So I haven't written in a while and a lot has changed since I did. So here's the bottom line. I am no longer involved with the game I was making the music for with my friends. I couldn't really make the music in the time they needed. If I continued doing music I would have been at a level that I consider acceptable in a couple of months. So I kinda disappeared and time just told my distance with the project. I believe in the project completely and wish them all the best, if you own an IOS device then pick it up when it comes out.
After I realized I wasn't making the music anymore, I started thinking about a lot of things. If you were to ask me if I'd be happy making video games, the answer will always be yes. So why didn't I stick with it? At the time I didn't know. I thought I was just being a little asshole for not working hard enough and using the fact that I am a little tone deaf and not a very good musician as an excuse. I think what was really bothering me was the fact that I wasn't making the game. I was making the music for the game, I wanted to make the game. I want to make a game; come up with art ideas, develop characters, motifs, color palettes...I slowly realized the things I was thinking about were not a video game, but a story, specifically a movie. Film has always been the thing I love the most in life and I think I'm at the point in life where I need to do this.
I started brainstorming ideas and I think I came up with a pretty good one. I pitched it to some friends and it seems to hit exactly where I want it to, but it's gonna need a lot of work. I've been itching to write the script in the last couple of weeks but my stupidity and the way our body is put together stopped me from doing so, in other words, I crashed against a glass door and fucked up my hand pretty bad. I can't move my "flip the bird" finger completely. I have just regained enough mobility so that writing this does not hurt, so the script writing must commence. It's gonna be pulpy as hell and I want to jump right into playing with genre conventions and stuff. To not make this any longer, I will post again whenever something happens, but if things go like I want them it will be pretty soon.
I wanted to share this with Y'all because...well, I can't make a movie on my own. I need more people. So anyone who is interested in making a small love-filled little film, or even episodic content I haven't decided yet, but hit me up, let's work together.
If you want info on the plot, leave your email in the comments and I'll send you the info :D
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Portals, pedals and hate for Oliver Stone
The midi controller has been staring at me this whole week, kinda leering more than staring. I go into this weird cycle in which when something is done I want nothing to do with it anymore. The funny thing is the first and last piece of music I uploaded is nowhere near done, but my brain is acting like it is. This week piano lessons will start and I'm hopeful that church dude understands what I need and won't teach me how to play Amazing Grace in seven different keys.
The question is: If I have not been doing any music then what in the world have I been doing? Well to be honest with you, nothing very productive. I finished Portal 2 this week and wanted to write a post about it and discuss the finer details of storytelling in games and how amazing Valve is at creating worlds and making you believe these outlandish things about science. After thinking about that I thought about how stories now use science like this magical thing that can make anything happen and how in any medium the mysterious thing they use to create plot devices and stuff goes changing with the times and with what people are amazed with at the time. Like in the fifties it was nuclear fission and then it was genetics and then nanobots and so on and so forth. Then I started thinking about how I've been wanting to watch movies that make me feel good. Movies that make me not think very much but just feel good you know, and that's as far as that thought went.
So it was Saturday and I'd done nothing productive. Days before I had started sizing things up a bit and realized that Mathnesium, the place I work at, is about 1.25 miles away, and I'm fat and the place is kinda close, and you know I'm fat. So i dusted off my sister's old pink bike, went to the bike shop and got that sucker up and running. I was all ready to do a test ride up to the office and see if I could make it every day and in turn cease to be fat.
The bike immediately felt familiar in a way, I remembered how much I missed the wind in my face and swaying back and forth avoiding holes in the streets, jumping over sidewalks. I felt like a kid again. Suddenly I got to a point where a lot of cars were coming, my breaks were not the greatest in the land and I lacked the practice to swerve out of the way and had yet to get a hang of the gear shifting in this thing. I freaked and eventually stopped. I got back on the sidewalk and all I could think about is every time I see someone going up a hill on a bike I say "look at that poor bastard haha" and now I was the bastard, wearing a polo short, dress pants and vans. Things started to get heated right around the thigh area and I was running short on breath. Right before I could feel the pedals getting any softer or the cars getting any slower I start seeing less and feeling woozy. I started using my brain for the first time that day and thought "I am hungover, have not eaten anything since yesterday noon, drank one glass of water and it's 4:30 pm. What the fuck am I doing?" This lead to me getting off the bike looking like a dumbass dragging it to my house and getting in my car to buy sugar. I intended to go riding today but that didn't really happen. I watched a lot of movies today and ate cereal whilst sitting around in my underwear. This week I will continue with the bike riding escapades and hopefully have some new music to show you guys.
Oh yeah and Fuck Oliver Stone all his movies are shit and he should never be allowed to touch a camera again.
This is one of the first pieces of music I made with Ableton, I didn't want to post without having anything for you to listen to, so listen to that :D
Beach PARRY by chamba-alvarado
The question is: If I have not been doing any music then what in the world have I been doing? Well to be honest with you, nothing very productive. I finished Portal 2 this week and wanted to write a post about it and discuss the finer details of storytelling in games and how amazing Valve is at creating worlds and making you believe these outlandish things about science. After thinking about that I thought about how stories now use science like this magical thing that can make anything happen and how in any medium the mysterious thing they use to create plot devices and stuff goes changing with the times and with what people are amazed with at the time. Like in the fifties it was nuclear fission and then it was genetics and then nanobots and so on and so forth. Then I started thinking about how I've been wanting to watch movies that make me feel good. Movies that make me not think very much but just feel good you know, and that's as far as that thought went.
So it was Saturday and I'd done nothing productive. Days before I had started sizing things up a bit and realized that Mathnesium, the place I work at, is about 1.25 miles away, and I'm fat and the place is kinda close, and you know I'm fat. So i dusted off my sister's old pink bike, went to the bike shop and got that sucker up and running. I was all ready to do a test ride up to the office and see if I could make it every day and in turn cease to be fat.
The bike immediately felt familiar in a way, I remembered how much I missed the wind in my face and swaying back and forth avoiding holes in the streets, jumping over sidewalks. I felt like a kid again. Suddenly I got to a point where a lot of cars were coming, my breaks were not the greatest in the land and I lacked the practice to swerve out of the way and had yet to get a hang of the gear shifting in this thing. I freaked and eventually stopped. I got back on the sidewalk and all I could think about is every time I see someone going up a hill on a bike I say "look at that poor bastard haha" and now I was the bastard, wearing a polo short, dress pants and vans. Things started to get heated right around the thigh area and I was running short on breath. Right before I could feel the pedals getting any softer or the cars getting any slower I start seeing less and feeling woozy. I started using my brain for the first time that day and thought "I am hungover, have not eaten anything since yesterday noon, drank one glass of water and it's 4:30 pm. What the fuck am I doing?" This lead to me getting off the bike looking like a dumbass dragging it to my house and getting in my car to buy sugar. I intended to go riding today but that didn't really happen. I watched a lot of movies today and ate cereal whilst sitting around in my underwear. This week I will continue with the bike riding escapades and hopefully have some new music to show you guys.
Oh yeah and Fuck Oliver Stone all his movies are shit and he should never be allowed to touch a camera again.
This is one of the first pieces of music I made with Ableton, I didn't want to post without having anything for you to listen to, so listen to that :D
Beach PARRY by chamba-alvarado
Monday, May 9, 2011
Pizza Music!!
I didn't think the next post would be this soon, but alas here we are. I was chatting with Andy this afternoon
and as I often do mentioned that I was hungry. I mentioned that I was hungry about twice every 2 minutes, so Andy got hungry, and he told me that he was eating healthy and whatnot, so he couldn't eat anything good, he could only eat those shitty rice cakes that taste like air. I just moved out to a new place so I have yet to go grocery shopping for real, I have cereal, water and yeah milk for the cereal but that's about it. So i was telling him how he could order a pizza for me. The great people at www.pizzahut.com.sv allow our "hermanos lejanos" to order pizza for us here in El Salvador. So Andy from San Francisco ordered a pizza for me in El Salvador.
Many thanks were offered and in return Andy said that I shouldn't give up on music I wrote but didn't like, that I should send it to Jenny and maybe she can do something about it. So I felt guilty because since I moved, the midi controller has been neatly stashed behind my monitor. I decided I would make a song before the pizza dude came. The pizza came and I had maybe a little chord progression I was happy with, so I ate and told Andy we should skype so he could hear it. That turned into a 4 hour skype call in which Jenny and I pianoed the shit out of some 8-bit sounds and came up with the piece of music I most happy with up until now.
I had some problems with Ableton in which a loop fucked up the timing and I spent about an hour dumbfounded at all the sounds from old video games that I could make. But no more blathering here is the song. Please let me know what you guys think.
Pizza music by chamba-alvarado
P.S. I need a new name for the blog URL. Please help me find new name that's not "CHAMBAWORLD"
and as I often do mentioned that I was hungry. I mentioned that I was hungry about twice every 2 minutes, so Andy got hungry, and he told me that he was eating healthy and whatnot, so he couldn't eat anything good, he could only eat those shitty rice cakes that taste like air. I just moved out to a new place so I have yet to go grocery shopping for real, I have cereal, water and yeah milk for the cereal but that's about it. So i was telling him how he could order a pizza for me. The great people at www.pizzahut.com.sv allow our "hermanos lejanos" to order pizza for us here in El Salvador. So Andy from San Francisco ordered a pizza for me in El Salvador.
Many thanks were offered and in return Andy said that I shouldn't give up on music I wrote but didn't like, that I should send it to Jenny and maybe she can do something about it. So I felt guilty because since I moved, the midi controller has been neatly stashed behind my monitor. I decided I would make a song before the pizza dude came. The pizza came and I had maybe a little chord progression I was happy with, so I ate and told Andy we should skype so he could hear it. That turned into a 4 hour skype call in which Jenny and I pianoed the shit out of some 8-bit sounds and came up with the piece of music I most happy with up until now.
I had some problems with Ableton in which a loop fucked up the timing and I spent about an hour dumbfounded at all the sounds from old video games that I could make. But no more blathering here is the song. Please let me know what you guys think.
Pizza music by chamba-alvarado
P.S. I need a new name for the blog URL. Please help me find new name that's not "CHAMBAWORLD"
Sunday, May 8, 2011
So I have a blog now and I don't know what to do...
So I created this thing so I could give my writing chops a bit of a workout. The last thing I wrote was an essay a friend paid me to write, and to be completely honest I miss it. I always go on these rants to myself about the shit I read, watch, play or listen to and one day thought to myself "I should say these things to other people" so I started tweeting them. That, of course, did nothing as the people that follow me on twitter are friends I know in real life who have no interest in how great Wheatley is in Portal 2 or how Game of Thrones is fucking incredibly entertaining. So this is my next attempt at being heard!
I am currently involved in a project that will change the course of my life forever, because once it's done I can say to myself "Holy shit we managed to shit this thing out of us and it works and makes sense and we might be on to something" We, is a friend I've known since I was born, like literally. His name is Andy. We spent almost all of out free time together when we were kids playing games, watching movies, using skateboards in ways they should not be used and creating these elaborate dreams about how we would make awesome things together. Our first big thing was creating our own anime series, we were deeply into Dragon Ball Z and imitated the art style to a tee, even the heroes' names were similar, Chigeta, Rageta, Bogeta etc..(we thought the staple for Saiyan names was that they had to end in "geta") So, we were super convinced we would sell it to our local network and be the kid geniuses who replaced DBZ. After that we dabbled in failing at making a movie other stuff I will post about later. The other part of our fantastic team is Jenny, who I can't praise enough. She is probably the most talented being I've ever met. You can check her page on newgrounds http://ajennypenny.newgrounds.com/ or Deviantart http://eponagirl.deviantart.com/ or her blog http://ajennypenny.blogspot.com/. I recommend them all she is incredible. I envy her hands and wish I didn't have these tusk clumsy hands and could draw like she does.
My role in this trifecta of awesome is making music. I love music, I hum music all day, I sing music all day and when I have an instrument I can play, I play it. But I know very little of composing and whatnot so this will be a journey into discovery. I am jumping head on into composing music in several genres and making it all make sense. To aid me in my journey, a dude will come to my house and teach me how to play the piano once a week and also allow me to pick his brain full of musical knowledge to put any doubts I have to rest. Meanwhile I will try to document my progress and upload anything I create, be it horrible or not so horrible. So opinions will be rewarded with my love and appreciation :D
I am currently involved in a project that will change the course of my life forever, because once it's done I can say to myself "Holy shit we managed to shit this thing out of us and it works and makes sense and we might be on to something" We, is a friend I've known since I was born, like literally. His name is Andy. We spent almost all of out free time together when we were kids playing games, watching movies, using skateboards in ways they should not be used and creating these elaborate dreams about how we would make awesome things together. Our first big thing was creating our own anime series, we were deeply into Dragon Ball Z and imitated the art style to a tee, even the heroes' names were similar, Chigeta, Rageta, Bogeta etc..(we thought the staple for Saiyan names was that they had to end in "geta") So, we were super convinced we would sell it to our local network and be the kid geniuses who replaced DBZ. After that we dabbled in failing at making a movie other stuff I will post about later. The other part of our fantastic team is Jenny, who I can't praise enough. She is probably the most talented being I've ever met. You can check her page on newgrounds http://ajennypenny.newgrounds.com/ or Deviantart http://eponagirl.deviantart.com/ or her blog http://ajennypenny.blogspot.com/. I recommend them all she is incredible. I envy her hands and wish I didn't have these tusk clumsy hands and could draw like she does.
My role in this trifecta of awesome is making music. I love music, I hum music all day, I sing music all day and when I have an instrument I can play, I play it. But I know very little of composing and whatnot so this will be a journey into discovery. I am jumping head on into composing music in several genres and making it all make sense. To aid me in my journey, a dude will come to my house and teach me how to play the piano once a week and also allow me to pick his brain full of musical knowledge to put any doubts I have to rest. Meanwhile I will try to document my progress and upload anything I create, be it horrible or not so horrible. So opinions will be rewarded with my love and appreciation :D
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