Category Archives: Advent Calendar

Projects Update

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(This post is mainly an attempt to give myself a gentle kick up the bum towards doing something about all this stuff).

So… it’s nearly 3 months since I posted about my personal projects, so it must be time for an update. Generally I haven’t got as much done on them as I’d hoped; travelling the world and playing with geek-toys has taken up a lot of my time over the past few weeks. But looking down my list and thinking about what I’ve achieved, I can see that it hasn’t been quite as bleak as I feared. And now I have Luna and a whole month (well, nearly) of not travelling anywhere at my disposal, I should be able to make some more progress.

Projects Bubble, Everything and Chippy are not really my responsibility to keep on track. There was a tentative plan to do something on Chippy back in June, but it was scuppered by a very full schedule and a hair dye disaster. It would be nice if more was happening on them (especially Bubble), but I’m not going to beat myself up over the fact that it hasn’t yet.

Project Hohoho: the funding campaign is now over and we raised a respectable amount :). First actual filming commences soon, though I probably shouldn’t say any more about it just now as the plans are still being kept under a certain sandwich-like food item (watch the pitch video!).

Project Noah is one of my major paid work projects. It’s coming along very nicely (apart from a slight setback involving a crucial building being full of asbestos and possibly having to be evacuated for an extended period while they get rid of it). I have an idea for a blog entry I want to post about this as I do think it’s really interesting stuff… it will take a bit of preparation though.

Project Bits: This is maybe the one I feel is most important but it seems slow to get started. I did a bit of writing and a bit of general planning work and research. It’s become more and more ambitious in my mind, which is probably a good thing in that it might help to differentiate it from anything similar that’s out there, but a bad thing in terms of making it less likely to actually get finished. I definitely need to organise it and work out what exactly I want to do.

Project Buster: not much progress. I downloaded a whole load of stuff for it onto my new computer but haven’t had time to do much with it yet. In my head it’s starting to become a bit more concrete, and form tentative links with Projects IOM and Fantasy World.

Project IOM: I was sort of hoping for some nice summer evenings as they would have given me a chance to do more of this. So far I’ve been disappointed :(. Let’s hope August and September are nicer.

Project X-Ray: haven’t done much, but it’s sort of linking up in my head with Project Fantasy World, which is going a bit better… and I have a more definite (but probably impossible) idea for it.

Project Megadroid: this one actually is going OK, after a quiet spell. Getting the new phone has helped it along rather a lot. So has something else that I may blog about separately.

Project History: making a lot of progress on this lately, again after a quiet spell. The first thing that needs to be done on it is quite a laborious task but the end is now in sight!

Projects Classical, New Leaf and Tridextrous haven’t got far. New Leaf really shouldn’t be hard to get finished but other things keep distracting me.

Project Fantasy World: this was possibly the vaguest idea of them all, but it’s taken shape in my head and started to connect with X-Ray, Buster and Bits. I’ve been playing with some software that could help with it and getting further than I expected to.

Project Bonkers: … um, yeah.

I do feel a bit more inspired now :). Hopefully next time I post about one of these it won’t be in quite such vague and meaningless terms!

Projects, projects, projects…

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This is heavily inspired by (read “ripped off from” 😉 ) a post on my brother’s blog.

I also have a bunch of creative projects on the go. Well actually, a lot of them are not quite so on-the-go as I would like, in fact some seem to be terminally stuck not going anywhere. Maybe talking about them a bit more publicly will inspire me to get them going again.

I’ve always been like this, I think. Ever since I was quite small I would come home from school and spend most of my free time writing stories, messing around making things on the computer, drawing maps of places I found interesting, or learning new music on the piano. I never saw the appeal of spending hours in front of the TV (I still don’t), and although I did play a lot of computer games, I must have spent at least as much time designing and writing my own as I did playing other people’s.

Now that I’ve got a full time job it’s a bit harder to find the time to do all that kind of stuff. But because it’s important to me, I still try. I’ve already blogged from time to time about my Android app making, my band, our film group, (on my other blog) one of my home-made computer games, and piano playing. To try and organise things a bit better and prioritise the stuff that’s really important to me, I decided to make a list and give them all codenames like Alex did in his blog. Here is the list, along with a little symbol of some kind for each one. Some of these overlap with Alex’s ones because they’re group projects of some kind – they have the same names that he gave them. Some of them are slightly ill-defined and are really catch-alls for a whole possibly area of creativity that I might be interested in experimenting with later on. Some are much more specific. OK, on with the list!

Project Bubble – this is the codename for our next Sonic Triangle EP, which has been in production for quite a while now. Alex already wrote a whole post about it so I won’t say much here.

 

Project Hohoho – the Beyond Studios Advent Calendar! Alex and I have both already written whole posts about this so again I won’t say much here.

 

Project Everything – this is really Alex’s project and I don’t know if he wants to reveal what it is yet, so I won’t.

 

 

Project Chippy – Alex’s web series!

 

 

Project Noah – this is actually a work (as in paid work) project. I need to find out whether I’m allowed to blog about it or not. I probably will be able to, and I hope I am, because I think it’s really interesting.

 

Project Bits – this one’s computer related and probably way over-ambitious, but at least I’ve been managing to make some progress on it lately.

 

Project Buster – one of the sort of vague, catch-all ones.

 

 

Project IOM – this one has been coming along quite nicely, before I even decided to make it a Project with a defined end goal. It’s nice because unlike most of the others it involves leaving the house quite a lot.

 

Project X-ray – another of the vague, catch-all ones… including ideas that are probably also way over-ambitious, but might be fun to play around with anyway.

 

Project Megadroid – if you’ve paid attention to my previous blog posts you can probably work out exactly what this one is just from its symbol and name. But anyway… it’s one of the few that’s (a) got a well defined goal, and (b) probably isn’t too far from reaching it… yay! It’s been taking a bit of a hiatus recently but thinking about it is starting to tickle my interest again, so maybe I’ll finally get it finished (and release it on here).

Project History – this one is journaling-related. It probably deserves its own post at some point.

 

 

Project Classical – another one that’s probably quite obvious from the name and pic.

 

 

Project New Leaf – a nice, hopefully quick and simple but very rewarding little Project that will help with some of the others once it’s done. I won’t say more than that because I’m saving it for its own blog post.

 

Project Tridextrous – ambitious, probably slightly insane, may never happen.

 

 

Project Fantasy World – very broad, catch-all project… no definite plans in it yet but an area I’m still interested in returning to.

 

 

Project Bonkers – … um, yeah.

 

 

So that’s them. Some of them will hopefully get their own posts soon and hopefully having a place to write about progress will inspire me to actually make some progress to write about.

 

Beyond Studios Advent Calendar

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Some friends and I have just launched a new project which, if you’re one of my regular readers, you’ve quite likely already seen splashed all over Facebook. Anyway here’s some more information.

Beyond Studios is my friend Gavin’s film making group, with which we’ve done several fun and often quite silly video and audio projects. (Some of the more recent ones are on Youtube and hopefully not too difficult to find). The Beyond Studios Advent Calendar’s actually been around a few years now (I think 2006 was the first one). To begin with it was just a collection of (usually) funny photos that Gavin would post on our private forum each day of December, but it’s got progressively more ambitious every year since – the last two have involved a comedy sketch or something similar every day, made by various members of the group (and taking up a significant proportion of our free time over the festive season!).

Anyway, there have been murmurings among the group for the last couple of years along the lines of “are we going to have time to make one this year?”, and “we can’t possibly make it any bigger than last year’s… can we?”. Oh yes we can, said Gavin, getting into the panto spirit already. Let’s make a public one that we can show to the world, with a much expanded team, and something else we never had before (drumroll please)… a budget!

That’s where you come in. We’ve launched a crowd funding campaign on IndieGoGo to try and raise the money. Even if you can’t afford to or don’t want to donate, the pitch video is worth a watch – it features an eccentric old man who makes hilariously suggestive comments and throws money at the silliest of ideas! (But enough about me 😉 ).

Pictures from the launch event we held at the Voodoo Rooms yesterday afternoon:

Setting up the technology.

Gavin in full sales pitch mode.

Gavin through the looking glass…

We even had business cards!

(I was also going to blog about seeing Derren Brown‘s Svengali show on Saturday, but he specifically asked anyone writing about it not to give away what happens, so the post probably would have boiled down to “Yeah, it was pretty good. The sort of thing you’d expect from Derren Brown, really”. So I don’t think I’ll bother giving it its own post… it can have this footnote instead).