The Odyssey Exhibition

Concept drawings for a nonspecific project inspired by the theater version of Lychee Light Club. The idea has been discussed in relation to the ongoing planning for the puppet version of Mercuro, with the Lychee concept going back and forth between either being a comic or a film. Similar to how Furuya did his own reinterpretation of the play from his personal recollections, the basic concept is to analyze the surviving elements of the play’s script along with audience and participant recollections to do a unique narrative that adapts the play’s original subtexts.

A collection of some more recent God Machine stills. As of writing this, the film’s screenplay seems to be finished. It’s my first soloist long-form script, most screenplays I’ve written before this were either collaborative (Kafka’s Supermarket, Box Men) or bare bones guidelines for silent shorts (Winter Sports). This is 74 pages with like multiple locations, flashbacks, flash forwards, dialogue, etc. I can’t really determine the quality since I can hardly read my own writing. It’s a starting point, at least. I have many more ideas after this that I’ll have to write, so I better get used to it. At this point I’ve started drawing the scenes with side characters like the deranged guardsmen and the termite woman. The basic setting for The God Machine takes some inspiration from Kōbō Abe's stories, namely Pitfall (1962) with the whole focus on a mining facility. The termite woman is a loose reference to a character in a play he wrote titled The Green Stockings. The man in the white suit and hat is also a callback to the antagonist from Pitfall.

Some of the backgrounds in the above screencaps, namely with the scenes of Prometheus confronting the God Machine and its Seraph, feature experimental photography as the backdrops. I shot various images through a glass bottle that was molded in a spiral pattern. I did a short little video where I show how it works on Instagram.

With this shot, I used images from the Akira manga and the Vampire Hunter D OVA as a reference for action effects with the flying rubble and the backgrounds. Previous Production Logs: July 15th, 2020 - October 3rd, 2020 - October 5th, 2020

A selection of finalized stills from The God Machine. I would draw the dynamic poses of all the shots first and then animate around them. The longest part of it is finding just the right sort of visual compositions and layouts for each scene. The last drawing is a finalized design model sheet for one of the characters in the film.

It’s been a while since I posted here. Over a month actually. Things have been somewhat hectic lately, a lot of stuff has been happening in personal life. Some of it has been good, some of it has been 2020. Anyway, I’ve come back with a little sample of what I’ve been working on in the meantime with this segment from my guro animation The God Machine. The timing may be altered somewhat in the final product and there might be music to accompany the sound design, but overall this is pretty close to the finalized version. This clip demonstrates how I’ll use flashing images in the film. The flashes here act as subliminal reveals of the real identities of some of the characters, in the film some of the characters are parts of the titular God Machine possessing corpses, resurrecting them in the process to hide itself. I also snuck in a somewhat mangled version of a Beckett quote in one of the flashing images. It also has just around the end a little bit of one of my new techniques in filmmaking, video synths. Some video synths output pure signals while others take samples that are fed in (I.E. video signals from a camera, DVD player, VHS player, etc) and distort them. I’m using the latter. It’s a lot like noise music recording in that way, you have the simple bases and it’s on the manual end of the user to engineer and mix the visuals together. You can get a bit of an idea of what they’re like in full force with the music video for SPK’s Slogun, which involved the use of a really early video synth model from the 1970s. Some additional screencaps below are included of some other video synth shots.

KAFKA’S SUPERMARKET: June 28th, 2019 YouTube - Vimeo - Official Soundtrack (Kafka, Incidental Music) - Letterboxd Production time - 1 year Runtime - 47:49 Kafka’s Supermarket is an abstract, vaguely Ballard inspired narrative on the escalation of commercialism and its effects on society as a whole. The film is in-part a response to the BBC documentary Century Of The Self, functioning as an anti-capitalist socialist response to what was originally intended by the author (Adam Curtis) to be a piece of neoliberal rhetoric. The film's narrative takes influence from Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition in its method of exploring psychological landscapes to communicate the overarching narrative. Kafka’s Supermarket took a little over a year to complete, mostly from how the film is wholly detached from the current Atlanta film scene as a fringe production. An in-depth blog post about the film’s production history and the artistic collaboration it features can be read here: https://eyeodyssey.tumblr.com/post/185917157961/kafkas-supermarket-june-28th-2019-youtube

ラバーズ・ラバー "Rubber's Lover" (1997) - Shozin Fukui I owned the DVD for this film for a while, had to get frames from a YouTube upload of the opening though since Mac DVD players are weird about screencapping. I bought it partly on a whim after really getting into the Japanese underground cyberpunk film style with my introduction to Tetsuo: The Iron Man, but never got around to viewing it out of a combination of procrastination and constantly working on personal projects. Still have to see it in full. I watched the first several minutes after a long sleepless day to get a small idea of what things would be like when I finally get to a proper viewing. I was pleasantly surprised with the opening to this film, great mixture of industrial grime and atmosphere. Top notch use of minimalist set design as well in combination with the black and white cinematography, will be keeping this film in mind for inspirational tips for future projects.

The complete set of illustrations that I drew to Drawkill’s Goretober prompts. Had several ideas that didn’t make it through where they could be done on time, but was able to finish more of these than I initially expected (especially with all the film production antics going on, both on my original projects and work for hire type stuff). Got a bit quirky with these in a way (especially with Christmas Over Tokyo), but happy with how they came out. Figure At The Base Of A Crucifixion: Prompt 01. (Pins And Needles) Senseless Fixation: Prompt 02. (Sensory Loss) Weaponized Dreams: Prompt 04. (Flesh And The Machine) The Colony: Prompt 08. (Infection). Christmas Over Tokyo: Prompt 14. (Blood Blood Blood). Man Bites Dog: Prompt 15. (Animal Instinct). Frankenstein’s Nightmare: Prompt 19. (Dismantle Instructions. Reconstruction Of A Fallen Angel (Frankenstein Version 2): Prompt 31. (Scientific Diagram).