@eyeodyssey / eyeodyssey.tumblr.com
The carriage shot in motion, with experimental photography and selective motion on just the whip continuing the scene. The audio here is a placeholder, the background music is from a live version of SPK's Leichenschrei. Previous Production Logs: July 15th, 2020 - October 3rd, 2020 - October 5th, 2020 - November 12th, 2020 - November 12th, 2020 - November 12th, 2020
A God Machine sequence that I started drawing during the Zeta blackout in Atlanta, I did the paper sketches for it along with some roughs for a connected shot. The chancellor is riding a carriage drawn by people that he engineered into becoming mutant humanoid bulls. Instead of regular frame-by-frame movement, the chancellor moves forward with each instance he cracks his whip. The motion of the whip cracks are conveyed with abstract flashing cutaways. Previous Production Logs: July 15th, 2020 - October 3rd, 2020 - October 5th, 2020 - November 12th, 2020 - November 12th, 2020
A walk cycle for The God Machine. In one of the scenes, the protagonist (Prometheus) sprouts out four Spider Crab-like legs and rampages through the mining facility. A later shot from the same scene.
Previous Production Logs: July 15th, 2020 - October 3rd, 2020 - October 5th, 2020 - November 12th, 2020
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.
It’s been a moment since I last posted here. Been meaning to write on here, and on most other places too, but mental energy has kinda been in the tubes. A lot of stuff has been happening. Being in Georgia, we’re supposed to be going back to work now since Kemp is a moron. So we’re now full-time in the zone, watching out for deathtraps. Will save all that for later though, if I ever get to it. Main focus of this post is that Winter Sports is done, and on YouTube, right now. Just a little under 6 minutes of condensed black comedy. A teddy bear with an invisible rifle participates in the annual winter sports where he hunts bipedal suited animals for game. The set design alludes to incidents of slaughtering and the fates of several hikers who mysteriously went missing. Winter Sports was conceived in a night along with three other absurdist shorts (Voluntary Martyrs, Patriot Carnival and Day Of The Woodpecker). The films were all conceived in some way or another as absurdist homages to Soviet Necrorealism. Necrorealism has been a movement that’s fascinated me for a while now. It’s technically over at this point, it was the brainchild of a singular director named Yevgeny Yufit, and he kicked the bucket back in 2016. The movement died with him, but I feel aspects of it ring as being relevant to America’s current crisis with the capitalist shitshow going on right now in light of COVID-19. The best way to communicate our current landscape is absurdism in my opinion. It kinda surprises me that with the current popularity of quarantine filmmaking, it didn’t pick up any traction. Times like this warrant pitch black dark humor. The basic premise of Winter Sports really took action when I had a little realization about these shorts I was watching for the past couple of years. For some reason, early Necrorealist shorts were really fixated on werewolves. In Werewolf Orderlies there was the titular werewolf orderlies, a bunch of medical assistants who take the protagonist (a sailor carrying a hacksaw) and drop him off in a snowy forest where he’s beaten to a pulp by a gang of manic shovelers. And in Woodcutter, you have a werewolf who disguises himself as a tourist who jumps off the roof of a building before throwing himself in front of a speeding train. Not exactly the sorta stuff you’d expect a werewolf to do. Sometime later, I heard it might have come from how wild dogs and wolves were considered a predatory threat in Russia, like how bears are in America. You had stuff like the death of Grizzly Man where he was mauled by a bear. In Winter Sports, I originally had the idea of the sportsman being a suited werewolf. But after this tidbit, I shifted the protagonist to instead be a teddy bear named Bino. The image of a cutesy Sanrio looking bear shooting people and skinning them was also funnier than a plain werewolf anyway, so it’s a win win. This upload of Winter Sports may or may not be a limited viewing kind of thing. The plan was that I’ll have the film up for a week, starting today (writing this on the 12th) until it’s made private again on the 19th. Film festivals are kinda uptight when it comes to films being not available to the public when submitted for consideration. Still thinking through on if it should actually be private though. Forgot to mention it on here, but it's also the reason Box Men (a similarly absurdist dark comedy I filmed in 2019) is currently private. I do have the loophole though where I can send private upload links to the film to anyone interested in seeing it.
Some more recent shots for The God Machine. Production was slowed down due to the outbreak, isolation and free time has become its own distraction. I’ve been able to work on smaller things in the meantime (I have a short absurdist film in the works) but larger projects were on the back-burner. Last week, I dreamt a rendition of the film’s ending that fleshed out certain elements I wanted to include. The lighting in it was different from how the rest of the film looked though, so I started experimenting with alternate color temperatures, hence the bottom screencap. I’ve also been actively researching certain limited animation tricks in TV anime from between the 1960s and 1980s. While the art for The God Machine is largely too complex to animate in a traditional manner (especially with my lack of personal experience), I’ve gathered a bunch of ideas for more experimental animation techniques, some of which referencing early chronophotography film. I’m also plotting out potential mixed-media editing tricks with live action in-camera effects. Lastly, I found on the Internet Archive a certain anatomy book (Atlas of Legal Medicine) that was essentially the bible of the 1980s Soviet Necrorealist film movement (article source, Six Simple Facts About Necrorealism by Obskura). I’ll be using the book both as makeup reference for future films (modelling actors in some of my absurdist shorts after the cadavers seen in the book) while also tracing some of the anatomical organ illustrations for the titular God Machine of the film. The God Machine itself would be like this horrible mishmash of organic matter and machinery, with the idea of it simultaneously looking like a mutilated body and a complex confusing factory machine. Content warning in that the attached PDF is a ye olde forensic science book, so there are illustrations of real corpses in it. Standard course for collage artists, but obviously not for everyone. I certainly lost my appetite while looking through it before. Comes in handy when I want to keep myself from quarantine stress eating at least!
First drawing on the blog in a while. A design reference sheet for a character I conceived in mid-2019, inspired by The Gerogerigegege album Moenai Hai. For some reason, I mentally associate the dark ambient tracks in that album with fishing villages from the 1960s.
For most of the month I’ve been somewhat off the map with an obnoxiously persistent flu, it started off as a common cold but turned into a lingering energy drainer after the first several days. I haven’t been able to do any filming as I haven’t really gone out that much until more recently, so I spent my time drawing shots for the animated segments of The God Machine. It’s starting to feel like things are fully coming together now in the overall treatment. I’ve been going around drawing out certain scenes while writing out various script and plot synopsis drafts to fully hone in the vibe and tone of the film. It’s starting to reach a concrete point where I can confidently make a finalized screenplay to send out to actors and decide resources that’d be needed to finish the film. I’m also recording incidental music for certain scenes. Viewers of Madhouse Mitchel (the film that The God Machine is effectively a revision of) will recognize one of the tracks I posted (Death Anthem) as being a revision of the death march heard at the ending of the 2017 animation. Soundcloud uploads of the current incidental music: - God Machine Ambience (Excerpt) - Cemetery Shootout (Film Take) - Death Anthem (6-Minute Excerpt) There are a lot of different tonal extremities at play with the concepts I have. I’m thinking specifically of the possibility of fusing these different opposing atmospheres and styles together for a very deliberate reason. In retrospect, I came to find that the ero guro art movement and Georges Bataille’s theory of the limit-experience are closely paralleled thematically. Both artistic philosophies essentially involve the shattering of standard comprehension in conceptual extremity. Given the mythological themes of The God Machine, I plan to cross guro art with the mysticism of Bataille’s limit experience to depict a form of mystical cyberpunk grotesque nonsense. The film will clash together certain emotional states that are so opposing to one another that, in concept, it will embody its own limit-experience. Some of the styles it will work with are experimental structural sequencing, science fiction, body horror, kaiju film, documentary, absurdist comedy, and theatric performance art. One of the main examples I can give is the film’s clashing of action and decay. All the possible action in the film is effectively dissected, revealing beneath either the misanthropy of the characters or the absurdist black humor of the violence they embody. There will be a great emphasis on foley audio in these certain scenes. Most action that does occur is seen at such a distance where any excitement it can give is completely devoid, depicted with a grueling slow-burn pace. The best likeness I can give is the last several minutes of Evgeny Yufit’s Knights Of Heaven (Рыцари поднебесья), as it’s where I got these ideas. Yufit’s films were part of a contemporary movement called Soviet Necrorealism, where fantastical science fiction ideas were rendered to their most primal minimalistic states. The movement was somewhat of a parallel to the Japanese cyberpunk scene (which in itself was a relative to ero guro) in that the films explored the concept of rapid technological advancement leading to entropy. Necrorealism took a more Tarkovsky reminiscent approach with the previously mentioned slow-burn pacing, alluding to the sense of technology degrading and returning to an organic state. In that way, The God Machine can be seen somewhat as a late bridging point between these movements, crossing the high-tension extremity of guro and cyberpunk with the decay and organic atmospheres of Necrorealist filmmaking. This is all just considering the film’s tonal effect, the story itself also has various different elements working behind it. Like Kafka’s Supermarket, the film is more socially themed. The main plotline of the film, when it’s unraveled, essentially amounts to a social drama about the exploitation of workers and abuse of power. I got a majority of the premise from a cross-viewing of Ken Russell’s The Devils and Teshigahara’s Pitfall, though thematically it leans more to the ladder. Working with the socially themed narrative are some philosophical questions about the nature of mankind and the conflict between sentience and primality, and how the two are used for violence in power structures. Last thing I feel I should probably note, I’ve been listening to Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery for more often than is likely healthy for the average person. Not the full album, but the self-titled single (and some of Karn Evil 9). Dunno if that’s been altering my judgment at all these past several weeks. Most of my brain waves at this point are synth lines comprised of 500-something notes and Moog bass riffs. Brain rot perversity.
Some excerpts from the second and third chapters of my surrealist webcomic “Iron Logs”. Iron Logs started off in mid-2017 when I was observing the cartoonist circles that were active on Tumblr. Many artists in that circle that I knew were either closely following or writing their own, for a lack of a better term, “nudie cutie” comics. Essentially the same sort of stylistic traits and narratives you’d get in a Russ Meyer film, but commonly with characters who were more ‘alternatively’ (i.e. mall punk or goth) fashioned. Just around that time, I was developing an interest in Georges Bataille, following closely from my interests in surrealist collage and ero guro. Considering the nature of how Bataille published Story Of The Eye, I got the idea to make a surrealist comic that disguised itself as one of those contemporary Tumblr nudie comics to sorta disrupt the norm. The first chapter was made over the summer, while these other two I just started writing this year. The first chapter is a bit rough artistically speaking, these following chapters are closer to my initial vision. It apparently did meet my goal though. I remember in particular another artist who was writing his own comic expressed his being deeply concerned after being at a bit of a loss for words during the comic’s launch. The series is now somewhat wandering for a new home, as Tumblr’s guidelines drastically shifted in late-2018 and most of those artists had since migrated to other places. I don’t really know where though. Aside from the transgressive actions of the dysfunctional lovers that the series follows, Iron Logs is driven by the bizarre locations that it traverses. Some of the locations include a forest made out of plastic, the flesh market, a 1930s factory town riddled with murderous businessmen, a mansion of bourgeoisie complacency and perversity, the fetus of the universe, a prison camp, a ‘void room’, a prison camp and the iron woods (a forest where trees made of coagulated blood grow from the remains of detonated missiles). Just to clarify due to the sort of imagery depicted, none of the scenes in the comic reflect my personal views. My parents were animal rescuers before I was born, and the sexuality depicted is meant to be grotesque and surreal than erotic.
I mentioned in an earlier post regarding The God Machine the premise for a film project titled “Freak”, Thought that while that was brought up, I’d also post this. The basic concept for Freak spawned off from a narrative I was already toying around with, first for an RPG Maker video game idea and later on a possible second chapter for Iron Logs (going by the title “The Taxidermist's Attic”). The overall narrative of the story takes influence from a mixture of my loose memories of a story from the Junji Ito anthology Flesh Colored Horror (Long Hair In The Attic) and the Swans album Filth. Like in the Ito narrative, hair becomes a point of focus in the story once the leading character (a dejected taxidermist) makes a coat for his boss from the corpses of feral cats. The finale of the story specifically involves a scene where the taxidermist is strangled in his sleep by cat hair that grows from the walls of his house.
A (long overdue) updated set of stills from The God Machine. Nuclear pollution wiping out a primitive mining town, war rooms with projected images of parasitic twins, an extension of the Prometheus myth, living mushroom clouds, atomic wombs harvesting fetal weapons of mass destruction, cyclopean stillborn infants emerging from missile launching grounds and more. The God Machine at its current state is an uncontainable, enraged exploration of mankind’s seemingly self-destructive habits, questioning whether or not sentience is ‘mostly harmless’ or a ticking time bomb set to annihilate everything and itself. The God Machine is the first of a planned series of films that I intend to make throughout the 2020s, the films all taking influence from the frantic sensibilities of Japanese cyberpunk. The films themselves aren’t exactly ‘cyberpunk’ by definition. Some are more industrial in tone, but prominently they don’t have the exact staples of the cyberpunk narrative. Some of the other planned films in the series include The Civilized Predator (a thriller about a repressed businessman who believes he’s becoming a werewolf), Freak (a dark comedy about the deranged adventures of a taxidermist living in a factory town) and The Wall Man (an Edogawa Ranpo inspired horror story about immortality, architecture, and voyeurism). A no-permit public performance art segment for The God Machine is planned to occur on the 31st of October, the live segment acting as the finale of the movie. Following that, I’ll film the rest of the movie in reverse, going from the ending to the opening segment. The film will be comprised of a complex mixture of live action acted segments, photo collage, stock footage, and animation. The acted segments I have planned out are very reminiscent of Shozin Fukui’s √964 Pinocchio, particularly its infamous and equally explosive finale. I recently bought a 10-18mm wide-angle lens for my camera that I’ll use extensively for both The God Machine and some of my future cyberpunk inspired productions.
Concept art for the mask that’ll be worn by the actress playing Prometheus. Like with Kafka, I’ve begrudgingly started the process of writing a screenplay for The God Machine. The script will cover for the film’s whole structure, animated and collage segments included. I’m intending to pitch it to actors to hook them into the production. Only one actor will be masked this time around, the actor playing Prometheus (or True Prometheus, or “The Prototype”, depending on the draft of the script). Ideally, the actor playing Prometheus will be a dancer of some sort, considering how a dancer is required to have full awareness of every individual muscle of their body. Prometheus’ character in the acted segments is primarily focused on the grotesqueness of the human body, focusing on the many ways it contorts and distorts itself, all set to the sound of metallic scraping and crackling.
In a purely ideal case scenario, I may have a version of the film done by 2020. This is primarily considering the acted segments and some of the animation. Ah damn, then there’s also getting voice actors for the thing. Ah hell, that’s all for later.
Screencaps from my ongoing film production, The God Machine. These shots specifically highlight the hand-drawn segments of the film. The full movie will feature an elaborate mixture of multi-media film experiments. Some of the already planned sequences will involve experiments with photography, live painting, narrations regarding the casualties of in-universe mining disasters, collage animation, and improvisational editing of documentary footage. The narrative of The God Machine is a complex anti-capitalist drama with elements of inspiration from Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Pitfall, T. F. Mou’s Men Behind The Sun, Hiroshi Harada’s The Death Lullaby and Ken Russell’s The Devils.
Genres Experimental film, avant-garde art, animation, collage film, hand-drawn theater
Uncut version (recommended edit) YouTube - Official Score Initial release YouTube Madhouse Mitchel was my second major short film, immediately following the making of “The Counting Man”. Begun when I was sixteen, due the detailed drawings, the film took two and a half years to make.When I began production, I viewed Madhouse Mitchel as a sort of small scale rebellious antidote to popular formula. The basic narrative style pays homage to my interest in Japanese avant garde cinema, and the art has hints of my early memories of the Russian animation I was attracted to as a child. It has a certain organic, traditional element which in this film clashes against the grotesque, mutated industrial scenery in which the characters reside. The way things move also makes reference both to the kamishibai storytelling art form and the earlier limited animation that would be utilized in shows like Devilman. All reblogs are greatly appreciated and encouraged. Shorts like this one take a while to make.
”Creeping from the halls of the maze brain, corruption and terror is woven by the devils born from the denied errors of mankind.”
Madhouse Mitchel was my second major short film, immediately following the making of “The Counting Man”. Begun when I was sixteen, due the detailed drawings, the film took two and a half years to make.When I began production, I viewed Madhouse Mitchel as a sort of small scale rebellious antidote to popular formula. The basic narrative style pays homage to my interest in Japanese avant garde cinema, and the art has hints of my early memories of the Russian animation I was attracted to as a child. It has a certain organic, traditional element which in this film clashes against the grotesque, mutated industrial scenery in which the characters reside. The way things move also makes reference both to the kamishibai storytelling art form and the earlier limited animation that would be utilized in shows like Devilman.
All shares and reblogs are greatly appreciated. Original release: YouTube - Vimeo Uncut Version (Featuring two additional minutes of previously unreleased content): YouTube - Vimeo Additional content: Original Soundtrack (Bandcamp) - Uncut release trailer
