it was me! And I ate too much peanut butter mash. (best idea ever!)

This happens for a reason. The world of a physicist, one would expect, is filled with numbers and graphs, vectors and greek letters, but not a single giraffe or slumbering hills or left-overs or pearls. Well it is when you let it, but revision is a scatterbrainer. It makes you forget who you really are, in favour of trials and becoming submerged in books and pdf files.

That's when the tedium becomes a medium for whittling away the hours sitting at the desk devote in your godly powers of overseer and omni-partici-pant.

Well no more! I've decided to shrug off facebook for a while. I'm not after congratulations, just letting you know how useless it really is and that its nice to have a break from it :)

[E-GROVE] Artwork by TOM "WOLF" CHANT [4th of January, 2012]

Hallo folks! Time to showcase an art piece I'm hopefully getting printed tomorrow. It's been digitally painted by one of my oldest friends, and he's coming round with a full-res copy of some of his stunning work for us to slap onto canvas using SuzyBee's (my stepmum) canvas printer. Hurrah!

I've known Tom Chant for donkeys years now, though where and when the donkey was involved, and why it was later played by Eddie Murphy, shall perhaps never be discovered. My folks knew his folks through the travelling ties I think, and I remember vividly rambling about around his house in Powys when I was younger. Tom went to the same primary and high school in Llanidloes as me, though it wasn't until I moved to Aberystwyth that I can definitely say I was to discover his pretty slick talents with music and art. We'd sometimes lay down a Photoshop or 3D modelling challenge or two online, testing inspiration and technique alike; other times I'd get a chance to listen to some of his audible dabblings. To this day he's remained a grand inspiration and a tonne of my new musical tastes come from his guidance.     Since the good ole days, Tom has had some of his delicious reggae-influenced psy-house classical mashup released on vinyl ("Summer's On Its Way") under the name of Wolfen Technologies, which you can check out over on Soundcloud along with some of his more recent stuff. Cheeky man choosing Brown Note as the record label name, hope that's worked in his favour :P 

He's also one of the star-studded crew to play at my dad's festival Freerotation, a testament to his mixing skills. Am not surprised considering his love for moosak!

So now I eagerly await the chance to catch up with him over a brew and admire the fully fledged form of his art on canvas! It's the piece blogged here, named "Technotropolis" ... a worthy title considering the psychadelic colour range and towering explosion of pattern! Can't wait to get it! :D

[7/1/12] EDIT: Here it is, printed nicely onto canvas paper just waiting to be stretched over canvas bars. After a few test prints to get the black and grey colours right (everything was in such high contrast SuzyBee and I were far too distracted by the pretty colours to get it done quickly. Curse you pretty colours!) we got the perfect print.

                                                                                                    

I may be tripping for some time just looking at it...  Epiletics beware my room from now on. ;)

[SHINNICHI] Nerikomi - the art of Japanese ceramics [3rd of January, 2012]

Translucent Nerikomi




In prepping myself for a potential excursion to Japan, and just filling in the time between the smidgens of revision I'm supposed to be doing, I watched a few documentaries on the NHK World news channel (日本放送協会, Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai; official English name: Japan Broadcasting Corporation) and came across one mentioning an American ceramics artist named Dorothy Feibleman.

She was making amazing ceramics using numeorus clays that when baked once are translucent, then fired again explodes into amazing colours and patterns! The method of Nerikomi patterning in clay is pretty cool: imagine layering different colours of clay and squishing them much in same way filo pastry is made with butter and batter layers. The squashed clay is cut into thin slices, with each slice detailed in swirling lines of colour. It can look like marble in some cases. The slices are smooshed together, replicating the patterns into forms such as petals, fossils, swirls and spikes, and the process goes on in a number of ways - the end product is a pot, a cup or a dish with beautiful colours and patterns. The techniques have been passed down through generations but the term Nerikomi is a modern term, and in reality the tradition travelled from China. Marbling techniques are present in many other cultures also.

Feibleman

Feibleman managed to use her extensive knowledge of clays and their properties in combination with the Nerikomi technique to craft unheard of designs, based on Japanese woven fabrics and nature. Oxides in the clay give them numerous qualities and she seems a master at picking them out, check these out:







What's brilliant is that these patterns are not painted on, they are actually the clay layered structure itself. So skillful!

She advanced the Japanese tradition of Nerikomi into a very postive direction, despite its decline alongside the loss of many other elder Japanese arts.

If I move to Japan and have the dosh I'd love to purchase a set made in this form: to support it and because it's amazing crafts-woman-ship!

On a side note, it's great that suddenly I was captured by this topic because I feel like there's so much to know about Japan that I'm completely clueless about. NHK seems to provide quite a few "fluffy puppy" documentaries but this one was quite honest and not really advertising Japan as so much just an observation. These kinda television shows I love because I don't feel like I'm being force-fed a load of biased sugarcoated trollop. Feibleman was very skilled - she has had her work in the New York Met Art Museum and many other places - and we were allowed to appreciate it impartially.

I must admit other documentaries probably aren't like this on NHK, but I'll do more research. You get the feeling with most nation-aligned broadcasters that their just boasting about how great their countries are. Comeon, we're more intelligent than that people!

Though I cannot complain really - at least I'm not in North Korea right now.

Who Sells Chicken Eggs? [3rd of January, 2012]

Did you know?



"Kai kai kai kai" is a phrase used to teach Thai children the tonalities of their language. When each "kai" is pronounced properly it means, "Who sells chicken eggs?" For the life of me, I can only think of one way to pronounce Kai; those wiley Thai children must be laughing at my linguistical ineptitude right now.  Grrrr!

So begins a torrent of thoughts and ideas, that otherwise would find themselves floundering on some forgotten saltplane of mismemory, or skewered and emprisoned by the responsibilities of the day. (Take that for wordplay Thai kids!) This zoological catalogue of sorts is not intended to indulge or to moan at the expense of you, readers, but will have the chance to entertain and even be relevent to anyone wishing to follow a Kailife in action! Mad things, arty things, audible treats, sciencey things and Japanese things can all be found in this very spot, which will hopefully act as a constient chronicle to the my life and the events that I see defining it. 

Each blogpost will have a marker to indicate what its about: 
Important updates [BIGNEWS], 
Creative musings [E-GROVE], 
Everything Japan-related [SHINNICHI], 
Someone playing Final Fantasy VII in the same room as me!? [GEEKTACULAR],
Music and gigs..... big names, little guys, underground and semi-mainstream if you please.... just sound to make the world go round! [BEAT-DELETE],
Sexy sexy Physics [PHYS],
And all the other stuff, including dead bees and the Poddington Peas [MISC]

[SHINNICHI]
I should probably start with the most gargantuan event to slap me round the chops - JAPAN. Believe me, it was a knockout :) I found myself departing for Osaka from Birmingham Airport back in 2007 and ever since staying for 2 weeks in Yosano-cho near Kyoto, I have settled upon one and only goal....

To return to Japan and make a living there. And evolve anime eyes somehow. Just to freak the folks out. 

[Grave of the late Frank Evans; a Welsh POW responsible for setting up the friendship group between Aberystwyth and Yosano-cho which allowed me to visit Japan. Yup, they called me the Fashion Assassin back then...-.-; ]

Since this dream is shared by a number of people I know, (and many I have yet to force into being my Japanafriend!) I wanted to document my journey towards getting there, in an effort to inspire and assist y'all! I'll be discussing stuff like what options are available to get to Japan, what you need to do to get started, tips on language and culture, food and finances, even getting in touch with Japanese folk. Whatever I can do to help, just ask - I'm a resource to be used and effused and confused and abused!

[Best bud Mark and myself in front of Osaka Castle. Mark achieves his dream of being escort to a samurai!]

First thing on the list of things to write about will be my experience of Japan, so stayed switched onto the SHINNICHI channel for a delve into Japanese nuttiness! It won't be winning me any accolades any time soon, but hope you enjoy it when it appears. :)

[All the friends made in Yosano wishing us a goodbye. An extremely painful endeavour for some of them, who apparently screamed us goodbye :P ]

That's all for my introduction, so laters!

Peace, Love and Light
~Kai