Theater: Only the Dead Die Twice

I found this in an old folder from my Sophomore year in high school. In my speech class, we listened to part of an old radio horror show, and at a certain point pressed stop. The teacher told us to finish the story on our own and then perform it later that week (along with two made-up commercials). This is the result of our collaboration. I'm pretty sure I did most of the work writing it, and I played the part of Alec Craig when we performed it in class.

If you want to hear the setup for this story, I found this as the actual radio show this is based on. It's weird to hear this now after all those years. We listened to the show up to the 13:57 point, and then made up our own story from there:

The Tale of Nicrodh

Okay, this piece is very interesting in my opinion; when I was in 3rd Grade, I was obsessed with WarCraft II, and made a custom campaign (or rather, series of individual maps, since you couldn't exactly do a campaign back then) called The Hard Lands. This was essentially a fanfiction (I know, don't judge me) of the lore of WarCraft as I could understand it at age eight; mostly, though, I just looked at the different units available on the map editor and made up my own lore about each one.

The following is a story that takes place in the Hard Lands, but as far as I can tell, it's completely irrelevant to the campaign's storyline. Judging by the name "Aegryn," as well as the overall style of this story, it's clear I got the idea for this out of the Alliance backstory in the WarCraft II manual. It's got some really weird story elements in it that I can't even figure out now (see "abomination of the castle of Alterac," "33,000-year-old Greek urn," "jeweled skillet," and "four Dolaemons"), but I remember being very proud of it, I'm glad I discovered it. It's very interesting to see how my imagination worked back then. 

If all goes well, I'm going to try and remake the old Hard Lands campaign on WarCraft III this year.
So sit back, relax, and enjoy the irrelevant Tale of Nicrodh.

The Salt Halt + Project-palooza Challenges!

It's February, which means it's another project month for me! Last year's was the Beat the Sweet Challenge, which gave me the idea for this year's:

SALT HALT!

Vid: Remember the Bobcats

I made this several years ago, and just realized that I never posted it online. It's one of my favorite short films I made, and I'll bet that it only took about an hour and a half total to film and edit. I'm surprised at how funny it turned out, and am pretty impressed with how much faux drama and how many cheesy clichés I could fit in it. I've tried since to make similar short films, but none of them turned out as funny as this one.

Battle Card 2.0: Archangel

This one was pretty fun. I'm basically doing one of each army type, so I chose the Archangel as the one from the Good army. I liked angels a lot when I was a kid, and even had two separate Archangel cards in my deck, along with a pet phoenix. This one combines the abilities of the two. I think this card may have a bit too much yellow on it, but oh well.

Vid: The Trump Card

I haven't posted a less-than-ten-second video for a while. This was just my brother and me looking to see how it would look to flip a card in slow motion. Pretty cool that it ended up landing perfectly aligned in front of the camera.

Graphic Art: Dragonfather

I was searching for drawing inspiration the other day and my thoughts turned to one of my top 5 favorite computer games of all time, Heroes of Might and Magic III. I loved this game as a kid and still consider it one of the most poignant PC game masterpieces ever made (hence it being in my top 5), and a lot of it is the imaginative aspect of the game. The majority of the storylines are given through text-based events, and each creature in a battle represents an army, so a lot is left to the imagination when playing. I have often compared it to a very complicated board game.

Anyway, one thing that I thought of that is also left to the imagination is the heroes themselves. They are only represented by a stock horse sprite, and distinguished by a small portrait. They can equip artifacts and armor, but you never get to see them wearing them. I came up with the idea to take one of the complete armor sets, the Power of the Dragonfather, and see what it would look like as a complete set. The result turned out pretty neat, and was a good practice of figure drawing and lighting.

I very likely will use this as inspiration for more drawings. There are a lot of cool artifact sets on Heroes III, and some of them would be fun to replicate even without putting them on a person. This is also good news in light of my upcoming annual project month in February! More on that later.