ModFX Experience Thingy
Welcome to the blogging section! And welcome to the first article of the aforementioned blogging section! As someone who have never been particularly good at writing anything I only foresee nothing but hope for the future. Anyway, last month I participated in this event thingy called ModFX. ModFX is basically like those art prompt challenges except there aren't really any limits as to what medium you can use for it. I haven't really done anything like this before, so I was pretty interested in seeing just how well this went. I was somewhat familiar with ModFX since I had seen infinitysnapz announcement for the second one on his channel, I didn't participate in that one because it was hosted on YTPmania back when that was still online. I didn't have an account there since I don't really see myself as a YTP artist, although I have dabbled in such dark arts. This years one was hosted on YellowTealPurple, which is sort of a ytp page but not really but kinda yeah, and i DO have an account there!
I joined YellowTealPurple mostly out of my sheer hatred of modern social media but also as a means of making more stuff. You may have noticed that there are large gaps between uploads on my channel and while I do make stuff inbetween that gap I don't really want to post it onto my channel since it's either not video stuff, too short to be a proper video (I will NOT upload YouTube shorts because i have morals goddamnit), or it just plain sucks, so I didn't just want to produce video content for this. I think it would be cool to use YellowTealPurple as an outlet for some of my more miscellaneous work, so this was sorta perfect for this. I will discuss how I think this approach impacted my work later. Now, obviously I can't go into depth about everything I did this month otherwise this article would take like 2 hours to read so I'm just going to go through some personal favourites of mine and some other stuff i think is significant.
3 - "pivot"
i didn't upload this one on it's own so you get this whoopsie
This was the first "real" submission I did (I missed the first 2 days so I just kinda rushed those two out). I drew the "pivot" itself in MS-Paint and animated it in Shotcut, I created the video feedback effect via an extremely complicated process known as "opening up OBS and pointing my webcam at the screen". This probably wasn't the best way to do this but It's the wat I know how to do it so that's how I did it. I'm an absolute sucker for video feedback, something I blame solely on Doctor Who of all things. I'll probably explain the connection one day but if you're wondering why so many of my submissions look like "that" then that's probably the reason.
7 - "interlocking"
Describing my creative process is kinda hard because when I do have a specific idea of what I want to do I'll usually try my best to follow it to the letter but when I don't have anything I'll usually just do whatever and if it's any good I'll keep it and if it isn't I will just throw it out and try again. That isn't exactly what happened here but I think it's a pretty decent example of what happened. I initially just wanted it to be two different videos with the whole "interlocking" part being the transition between the two sections but I thought just playing two different videos would be boring so I made the stuff at the beginning with the line and the colours and all that, and I think that sorta became the whole thing really. Whoops.
13 - "frantic"
This one was probably the one I spent the most time on, and I'm actually quite happy with the way it turned out. Like I said in the description of my YellowTealPurple post I very loosely based the concept off of a half-remembered Windows 95 commercial (specifically this one) and I just sorta took it from there. The reason why I spent so much time on this one was because I couldn't figure out a way to automate the animation so I pretty much did the whole thing manually. I thought about only including 2 colours in the grid square and putting them at opposite ends to make things neater but I ended up going with the three colours just so I could make them yellow, teal, and purple... d'ya geddit?
15 - "vindicate"
I should probably talk about at least one of the images I made for this, what with me talking about wanting to do more than just videos earlier on and all that. I made this in GIMP because it's free and it's the one image editing program I've been loyal to for the past 10 years so why stop now? You may have seen Craig in a few other submissions I made. I honestly do not remember where the name Craig came from, the filename on my computer for this image is just "my man craig.jpg" so that's who he is to me. He's my man Craig, and I'm very happy he's not going to jail.
18 - "program"
This is like the previous one, where it felt like I had just sorta subconsciously made decisions on how this one should look. Evidently it worked, though since this one actually ended up getting featured on YellowTealPurple's front page. That was pretty cool. I was gonna say more than just "computer" but when I went through it I thought it sounded kinda weird. I didn't want to remove the voiceover entirely because I thought it would just be kinda weird just weird having the Aphex Twin track I stole playing on it's own so I just went with the one thing and I think it went okay.
22 - "bifurcation"
Another video feedback one. I made this one by feeding a video of these two diverging lines into the feedback thingy and it came back like this, or something like that anyway. I toyed with the colours on this one afterwards, since I thought the original looked like crap. I think it's kinda funny that it looks like the bisexual pride flag colours. I don't really have much else to say about this one, I'm really just writing up on this one because I really like how it came out.
31 - "revolution
It's the last one, so I thought it would be cool if I could make it mirror the first submission I did. Or actually the third since there was no way I was submitting an ms-paint drawing that barely took a minute to make for the last submission. Anyway it's revolution as in like orbital revolution but like many of these I sorta just "did it" and that's how it worked. hooray.
So that was ModFX! I honestly had a lot of fun with this, even if I wasn't always impressed with what I did. I definitely think I was flaking a bit at the end but overall I'm fairly happy with what I put out, although I think the audio stuff kinda sucks lmao. I think if I ever did this again I would stick to a specific format or theme, just to make my submissions more consistent. I do think YellowTealPurple is good for a place to just sorta dump stuff that I don't think entirely fits on the channel, my one major concern is the storage limit, so I should probably either upload my stuff on a file sharing website and just embed my stuff there or delete my stuff whenever I'm getting close to the storage limit, which I don't find a particularly nice thing to do but if I really wanted to I could. I would like to think that doing all this has made me a bit more productive but honestly I'm really not too sure about that. I'm fairly good with schedules when they're there but the problem is when you're doing YouTube stuff on your own there is no deadline and self-imposed ones don't work because they Don't Exist so most of my stuff falls into the void of executive dysfunction for months until I finally decide to shove the whole thing out within a week. That's a nice note to end on, yeah? I'm sure that's good. See you next week when I post about why I think more people should watch Blake's 7. See ya!
SOME OTHER NOTES THAT DON'T REALLY GO ANYWHERE
- While I was making the compilation, I realized that I had accidentally exported some of these videos in 1080p at 25fps instead of the usual 1440p at 60fps that I usually go for. When I was fixing this I took the opportunity to slightly tweak some of my submissions. The only major changes were to day 23 (attention), which I admittedly rushed out to make it on time. The original is still on YellowTealPurple if you want to see it. The changes to the other submissions are mostly just timing fixes to look better at the new framerate.
- Yes, the visualizations in the video are laggy. I recorded them off a VM running Windows ME. I thought it would be funny.
- Third thing
Credits (aka all the music i stole to make these)
- vertigo (2): Kevin MacLeod - Wallpaper
- pivot (3): The Sunshine Fix - The Many Keys to Reunion
- octahedral (8): Unknown - North Carolina Public Television Jingle (1983)
- narrow (11): Hiroshi Kawaguchi - Opa-Opa! & Victory Way (from Fantasy Zone OST)
- frantic (13) and parallel (26): Sweet Trip - Female Lover
- irrational (14): Kevin MacLeod - Electrodoodle
- program (18): Aphex Twin - Blue Calx
- bifurcation (22): John Baker/BBC Radiophonic Workshop - Festival Time
- attention (23): Unknown - Rete37 Bumper (1994)
- build (27): Intermix - Voices
- revolution (31): my bloody valentine - what you want
Stuff I stole for the compilation vid:
- Osamu Sato - Pit & Temple Ambient A & Cartoon C(LSD: Dream Emulator)
- Takaki Horigome - Jugpot King Speaks (Klonoa: Door to Phantomile)
- Shogo Sakai - O2 in Love (Mother 3)
- Nobuo Uematsu - Victory Theme (Final Fantasy VII)
- Brian Orr - clouds.mid (Windows 95)
- Bill Brown - Windows XP Tour Music
- Toilet Ananas Nasdas - Toilet Ananas Nasdas
Sound effects sourced from Pixabay
Chris Pratt (mario) photo sourced from Hell.