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POST 13: VIRAL-NESS, YOUTUBE CRITICISM, and WHAT’S NEXT

17/08/24 at 8.22pm   /   by captainredblood   /   0 Comment

 

VIRAL-NESS, YOUTUBE CRITICISM, and WHAT’S NEXT

 

For those just joining the Camp Redblood crew, here’s a quick recap of how we got here…

 

In late 2013, I was working a middling job at a middling company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I wasn’t doing what I wanted to be doing occupation-wise (I’m still not to be honest, but I do enjoy the work I’m doing at my current job, a firm that’s anything BUT middling). Anyway, one day the company hosted some sort of tech fair, in which several vendors showed off cool gadgets and products. There were booths and presentations, and there was a guy giving free massages (my chief reason for attending). In other words, it was the boring adult equivalent of having a school holiday party–half the day was working, the other half was pizza and fucking off until it was time to get back on the MBTA.

 

Anyway, one of the companies that showed up was Microsoft. You might sense where this is going. Fresh from a killer 10 minute massage and encouraged by some excellent friends and coworkers, I moseyed on over to the-booth-that-Gates-built. There I listened to five seconds of a pitch about how awesome the Microsoft Surface 1 was before I held up my hand and said, “I gotta be honest, I’m really not interested in a tablet, but here are some cool drawings I made with one of your… other products.” It wasn’t the smoothest pitch in history, but it impressed a very special woman named Barrie Mirman, who passed it on to someone, who passed it on to someone else, and in January of 2013, Microsoft’s New England Research and Development blog ran a story about me.

 

https://blogs.microsoft.com/newengland/2014/01/22/pats-old-school-art-with-microsoft-paint/

 

Now, at this time, Camp Redblood was nothing more than a failed horror screenplay alternately titled Last Stand at Camp Hawkeye and Something’s Out There… However, when I saw how far my weird MS Paint hobby had brought me, my inner hustler was awakened. If I could get Microsoft to do a story about me, I sensed the potential to fulfill Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” prophecy… in other words, the potential go viral. I’d already made the front page of Reddit a year or so before, when my girlfriend posted one of my Harry Potter illustrations there. MS Paint was already inextricably connected to the birth of Camp Redblood (see here), but now it had a shot at getting Redblood to the next level.

 

After some hand-wringing over whether I should create a Paint comic book or a novel, practicality won the day, and I wrote it as a prose novel with illustrations. This would later lead to some misconceptions in the press, with many outlets referring to the book as a “graphic novel”, which I totally understand. My illustrations look like comics, or even animation cells from a cartoon—not entirely matching the very R-rated tone of Camp Redblood. As it happens, I did make some proof-of-concept comic pages, but to do it as a comic would have required me to quit my job, and brother, I just don’t have that kind of capital.

 

So two years went by, during which I wrote my first book. I wrote on it the Orange Line, I wrote it on the Red Line. I wrote it in my cubicle. I wrote it on park benches. I wrote it in the Algiers Coffee House in Harvard Square, drinking pot after pot of jasmine tea, waiting for my girl to finish the late shift at her job. I wrote it at three different apartments, on God knows how many notebooks, and typed it on at least five separate computers. I self-published to Amazon Kindle and made like ten bucks from those family members who were kind enough to buy it (even if they didn’t own a Kindle). That first edition, published in April, 2016, did have a few illustrations, but they were little more than black and white line art, nothing that would attract attention. I knew I’d have to wait until they were done in full color before really putting it out there.

 

Another year went by.

 

May, 2017. I finally release the “Special Edition” with eight full-color “MS Paint-ings”, the most I’ve ever completed in one year (buy it here!). I posted them to Imgur just before lunch on a bright day in late May, and at just the right moment—using the novelty of MS Paint to go viral had been the plan from the beginning, but it was a plan that always hinged on a certain amount of luck—and then I went to lunch. By the end of that lunch I had several thousand views on Imgur and, for once, more upvotes than downvotes. The next thing I knew, I was fielding interview requests and Microsoft had invited to fly me out to Seattle to join the Creator Council for their new program, Paint 3D. It was my first time on a plane since 2007, and it was pissah.

 

Fast-forward to late August, and my stuff has gone viral twice over since May. First was July when Microsoft announced it was done with MS Paint, and now again with the release of the awesome video produced by the talented folks at Vox.com. The video has racked up over 700,000 views, and peaked at 19 on YouTube’s top videos. Both of my Facebook pages have received over 600 new followers in less than a week, which is why I’ve written this little abbreviated history.

 

THE VOX VIDEO

 

I can’t overstate how honored I am by the video Phil Edwards and the rest of the team at Vox put together. It’s so well-edited and informative that even listening to my own voice (which I hate) didn’t bother me as I watched it. Even before the video was released, many people warned me against reading the comments, as YouTube’s comments section isn’t exactly known as the bastion of sober, respectful discourse. While much of the comments have been positive, ego-boosting bursts of praise, there has been some legitimate criticism of the illustration itself.

 

To receive this criticism is, in itself, its own kind of honor. It means that, at least for the moment, the discussion has moved beyond “Why don’t you just use Photoshop?” (I’ve provided many answers to this, but it always boils down to 1. I don’t fuckin’ feel like it, and 2. We’re only talking about this BECAUSE it’s MS Paint.) So I’m only too happy to see commentators like “Juliette” rip on the piece a little, because it also means people are taking it seriously. While I appreciate all the nice folks who have sprung to illustration’s defense, I thought Juliette’s assessment was pretty fair. In my own defense, I would just say that this project was somewhat rushed because of a deadline, and I was working on a much smaller canvas than usual, which is why the seams of Paint show a bit more—the larger the canvas, the less you see those somewhat jagged Paint lines.

 

I’m cool with all of the criticism now for another very specific reason—I’m not a professional. I’m an amateur, a hobbyist. This is a passion project for me, and while I’ve come a long way from my earlier MS Paint pieces, I’m still learning with every single project. My chief weaknesses remain perspective and anatomy (I seriously have like one standard ear that I draw on everyone, and you should never scrutinize my characters’ hands for too long), but I’m comfortable with that for the moment because I do make honest efforts to improve the craft with each new illustration. I remember reading a prominent comic book artist admit one time that he never drew his characters from an elevated perspective, as if you were looking down on them, because he could just never nail that angle. I find little anecdotes like that heartening. I also like to remember how unpolished stuff like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics looked when they first appeared in the early 1980’s. They were rough, but they had serious charm, and I like to think that what people who like my illustrations are responding to is a similar sort of rough charm.

 

WHAT’S NEXT?

 

The plan was to just jump right into the next Camp Redblood novel, Camp Redblood and the Summer of Terror, which I began writing well over a year ago (there’s even a chapter 1 excerpt of it in the Camp Redblood and the Essential Revenge Special Edition, available here!). The story is set several years before Essential Revenge, and chronicles Leigh Carter’s first summer at Camp Redblood. All my recent attention, however, has led to commission requests, and since I do still work a full-time job, this has slowed down the production on that novel. Another reason for the delay is that Summer of Terror is much more ambitious than Essential Revenge, spanning, as the title suggests, an entire summer, whereas Revenge took place over the course of 48 hours or so. For this reason, I’ve decided to take my time with the book.

 

The good news, however, is that another, much shorter Camp Redblood novel is in the works. I don’t have a working title yet, but it is a direct sequel to Camp Redblood and the Essential Revenge, and picks up a few weeks after that story left off. As of this writing I’m about 55 pages into it, and am aiming for a much shorter, leaner, propulsive narrative. A synopsis will be forthcoming, and like Essential Revenge, I’m anticipating a barebones version first, followed by an illustrated Special Edition.

 

MANY THANKS

 

I just want to take this moment to thank Vox.com once again for their dynamite video. Also want to thank all the new readers and Facebook followers, and welcome them into the Camp Redblood gang. Have a look around, check out some concept art, some old blog posts, and be sure to check out Camp Redblood and the Essential Revenge. The Special Edition costs about six bucks, and the standard version is even cheaper. It’s a fun little foul-mouthed adventure, but it was written—and drawn—from the heart.

 

–Pat

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07143FXZ5

POST 12: MS PAINT AND THE EVOLUTION OF CAMP REDBLOOD

16/05/14 at 1.08pm   /   by captainredblood   /   0 Comment

MS PAINT AND THE EVOLUTION OF CAMP REDBLOOD

Microsoft Paint can do anything.

I frequently say this to people who react incredulously when I tell them what my favorite artistic medium is. It’s not entirely true; every once in a while I’ll require the services of a Photoshop knock-off to get a detail right for one of my Paintings.  It almost always relates to text within a piece; Paint’s text tool is strictly linear, and sometimes I need it to wrap around something, like on the Camp Redblood logo. I suppose I could just draw the text, but even I don’t have that kind of patience. So while it might not be 100% true that Paint can do anything, it sure feels like that to me sometimes, especially when it relates to Camp Redblood. After all, Camp Redblood was basically conceived in MS Paint.

Something__s_Out_There____by_PatrickHines

 

__Who_are_THEY_____MS_PAINT_by_PatrickHines

 

These were created way back when I was still futzing around with Paint, unaware that it would become my primary tool in creating artwork. I knew I loved the summer camp milieu, and I knew I wanted to do my own take on it, but I couldn’t put it into words just yet. It would be some years before I did, but these two illustrations captured the tone I was going for. What eventually emerged from these illustrations was a stand-alone horror screenplay that went through a few working titles, beginning as Last Stand at Camp Hawkeye (the camp was called “Hawkeye” until I stumbled upon a real camp with the same name, located rather inconveniently in he exact same region as my fictional camp) and eventually becoming Something’s Out There.

 

LAST STAND LOGO

 

At the time, I had ambitions of raising money to make the movie with friends, and I thought one way garner interest would be to produce a series of concept illustrations the way George Lucas did with Ralph McQuarrie’s indelible proof-of-concept work for the original Star Wars.

 

Chooch__s_Campfire_Tale_by_PatrickHines

 

Girl Talk

 

Something__s_Out_There_by_PatrickHines

 

Bradys_Grim_Discovery_MS_PAINT_by_PatrickHines

 

GET_INSIDE_shaded_by_PatrickHines

 

My movie never came about, either because of my own laziness or my growing dissatisfaction with the script. Hindsight, however, reveals a third reason: I wanted to know more about this summer camp and its people before I burned it to the ground. Something’s Out There was a straight-up horror story, and many characters (several of whom appear in Camp Redblood and the Essential Revenge) do not survive the tale, but they all felt like they’d known each other for a long time, and presumably spent many summers together. There was a shared history there. Yet I remained resolute in the idea that this would be a one-and-done story; creating backstories is fun, and for me at least, necessary, but in the past it had turned to quicksand with almost every writing project I’d embarked upon.

Enter MS Paint.

When you’re drawing literally pixel to pixel sometimes, details become important. Initially, I tried to make the camp as nondescript as possible without completely robbing it of personality. The rationale being, the more ordinary it was, the scarier it would be once I introduced ghosts or knife-wielding maniacs into the fray.

 

Dining_Hall_Master_MS_PAINT_by_PatrickHines

Little by little, however, small details would creep up in these concept illustrations. Small details in the background that hinted at more. A photo on a wall. The camp flag. The camp motto. Graffiti left on a wall or toilet stall. Like the characters, the camp itself was hinting at a rich history. It got to the point where I was creating Camp Redblood material long after I’d left the screenplay to languish in my “completed works” drawer.

Camp_Hawkeye_Map_MS_PAINT_by_PatrickHines

HAWKEYE MAP

Slowly the urge to write a complete piece came back, and an idea for a short story pulled me up out of all my creative quicksand. “Bombardment” was really the springboard for the novel that would follow. With it came a bevy of MS Paint designs that would shape the relationship between Camp Redblood and her nemesis, Camp Eagle. Eagle quickly asserted itself as the quintessential summer camp for rich snobs, with Redblood emerging as the slowly-eroding den of the underdog.

 

Camp Eagle Bombardment Jerseys 1

 

Camp Eagle Bus designs

 

Snobs vs slobs has been done in plenty of subgenres, especially the summer camp one, but I thought I could bring something new to the table that I wouldn’t have been able to had I been constrained by a movie budget. Camp Redblood exists in a mostly-realistic 1980s, but it’s still something of an alternate history, one where “supercamps” became a fad. These supercamps, specifically Camp Eagle, allowed me to run wild with my imagination, creating cool structures and ridiculous features like the elaborate obstacle course that encircles the place.

 

BOOK - CAMP EAGLE

 

It also gave me leave to make Redblood itself a bit cooler than it would have been in a straight horror tale. Before long I had no problem making it into my own private Hogwarts, improbably situated atop a mountain, filled with secret passageways, and featuring cabins that would never pass a building inspection in a million years. None of this could have been done without Paint. I’ve never been very technically inclined, least of all when it came to drawing. Perspective was always difficult for me, and any time I had to use a ruler I would spend half my time erasing, so drawing buildings was always an uphill battle. With Paint, however, it was simple enough that I could create schematics (or at least schematic-like drawings) that didn’t slow me down, and that I could build on in my head when it came time to write. The entire final chapter of Essential Revenge saw me basically pushing chess pieces around a Camp Eagle layout I created with the program.

 

Dining_Hall_Schematic_MS_Paint_by_PatrickHines

 

Camp Eagle Layout II A

 

I used to assume I’d eventually move on from MS Paint. Then my artwork began to get noticed just because it made in Paint, but that’s not why I’ve stuck with it. Seen in that light, it’s little more than a novelty, something you only see on clickbait websites. The real reason I stuck with it is simple: it’s the one medium where the end result always lived up to what I had in my head.

POST 10: CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART IV – THE STAFF

15/01/21 at 1.43am   /   by captainredblood   /   0 Comment

CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART IV – THE STAFF

Staff Samson tree

 

Wacky counselors are a staple of summer camp stories, and Camp Redblood’s staff is no exception. When I started writing this thing I knew I had my work cut out for me in this area. Pop culture is littered with memorable staffs, from the professors of Hogwarts to the paper-pushers at Dunder Mifflin. The insane counselors of Wet Hot American Summer’s Camp Firewood cast the biggest shadow in the summer camp subgenre, and to a lesser extent, the crew from Meatballs.

 

Staff Spud

 

The rule I set for Camp Redblood’s employees was that they had to be equal parts funny, badass, and strange. There’s a few pricks thrown in there too; Redblood’s rival, Camp Eagle, couldn’t get all the jerks. Redblood’s camp structure offered a lot of room for variation. The basic camp counselors who dutifully drag their campers from activity to activity are only the tip of the iceberg. Aside from the normal specialist positions like Nature and Ropes instructors, Redblood keeps a full time loremaster on staff, a demolition/sabotage expert, paranormal affairs consultant, gossip coordinator, and more.

 

Staff Cheevers

 

Maintaining a certain tone can be a tightrope act, especially when it comes to creating larger than life characters. On one hand you don’t want the usual bland teenagers that populate summer camp horror, but go too big with the characters and you suddenly find yourself in a cartoon or a Wes Anderson movie. Camp Redblood exists in a reality just slightly removed from our own, so I think it’s important to set tonal boundaries here and there. With that in mind, I tried to draw from real people as much as possible rather than make up the characters entirely.

 

Staff Samson

 

Staff Murdoch

At any job I’ve ever worked at there’s always been at least one coworker who has an interesting background, is a flat-out badass, or is just exceedingly strange. For example, I once had a security supervisor who claimed he’d done some training for Muhammad Ali in the 1970s. I thought the guy was full of shit until he produced an old Sports Illustrated with an article about him and a photo with him and the champ. A member of the Wompanoag Tribe, this gentleman also regaled me with stories of the haunted Hockomock Swamp in southeastern Massachusetts. One such tale found him camping in those eerie wetlands when all of a sudden he had an overwhelming premonition that he needed to get out of there. As it turned out, the premonition wasn’t warning him of danger within the woods, but of the attempted theft of his car that he discovered upon reaching the parking lot. This lead to one of the single greatest pieces of advice that’s ever been given to me: “Never go into a haunted place like that without some type of spiritual protection. That, or a good side-arm.” These were the type of characters I thought belonged at Camp Redblood.

 

Staff Major Ecks
Anyone who has worked as a camp counselor knows that counselors in training, otherwise known as CITs, are among the most useless lifeforms on the planet, so I thought it would be funny if they all had derogatory nicknames. I find little details like that make the writing process more enjoyable, if a bit time consuming.

 

Staff CITs

Camp Redblood’s staff goes through many iterations between its opening in 1946 and the present day. One of the things I’m most looking forward to in writing future Redblood stories is creating new and unusual counselors for all of the different eras of camp.

Leigh I

Leigh 3

Joe

Leigh 2

Staff Chooch

Staff Constellation

Staff Kelsey

Staff Chef

Staff Murph

POST 9: CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART III – FUN WITH LOGOS

15/01/08 at 4.14pm   /   by captainredblood   /   0 Comment

Happy new year campers!

One way or another, 2015 is it, the year this sumbitch gets finished and published. Hopefully I’ll be posting more frequently with  updates and news regarding the editing and publication process of Camp Redblood and the Essential Revenge. In the meantime, here’s the latest installment of “Creating Camp Redblood”.

 

CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART III: FUN WITH LOGOS

When I set out to create my fictional summer camp, I knew it had to have a proper badass logo. The more I wrote, however, the more I realized just how many different logos would be required and what an important part of world-building they are. Just look at all the sigils and banners in George R.R. Matin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. I’m not sure how Martin and other writers go about creating stuff like this—do they design the logos themselves and then describe them in prose or do they work off a simple, less defined, but very basic and easy-to-describe idea? It varies, I’m sure, and I’ll bet some writers turn to others to help them conceive visual aspects of their stories, but I knew from the beginning I wanted to attempt all the logos and graphics myself.

I mentioned in a previous post my fascination with iconography. The interesting thing about iconography is that it comes in so many different forms. It can be a quote (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”), a photograph (sailor kisses nurse), a costume (when you think of Uma Thurman, is she wearing a yellow warm up suit with black piping?), or an album cover (pretty much any Beatles record). Often iconography is very simple, as with logos. Therein lies the challenge.

In creating Redblood’s logos, I first sought inspiration from the great Saul Bass. Google “Saul Bass logos” to get an idea how much of an influence this guy’s had on what you see every day. His second AT&T logo, created over thirty years ago, is still in use. Bass had a wonderful way of distilling a company or and idea down to its most simple form. I made many attempts to emulate that.

 

Redblood Logo Designs

 

At some point I decided Redblood’s main logo had to contain two things: 1.) it had to be simple, and 2.) it had to have a skull. This was just the right amount of preconceived notion to have, but it still took me several years to arrive at a good working logo because I proceeded to attach several more preconceived notions to the process.

 

Redblood Logo Old 3

Redblood Logo Old

 

As you can see, I really thought I had it with the above logo. The idea came to me after I created rival Camp Eagle’s logo, featuring a child riding on the wings of the camp’s eponymous bird.

 

Camp Eagle Logo

 

If Eagle’s logo evoked spoiled kids coasting through life, riding on the accomplishments of their elders, surely Redblood’s ought to convey someone who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, who fought their way, both out of danger and through life. That’s how I arrived at the image of a camper pushing his way out of a death’s head. The reasoning behind the design was sound, but the logo had a fatal flaw: you had to stare at it for a few seconds to understand exactly what it was. Many people tried to explain their confusion to me, but for the longest time I would have none of it. It was too thematically cohesive to throw out, damn it!

Eventually I came back to my senses and returned to the drawing board. This time I set aside my nitwistic notions of symmetry and tried to shoot for Bass’ simplicity. Camping and skull, that’s what the Redblood logo had to be. Camping and skull, camping and skull. It took a few more tries, but before long I was onto something. I almost kicked myself when the idea dawned on me, it was so obvious.

 

 

Redblood Logo old 4

Redblood Logo old 5

 

From there it was a simple* matter of creating the final logo in Microsoft Paint (because what was I going to use, Photoshop or something? Please.). I will delve into that process in a later post, but the result is the logo you see at the top of this page. I’m happy with the final design and wear it on my baseball cap every day. It’s been mistaken for a real camp (usually military) and more than one person on the train has expressed their admiration for it, so that’s a good sign.

When I’m trying to solve a narrative problem in my book or designing things for it, I tend to have a conversation with myself on the page in the form of notes. These often seem like the ramblings of a mental patient, but they’ve come in handy. One of my rejected designs for Camp Redblood was later repurposed as the insignia for the Heavy Hittahs, a fictional small-town gang in my book’s world.

 

Heavy Hittahs

 

 

 

I really wanted to name them after West Roxbury’s own absurd gang, the Fruits and Vegetables (hailing from the hard-hitting aisles of Roche Bros.), but I thought readers would find such a pathetic excuse for a gang too lame to believe. Plus, I wasn’t going to break my ass trying to create a gang insignia out of fruits and vegetables.

Another great inspiration for logos and brand names is Pixar Studios. Their movie logos are usually perfect, with Monster’s Inc, Cars, and The Incredibles being the standouts, but the logo designs within the worlds of their stories (Pizza Planet, the Buy N’ Large Corporation) are often just as amazing. Part of my story takes place in the town near camp (It’s always fun to get away from camp, even if it’s just for an hour), which meant I’d have to think up some business names and signs. The first, pictured below, is a work in progress, but I tried to keep the Pixar designs in mind as I created it.

 

Sundae Best

 

At the end of the day all of this stuff is secondary to the story and characters, but with world-building such a major part of popular fiction these days, it doesn’t hurt to devote some time to it. It’s definitely given me a better sense of the world of Camp Redblood, and it’s just plain fun to do besides.

*Not simple at all.

POST 4: CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART II

14/11/12 at 1.49pm   /   by captainredblood   /   0 Comment

CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART II: THE CAMPERS

If you were one of those kids who still had to go to Phys-Ed during your later high school years because you didn’t play a sport, you might have an idea of what kind of campers populate Camp Redblood during the summer of 1985, when Camp Redblood and the Essential Revenge takes place.

There was always an eye-patch kid, wasn't there?

There was always an eye-patch kid, wasn’t there?

I do not like sports. I played hockey growing up, and though I made the most of it, I remain as uninterested in it now as I was then. Consequently, I was one of those elder statesmen of the gym class, typically home by 3 pm relaxing with a peanut butter sandwich in front of Animaniacs instead of busting my ass at some type of practice. One of the more amusing relationships I observed in all of high school was that of the alpha-male coaches and the beta, zeta, and flat-out omega-males those coaches had to interact with during these late-stage gym classes.

The guy who got stuck with my junior year gym class was a football coach I liked a lot. He made the best of our very silly situation by treating us like we were his own players for fifty minutes a week to varying (and often hilarious) degrees of success. My greatest athletic achievement in all of high school* was being called “Tiger” by this guy, a term of endearment normally reserved for his players. This moment occurred during one of those aborted gym class football games that I was taking way too seriously (being one of the more athletic kids in a class full of human marshmallows did wonders for my anti-sports attitude).  I had made a decent tackle and the coach gave me a slap on the back and said, “There ya go, Tiger!” with legitimate enthusiasm. The coach was from the Midwest I think, so imagine someone from Fargo saying that.

It was a small gesture to him I’m sure, but here I am thirteen years later writing about it. A few other guys in the class received the honor of being called Tiger as well, and I’m sure they appreciated it as much as I did. Hell, we could have wound up with the shithead who spent those periods reading the sports pages while the nerds, potheads, and other athletically-challenged SOBs who made up his class fumbled around with basketballs and floor hockey equipment like Neanderthals discovering tools.

I guess this is my long, incoherent way of saying that Camp Redblood’s campers, like The Goonies and Stephen King’s Loser’s Club before them, are good, old-fashioned outcasts. In creating these characters though, I didn’t want to just make them types (the fat kid, the smart kid, the mouth, etc.), I wanted to make them all as weird and original as possible, just like the guys in those ragtag gym classes. Even as a kid I was never convinced that The Goonies were the rejects Sean Astin’s character described them as. Sure, they’re all a little weird, but they’re not exactly sitting by themselves at the lunch table. Aside from Chunk and maybe Data, I’m sure the rest of them would have avoided upper-classmen Phys-Ed. Brand is a jock for Christ sake.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Camp Redblood in 1985 is in a steady state of decline, with their “best” campers (i.e. the most athletic, confident, popular, and prettiest) having defected to arch-rival Camp Eagle. Redblood’s director, Dr. Cheevers, comes from a much different world, one where the geeks had not yet inherited the Earth, where feminism was a nascent, mildly irritating concept, and where you stood up for yourself with your fists if necessary. Being from that world, Cheevers doesn’t quite know what to make of the goofballs he’s left with, so he makes the most of them, just like my junior year gym teacher did.

Brady Ralph

Lena Ralph ShermanGrand and CloudyBrady Grand Alejandry
Bogey Hanna SALLY 1
*I go back and forth regarding my greatest athletic achievement in high school. Some days it’s the memory listed above, other days it’s the single game of JV Vollyball I played in (lost 15-0), which I did for the sole purpose of being invited to their end-of-year cookout. I still have the jersey and you better believe I listed JV Vollyball as an activity on my college applications.

POST 2: CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART I

14/10/29 at 2.23pm   /   by captainredblood   /   2 Comments

CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART I: A CAMP WITH PERSONALITY

In the ten or so years since I first conceived Camp Redblood, the camp itself has gradually taken shape through various media. The first Redblood story I wrote was a screenplay titled Something’s Out There. I wrote it to be a low-budget, stand-alone movie, something we see far too little of in this age of endless franchise-building. Genre movies in the twenty-first century only serve to set up sequels and spin-offs, rarely telling a complete, self-contained story with a beginning, middle, and end. Think about it, we’re nearly three movies into the rebooted Star Trek franchise and the crew of the Enterprise has yet to begin the legendary five-year journey that made up so much of the original series. The last two Spider-Man movies have done nothing but set up characters and plots that have gone nowhere. Camp Redblood began as a challenge I set for myself, to write the proverbial stand-alone summer camp horror movie.

Yeah, I failed at it completely.

The problem turned out to be the old camp herself. The one summer camp that looms over all others in popular culture is Camp Crystal Lake from the Friday the 13th films. One of the big problems I have with those films is how anonymous Crystal Lake is. This isn’t entirely the fault of its creators. After all, no two Friday movies were actually shot at the same location, leaving little room for visual continuity, much less a feigned history. When audiences first laid eyes on it in 1980, Crystal Lake had no significant fictional history aside from being the place where physically disabled camper Jason Voorhees drowned. Beyond that, Crystal Lake is fairly anonymous as far as summer camps go. No camp mottos, traditions, or even notable campers aside from Jason. In fact, very few campers are actually seen in the series until the sixth film. One could argue that Crystal Lake’s anonymity is what makes it scary. There’s a reason why The Overlook Hotel is designed and lit as naturalistically as possible in Kubrick’s The Shining—it looks like a real hotel, not some shadow-draped Victorian nightmare. The Overlook had personality though. Crystal Lake has none.

 

Top cabin cool kids only.

Top cabin is for cool kids only.

So when it came time to write what I’d envisioned as the definitive summer camp horror film (which, trust me, it wasn’t), I really wanted it to be a memorable place, complete with its own history, secrets, traditions, and peculiarities. Alas, one of the frustrations of screenwriting is that you have to convey as much as you can on the page with as little writing possible. It’s a constant battle to keep the page count south of 120 if you want anyone to actually read it, and those 120 pages go fast. This meant that all the flowery, intricate description of my dream camp was the first thing to go on the chopping block.

May not be up to building code...

May not be up to building code.

A few years went by and I did very little with the script (a potentially fortuitous turn of events, as that script essentially represented the last Camp Redblood story, one I still hope to tell at some point). Meanwhile, the grand old summer camp I had created for the supposedly stand-alone movie that I never made was still standing, very much alone, empty, and unused somewhere in my head. It was just waiting to be reopened and occupied.

Lots of hammocks in this cabin.

Lots of hammocks in this cabin.

It was around this time that I began to come into my own as an artist specializing in the inconvenient medium known as Microsoft Paint. Somewhere along the line it dawned on me that if I could produce a respectable-looking comic book created entirely in that program I would probably be the first to ever do so, and could conceivably get some publicity out of of it. This meant I could finally visualize, with neither financial nor creative restraint, the summer camp I had left to rot. Unfortunately, I slowly realized that it would take me roughly as much time to draw a comic book in Microsoft Paint as it would to actually go out and build a goddamn summer camp with my bare hands. In fairness, I’ve refined my craft in Paint to the point where I probably could produce a regular comic—that is, if I didn’t have to go work a day job for 40 hours a week. So the comic book option was out. My time was not wasted, however. This period yielded some strong designs, ones that would aid greatly in the writing of this first Camp Redblood novel.

The older I get the more interested I am in iconography. I want to know what magic makes a certain aesthetic choice not only memorable and lasting, but definitive. It’s obnoxious and counterproductive to say you want to make something iconic of your own, something classic, but I think it’s important to aim at least for something that does not become obsolete in the space of a few years or a decade. This was the mindset with which I approached the design of Redblood.

From my forthcoming coffee table book, "Architecture in MS Paint".

From my forthcoming coffee table book, ARCHITECTURE IN MS PAINT.

The Camp Redblood that exists on the page was designed and built by a small group of World War II veterans fresh from their service in the war. The prevailing image of this generation, the “Greatest Generation” (a designation I’ve never heard anyone from that generation self-apply), is one of mythically capable, practical men and women. It’s also a very romantic generation (in addition to being romanticized), and I thought that should come through in the designs.

At the point of time in which this story takes place, however, Redblood and its reputation are in a state of decline. Though well-maintained under the supervision of its grizzled founder and camp director, Dr. Cheevers, the joint isn’t what it used to be. That state of decline hopefully supplies the camp with some of the much-needed personality I found lacking in Crystal Lake and all the other cinematic and literary summer camps. Whether or not I’ve succeeded will be up to the reader.

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