The Story Synopsis

Hopefully a couple of people are itching to know what the story is behind this "Nommo: New Story of RA" thing is, because there have only been disjointed bits and pieces up to this point. Here is an updated draft of my Thesis treatment that will hopefully pull all of the random pieces I've posted, so far, together. Feel free to ask any questions you'd like.



NOMMO ->“Word Magic”

{i n t r o}

Nommo is a West African term for “Word Magic” or "The Power of Words" and it is an important part of the title of my thesis project. The story is one based in the long lineage of fantasy/science-fiction storytelling, but with a twist. For me, it’s important to declare that it is a story of fiction, so that it is perceived as “A story being told” not just a sequence of fictitious events being given to an audience. I would like to establish the story as the beginning of a new kind of modern mythology that blends futuristic technology elements with elements of the ancient African cultural aesthetic. The premise of the story is the demise and redemption of John Kilner, the avatar of Ra. (Egyptian mythical God) Because this will be a CG short story/trailer, the challenges will be the amount character animation/ design/modeling that will be necessary and the creation and rendering of natural rural environments.

{concept}

The McGuffin - “A man with the power of God that began as a hero and became a villain choked out by his own villainy.”

The story "NOMMO: New Story of RA" takes place in the distant future of earth where the countries of Africa had united and become one powerful country in the world system, under RA. The transformation/reshaping of Africa took place as a direct result of the intervention of John Kilner (aka., The Avatar of RA.) As the Avatar of RA Kilner was only supposed to oversee and intervene as minimally as possible with the activities of the universe. Greed, lust and frustration with the "Order of Things" corrupted him and he abused the power he was given. The birth of New KMT was the result. (KMT ->Kemet -> “Place for the Blacks”/ "Black Land") KMT is the original name of Egypt and was adopted by the new United Africa. For some of the citizens of New KMT life was more than fair, but for most it was egregiously unfair. Disparity of justice and inequality under a tyrannical government lead to strife and civil unrest, which lead to a coup. Kilner falsely accused of a murder was stripped of his governmental position, hunted down and killed in a nameless ravine in South Africa. Carthegians lead by a descendent of Hannibal pursued, the Spartan Army of Zaire pursued, The Royal Marine Corp. of Johannesburg pursued, and the Elite cloud forces of Nigeria pursued. Kilner's end came after being surrounded in a valley by armies charging from peaks of the cliffs, mountains and plains surrounding the barren, desolate, sun beaten valley {ravine.} (The trailer is ultimately about laying out the "Chase Scene.") The Mountains and cliffs on one side were beige, like a desert with sparse foliage. The other side was green with dense foliage and many trees and in the distance were snow covered mountain peaks. RA was in the rift attempting to escape while others closed in from the outside. This area most resembles the Great Rift Valley in Africa today.


{m y m o t i v a t i o n}

The "Ra" fantasy/mythology story is one that I had developed fairly extensively three years ago. The developed story, for me, represents an amalgamated creative structure for me to continue to explore a couple of areas that I have always been intrigued by: ancient African history, culture and art, science fiction, fantasy and mythology. The “Ra” story was originally conceived as a novella/graphic novel, but can easily translate to a more cinematic presentation format. While "NOMMO: New Story of RA" is different from the RA stories some of the characters and the storyline follow the same path and there is quite a bit of back-story development for me to pick and choose from in the original fantasy/fiction stories. The new story takes place much further in the future and includes aliens from the farthest reaches of the universe as well as technologocally advanced or even enhanced humans.

Stylistically, I always intuitively lean towards “Clean Lines” and geometric pattern while wanting to do grunge work. The largest influence on me, in terms of overal design of "Look and Feel" of futuristic environments and specifically for this project is Syd Mead, a world renowned Cinema Set/Art Director. Syd Mead is most well known for doing most of the conceptual art and set design for the film “BladeRunner”, "Aliens", "TRON", "Short Circuit", "Solar Crisis", "Star Blazers: Yamato 2520" the animated series and "Gundam".

The Cloud Army Concept

The cloud army concept is something that just kind of popped into my head at some point and many of the things I learned in my Particles and Dynamics course with Jean-Micheal Mistrot really filled in the gaps, as to whether I can realistically get the smoke effects I would want. Below are images of the Human Torch, because I can't really find any reference of of the same look using smoke gotta use the imagination God gave me. The idea of the look, for me, is to replace the flames with smoke, or "Clouds." The characters will appear "Hawkish", or short tempered. They will be flying feverishly towards the center of the terrain area and swarming roughly in the shape of a sphere. It will look like a cross between a moving bee swarm shaped as a sphere and an atom with positive and negative charges speeding around it.

Attire:
Different variations of long draping leather-like costumes, partial armor plating, primarily white with red accents, "Pilot" goggles, "Spitfire" bomber style leather pilot helmets.


(Image Below is by Skottie Young)
"Human Torch" is © Marvel Comics group ® All rights reserved




(Image Below is of stutue Sculpted by Thomas Kuntz/ Bowen Designs)
"Human Torch" is © Marvel Comics group ® All rights reserved

"The Messenger"

This is John "The Bike Messenger." He's a computer/graphic art/ Traditional art guy that I used to shoot the breeze with at my beloved Empryean Cafe, which is now closed. John likes some of the fantasy and sci-fi stuff out there, loved the idea of being turned into a 3D character, so he'll probably get a kick out being the leading general of my cloud army.

The Bouncing Stilt Walker Concept

The majority of the visual "Weight" in my piece is coming from four armies converging to one spot. Since I will have cutaway shots getting closer into the armies I can really open things up a bit and make the armies and their movement/design more dynamic. I decided to make all four of the armies very different. The bouncing stilt idea came from seeing performers on bouncing stilts at the grand opening of the World Class Kimmel Music and Theatre center in Philadelphia. The dynamic bouncing movement that these stilts lend themselves to idea of "Acrobatic Super Soldier" very well and will add believability to the kind of movement I want. These things are real and there are many types and variations. Right now, my designs will more closely follow the Poweriser design. Below are images that hopefully will describe what I mean in a more clear way.

PoweRisers
http://www.poweriser.net












Bionic Boots
http://pages.zoom.co.uk/bionicboots/







SpringWalker
http://www.springwalker.com/

Nuts and Bolts

At this stage of my project there are really two areas, being evaluated against the reference artists' work that I am focussing on to establish the tone of the film:

-Poses and gestures

There are certain gestures or posture that
uniquely identify characters, particularly modern
myth characters, like Superman or Spiderman,
even if they are only seen in silhouette. This
includes body poses, face poses and original character design.
It's my intention to depict, clearly and visually, that this is a story about Heroes and Villains.


-Properties(all props.), texture, Color Palette

Ideally I will have figured out, fairly soon, a set of rules or a theme
for these interconnected elements. Right now, I am thinking to
primarily work in shades of a muted slate blue, and muted red,
and shades of grey. Having green trees and forrestry "Pop-out"
from that should be visually interesting. Also, possibly tinting with
a virtual neutral density, or slate blue filter at the end, may help blend everything.

(Image Below is by Leinil Yu)
"Superman Birthright" is © DC Comics group ® All rights reserved

Blackmale photos of a Troll.

Flikr's a pain in the A$$. I like the idea of being able to have a seperate image posting service from my Blog, but Flikr makes it difficult to find just the html code that points to where the picure is. Instead, it's much easier to find their "Blog this" button which creates a seperate Blog entry for every single stinkin photo and , but of course they add a nice little hotlink to that takes people to the Flikr website so they can peddle their services. I personally think this process is retarded...if you didn't pick that up already and am still trying to figure out how I got the code for the first images I posted.


Anyway the pictures below are of Lauryn Smith, a classmate of mine at NYU: CADA. The images are being used as reference to build another character fo my thesis project. I joked to Lauryn and said that I was going to make her a troll, she insisted that she would better fit the roll of a "Sexy Elf Chick" (Index Fingers pointed up and around her ear area "Blinking", I was appalled by her vanity and reiterated that she would be a troll. After some consideration I won't make Lauryn a troll, I do however think I can model a character from the photos of her that will make a pretty cool field general for my bouncing stilt-walker army.

Still not quite enough.

I will add a journal entry here though.

My younger sister was home this week on break and so I'm allowing myself some "time off" of my thesis. She wanted to rent movies, at the beginning of the week, which is always great for me to do personally and professionally. We rented "The Grudge", "She Hate Me", "Saw" and "Girl With a Pearl Earing."

"The Grudge" was decent, by the end, but a lot like "The Ring"; I only saw the Japanese version.

"She Hate Me" was the best shot Spike Lee film I've ever seen, but conversely almost the worse story only second to "Girl 6."
The thing that sucked the worse about the film is that it starts off making you believe that it is brilliantly structured satire that comments on the current state of human greed, averice, and malice in government and corporate subculture only to belittle itself as a bizarre circus sideshow where the embattled star of the film becomes the soulmate of two lesbian women and their two collective children. WTF!?!

"Saw" was decent, but too predictable, Definitely nowhere near 7even. I didnt even hear about the movie until it was almost out of the theatres, but all that I'd read at that point said that it was overrated when compared to Seven, so I assumed that was wht all the early reviews compared it to.

"Girl with a Pearl Earing" was by far the best movie of the group and even that film had gaps that weren't filled either by poor direction, poor screenplay condensing of the novel, or just bad choices made by the original novelist. A lot of those things showed themselves when watching the "Behind The Scenes Featurette" on the DVD. The interviews layed some things out that should have been told visually that never were. Overall though it was better than average and Scarlett Johanson was gorgeous.

I am also going to check out the new "Dali" exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Museum with my sisters, if we can get tickets and we'll also be checking out the Egypt Gallery at the University of Penn. Museum, which is permanent. Visiting museums is something that I always secretly wanted to do, but was always "Too Cool", or too busy "Dealing with Real Life" to be frivolously visiting museums. However, now, that I almost consider myself an artist I feel justified in going. (Note: Children this is not a justifiable way of doing things, if you genuinely want to do something that there's nothing wrong with doing that don't let superficial obstacles get in the way.) Interestingly enough it took a rather unsettling experience at an artists' gallery for me to actually begin to view myself as an artist. I'll put that in the next Blog entry though.

Gotta move the images down and out of the way of the sidebar.

Technology is never perfect.

My first 3 modelled characters, almost COMPLETE

I'm finally getting the hang of Flikr, an image posting service that allows me to sore my images online, but also forward them to this blog to be viewed online.

Sexism and Racism in Contemporary Fantasy Art.

As I'm looking through reference material and rediscovering some art that I've seen in the past and admired, but didn't know the names of the artists of I am beginning to see certain elements of the artist's body of work and Fantasy art as a genre that concerns me. Namely, work that falls into the same category as Frank Frazetta, and Simon Bisely's work. While I would not would not be foolish enough, as a man, to say something as stupid as " I abhor the sight of voluptuous nude women." I do have two sisters and feel like a lot of the work within the fantasy genre is offensive to them. I intend on having more than one female character and am wrestling on how to depict them. FEEDBACK WOULD BE GREAT HERE. The female characters won't all be weak and in need of saving so then there is the idea of how to physically depict them. I would like to have an erotic elemen, if only for appeal, but I want to find some middle ground between an asexual "Butch" female and a gyrating "Music video girl."

A good sampling of Fantasy art:

Frazetta Gallery

Fantasy Gallery dot net

Still organizing

I'm still organizing and keep finding new images that are relevent to the work. I will take some time to post images some of my stuff up to this point. I probably, will have to use a variety web image posting services since Blogger doesn't support image posting directly, so once some images start going up some may/ or may not erretically be available and unavailable, but I'll have to see how it works out.

Travis Charest

Travis Charest's artistic style and depiction of character in a particular context is THE major influence on the aesthetic of my sci-fi/fantasy work right now. Travis Charest is one of the few comic book illustrators that has re-established the look of traditonal art styles prior to the "Comic Book" art style era in popular books published now. Charest's work seems influenced mostly by Greek/Italian/renaissance period art.

Joe Mad!

Joe Madureira's art is one the many artistic influences on my work. I'm still organizing my refernce art and am really trying to whittle down my selection to something manageable and also create an aesthic paradigm for my project which combines sci-fi/ high technology and ancient myth-based fantasy. Joe Mad and Travis Charest, both illustrators primarily for comic books and graphic novels, are my main influences for tastefully blending lots of elements. So, primarily that's what I'm doing today while sorting through all these reference images.

Organizing

Current Favorites:
two songs: "Ghetto Rock" - Mos Def, "Big Weenie" - Eminem
two movies: "House of Flying Daggers", "Kinsey"

While I have some characters and a basic animatic already built I need to take time to organize my reference materials to streamline my modeling and texturing workflow. Unfortunately, all of my material is scattered all over my computers. I hate to do product plugs, but I just got and started using Extensis Portfolio 7 and it really is awesome at helping to organize lots of images quickly.

NOMMO the movie

This is my first entry for my thesis journal. I am testing the blog thing to see if it will allow me to journal my progress in a convenient, effective and finished way. It will be ideal to be able to edit and publish this from anywhere since I move around so much, primarirly between Philadelphia and New York daily. If you didn't know already I'm Butch Arrington, currently a grad. student at NYU. I am a Master's candidate in NYU's Center for Advanced Digital Applications otherwise known as CADA. "Nommo" is the tentative title for my thesis project and the film teaser trailer of a movie I would like to produce VERY SOON! "Nommo" is a West African term that roughly means "Word Magic" and it is very often used in reference to idea of weaving, or crafting stories orally by a person like a griot. A very important element of my film concept is the idea that the story itself is a story that is like mythology being passed down from generation to generation. The opening of the story includes a father telling one of the many "modern" stories of RA to his son.