HEART OF NEON is...
Me at the curry house with Jeff, Giles & Gary Liddon (none of whom are in the picture) on the day I met Jeff & Giles for the first time. Photo by Gary Liddon.
You don’t know what you don’t know, right? I thought I was a top shelf editor, which is probably the biggest reason I thought embarking on making HEART OF NEON without the typical support system most projects have was a reasonable proposition. It turned out I _wasn’t_ a top shelf editor by quite a long stretch. I lacked knowledge and experience in key areas that, until this project, I’d been able to wave away as unnecessary skills to the fundamental art of storytelling. Laughable, right? The thing is, what I DID have was the _potential_ to be a top shelf editor, and throwing myself into HEART OF NEON made me raise my game.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I’m the cat’s pajamas in the edit room. I struggle with the process. I’m wracked with doubt, haunted by imposter syndrome, blind still to the things I need to work on. But embarking on this project made me commit in a way I’ve never committed before.
I can’t deny this project has brought to mind my earlier career as an artist. I miss that, but the truth that’s obvious to me in retrospect is that I never had the necessary commitment to the work to make it last. I sometimes wish I’d been smarter about it, but I wasn’t prepared to be able to think about my work like that at the time. As you might imagine, I was a bit confounding to be around at the time.
In the newsletter I was reading today I talk about revisiting 8-bit graphics…
I was talking to Andy Roberts of Thalamus about something obliquely related to the film, and the conversation turned to me doing 8-bit art again. I’m pretty cool on the idea. Collaborating with Robin Levy taught me there’s a bit of a learning curve getting my head back into that creative mode working with the tools we have now. I counted on Robin quite a lot when it came to the Jeff screen we did. I didn't make any secret of that. Working on photo realistic stuff in Photoshop is one thing, I’m in no rush to return to the massive limitations of working on C64 art.
But then Andy mentioned if I made something Thalamus related he’d be able to throw some $$ my way, so…. yeah, okay.
And here we are. I have an idea I’m quite keen on, I’ve made some preliminary sketches, I pulled some reference art, and I’ve been working on test screens in Photoshop trying to figure out the best way to make this a legit C64 image. It looks now like it’s going to happen. I’ll keep you posted.
EDIT: Still thinking about this. Since I wrote that last paragraph I had a fairly successful evening trying stuff out in Photoshop. Got to the point I had my test image displayed in a custom 16 color C64 palette at 160 double width horizontal pixels and I thought, oh yeah, that looks like a C64 thing…
Then I did some research to see what C64 graphics look like these days. Good grief but there are some staggeringly talented artists on the 64 today. Names new to me like The Sarge, Facet, Carrion… Not to mention Robin Levy’s stuff. People think about color on the C64 differently now. Plus the design is really strong in a lot of this stuff. It’s a bit intimidating, but the ideas are really exciting. I have new stuff to try out.
I really have to step up my game.
What I don’t mention in this bit is Steve Day had been encouraging me for AGES to do another screen. He’d shared some tools with me that I was using to make the images I discuss here. Without Steve I wouldn’t have done any of this stuff, no doubt in my mind.
My first C64 screen in decades.
But doing stuff regardless of not having all the answers, without having tested yourself at these tasks before, embracing the commitment it takes to learn new things (or relearn old things) - that’s what it takes to be indie-anything - musician, artist, writer, gamedev, filmmaker… it’s finding it within yourself to commit to following the creative process through to the end no matter what.
To point out that Llamasoft is a key example of this philosophy is really just stating the obvious. Both Jeff & Giles relish new challenges, and seize new opportunities to be tested. They both love working on new, bleeding edge hardware, boldly coding where no person has coded before. That’s the juice for them. I admire the hell out of that.
I’m a better filmmaker today than I was in 2016, no question in my mind. That doesn’t guarantee HEART OF NEON is going to be a huge success financially, but creatively it was something I didn’t realise I needed.
Times are hard for a lot of people right now, for people in my profession of television editing AND in game development who are feeling the same fallout of a new corporate austerity that has dammed up opportunities for too many creative people to make a living practicing their craft. It’s hard to be bold when hardship has been thrust on you and your family looks to you to pull through. Everybody has a different risk tolerance. But perhaps embracing your ability to overcome new obstacles, no matter what, is a helpful mindset when what you’ve come to take for granted has let you down.