He came to stay and he brought Rachael, who sings sometimes. We spent most of the time making awesome music. He taught me some very cool things about Ableton Live and we ended up making a pretty cool piece of electronic music.

The first night he was here, Edd was also here. We had the photo studio booked to take some pictures and film Tom’s video for asdfcomp. It looked a bit like this:

A couple of days later we went to the studio again, this time without Tom or Edd, to make a video for our new track. It’s called Back To Back, and you can get it from Stephen’s Bandcamp page right here. The video looks a bit like this:

Be sure to watch in HD! At lower quality YouTube tends to drop frames, and one frame can make all the difference…

In other news, TomSka is in San Diego at Comic Con 2010. I’m still in England, feeling like I really should be in San Diego. If he doesn’t buy me a present he will die a violent and untimely death.

That is all.

Credits

Directed by: Bing
Starring: Bing and Mike Trueman
Additional voice acting: TomSka
Camera operated by: TomSka
Edited by: Bing
Music: ‘Destroy’ by The Japanese Popstars

Photos provided by these lovely people under Creative Commons licensing:
jurvetson, psd, comedy_nose, dmuth, TheAlienessGiselaGiardino²³, euthman, Valerie Everett, jimf0390, arenamontanus, and Sougent Harrop.

Special thanks to the amazing guy who sold me the guitar! It was loved.

But that’s not all…

The Japanese Popstars have given me five signed copies of their new EP to give away to whoever I think deserves them. You can enter the contest by doing one of these things:

1. Make a video response of you waging war on old music. Break stuff, make stuff, re-cut and re-edit. Be destructive and creative. (Make sure you post it as a video response so we can see it!)

Your video response can be anything. There aren’t really any guidelines. I just want you to go nuts. You could make some music, break some music, destroy and instrument or two, re-edit Egon or make your own Egon video. Just do some cool shit and if I like it you will get a prize.

2. Come up with your own futuristic instrument and give it a name! Tweet it using the hashtag ‘#destroymusic’, or post it to the CakeBomb Facebook page. (For extra points, you could tell us what it’s made of, or how it sounds. You could even draw a picture of it…)

The cleverer the instrument the better. If you make me laugh, I’ll like it. But please don’t repeat ones that are already in the video or change them slightly. That’s boring. Also, if you can’t think of any yourself, why not retweet one you really like and help that person win?

That’s still not all…

There are 10 subliminal images in this video. Try and find them. Use the comments here or on YouTube to point them out.

That is all.

Then I presented/narrated a short film that my housemate Chris Devlin was working on. I also helped record the sound and stuff. It’s pretty cool:

Our last project of the year was to make an experimental film. We were given various starting points, but we we free to do almost anything we wanted. I took the opportunity to try out an idea I had been sitting on for a while. I wanted to make a point about how editing can conceal and reveal details, and alter pace. Most people are aware of continuity editing and conventions such as the shot/reverse, wide and close-up. I wanted to see what happened when everything was shown at once, so I directed and edited Behind the Lines with my colleague Adam.

We filmed on a Canon 500D, edited in Final Cut and applied an image matte in After Effects (the lines). We also recorded all the sounds separately and I composed the soundtrack in Logic. It was a really fun experiment.

How many of you saw the guy in the background of the last shot? And if you didn’t, go back and watch it again. (It’s TomSka.)

Summer is here, so I’ll be planning and writing more than filming for a while. I’ll also be working on CakeBomb version SEVEN POINT ZERO with Amy. You guys are in for a treat…

I Watched Skins

So I thought it was about time I saw what all the fuss was about, and bought myself the first two seasons of Jamie Brittain and Bryan Elsley’s crazy-successful teen drama. I’ve always had a secret soft spot for teen drama (if it’s done well), and I found myself really enjoying it. The first season was particularly awesome. My favourite episode by a huge margin was episode 8, which became incredibly sinister and an audio-visual delight.

(I’ve recently started watching Nip/Tuck, another series I had been meaning to watch for a while. It’s pretty cool and has boobies in it.)

I Made a Comic

Some of you know Captain Baculum, my webcomic. Most of you probably think it’s pretty bad, and I would agree with you there. But I always had a plan, and last week that plan became a reality. I spent all my spare time for 3 months re-drawing almost every comic and filling out the story, then I had the first episode of the Captain’s story printed professionally by the lovely people at Lincoln Print & Copy Centre to sell at the Webcomix Thing in London. I printed 50 of them, and probably won’t get any more printed until next year (if EVER). I’ll make it all available online soon, don’t worry. (If you want to buy a copy I still have some left, which you can order here.)

I’m taking a break from Baculum for a few months to relax a little and think about the next episode. I’d like it to be more strip-based than the first episode. I’ve already started drawing new stuff in a brand new drawing pad, which I bought with money from selling comics. It’s a glorious cycle.

The Webcomix Thing was amazing fun. I sold 10 comics and spent far too much money buying comics from all the other guys. I made some cool friends like Timothy who draws People I Know and Nikki, the creator of Herald Owlett.

I Saw a Swan Fight a Dog

Tom saw it too. It was rad.

I Produced a Film

My specialist module at university is ’single camera productions, and for the latest project I took on the role of producer. Myself and classmates Guy, Adam, Stacey and Dan made this film right here:

This film was exciting technically, because it was my first time with a new set of equipment. We used wireless clip mics concealed in the actors’ clothes to record sound. (I also used this method for Tom Scar’s Hardest Men.) The big thing was that we were filming with a Canon 5D Mark II, a digital SLR (made for stills), shooting in full HD with interchangeable lenses. The result can end up looking far more professional than most digital camcorders are capable of. Neat.

What next? I’m going to keep trying new things because it’s fun.

ps. Check out Michael Sandford’s comic, Happy Attack, which is going to be taking my place on Thursdays for now. It’s awesome.

Last semester I directed a 10-minute documentary about the Church of England for my Single Camera Production (making films) module. It was the second-longest shoot I’ve been involved in, and it was tiring. BUT it was really good fun and we made a cool little film.

I’ve also been scripting a series of videos about (spoiler alert) Tom being invisible. The first of these is up on YouTunes already!

Then there’s Captain Baculum. In preparation for this year’s Webcomix Thing in London, I’ve been working on a remixed version of Captain Baculum to be printed and sold at the CakeBomb table! Here’s a preview:

The comics are essentially the same, but I’m reworking them to better fit a printed copy. This means extra panels and hopefully a better pace. It also gives me the chance to add details to the story and redraw panels I was unhappy with. Hopefully the finished thing will be done sometime in March, ready to be printed, and it will feature the entire 1st episode as well as extras and maybe even some guest strips.

What does the future hold? This semester I’m working on a fiction short film as producer (and maybe director of photography). It doesn’t have a name yet but it’s going to be a drama based on the life and times of a two-man band. For my digital media module I’m also working on an interactive DVD game. It’s called Billy Ninja vs. The Robots and it’s going to be a cheesy, retro-style shooter.

I’ve also started a new theory subject (TomSka does it too) called New Media Cultures. It’s tough stuff, but if you’re interested in debates and articles and lots of words, you can read what I’m studying about on my NMC blog over here. It might be useful if you’re planning to study media technology.

I’ve also been learning to use the world’s cheapest and oldest steadicam. Life is exciting.

My grandmother strokes her cat and says “for once just be a part of the rest of the world,” with emphasis in all the important places that turn it the colour of a condescending plea, that I imagine as a sickly green. The little bar that indicates volume grows with the push of a button and the BBC News at Ten tears itself into my ears and eyes with such force that it drowns every other noise from the room- that is apart from my grandmother. Her voice, which I have decided is the optimum pitch for all hearing ranges and that minute degree below uncomfortable amplitude so that it can brave any competition from television or radio or traffic and ring true in any environment, continues unmolested and unforgiving.

So she sits with her finger bent into the volume control and lets these words roll from her tongue, “for once just be a part of the rest of the world”. They hum with discordance and crackling, desperate grief, that I could be so imposing in my aversion to the BBC News at Ten.

The television tells me that Obama is doing well. I know that already. The man is practically wearing the White House, and nothing new is to be said. I try to engage my company with an argument I had two nights earlier about Trotta’s blunder and public apology, about the controversy caused over the accidental mention of assassination, about such things being brought to light being part of the problem, about liberals clinging to causes as a crutch, unable to see two sides of a coin and blissful in their narrow-minded negativity about stupid political scapegoats. No more than four words escape my mouth over the buffeting wind of the BBC News at Ten. It plucks the eyes from the sockets in my family’s skulls. It clogs and protrudes from their ears in ugly solid lumps.

Next, the television tells me about knives, and how the government has spent three million pounds creating saturated media campaigns to raise awareness about sharp weapons. It says that the campaign is going to reach the young people with viral advertising on social networking sites- that available to see on every computer in the intelligent universe will be streaming video of actors emulating closed-circuit footage of brutal stabbings, that a shock tactic directed by a film post-graduate is set to lower violent crime by talking to the children on their own wavelength. I want to be there with my fist around the tie of whichever department head used his keen instinct and intuition to head up this brilliant scheme. To be the one to calmly tell him that he is patronising his target audience on their own turf, and nothing will come of this multi-million pound endeavor in futility.

After that, the television tells me that people living in one part of England are far healthier than those in another. It offers a hilariously warped representation of the two parties- one set of interviews taking place in a pub and the other in a gym. Some small shudder comes over me, a laugh too, that such unsophisticated bias can still exist so forefront in the journalistic world.

The whole experience doesn’t fill me with great confidence, so I lie on the floor. The intensity of unrequited desire bares down on my chest. I want to scream in the faces of people I know, family and friends. I want to spit sarcastic prose in the face of every imbecile watching the BBC News at Ten. ‘Look at this marvelous and wonderful thing, technology. What wonders it can perform, but what an unknown danger it is! These children know nothing but electronic noise from the moment they are born, never once lifting their eyes to the outside world or flicking through the pages of a novel. These poor, naive souls know not the real! They live in this distant, digital land that is so radically different from our own. What a great novelty it is to us when we see them at their play.’ I have this passionate will to set alight all the televisions in the world and create a flaming mountain- atop which I would boom a million verses. ‘You approach this as a novelty when it is a way of life. It is our way of life that you have created- these billion sad bastards asleep before a back-lit screen couldn’t possibly learn from it? You abandon us with this limitless connectivity, and now you see what we’ve done with it you want back in? You want to capitalise on this fantastic era of free speech that your generation gave birth to, and our generation grew up with?’

And still these words surface in my mind, “for once just be a part of rest of the world”. I’m screaming, ‘every day of my life I am a part of the rest of the world. Every day I make connections with every country under the sun. In truth, it’s almost impossible not to, and you have the gall and some narrow ignorance to insist that my world ends somewhere far before the BBC News at Ten?’

The track is called Journey Home and it’s vaguely ambient electro. It’s not very representative of the rest, but I wanted to put something up that worked on it’s own. You can download it on my bandcamp page by clicking here.

More music coming in January!

ps. There will be a new Baculum this week too. I promise. Semester is over and I finally have time to do fun things again.

Castle

Castle is a formula-driven cop show about a quirky, loveable crime novelist called Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion). He bags the chance to follow a real-life violent crime detective- the down to earth, sexually repressed Kate Beckett (Stana Katic). Watch them play the inevitable endless romantic tension game.

Included in the supporting cast are Castle’s adorably teenage daughter and drunken mother, and two other guy cops who do guy cop things.

I may sound unenthusiastic about the premise, but this show is really good. I always (and often unpopularly) advocate formula-driven series because of the scope for slow character development. A show like Castle can capture you with it’s ensemble of characters and, once you’re invested, do terrible and amazing things to them. The later seasons of Numb3rs performed this spectacularly.

Stargate: Universe

SGU is the Stargate franchise’s answer to everything Battlestar Galactica brought to the genre. It’s got sex.

It’s got blood.

It’s got this mysterious guy.

Most importantly, it’s got an ensemble cast of characters whose morals are not set in stone. It’s filmed using trendily stylised handheld camerawork and realistic lighting. It is unstructured and uncertain in a way previous incarnations of Stargate could never fathom. It’s even got a cute geeky character for us, the audience, to identify with:

This new series takes the Stargate mythology way out of it’s procedure-driven comfort zone and tackles new trends in TV serials, as well as treading new ground for scifi TV in general. I’ve also very impressed at how many episodes they managed to write before they dabbled in anything remotely alien. Almost all the narrative has been character and situation-driven. Very classy.

Community

What drew me to this show at first was that Donald Glover is in it. He’s part of the New York comedy troupe Derrick Comedy. He writes for 30 Rock and, apart from a very brief cameo in that, this is his TV debut.

The show features a pretty awesome cast including Joel McHale (The Soup), Alison Brie (Mad Men) and Chevy Chase (The Chevy Chase Show). It’s set in a community college full of lots of losers, and follows a group of the most entertaining losers who become a group of haphazard friends. It’s got romantic tension too, between these guys.

It’s the funniest new sitcom I’ve seen in a while. TomSka and myself have been rapping in Spanish all week.

Bored to Death

Bored to Death is a beautifully filmed dead-pan comedy noir series. It stars Jason Schwartzman as a depressed, lonely New York Jew writer. After suffering a break-up with his long-term girlfriend, he creates an online ad selling his services as an ‘unlicensed’ private detective. He is able to work out his nervous breakdown by living out his fantasy, while his life continues to fall apart in the background.

Not for everyone, but it’s delightfully odd, filmed and coloured nicely, and it has a cool opening.

Glee

I’ll say right now, Glee is a serious guilty pleasure. It’s a high school teen drama/comedy. However, when you do something like this right, it can be just as compelling as anything else. I’m not ashamed to sit in my room alone and watch several episodes of this show in a row. Glee follows the lives of both teacher and student, forming an unreasonably talented show choir club in a typical American TV high school. They overcome their differences and stuff when they sing together. Characters include but are not limited to: The Bitchy Cheerleader, The Wheelchair Kid, The Black Girl, The Perfect Student Girl, The Gay and The Jock.

If you haven’t already stopped reading, check this out. What makes this show really interesting is that it’s a hybrid of forms, including the musical. There are song performances in every episode, but sometimes (and it caught me really off-guard the first time) the song becomes non-diegetic. This means the character steps out of their role in order to sing the song. That’s pretty musical.

So why am I watching this? Because a little guilty pleasure is good for the soul. When done right (and this is done right) the teen, the romance, even the musical, can make amazing television. Glee provides enough comedy, engaging characters and fun storytelling that you get wrapped up in it. Ergo, it works.

Also it has Jayma Mays in it. Isn’t she just adorable? I love her.

Stuff I didn’t like as much:

The Middle

This show is like if Malcom in the Middle was all about his mother. It’s about a dirt poor, white Ohio family with assorted useless children. Not really my thing.

Cougar Town

This is the Courteney Cox show featuring Courteney Cox. It was created by Bill Lawrence (Scrubs) and it’s about a middle-aged, divorced Courteney Cox and how hard it is to have fun and get laid. The funniest character is the teenage son who gets no screen time.

V

V is about Tom from The 4400, Inara and Wash from Firefly and That Bitch from Lost getting caught up in a slimy alien conspiracy. Interesting, but it hasn’t grabbed me.

For those of you on Twitter, I’ve started a hash tag (#plzdontgetcancelled) for when I talk about TV shows I like. Check them out if you can, particularly if you live in America. Feel free to tweet about shows you like too.

Good times.