My Writerly Blog

A friend posted this short, collaborative film on Facebook the other day. It was cute, and included an actor I like, so I was amused. At first. After exploring the hitRECord site a bit, however, I was amazed. While the short film was written and filmed the way many are - as a collaboration of the few - its final(?) iteration is the product of crowdsourcing, via members of hitRECord. Happily for my purposes, a kind user on the site mapped out a timeline of its production . Now, this is a site created and sponsored by a pretty well-known guy. He has connections. He can fund project entry into Sundance, and he's the one who ultimately decides what gets a big-boy push and what doesn't. Not all of us can do this to this level of success. But... It's still an amazing example of this new sort of creativity that the Web 2.0, along with the open licensing concept, is facilitating. Some artists are letting go of this evanescent concept of copyright, letting it go ...

I've finally done it. I have entered nerdhood, via the rather embarrassing route of sustaining a significant injury from too much time spent in front of a computer screen. My osteopath was beside herself. It was time well spent, however, as I managed to update my entire website, form the platform for my work in the next few years, and gain a lot more knowledge about the software I'll be using to create my digital stories. But the truly interesting thing I learned by using new software and rebuilding my site from the ground up was this: I need better pencils. As it turns out, I'm rather crap at designing unless I have a pencil (not a pen) and paper. I couldn't even begin putting the pages together until I had thumbnail sketches and hastily drawn scribbles and lists in a notebook in front of me. My sole mechanical pencil broke one evening, and I found myself unable to continue working. In a related episode, I attended a lecture this week that was not up ...

I spent 3 days in London this weekend, and almost all of it can be classed research. Amazing. Friday was spent entirely on the Underground - no joke, I saw sky only when the trains emerged aboveground - taking photographs to use (likely much altered) in my digital fiction project. I know, I know, there are a ton of subway station and train photos available on Flickr, etc., but as a train system is the foundation for my work I really wanted the experience of taking the photos myself. Particularly as it's one discipline in creating digital stories that I do have experience with (learning all the coding, web building, and networking has been humbling). So I dusted off my old film camera (yes, film is still better for art photog, in my mind), and trolled the Underground. I don't have the film back yet, but I do want to note the experience of that portion of the process. For one, I got tired. I spent 5 hours taking pictures, and I don't recall ever being so sick of a s...