Issue 2 of Backwards Burd

Issue 2 of Backwards Burd magazine is out online, go check it out! Goal now is to get a printed anthology ASAP!

Battle of the Gods

You may remember the 10x10x10 blog from a month or so ago, you may also have just read about the midyear exhibition we had. When we had 1 week until the show I realised I had nothing to show that represented me the way I wanted to be seen, I had a shit scrappy looking game, a low quality looking video and then just a very fleshed out idea proposal. As I said that I like real proper outcomes especially I felt that this wouldn't do.

Out of the 3 projects the only one I was excited about enought to make into something really cool within 1 week was the game. So what needed fixing in my game?

Currently nothing happened in playtime because of moving around and attacking being nearly impossible, and needing to move to attack. Squares for movement allowed too few directions, and there were too few squares to warrant moving at all really. I fixed this by introducing a bigger, hexagonal playing area

This is what we played on first to get the rules ironed out. The other thing was that it made no sense that a goat took as many hits to kill as a dragon, so the different monsters needed to have different HP values, and the only way to balance this was to make each player take a group of monsters in their team. 4 felt like the right number, so I changed the 1 0-5 dice into 4 regular 6 sided dice.

Using the 10 monsters I already had I assigned them HP values based on their groupings from before, so Dragon and Squid were 4HP (originally 6, but this was too high) Stone Golem and Laser Shark were 3HP, Fire Ghost and Giant Spider were 2HP and Human Warrior, Milipede, Goat and Eagle were 1HP. Sticking with the 10HP thing from before I decided that players would select a team of monsters up to a total of 10 HP, players could not exceed this HP and they had to take a minimum of 4 monsters.

The way the game now worked was Player A and B roll a dice each, the highest decides whether to choose a monster first or have the first turn. Then players take it in turns to choose monsters, up to a max HP of 10. Then monsters were placed on the field along the edge closest to their player. The 4 dice are rolled, they still represent energy. Originally all energy was pooled, but then creatures like goat would just race forwards and head butt everyone on a good roll or just run up to dragon and machine gun head butt him 4 times. To counteract this the rules were changed to: You had to spend a dice on each remaining monster before you could spend an additional dice on them and each monster can only attack a monster once per turn, it may attack as many monsters as it can but each one can only receive 1 attack.

This meant that high energy attackers (squid, dragon) had to be kept in reserve until towards the end of the game because with only 1 dice they could at best move 2 hex tiles and attack, whereas Human Warrior could move 5 hex tiles and attack, making him more useful early on. This made the 1HP guys feel like pawns and the 4HP guys feel like queens (to use chess terms) with 2 and 3HP guys in between obviously.

Terrain was decided by shuffling the terrain cards and then drawing 1 at random, if your monster was good in that terrain it moved at double speed (1 energy moving it 2 hex tiles) this encouraged players to make sure that within their team they had a range of terrains covered.

Finally to add some variety to the battlefield each game each player took it in turns to place 3 obstacles on the board, making 6 of the hexagonal tiles impassable to monsters. No ranged attacks through them, no movement through them, only around them.

Because the game was so good Dan, Anastasia and Sajan wanted to get involved, because there was a lot to do within 1 week I was happy with this arrangement and tasked them with the drawing of the monsters (excluding Squid, as I already had a cool drawing of a squid from my Natural History Museum drawings).

My initial plan was to have a thick game board that would have a gap in it that I could slide a picture of the terrain into, I planned to have them as print outs but dropped this idea as it felt cumbersome, and the battlefield could just as well be represented by a card that you shuffled and drew out randomly.

original monster card design

original battlefield card design

original card backs design

I had planned to make cards similar to pokemon, but instead decided to make a big deal of the wooden rustic aesthetic. Instead we searched for something wooden we could use for cards, we thought coasters originally but Dan got some mousetraps and they worked really well. Because they were a different size to regular cards (wider and shorter) the design needed to be changed a bit.

monster cards

The drawings are by Anastasia Ivanova, Daniel de Sosa and Sajan Rai, I only drew Squid, but I did the design of the cards. I quite like the variety of styles on the cards, that's the way pokemon does it.

battlefield cards

These are all my own design. We changed the cards to black and white so that when we glued the printed sheets onto the mousetraps and varnished them everything would still stand out.

card backs

Dan came up with this sun and moon conflict idea on the board, and we carried it over to the back of cards. The cards were really successful in the end, Dan glued and varnished them, and they came out like this:

I created a mock up out of foam board for the game board, then placed it over the top of a 60x45x 1.5cm piece of wood.

Dan then took over making the board, here's some pictures of him doing some cool shit:

Whilst Dan was in charge of sorting out the board my part was to make the playing pieces. We searched Camden for little animal toys, a lot of what we found was too big, and we didn't have all of the animals we were after, but I have some experience in sculpting small models out of putty, at a smaller scale than I needed in fact, so it wasn't too hard. At this point a couple of the characters changed, Fire Ghost became Fire Bat and Giant Spider became Science Rat. I tried to sculpt a Giant Spider but it was really hard, I couldn't sculpt it solidly, I needed thinner wire, which is why we changed it to Science Rat when we found a little Zodiac Rat keyring. Some models I just made alteration to the toys, for instance Millipede is an upside down stegosaurus type dinosaur with the legs removed, Stone Golem is a gorilla who had all the fur chipped off, Human Warrior was a toy from a Donald Duck film, so I shaved the duck down so it looked like he knight in armour, then made a sword out of plasticard. Here's some pictures of me making the models:

 Laser Shark, made from  a hippo toy with extra bits sculpted on

 (from left to right) Squid, Laser Shark, Giant Spider

 Fire Bat made from a upside down lion's head with extra bits sculpted on

After all the models were built I attached them to the tops of 2x2x5cm blocks of wood, I primed them with light blue spray paint, as I thought it was a better midpoint between black and white, then painted each monsters name onto the blocks of wood, in white and black, and then painted the models.

Then when everything was glued and dried we varnished the lot, this would protect everything and shade the monster models.

For the obstacles Dan bought some nice looking stones from Camden Lock market. I'm really happy with how the whole game came together in just 1 week, and I think it looks really good. Things that need addressing; whilst the models are quite cool, they keep breaking, I want to make a more totem like object, just one piece of wood carved into with a drawing and the monster name, but I'm considering flat tokens or 3D printed models.

We took the game into uni for the show the next day and everyone thought it looked really cool, I printed up a set of rules so people could see how to play it without my explaining it personally.

Feedback was really positive, at one point I went into the room we were doing the show in and saw 2 girls playing Battle of the Gods, I knew then that the rules were understandable and the board attractive enough to invite play. I was making Christmas cards to raise funds for Backwards Burd in the print room, so I got to the show about 20 mins in, when I got there the lights were switched off and an hour or so long video reel started, I think it discouraged people from wandering around and engaging with any of the things on the walls or tables. To play my game you would have had to stand in front of the screen everyone was watching videos on. I'm glad I didn't put my Perfect Guide video in the video reel, it had enough shit, overly long, videos.

I should probably quickly explain where the game title comes from, I thought it would be cool if you played as a God, and that's why you can summon such an eclectic group of monsters to fight for you all across the world. Plus, I'm hoping people find the title a bit confrontational so it sticks in their minds, or even better gets discussed as a result. Plus it sounds cool and has only ever been a subtitle of things up until now.

I need to make some more monsters, less general, more special unique powers. I will do this over the Christmas holiday, as it's really fun to play and come up with new monsters, try to figure out what they can do, how fair it all is etc, and Dan and Sajan are very happy to play against me and each other to playtest the new stuff.

Advertising Is Not Working

To begin this project we were shown the film "Somers Town". It turned out this was an advert for Eurostar trains. We were told by our tutor Dan Duran that people aren't paying attention to traditional adverts these days, advertisers have to be a lot more subtle and weave adverts into the fabric of things more.

With this in mind we were given a list of companies and told to select one to do a advert that wasn't an advert for, getting a message across is a new exciting way. I thought about games but it's been done, films have been done, then we were told that we shouldn't feel limited by what we could personally produce, it only needed to be a proposal. Oh, and we had to work in teams, which was sort of annoying. I worked with Miles, I like Miles, he's sound, but we had really different ideas about what to do and didn't chat to each other for a little bit.

I researched what made viral videos popular and looked at how Derren Brown does his mind control tricks, this clip especially inspired my initial ideas:



My plan was to combine all the things that make viral videos successful (dance/replicable movement/noises, Animals, Hot chicks, Filming looks accidental) along with how Derren Brown implants ideas into peoples heads. As Derren Brown used to be a graphic designer I really felt that this line of thinking was the right way to go.

The video would be recorded on a phone and go like this:

-dog doing cute dance move
-hot chick bends over to pet the dog and exclaim how cute it is
-then there's a loud bang
-camera pans to the cause of the bang, it's a car crashed into the back of a DHL van
-DHL delivery guy runs over to help the guy in the car

Then abruptly end the video, it combines everything people want to watch; cute animals dancing, hot girls and death.

I met up with Miles and he was thinking totally different. He wanted to do a Tarmac sponsored skate park, but I didn't get why Tarmac would sponsor a skatepark. His other idea was a healthy pop up grocery shop from Asda that would be in festivals. But I didn't get why Asda wouldn't just put their name on it, there was no reason for them not to in my mind.

So I convinced Miles to go with my idea, storyboarded and then that was it, we didn't have the means to actually make a video of a dancing dog, a hot babe and a crashing car with a DHL van. Miles felt we needed to make something and I conceded the point, so we made a little stop motion animation of some bi-planes trying to catch the pigeon like in that Dick Dastardly thing. We showed it at the mid year show, and amongst all of them 4 minute longer than they needed to be videos it was a welcome break, being only 20 somet' seconds long.

Grug The Destroyer

I thought I'd just write a little bit about the comic I started on for Backwards Burd - if I'm gonna spend time organising people, putting the magazine together and promoting it then I want my own work in there too! I hadn't really done any comics for a looooooong time, so I read some books (Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics was particularly useful) and then just some good graphic novels and comics that Dan and Sajan recommended. With my research accrued I had a few small attempts, playing with the concepts outlined by McCloud. I like to subvert things, so I thought it might be cool if the main protagonist warrior guy was actually just a strong idiot controlled by his armour and sword, provoking the thought: Who is truly the tool? This idea also meant I would have to draw less characters, as conversations would go on between sections of the 1 guy's body instead of between multiple people.

I kept the drawing style simple because I'm quite out of practice, I was worried for ages that it would just be a waste of time shit comic, but then I thought there's loads of creative projects that get better over time. Look at Southpark, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have got the formula of what makes a good episode down to a T these days, the animation's better and most episodes feel like they make a clever point, but when they first started it was just funny, stupid bad animation.

There is some symbolism within Grug, mainly Grug representing the masses, the Helmet is the mind, the Armour is the heart (or passion) and the Sword is the phallus or lust. In this way the Hero of Grug the Destroyer has a wicked mind, an apathetic heart and an overeager lust for killing - not heroic qualities at all, but it's ok, because Grug is the manipulated victim of them. The whole set up has some freudian stuff going on as well, or so people who've read it have told me.

I can't reveal the story yet, but there will be a concluding chat about Grug when all is said and done. If you don't know what I'm talking about you can read Grug the Destroyer in Backwards Burd magazine, there's a link to it in the previous post.

Backwards Burd!

I have started an Illustration Society within the uni, our goal is to print a magazine of student artwork and comics every month. Our society is called Backwards Burd, and I am the president.

Our first step was to make posters and post them up around the AVA building. Sajan drew some funny and weird cartoons and we collaged them together using a photocopier to make our posters. We had 2 different ones, Sajan put one together I put the other together.

Dan, Sajan (I started living with them in September, realised that living with my best friends was a bad idea, I ended up looking after them too much and being annoyed with them as a result, it's much better having your mental close friends a little distance away) and I went to this short class about what running a society within UEL was about and learnt that our society would get a £100 if we filled out a form stating what we do and what our intentions for the year were. We decided to do an animation instead. We used the cartoon characters from the posters, I came up with the script with Sajan and then he began animating. I did a little bit of the animating type drawing to help him out, but Sajan did the majority of it. Then I came up with a theme song, inspired by "Waynes World! Waynes World! Party time! Excellent!". The video came out great:



We've had a really good response to this video, and a fair few people took us a lot more seriously because of it. We had our first meeting, around 15 people came, which was great. We then continued to sign people up by going round the illustration classes, and to make finding our meeting place easier we made another video. This one we wore bird masks and suits backwards, and then faced away from the camera the whole time. This video was made to be projected in the AVA stairwell, which meant that it needed to work without sound. Sajan and I made our bird masks on the friday night, got dressed for it on the saturday and then went to the park in the morning. It was a nice sunny day and a lot of fun to film, then I edited it together:



Then I made the website, I wanted it to be functional whilst also quite illustrationy. We got the background from a fundraiser we ran in 93 Feet East on Brick Lane where I stuck big bits of paper up and invited people to draw on them, and gave them a flier and told them they'd be able to see their own drawings on our website as a way of getting them to check it out.

The website URL is: www.backwardsburd.com

The site doesn't work on Internet Explorer, which is annoying, but it works on Firefox and Chrome, and they're the better browsers anyway. If the website doesn't work for you then I suggest you get a better internet browser.

We learnt that we couldn't afford to print every month, but here's our first Online issue of Backwards Burd:

Perfect Guide

Our next Graphics project was to make the perfect guide for something, a cup of tea was suggested, throughout life this suggestion of writing guides about making a cup of tea have come up again and again and I don't know why. I can sum it up in a couple of sentences: "Put a teabag in a mug, add boiling water. Stir, wait a sec, take the teabag out." anything beyond that is your own preferences, if you need a guide to help you accomplish this task then maybe it isn't safe for you to be boiling water.

Anyway, my initial thoughts were getting about in London for people who don't usually travel around London and Masturbation because I thought I can do something rude and possibly funny - but who would be the audience of such a guide? I thought maybe Muslims as it would be offensive (just read this back and want to point out, I'm not racist, I want to offend everyone), but I don't have a circumcised cock, so to get the drawings right I would have to look it up, and I didn't want to base a project around drawing someone else's knob.

I realised early on that the trick to making a perfect guide was all in the audience, the more specific your audience the more perfect your guide would be. A lot of other students didn't get this, and I spent one Wednesday morning trying to get it through to them that their idea was shit if they were trying to address everyone. This idea was similar to mine, so worth bringing up: "a guide to Oxford street for tourists" which tourists? "all of them". How can the guide ever be perfect unless it is in all of the languages? Thankfully most of the students got what I was getting at and tailored their idea to a much more specific audience.

I decided that the specific group of non-londoners my guide was for where Northerners, then specified it to Leeds. My dad's from Leeds, I've been there a fair few times to see my grandparents and that meant that of all the places in the north of England it was the one I was most familiar with (and it meant I could get some good first hand referencing from my dad by asking him about his thoughts when first going to London, to really get inside the head of my audience).

Northerners behave quite differently to Londoners, and I aimed to capitalise on this difference with various jokes that would take the piss out of both (being from the Midlands I'm obviously the perfect mix of north and south; Hard, yet refined, like a diamond!)

I had my subject and audience, the only thing missing was the delivery. What was the best way to convey this information? I decided that I would make an airplane safety video style VT that would be watched on coach trips from Leeds to London.

I interviewed my dad and the useful info was: London's the only place with integrated travel, don't chat to other people (my dad had an anecdote about asking somebody on the tube for the time the first time he rode it and the woman he asked thought he was trying to chat her up and took offence). At the time he went most pubs said no travellers and there was a definite atmostphere unfriendlyness and of only locals are welcome. London's on a massive scale, transport network being bigger than Belgium and lastly that the busyness, volume and speed of people was nothing like he'd experienced in Yorkshire. Lastly, that busses had doors in the middle which was surprising.

I watched a fair few in flight safety vids and they were all in a pretty ugly 3D animation style, I considered doing an animation for the VT but decided against it as this was for coach travel, and realistically would have a lower budget, meaning live action was more likely (and far more achievable for me).

I wrote the script in a yorkshire accent, and then made a storyboard. The key elements of the video were that I would chat to the camera in a pub, overlaying with graphics when appropriate and splicing in scenes of what I was describing, such as tapping in and buying travel cards, and hoping that scenes where Sajan (the busy Londoner) interacted with me (as the hapless Yorkshire tourist) would bring some humour to the video.

Here is the video I made:


I don't think that the outcome was as successful as I'd imagined, the idea is good but the video is too long and quite boring to watch. I recently read a section of "The Video Production Handbook" by Jim Owens and Gerald Millerson" that said inexperienced video editors use techniques such as rapid succession of unrelated shots or fast cutting between different view points to create an illusion of excitement for a dull subject. And watching this video back I get what they mean, the content should be interesting enough to watch without me doing the narration in 2 different directions. The way it is now is quite annoying to watch.

I also made a laminated card that would be found in the coach seat back pocket with the main symbols and info on:

This little bit satisfied my desire to make information graphics and draw them with vectors.

Making videos well requires a decent camera on tripod (with wheels if you're after a moving camera), lighting, a microphone and a team of people to operate these items, as well as whoever their filming. At this stage my work needs to be at a really high production standard, I can't keep making these videos that look so low quality. I dreamt that the strength of the idea was what truly mattered, but how do you get people to see your idea if they way its presented is unattractive? The next video I make needs to be shorter and look nicer, crisper, sound better!

Illustration 1000 Drawings

We've been encouraged to blog about our illustration work but told to use existing blogs that we have. For this project we were told to go to a museum of our choice and do a thousand drawings. I chose the Natural History museum so that I could draw dinosaurs. The first day I went was on a sunday. The exscuse I gave for the small amount of drawings I did was that the museum was packed out but in truth I wasn't really sure how to draw quickly, so I didn't, and I allowed a dislike of what I was drawing to put me off.

I went back again and this time sped myself up, not letting myself get disheartened by unsuccessful drawings, they weren't all good but I was pretty happy with a few of the drawings from this trip.

I got some feed back that I ought to focus more on the forms and less on the lines, so I acquired a graphite stick, and at my next museum trip I vowed to only work with graphite stick and felt tip pens (to force myself into colour as well). Using a chunkier medium really loosened me up and I began to really enjoy what I was doing. I struggled to make the felt tip pens work that well, but the graphite stick made me remember that I like drawing a lot, and how lucky was I that what my project came down to was just drawing my favourite animals.

I went back and this time drew solely with the graphite stick, I did around a hundred drawings in 6 hours, not all of them worked but a lot of them did, and as my enjoyment of the project grew so too did my confidence, which allowed me to draw more ambitiously and so I enjoyed it more.

I finished the sketchbook, full to the brim with drawings and felt that what I needed was to increase my page size. I decided to add a conte crayon to my tool kit. I hadn't worked with conte for a while, it allowed me to create more medium tone that I could then layer a dark graphite tone over. By this point I had well over a hundred more drawings than most of the class, so I decided to slow it down a bit and create some longer studies of a few particular favourites.

Finally I returned to the museum with an A3 sketchpad and a pack of never before used (but owned for 3 years) landscape chalky oil pastel sticks. They were almost all earthy tones, which is fine for a lot of animals anyway, and just like squares. So I had moved from the fine point of a pencil all the way through to the a flat edge of a landscape pastel, and I'm very happy with the progress I made as a result.

I learnt that drawing is a lot like music. Each time you draw something it's like trying to play a song, you can't expect to master it right away, but if you keep trying and don't throw your guitar on the floor cause you miss a note, then you will learn how to play it, and you'll be better at playing your instrument in general, able to learn the next song more quickly. And also that everything you do that you enjoy will be a lot more successful than things you don't enjoy. I bumped into a lot of kids in the museum from around the world and had them ask me all sorts, I don't mind chatting to people, and I was in such a good mood drawing all the time I couldn't help myself from chatting to them about drawing. I even had a group of btec students ask me to be their art teacher they were that inspired by me, which was a really good feeling. I started this project embarrassed about people seeing my drawings, and by the end I laid a big piece of paper out on the floor to draw on so that I could almost invite people to see my progress.