Skip to main content

To live to create to live forever


After spending a month or two to get my latest game FACE TOGETHER FACE to a shipping state my brain felt a bit overloaded- To finish off my self imposed four year game development university course I spent the last year doing an intensive self imposed C# programming course which finished off with FACE TOGETHER FACE-

Once I shipped the game I felt a bit melty brained- overloaded- I SLAMMED a few years of learning/experience into a single year and needed a break from it for a bit-

In 2014 my wife and I made this album under the name of DOTTIR- we made over the span of a week or two- I composed the tracks while sitting on our couch late at night then we recorded the vocals in our closet-

It was a fun project and people keep buying it four years later- the little payment notifications are reminders to me saying like "hey people like this thing, make more"

Over the past two years I made/outlined twenty or so instrumentals for use with future DOTTIR songs- you can hear one in this video when the radio turns on near the passed out girl-

Game dev/programming got in the way and I never did anything with them-

Fast forward to a week or so ago- I had finished my last game/university after returning from Iceland for Xmas and I needed to do something creative that I could do without thinking-

So I sat at my desk, pulled out the Push- launched Ableton and made 14 new songs over the course of four consecutive days- on the 5th day I felt terrible and did nothing- on the sixth I still felt a little insane so I drank some wine, worked out and went a ran a few miles- I had to run a few miles the next day as well-

THEN I felt ok so I set up our closet vocal booth and over the next 5 days my wife and I recorded all the vocals for the 14 new songs- 

I'm mixing and mastering them now- this isn't a finished mix but you listen to one of the new songs here 


I've been doing music for almost twenty years now- I'm able to do it without thinking- its almost like I go into a trance- afterwards I don't even remember what I did- so when I listen to the songs I'm like "this is cool? I made this?!"

I literally don't think at any part of the process- it all just flows- WHICH is the exact opposite of programming for me as I cannot NOT think at any part of the process lest I write shitty code-

It seems like making music and coding balance each other out quite well-

I don't think when I'm doing animation or writing either-

I plan to finish this album in the next week or so- I've been reading up a little on mixing trying to improve on that and we're getting some Auratone 5C's to use as ref monitors as I gave my old ref monitors away to a friend years ago-

After this album is done I have to look at my project queue to figure out what I will do next-

I have an animated short film I wrote/storyboarded back in October 2017 I wanted to do for Halloween but didn't have the time- I might do that-

I have several game idea/prototypes to jump into as well-

I'm just going to keep creating things and releasing them onto the internet for the future as that is what makes me feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to-

Sharing what I've learned with other people is something else that makes me feel happy so I'll continue to do that with tutorials and the like-

Now that I'm out of self imposed university and I don't waste my time playing with a phone or arguing on social media about nothing I'll be able to put more stuff out-

I really like not having any social media profiles- I just have this blog and my youtube channel- I feel like I don't exist, and I mean that in a good way- I'm not swimming in the sea of human nonsense that plagues water coolers, reality shows and their metaphorical digital equivalents-

Anyway- its been awhile I thought I would leave an update here for February 2018

As always, best to you my friends.

P.S.  Beware I live- I was HIM all along ^_^













Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What format should I render out of Cinema 4d with?

UPDATED 2_27_13!  RENDER USING EXR Lossy Zip16! Since I'm working on a new feature film that will generate over 1500 shots made up of image sequences I need to make sure I choose the right file format to render to lest my hard drives explode. What I need from my format is  at least 16bit, an alpha included and preferably small size. I rendered out a frame from my film tallied up all the file sizes here- their all different types of codecs listed from smallest file size to largest. The render includes an RGBA pass, Depth pass, and Material Luminance pass because thats what I always render out. 1.00mb 8bit-Photo Jpeg %100 1.27mb 8bit-PNG 4.65mb 16bit- EXR lossy ZIP16 5.75mb 8bit-PSD 6.23mb 16bit-EXR lossy PLZ 6.44mb 16bit-PNG 7.94mb 8bit-TIFF 8.50mb 16bit-EXR Lossy 24 9.05mb 16bit-EXR Lossy Run Length 14.6mb 8bit-TARGA 22.4mb 32bit-EXR ZIP16 24.6mb 32bit-EXR Zip1 25.6mb 32bit-EXR PLZ 29.3mb 16bit-TIFF 29.3mb 16bit-PSD 40.0mb 32bit-EXR Run Length 58.7mb 16

Aggregated feedZ

So I totally aggregated all meh rss feedZ...So in this one handy like feed thing you can get... -Meh blog posts -Meh EXCITING Facebook status updates (ex. "I'm so FACE") -Meh youtube videos -Meh Vimeo videos -Meh Blogtalk radio episodes - and much more (actually just like some other xml code that i don't understand) Just subscribe via this link and you can get all that for a low low price of...oh wait it's totally FREE ^ ^

So a guy is trying to take credit for my film...

TLDR- Scroll down to THE THIEVERY My name is Mike- I make films under the name "M dot Strange" and I have done so for the past 10+ years- this is my story as a filmmaker culminating in a recent event wherein a "filmmaker" tried to take credit for my life's work Here's my imdb page with my film credits  My web site Here's a reel with stuff from my original films in which I wrote/created/designed/animated etc everything that you see- I can and have performed all aspects of animated film production on my films- thats sort of how I made a name for myself- by being a one man animated film studio Here's a presentation from 2014 with me discussing the production of my last film My first animated feature film "We Are The Strange" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007 Sundance archives link Article about the film Link to the film Film's site Because of the buzz that film generated I was given offers to sell the