Stouffville, Ontario Canada (647) 962-1997 gwstudios@rogers.com M-F 8:30am - 2:30pm & 8:00pm - 11:00pm

Tag: Inspiration

“You know what I love the most about being out here?…

greatwallstudios1 Comment on “You know what I love the most about being out here?…

The unobstructed view of the galaxy around us. Don’t you just love it!” She says, looking back at me, over her right shoulder. Her orange coveralls tied firmly around her waist. Her socks, and her shirt are a brilliant white, not a speck of dirt on them.

“Hmmm… no, all I keep thinking about is how isolated it is out here, and how far we are from anything, or anyone.” I say, staring down at the now ice cold bulb of mock coffee. It’s inky, black-brown packaging has golden markings all over it. I can’t read it. It was a gift from the Chinese agency, from last Christmas. It smells faintly of roasted cinnamon.

“Well, I really can’t get enough of this view, I mean what a breathtaking vista that is spread out before us.” She says it with that ear to ear grin she always has. It makes her dimples pop, her ice blue eyes twinkle in the brilliant starlight. Every day now, she comes to stand at the same view port, always looking forwards – to the stars. I’m hunched over a tiny table that converts to tuck back into the bulkhead. I stand up, and toss my bulb of frozen black coffee into an incinerator bin. This capsule, the Non Sequitur, was meant for ten, still feels cramped, even with just the four of us. A long cylinder of off white padded curved walls, illuminated in phosphorescent white light that has started to show some wear and tear. I will give them this, The Company does love to recycle. This is my seventh uneventful mission out here with one of the jury rigged crafts. “You know… we… I… hmmm, that first twenty nine week stretch out to Mars was tedious. I didn’t get any worth while readings, and there is no sign of the anomaly.” I am not happy. This line of work was supposed to be cutting edge. For fuck’s sake, it is space travel, and you promised us adventure, aliens, or at the very least a chance to bring about the singularity before the fall of mankind. We ventured out here in search of something, anything, anything at all that could be the key to unlocking our full potential as a species. And all I got was this lousy t-shirt. “I am not looking forward to eighty more weeks of this before we make it out to Pluto.” I have been glum for quite some time. I never could muster the same enthusiasm for these missions. Even with the pressure of the world on my shoulders. I just don’t care anymore.

“Same time tomorrow then darling.” She giggles as she says it. Every time with this same schtick. I’m annoyed, but I chuckle anyway. “Of course babe, say hello to our girls for me.” Jennifer vanishes in the dim light, leaving me all of the sparse, utilitarian room. The bright padding fades away to reveal the gathered filth and blood splatter of neglect. The fabric throughout the cabin is stained jet black in places, it reeks of smoke, and decay. The lights inside the observation pod have not come on in quite some time.

Outside the capsule, sparks continue to fall away from the craft’s hull like a giant rooster tail of cascading embers. A large black burn stretches across the jagged edge of what’s left of the crew quarters. There in the distance are vague forms of a woman and two children, suspended in their bed pods, both flash frozen, and boiled in the vacuum of space. The capsule is half a million miles off course, even though the engines and navigation survived the attack in one piece. Denial, much like the void of space, does not discriminate.

 

PART I

 

*****

And NOW for shits and giggles you can listen to me narrate Chapter One .

“What do you think happened here”

greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment on “What do you think happened here”

He says from over my shoulder. I am looking at the body in front of me, laid prone on the floor in a massive puddle of dark icor. “Well, hmmm… from the looks of it, I’d say he put two in the chest, and one in his head, painting that wall over there with bits of brains, skull fragments and hair.” I stand up slowly, have been having nasty head rushes as of late, when getting up from a crouch. “No, not that, my sandwich! Look there’s like one strip of bacon, and like half a leaf of lettuce. Jesus, don’t the rookies even look at this shit before they bring it to us.” He’s mad, turning this way and that, looking to get up in someones face, anyone within arms reach. “Oh come off it. Lunch was an hour ago, put that down and help me put together a reasonable theory of the case.” I spit the words out, realizing my lunch didn’t do much to satisfy my hunger today either. Irritated, we walk out the front door of this rat infested apartment, with its dangling light bulbs, and chipped paint on all the trim. The shared hall is choked with cops, and partially dressed angry neighbours. They’re all in a huff over the noise, and foot traffic coming and going at all hours. Really they’re just mad they can’t smoke crack or meth while so many cops are around. The floors creak under the additional strain of so many bodies. The temperature inside this hundred year old building is intense. Humidity of high summer has condensed on the walls, dribbling down to make foul smelling pools mixed with discarded cigarette ash, and garbage.

“Oh hey! Mind that puddle over there by that green door.” An elderly gentleman says, he has an indistinct, yet exotic look to him. Thinning dark hair, and a far too short kimono over what I could only describe as neon pink fishnets. “Huh? What’s that sir?”. I shout over the din of the gathered crowd. “Well, just steer clear of that shit. You know old lady Darcy’s a hoarder. That cloying smell of rot, vomit, and god knows what is her doing! Can’t even open her front door, it’s so chock full of shit in there.” He is becoming animated with all the young officers around, staring at him. “Some delivery dude came round here last week in fucking flip flops, had to go see a doctor because that puddle of sludge caused a pus ridden growth on both his feet. Fuck’in nasty. Banged on her door for like an hour, in a rage, he was. Poor kid. But what do I know…” My partner mimics the wanking motion with his left hand, the poor man’s soggy blt flopping about in his right. Mayo has collected on his lip, mixed in to his five o’clock shadow. He smells of cheap cologne, and sweat. We turn for the stairs, the black railing is peeling, it shows about twenty layers of caked on lead paint, and walk down the five flights to our squad car. The temperature outside isn’t any better, neither is the smell. Through a cracked window the radio cackles with an indecipherable muffled call. Followed by several clipped responses. In a rumpled tan suit, my partner shouts over the top of the car to me. I don’t hear it.

Searching with my good eye closed…For Inspiration in Design.

greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment on Searching with my good eye closed…For Inspiration in Design.

Some days this ingenious song lyric (Chris Cornell via Soundgarden) is how I feel about finding inspiration for new projects. As I have mentioned in previous posts, my day job, and one of my hobby’s is graphic design.

Now that’s a pretty big umbrella statement, as (GD) has a multitude of facets, and I am hardly a guru in all of them. Like they say, a jack of all trades is a master of none, so I’ve had to pull back on my desire to learn something useful about every single facet of graphic design and focus instead on a core group of skills that are near and dear to me. But at its heart, (GD) is still about producing artwork, perhaps not “Art” but commercial art nonetheless. No matter how hard I try I don’t ever feel like an artiste. Even though I make 100% of my living off of producing quality images, logos, compositions, type set pages etc etc… To me I don’t feel like an artist. I may well be more artistic than the average bear, but I don’t dress all in black, nor do I walk about covered in paint/ink/chalk, nor do I wear a beret or act particularly bohemian. (I know that is a fairly stereotypical account of what an artiste is, but it’s a hard image to break inside my own head). I’m also a pretty shallow person (in mind set) I’m not all that concerned with symbolism, reading between the lines, undertones or subtext. I’m… for lack of a better turn of phrase; blunt. Like a grey cinderblock. Perhaps because I have eschewed the preposterousness of pretension I feel like I’m not an artist. I also have very little creative control over the substance of what I produce, except for where the item(s) are for myself. Artistic integrity is a luxury I can’t afford at this stage. Not to say that some things don’t rankle my bones, and make me spitting mad, but my job is to produce what others have asked for, in the format they have asked for it. Perhaps those high level agency types know what it is like to be able to walk away from a project over “creative differences” or “artistic integrity”. I don’t quite have the weight to throw around like that just yet.

Back to my main point, which is, searching for and finding inspiration. A real creative spark. I personally have no formula to follow, no checklist to run down in order to find that spark of life which will turn an average idea into something that really gets people talking, or creates a very visceral response. I am not even all that superstitious, so I don’t have the luck to believe that wearing the same socks, or hat or sitting in the same chair will bring that feeling back. So some times that fabulous little spark finds me, and some times I do what I can without it.

So then, what does searching with your good eye closed mean? I don’t actually try to look at stuff with my eyes closed, that’s preposterous… well unless it was a tactile object meant to be experienced, touched, interacted with, rather than just observed… but you hardly close your eyes and touch a poster (scratch & sniff excepted here). It is a whole lot like reading a page while not paying attention to it. Your brain is reading the items, but the words flow in one eye and out the other (I almost said in one eye and out your mother, but that’s another Soundgarden inside joke). You sort of know you read the words but you didn’t take in all in, you just weren’t all that present while you read it. You were on a sort of distracted auto-pilot. Then you have to go back and actually re-read it again (This idea isn’t new, by any means. Any sociology text book or phycology text will have a far better explanation of this than I will ever put down in words.) But what I mean is, there are a whole lot of times when I am searching for inspiration under time constraints, and rather than soak up the nuances of the research materials I’ve gathered for a project, I’m glossing over them and missing that … that, I don’t know, just that “THING” that jumps out at you, akin to a mental domino in your brain that falls against something else and begins to snowball and before you know it your synapses are firing like mad and a picture is forming in your head, and you just start pouring work out onto the page. That excited rush of ideas crashing over you in waves, some of them so fast and furious you don’t even have the time to get them out onto the page before they have slipped out of reach again, but you have flashes of them still, which you cling to and work off of. If I’m lucky a few of those little snippets are enough to bring the idea back into my conscience thought  as a whole idea and I can take it even further. Other times I’m left with parts of a good idea, but have to really work to unify them, or pull them apart and use them piece-meal elsewhere.

In order to be (oh god, I am going to say this, Ugh) “open” to finding inspiration, I need to really take the time to look, and see what is in front of me. Not just view it absently, but really take the precious time to not watch the clock, not be consumed by the deadline, and just look, think and brainstorm. Sounds really hokey, and wishy-washy I’m sure.  But it happens to me, I get so tied up in the technical details that I don’t take the much needed time to really look and see. I have to just keep reminding myself to come back to it with fresh eyes, and positive outlook.

But, you say, even when I have the time and am really aware of myself and my subject matter, there is no guarantee that I will find the inspiration I seek. Yes, sadly that is true. I have no real insight into helping anyone else with this same issue. But perhaps you are taking a breather right now while reading this. That might be all the help you need.

I always feel just a little bit better after putting things down on paper.

-M