CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART IV – THE STAFF

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

*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.

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 13^th 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 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.

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.

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.

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.