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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.
A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.
I just registered so this seems like a good post to say hello and join the conversation.
Currently, I'm writing an album with bandmates as well as composing music and sound effects for an indie video game on my own. A couple of months ago, I recorded on-set sound for a local television pilot and will be doing ADR and audio post for that project soon. I just love audio work.
Hello!
Can you say a little bit more about your band? How many people are in it, how long have you been playing, what type of music do you play? Where do you practice?
Sound work is fascinating. I know a tiny bit -- enough to know that I don't know nearly enough.
When you watch youtube do you find yourself looking at the poor microphone technique?
Hello back! Not a whole lot to tell really. We're more of a studio band at the moment. The music has a strong rock band vibe, but we want dynamics in our sound so it's not all loud, distorted guitars. Some songs fit into the hard rock/metal category, others are clean and jazzy, or have a western feel, or driven by a funky bassline. I like being a rock band, but I don't want to limit us to just one kind of sound. Most of the bands I'm influenced by have a wide range of music in their catelogs.
It all began at the beginning of the year. I started turning some riffs and pieces of songs that I had written into full songs. I play guitar and bass which I used to work out the foundation of the songs and then wrote lyrics and recorded some vocals.
I have an old friend who's a great drummer, but he lives in a different part of the country than me so we did the remote thing and passed tracks back and forth to work out drum parts. That has it's challenges, but we've gotten some cool stuff from it.
The newest member is another local guitarist I met from a Craigslist ad. He's really good with leads and chord work so he can take a simple part I've written and make it sound fuller and more interesting. He also plays keys fairly well.
Right now, we're just recording demos for 12 tracks where all the various guitar, bass, drum, and vocal parts are mapped out. Once we have the map, we can record a more polished album version. I would like to add a bass player before this though so we can track as a full band and play the songs live (preferably one who can sing as I don't want to be the only vocalist in the group.) That's where we are so far. Still a lot of work to do before the demos are finished, but I really enjoy the process of fleshing out the tracks to their full versions.
As for YouTube, I mostly watch tutorials and product demos, and haven't noticed too many poor mic techniques.
After completing a first draft reboot script of The Phantom Menace (as writing practice), I'm doing a 3rd draft of my more serious sci-fi screenplay, and I've started the opening pages for a feature I want to turn into an animated film (I'm learning to draw specifically so I can try to do this in 2-3 years, quality will be low), and an anime series (just for writing practice), and I've got 12 pages or so of a drama called A Talking Pie that I'd like to pick back up.
Does it count if I've been working on them a long time ago?
I have three short-story series that I'd like to get onto again.
One is tentatively called Marvel Reality. It's meant to reflect a more grounded nature of this universe. I enjoy the MCU films but find them – and most of the comic-book stories – too fantastical. My goal was to make something more grounded and gritty, as well as experiment with the characters.
(I know, the Ultimate comic series exists. Closer, but no cigar.)
By the time I'd finished with the project, I had a first-of two intro story written for Peter Parker, and a complete story ready for editing for Logan a.k.a. Wolverine. Hydra was established as a modern domestic terrorist group. Shield was something of a paramilitary group, doing what their operatives believe is good but standing at odds with the UN and plenty of its members. Tony Stark died under difficult circumstances, but his two adult children later found a file in the old system called
ironman.ai. Hank Pym was part of the project to research artificial intelligence in the 60s – a project that actually yielded results in the form of an established theorical framework for how to create a machine equivalent to the human mind (the project went nowhere because the technology wasn't there yet).I want to get back to it and finish it eventually, as a form of fan fiction, without ever pretending on the copyrights of Marvel's.
The second series is Crystal Clear – another fan fiction reimagination, this time – of the Dota 2 universe. (There's some lore in this game, though not very fleshed out.) Most of the characters are teenagers, some, like in the source game, – mages. Set in a world akin to our 90s, part of the series' goal was to explore a society where magic is part of the daily life.
Given that the main character, Rylai (the game's Crystal Maiden), is an ice mage, I also wanted to explore what it's like to be a mage in a modern world where there are regulations. Mages have to take classes on how to control their power and use it for good, there are medical implications for using magic inappropriately, and breaking the law may result in harsher punishments for mages – partly due to defined legal repercussions, partly due to the still-persistent bias.
At its heart, it's a young-adult story about a 15-year-old girl trying to find her place in life.
The third one – the shortest of them all – is Claire's. It's based on a set of Tumblr posts with wild premises about a real-world location called Claire's (I still don't know what that is, and I'm not looking to find out.) For each of the five posts, I wanted to create a story that matched the premise, at least metaphorically, while still being grounded in the magical-realism setting.
The stories are set in the old-school diner called Claire's, after the owner. It's a place where people come not so much to eat but to hang out. Claire herself is kind, compassionate, and cheerful, always ready to lend an ear. She also works with agents of secretive international organizations, underground artists with odd prices for work, and mystical old men, while helping young girls with powers to find a better life for themselves, without having to live constantly in fear.
I'm going to forgo the "Username checks out" meme, and say that I would be interested in a more grounded and low stakes version of the Marvel Universe where not every outing is saving the world or using their fighting spirit to overpower a shiny thing and surpassing flaws that will come up the next time around, until their dead, until they're not.
I rarely do. :P
The username in question comes from the time I needed a new Reddit account. I was writing Crystal Clear at the time, and thought that, by the time I finish and publish it, I would be known as that fanfic guy on /r/DotA2.
That's just about what I had in mind.
A friend once gifted a couple of comic books. She had no idea about which are good, so she gave two different ones from Marvel. One was a mainstream Avengers issue, which was not very interesting. The other, however, blew me away.
It focused on a short scene, part of a greater story I wasn't aware of. Tony Stark had a villain in a high-tech prison. Stark, in the Iron Man armor sans the helmet, enters the containment room and talks to the guy; he's visibly disturbed. Turned out, the guy turned every single person in Paris into stone – and they were still alive underneath.
By the end of the drawn-out, very human conversation, Stark draws his hand in the firing motion and points it towards the villain. Stark's drunk: he's been drinking again, to cope with the atrocity he'd witnessed. It clearly shook him to the core – so now he's pointing a repulsor at him, and his intent is clear: he wants to blow the guy away, and forgo the fair trial others think he deserves... Deep down, Stark thinks so too – so after a long wait, he lowers the arm and, after a finishing sentences, turns around and leaves the room.
That's the whole issue.
That's the kind of scenarios I strove to portray all along: how superheroes – ostensibly above us mere mortals – cope with unimaginable pain much in the same way we do. I mean, fuck, that whole scene was intense, and the human emotions ran rampant, in a collected, almost repressed fashion. How would you react to a whole city's worth of people confined in their own flesh yet still living to experience the horror?
I'm no master wordsmith, but if I can come close to how human that scene was, I may leave this life's performance feeling satisfied with what I've done. The Reality project may well be an outlet for that.
I was inspired by a comment someone made suggesting reusable gift bags instead of using paper, so I bought two Christmassy prints from Joanne's and started sewing. I've only got one incomplete bag so far, but it looks so good already! I will show some photos when I am done.
Of course the irony is that the original poster said that it was to save money because they were reusable, but I have spent about $30 on it so far! I probably won't recoup that for a few years at best. But they look so good and they're pretty good quality in spite of my shoddy sewing.
I've been working on some label cover art recently and have been experimenting with some t-shirt design for a band I made a cover for.
As a hobby me and my roommate have been making some experimental lo-fi music videos where he brings the tunes and I make the visuals.
I'm working on my own note taking application with wiki-like capabilities, because I have tried all the prior options and none of them work the way I feel like a modern note taking application should work. It's also a file manager, kind of cool.
I'm also testing and experimenting a new agricultural growth system, been a long process the last three years but we've made some good progress here lately after fifty (fifty!) or so failed attempts.
Sounds cool! Describe?
I'm assuming you've tried Notion.
After taking a peek at Notion, my only issue with it is that it seems to be cloud-based, so I'm intrigued with @drannex's idea.
Not entirely related, but I really enjoy using Indigrid. However, I wish it had a little more functionality (multiple notebooks, page groups) and could be a hosted application that I could make accessible to friends. I know it takes away from the purpose of Indigrid being a simple, easy to use alternative to things like Evernote and OneNote but it's too simple for me some days.
I think the idea for Indigrid is to reduce functionality to what's necessary. In this case, you can adjust your view to open multiple columns in one bookmark, add a new bookmark, and open a different set of columns in the other.
That way, especially if you store the items in their own "categories" (separated by being children of different nodes), you get the pleasant experience of having multiple notebooks without the hassle of switching between physical files. You can then take your
vault.dbfile (where all the data is stored) to a new computer and continue using it there like no physical transfer has occurred.Or did you mean something different by page groups?
Intergrid – the thing I'm working on at the moment – is going to have multiple boards eventually, as part of the user's ability to share read-only or editable versions of (parts of) their notes with other people, for presentation or cooperation. I like Indigrid's one-notebook idea, but at that stage, no one would be able to stop you from having multiple boards, each of their own independent content.
So in OneNote, you can have tabs, basically sections of pages that you could equate to using those coloured stickout tabs in notebooks. That's what I meant by page groups, I guess. I'd imagine that the board concept would be the same, unless your board concept is the same as the columns in Indigrid.
I like the idea of multiple notebooks that can be closed and loaded as needed, which is the main thing I wish Indigrid had, without having to run multiple software instances.
You don't think columns are functionally-similar to OneNote's tabs? Is it because you can open more than one, thus losing mental focus?
There's nothing preventing you from having several "category" nodes that each map to a separate notebook. As far as the functionality you have versus the functionality you wish you had, this is the best mental mapping you can do. That said, feel free to email Mark, the creator of Indigrid: there's an email address on the main page.
The only true form of connection in Indigrid is the hierarchy. You can – and should – do whatever you want with it.
I guess they do, sort of, but because of the structure of the software, my mind doesn't view it that way.
Not sure what you mean by that. You can only open one notebook in Indigrid.
EDIT: I probably just need to play around with Indigrid more.
Check this out. If you open one notebook at a time, and maybe navigate your way around them with bookmarks, you can have what you want without the overhead of managing files.
Oh yeah, no I understand that, but my brain doesn't see those as notebooks.
My brain can't wrap around Indigrid lol
That's the beauty of it: it's up to you. You can internalize the uppermost-level nodes as notebooks, their children – as categories, their grandchildren – as pages etc. etc.
Have you read the design philosophy of Indigrid? It may shed some light onto why it is the way it is, and also offer a few ideas on how to handle the app.
The design philosophy is too dense of a read. I'm sure there's insight somewhere but there's so much content that I can't imagine I'd care about.
Started putting actual effort into Writing again in honor of Timasomo, and when you are putting something together, you can by definition see all the strings and it looks ugly during your first go of it. You can see all the railroading that takes place, the over quipping, people saying their motivations out loud in order to move things along, and it all looks like ass and unstable. Maybe once I put some page distance between me and what I just wrote it will seem more established, like it was always part of the story, but for now it just looks ugly, like an adaptation of how it's supposed to play out. Eww...
I'm nearly at the end of several years of work on this one, but my upcoming party game being published by Roxley Games, Gorilla Marketing, will soon be available in stores! I did a quick runthrough of it at a convention called SHUX last month and they just posted the video yesterday: https://youtu.be/YZwjdj8e_lg
Made a render