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What creative projects have you been working on?
This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.
Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.
If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.
Trying to finish the planning of the first act of a three-act cosmic horror/scifi story I'm working on tentatively titled SENTINEL. It's about humanity discovering the world we think is real is actually an alternate dimension caused by us messing with inter-dimensional travel, and what happens when the denizens of one of these other dimensions decide to show themselves. It's hopefully more interesting than it sounds.
It's been a long time coming, but the big players in the story have come into their own, so I feel it might be time to move onto the rest of the cast to flesh things out. And by 'cosmic horror', I don't mean 'drop some Lovecraft references in there and call it a day'. I'm trying to make something that pays homage to my influences but without it just being Lovecraft namedrops like I find happens quite often with the cosmic horror genre these days. I'm hoping I can finish some bits and bobs and post them here for feedback at some point.
I’ve been writing a book for the past 4 years about my experiences growing up in a cult, how I got out, and what life is like now. I think I’ll need at least another 4 years.
Starting this year, I realized how writing and sharing said writings with my friends, extended circle as well as discussing them with strangers on the internet was quite fulfilling to me. I therefore restarted my personal blog and started posting some of my poems, reflections and technical troubleshooting escapades. This is all partly an effort to go back to the "internet of old" as I mention in Grieving the Early Internet
In preparation for Timasomo I started exploring music-making apps and tools.
While I will be using Bitwig Studio for my actual project, I bought a copy of Cubasis 3 on my phone and it's been a lot of fun. It's great for sketching an idea really quick or recording on the go. Moving these ideas to Bitwig is a tad difficult (as Cubasis only exports natively to Cubase, obviously) but shouldn't be a problem.
Anyway, I threw some rock drums, an electric bass and an electric piano sound for chords together and I've got a little song going. Not sure of the exact direction I'm going in, but right now I have a 16-bar loop that sounds a little angsty, maybe a little sad. Would probably fit as a video game soundtrack, for a forest or cave level, or something, lol.
My biggest creative project right now is my D&D campaign. I'm very new to DMing, but it might be one of the most satisfying things I've ever done in my life. It's basically the ultimate creative outlet for me and the best part is I have a captive audience because nobody else wants to DM!
I'll save the in-depth D&D talk for ~games.tabletop, but I've been able to do a lot of writing, character development, practice some voice acting, practice some improv comedy, and even some crafting. I made a windmill miniature and dice tower out of popsicle sticks and hot glue.
It just scratches so many of my creative itches and I love it.
Do you mind sharing any of this? I'm super curious !
It sounds like you're having an absolute blast.
I've been meaning to write a new post about it for a while, but I do have two topics I wrote a little while ago about me preparing to DM my first game and how the first session went:
But yeah long story short (maybe) I bought the starter kit for D&D and immediately began changing the campaign. For me half of the fun comes from creating the encounters, the settings, characters, etc. and the other half is the game itself. So right off the bat I shoehorned in a character I played as years ago named "Craymond Zephyrson Ponce IV", who is just this rich, smug asshole that sounds like Foghorn Leghorn. I narrate the game in my own voice, but all major story beats occur through him. So I get plenty of opportunity to be in-character. I'm also having to develop systems for keeping track of which NPCs have which voices. There was a session where all of my characters just sounded English...and the women sounded like every Monty Python sketch featuring women. I'm already pretty decent at doing voices, I'm just not great at remembering to do them on the fly (or which ones to do). So I've started adding a table of voices on every page of my notes that a character appears so I can keep track of who has what voice. And hopefully inject some variety into the voices as well!
The original campaign was basically that there have been dragon sightings around Phandalin and your early quests are based around trying to save or alert people about it. You run off to a windmill to warn an old woman..but oh no there's a Manticore. But I wanted to give it some flair. So instead I changed it to Ponce being in charge of the town and basically trying to skirt every safety precaution known to man kind to save money. Workers keep getting injured and healers can't keep up. So he reached out to this windmill woman (who is also an alchemist) to convince (or force) her to come work for him so she can create healing potions so he can continue sweeping the horrible working conditions under the rug. She's smarter than that, so she refused to work with him. But after taking care of the manticore, the group ultimately convinced her to come to town under the promise that she didn't have to interact with Ponce (I will likely tap into this thread later on in the campaign, as I'm not satisfied with that ending).
Then for my first completely custom dungeon, Ponce sends the adventurers into the town's sewers because there have been block ups and flooding for a while and he doesn't want to be dealing with that with the threat of a dragon looming. Unbeknownst to the adventures (but known to Ponce), the sewers are actually run by sewer-dwellers that Ponce pays (poorly) to keep things flowing. Sewerfolk filter out any valuables from the sewage, keep the pipes flowing, rebuild any broken stonework, etc. The sewerfolk are actually striking because of their horrible conditions and are intentionally blocking up the sewer to bargain for better conditions/pay.
The big reveal, should the adventurers choose to break up the strike by force, is that the leader of this strike is a Kobold sent by the dragon to sow chaos. Which will make sacking the city much easier for the dragon. And should the adventurers discover a hidden room in the sewer (actually home to a new chapter of the Assassin's Guild), there's a plot to kill Ponce orchestrated by that same Kobold.
Haven't written much more than that yet, as the group kind of bottlenecked at the dungeon. It's taking a few sessions to get through it, so I've had time to focus on the other campaign.
Surviving, economically and existentially speaking. Sometimes, I wonder what its all for. In any case, my methods are necessarily creative in order to avoid the prescient alternative
I’ve been doing some origami! Made a little flapping bird, a cube made of 6 units, and then a firework that is essentially a paper toy. Been sketching randomly but haven’t kept any of it, just keep erasing and drawing over and over. I’ve also just been randomly writing little articles relating to cars for myself. Currently I just do it in markdown files on my computer but I want to pick up a pen and start writing them in a notebook. Picked up a pen the other day to write a little note on a check and I couldn’t remember the last time I picked up a pen/pencil to write something instead of just signing my name.
I'm trying to scrap together a basic plan for a documentary style video project. I want to make short form documentaries because it'll allow me to exercise so many of the creative hobbies I've built up my skills in over the last few years, but I'm having some slight difficulty finding a topic I'm able to start with here. Partially because I've not become super familiar with my surroundings but also just because I've been busy with a full-time job that hasn't really given me any time to rest in the last year.
Then it'll be a matter of principal research, writing, location filming, editing (for the first time in nearly a decade), mixing, and actually publishing it - then not getting discouraged when it's not a particular success. But I genuinely relish the challenge of putting it all together and pushing myself to do more than I ever have before.
Well, I see your topic right there: Documenting you getting familiar with your surroundings.
This is an awesome and inspiring project idea, that I might steal at some point in time. I have a background in audio production, but also had a video project which had me editing and composing images. What I am lacking is coming up and executing some fictional story. So a documentary is a great format. Actually, I am doing a photography survey of my neighborhood at the moment and it is a lot of fun.
I’ve been working on an animated cartoon series for the last 2-3 years that I’m trying to develop enough to where I can pitch it to a studio to help me develop it. It’s been a passion project of mine for a while and I finally got serious about it about 3 years ago. I’m working with an animation studio already but animation is ungodly expensive so I’m basically doing everything but animation myself - writing, planning, design, world building, etc.
The show is called Pajamazon and it’s about a group of warrior girls that help kids and teens fight their bad dreams. Currently, I’m stuck writing the script and, although I’ve solicited help from some writers, I want to pay them for their work as much as possible at as fair a price as possible so I either have to do as much of the writing myself or do enough freelance work outside of my full-time job to cover those expensive.
It’s hard work but it’s immensely fulfilling and very gratifying to see what’s in my head forming into a reality that I can visually see.
I've been drafting some essays and video scripts for my website. I'm trying really hard to set myself up to quit my job and be self-employed again, so I've been building a consulting biz on the side, at least that's the dream.
Good luck, remember that in consulting the pipeline is everything 👍🏼
Thanks! Lack of pipeline is what's frustrating me at my current job so hopefully I can walk the walk 😅
Photography: was sick last week so I didn't go to as many sports games as I usually would. Every day I went out with the camera though and took a lot of pictures in the yard and at home. I've been trying to master the Lytro Light Field Camera not only using it as a backup camera but hopefully get some depth data for stereograms and other VR work.
Bought a bunch of batteries for the Sony and a charger because I don't want to run out during a game. Speaking of stereograms I bought a bunch of batteries for the Qoocam Ego too. I've given up on flower stereograms after getting just this half-success after a lot of trying
https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/67280877
I gotta go out and take a lot of stereogram of the horses (I live on a farm and have 8 of them) and make a collage but really I am burnt out from stereograms.
Saturday I went to a Volleyball game and a Women's Ice Hockey game: the Volleyball game was a complete disaster in terms of photography, I have to regroup and go back because I have a project of photographing every sport my university is in. Somebody asked me if I do photography as a business and I said "I wish I did" and maybe I'd better speed that up because the lens I wish I could bring to the next Volleyball game isn't cheap. Ice Hockey on the other hand turned out fine with the same kit (Sony alpha 7ii and a 90 mm macro prime). I think it is women's soccer this Wednesday or Saturday (though I love the crowd that turns up for Men's games) and I'll be taking my wife to Men's Polo this Friday and get revenge for volleyball on Saturday.
Three-sided cards: Until recently my photograpy was motivated entirely by three-sided cards but I found out that Mastodonsters eat up my flower photos so I am back into shooting for social again. I have yet to write the manifesto for three-sided cards even though I wrote the first draft two years ago when they were changing very rapidly. The latest few cards I printed are here
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111168528593969946
you can see anime and photography as themes, art reproductions are the third leg of the stool but I've neglected those relatively lately. I just printed design #345 which are those really dreamy flowers in that dprreview post above. Three-sided cards (the third side is on the other side of the QR code) stand on their own but by the time I got to card #50 or so I started printing out groups of cards, my last two collages are
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111052075781351382
and
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110607498804590869
right now I am focusing on getting back to high rate production of individual cards mostly from my backlog of sports photos and photos I've been posting to Mastodon but I can't stop w/ the Moe characters. I have a few collage projects in mind: (1) a stereo collage of the horses, (2) a collage based on cards that share one common dimension but vary in the other, I'd really like to find a bunch of Fate characters drawn in a distinctive style to do this way, (3) a long "sinuous" collage that spans a whole wall, the idea is to make a wave that goes up and down from one side to the other, I'm not sure what the subject will be but if I print a lot of singles I'll either have enough to pick from or get a plan.
I write about this stuff a lot on on the "technical projects" recurring thread because the cards in particular involve a lot of software development and so do the stereograms. When it comes to art reproductions I had some software working two years ago that pulled all the metadata for the collection at the Metropolitan Museum, turns out a lot of other museums use the same software, I have to get that out of mothballs, plus I have some other image curation projects that are making me think of getting some kind of "booru" software running on my home server (named "tamamo", yeah I'm a weeaboo)
I got two "stretch" projects, one of which I will probably do some day and the other not: (1) get a persistence of vision sign stuck to my car so I can draw hearts and stars and flowers and stuff when I drive by or maybe you will look at my car for a moment when the sun is setting and swear you could have seen a McLaren F1 instead of a Honda, and (2) do a sketch comedy routine together with a video game character reflected in a mirror which not only had the hardware component (projector, mirror, etc._) and a lot of software and involves being funny which is would be the hardest for me of all.