It’s done! I created film stills from a movie that never existed, based on a book that’s just been released. Empire State was written by Adam Christopher, and is a ...
Spotlight
New Posts
The Zombies Are Here!
When Shelter in Place went beyond our original Kickstarter goals, one of the questions I wrestled with was how to reward our supporters. We wanted to do something special, some extra for them to show how much it meant to us to hit 200% of our goal. In the end, we decided to do one of our favorite things – put together another book.
Gimme Shelter was really a chance for me to work with friends and writers that I admire on a project very dear to me. I got to produce a book that is essentially a love letter, to horror, zombies and the apocalypse. Since the Kickstarter Gimme Shelter was only made available to our supporters. One of the main questions I’ve been getting asked these past few months is by people who missed the Kickstarter but still want the book. Well, today is the day they can get it.
Gimme Shelter, the anthology of the zombie Apocalypse, is now available! Gimme Shelter is about zombies, survival, fathers and daughters, teenagers making out, guns, awkward third dates, reality TV gone wrong, and having a sense of humor in the face of impending disaster.
Gimme Shelter features all-new fiction from Filamena Young, Jared Axelrod, PJ Schnyder, Christiana Ellis, Peter Woodworth, Tee Morris, Mur Lafferty, Rob Wieland, David A. Hill Jr., Phillipa Ballentine, Chuck Wendig, and J.R. Blackwell.
Purchase Gimme Shelter in PDF: 2.99
Purchase Gimme Shelter in paperback: 5.99
Previously:
The Creation of a Book Cover
Shelter in Place now for sale!
Creative Director
This week, Galileo Games announced that I’m their new Creative Director! This is the most excited I’ve ever been about a job. This position fits very neatly into my very favorite things: writing, gaming and working on creative projects with talented people. I’m delighted to be in this position, working with Brennan, producing new art. I’m answering questions about me and the new position all this week over on the Galileo Blog.
I was really touched this week from the outpouring of support when Brennan made this announcement. People I’ve never met wrote to Brennan telling him what a great decision he’s made, and friends from all over wrote congratulating me. It reminded me about the best things about the gaming community, and how welcome I’ve been made to feel. Thank you to everyone who expressed support, and to everyone who also expressed interest in what adding a Creative Director would do to Galileo Games this year. I am hoping that what we produce will make folks who are already fans very happy, and maybe bring in some new folks as well.
Jennisodes has released an interview with me that she did about Shelter in Place, photography and other creative things. It was a very fun, relaxed interview. After the interview we had a rather candid chat about gaming and the choices we’ve made online which was one of those refreshing and renewing discussions that rarely comes alone, but is always welcome.
Jenn is so incredibly clever. I’ve played a test run of her game, and it charmed my pants off. When I first met Jenn, we were at a party, and we were both wearing little black dresses. When I think of her, that is how I imagine her, perched on a bar-stool, legs crossed, in a little black dress, drink in hand. I can assure you that, despite the icon on her page, she does not look like a giant panda head. That is how I pictured her before we actually met, so if you meet her, do not be alarmed.
LINKS
Shelter in Place
Jennisodes Interview
Creative Director Announcement on Galileo Games
2011 In Review
The Year of Zombies, Friends and the Start of Things To Come
This retrospective is more for me than for you. Looking back helps when sculpting the road ahead. It’s been a busy year. A hard year. A good year. This year, a book was dedicated to me and my husband by people we cherish. That alone makes it a good year, wiping out whatever troubles were once in my path. It is an honor.
These are the projects I did this year. Looking at them I see that though I finished my big project, Shelter in Place, many of the projects I worked on are foundations for things to come. I will build on these in 2012.
Shelter in Place
I finished and launched my game, Shelter in Place this year with Galileo Games. The Kickstarter reached over 200% of it’s goal giving us the funding we needed to produce the print run and create all sorts of rewards. This was a big project for me, involving working with an amazing team to create this book. I’m proud of it. I love the cover, the writing, the art. This project is done, but it’s made me think about what I can do, and what I want to do next.
The game is now available for purchase. LINK
Gimme Shelter
The success of Shelter in Place lead to a zombie anthology called Gimme Shelter which has gone out to our Kickstarter supporters. I created the cover for the book. This may be available for purchase in 2012. LINK
Graphic Novel Plan: Sol
I worked with my artist Natalie on putting together a plan to create a graphic novel called Sol. We pitched a few pages, story and concept art around to a few publishers with more success than either one of us expected. Now our work REALLY begins.
Photoshoots
In short, these are the shoots that happened this year: Ponies, pinups, engagement shoots, graveyards, two weddings, a punk rock wizard, Randolf Carter, monsters, barbarians, ghosts, supernatural cops and a steampunk engineer. I have such an intense backlog – I haven’t even finished editing all of the photos I’ve taken this year.
Worldbuilder
I created fake screenshots from a 1940′s movie that never happened called Empire State for an anthology called Worldbuilder. The photos are with the editor now and I believe that it is set to come out in January. LINK
Don’t Ask Alice
I wrote Don’t Ask Alice, a play about a young woman talking to her own brain. It was performed during the 24 hour cram at Plays and Players. As last year, I made a new friend through this experience.
All The Kings Monsters
I ran an original concept game titled “All The Kings Monsters” for my all-lady gaming crew on the FATE System. It was amazing. The women I played with were amazing and the experience was one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. I put together so many materials for this game that I could just organize them and lay them out to make a module.
Abundant
This is my new portrait project, launched in December, this is my efforts at documenting, using characters and props and makeup and sets, the changes of the next few months. It’s going to be much like my 365Days project, but with more planning surrounding the shoots. I want to push myself with this project, and make a new kind of statement about women, about me, and about fiction. I’ll post results here, so you can see how it goes. LINK
Interviews from 2011
In Defense of LARP
There was a little girl, who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead,
And when she was good, she was very, very good,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
There is a dismissive attitude towards LARPs in some sectors of the gaming community. I often get the feeling that LARPs are perceived as a sign of poor taste, and that LARPers are thought to be overly dramatic, and not “true” gamers.When I was working on Shelter in Place, I was often advised not to call it a LARP, because that might discourage people from buying the game.
“Call it a Party Game!” people would tell me.
“Say it’s an Improv game.” I’d be advised.
And it most certainly is those things. It is also a LARP – a Live Action Role Playing game.
Many people who hold this opinion do so because they have heard stereotypes about LARPs in the media, or they have played in a LARP and found the experience distasteful. I understand. I often think of the poem above when I think about LARPing, because in my experience, a good LARP is transcendent, but a bad LARP really is horrid. Playing a lot of tabletop games, run by a variety of game-masters has given me a good mental scale to calculate good and bad games.
In the very worst tabletop I’ve ever played, the game master was racist, and one of the players refused to look at me, and the game itself was tedious. Afterward, I walked out of that game and though to myself “Well, I wont be doing that again!” and had a weird story to tell about the afternoon.
After a bad LARP though? You really want to punch someone, or a wall, or yourself. Something about acting out the action with a bad group or GM can make a LARP a miserable experience. A bad tabletop can be laughed off, where a bad LARP can leave you seething.
LARPing also opens up a person to ridicule. When you tabletop, there is distance between yourself and the character. LARPing requires that you throw yourself into the character with abandon, and that can be embarrassing. Like an actor who throws themselves into a role, a good LARPer commits to the role, becoming the character.
The rewards of an excellent LARP are astounding. A well constructed, well played LARP allows the player to walk in a characters shoes, to understand what it is to be strong or weak or feared. It lets the player know what it is like to defend your village against dragons, or rebel against an undead overlord. It lets you experience betrayal without real world consequences. It gives you a space to play out being a scheming villain and a selfless hero. Where in tabletop, you imagine yourself somewhere, in LARP you go there. You wear the armor, you carry the sword, you run from the zombies.
LARP showed me what it was like to be a leader. I am a softhearted person, and LARP allowed me to experience being ruthless without actually hurting anyone.
Most importantly, LARP helped me make my peace with death. I remember purposefully setting up the death of a character, and giving her the best darn story death I could think of. Living beyond the death of a character has allowed me to come to some peace with death in my own life. Not that I am an incredible risk taker now, or that I am living without fear, but I live with the understanding that there is a good death, and a life well lived.
I understand why LARP might not be the preference of some gamers. There are games I don’t enjoy either. But the LARP deserves respect, because while it runs the risk of being terrible, it also has the chance for being transcendent. LARP can teach us how to live a different life, and how to take those lessons back to our own lives.
Edit: Welcome Reddit! Thanks for coming to visit my article about LARP. I am a writer, photographer and game designer. You can read about me and my various projects on my about page. I am the Creative Director for Galileo Games, who hired me after a successful collaboration publishing my game, Shelter in Place. Thanks for taking the time to read this article and visit my site. I’m happy to hear your comments, but agree or disagree, I do like to keep things civil around here. Thanks for stopping by!
Shelter in Place Now For Sale!
Shelter in Place is now for sale at Indie Press Revolution and Drive Thru RPG. You can purchase the PDF, book, or a bundle of the both.
I am so thrilled that is now out and available for everyone to buy. So much love goes out to the Kickstarter supporters, who helped me to get to this place so that I could have the first print run of the book. It was such a pleasure to find out that so many people were interested in this this game.
Putting out this game was something that was accomplished as a team effort. I had the pleasure of working with some of the best people I know on making this happen. There are few greater joys that working with talented people who you respect on a project that you love.
I’ve been thinking about the new year recently and what games, art projects, collaborations and graphic novels I have in the pipeline. This year was a good one and next year looks like it’s going to be even better.
Self Portraits: Using Who I Am For What I’m Not
I don’t look like this:
Or like this:
I don’t look like this either:
Or this:
Or this:
When people who follow my photography meet me for the first time often they don’t recognize me. One of the most common comments I get is: “You don’t look anything like your photographs.”
And it’s true. I work hard to get it that way. Self Portraiture is about different things to different artists, but most frequently it seems to center around discovering, or revealing something about the self. The idea being that the artist is telling the viewer something about who they are. While I’d never say that you couldn’t figure out something about me from my self portraits, my purpose is not to tell you about myself, but to create characters and stories, using my body as a hanger I can put them on.
My 365 Days project was all about this concept. I’ve been thinking about it a lot as I finish up the book and as I work on my new self portrait project, Abundant. Don’t be surprised if you can’t see much of me through the makeup, costumes and lighting. It’s not about showing you who I am, it’s showing you all the things a person CAN be. I believe that we are flexible creatures, and that within us their are many characters, good and evil, old and young, and when I use myself as a model, I’m working to bring them to life.
Thinking Visually
Last weekend I found a collection of the long lost screenshots from the 1946 production of Empire State.
Of course, by that, I mean, that I took photos meant to look like they were from a 1946 movie of a new novel that hasn’t been released yet. The photos are for an anthology called Worldbuilder which seeks to expand on the world of novels using other writers, illustrators and artists to build on an existing world.
What I wanted to do was to make the 1946 movie of Empire State in screenshots. To prepare, I watched lot of movies from the 1940′s, went location scouting, planning out a shot list, collecting my best models, and setting aside a nine hour day to drive five models all over the city.
Behind the scenes during the Empire State shoot
This also meant that I had to see things like a filmmaker, to think visually about each shot. Now I am far more sympathetic to the changes a filmmaker might make to an original story to make a stronger film. As a photographer, I am not transcribing the images of the book so much as as translating them into my own language.
Photos from this shoot will be available in the Worldbuilder anthology for Empire State. Makeup and hair for this shoot was done by Bunny Greene.
Previously:
Abundant
Abundant is my new weekly self portrait project.
I’ve been considering a project like this for a while. Now is the right time to get it going. I want to create striking images, images that have a message in them, even if everyone who sees them might interpret them differently.
Like my 365 Days project, where I took a new self portrait every day for 365 Days, Abundant will be about transformation, creativity, and pushing my own limits. However, the weekly nature of of Abundant gives me more time to think about what image I’m going to produce and put more time and energy into creating it.
The challenge here isn’t about producing daily, but about producing telling the stories I want to tell, how I want to tell them. And I want to tell stories with blood and guts.
These photos may come out in sets, like this week, or just be one image. I may put out prints or a book or both. The shape of the project will reveal itself as I do it, and whatever shape that takes, I want to be open to it.
In the weeks to come I want to create monsters and the divine, I want to make fantasies real, and create characters, I want to explore the theme of transformation. I don’t know how long I will do this project, a few weeks or months, or maybe longer.
This series of photos for this week is called “Hunger” because that’s what I’ve been feeling recently, a great hunger for creating something new, for experimentation.
I’ll be posting updates here weekly, so if you want to follow along with this project, please feel free to check back here weekly, or subscribe to my feed for updates.
Related Links:
You can view my last self portrait project, 365 Days, on Flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jrblackwell/sets/72157603149475614/
For more about my photography, philosophy, previous projects and rates, you can view the photo page of my website: http://jrblackwell.wordpress.com/photographs/
Abundant
Finding the Empire State: Location Scouting
The biggest project on my plate right now is a shoot for a magazine called Worldbuilder. For this shoot, I am going to be creating a series of photos based on Empire State, a science-fiction noir novel.
My inspiration for the photos are noir films of the 1940′s. The shot above was especially influenced by my viewing of The Third Man. I want to create film stills from the non-existent Empire State film of the 1940′s. The fact that the film doesn’t exist isn’t going to stop me. I’ve already written about finding models, and getting the 1940′s look, but today I’m going to talk about location scouting.
Location scouting is becoming more and more vital for me as I push my photography forward. I am always on the lookout for places that are dramatic and interesting, that I can imagine fitting characters into. For this shoot, finding locations that look like they could be out of a noir movie were the most important thing, which meant visiting a lot of historical sites.
This shoot adds a special challenge, because though many of the locations for the shoot are outdoors, I need these shots not to look modern, to look suitable for the 1940′s. Though I do plan to use photoshop for some of these images, I find it best not to rely to heavily on photoshop, but to find people, costumes, and locations that work to create the mood of the photo I’m going for already. For example, in the photo above, I might edit out the signs that say “push” but since the character of the door has an art-deco feel, it would still make a great backdrop.
Since the city of Empire State features so strongly in the novel, I want to find places that speak to the urban setting and character of the novel. This means seeking out a lot of the older, art deco features of the city, and finding the places I can shoot without passers-by wandering into the shot. I did some scouting in 30th Street Station today, and one of the interesting things is that despite how busy the station is, there are a few corners, here and there, that seem almost lonely.
You can view a selection of my location shots on Flickr here: Worldbuilder Set
Previously:
Worldbuilding
The big project I’m working on now is for a magazine called Worldbuilder, where I have been commissioned to do a shoot. This shoot is working out to be my most complex and challenging shoot to date. This has to do with makeup, costumes, models and the photography itself.
Since the shoot is based on a novel, Empire State, one of the things I’ve had to do is recruit a set of models who fit the look of the book’s characters. The book hasn’t been released yet, but since I’ve gotten a sneak-peak of the action, I’ve recruited the models who I feel can best capture some of the characters from the book. Because this shoot is challenging, I’ve chosen to work with models that I know can do what is needed to make things work.
These are the models I’ll be working with on the Worldbuilder: Empire State photoshoot.
Jerry
This is Jerry, he is the lead model for my shoot, portraying the main character from the book. An experienced actor, Jerry has the kind of control over his expressions – both in his face and his body, to be able to take this role and run with it. I watched Jerry perform in Titus once and watched him change his body language from a servant to a villain by unfolding his shoulders, changing his posture so it appeared he became another person. Jerry is a gem.
Bunny
Bunny seems able to change her look with barely a thought. She know what looks good on camera so well that it seems to be instinct. She makes me look good in every shoot I do with her.
Russell
For this shoot, I wanted a man who looked like he could have stepped out of a 1940′s noir movie. Russell has that look.
Jennifer
When I knew I needed a sexy woman who was going to be deliciously curvy, with the large myserious eyes of a dame in trouble it was Jennifer Rodgers or bust. Lucky, Jennifer Rodgers agreed to be in it.
Jared
I think I’ve taken more pictures of Jared Axelrod than any model save myself. You won’t see Jared Axelrods face in this shoot, but you will see him. Him, his props and his fantastic costumes. As a photographer, I am fortunate to live with such an engine of creation, who regularly churns out fabulous costumes and props. As his wife, I’m just lucky in such a pervasive way that it would take a book to go into it all.
Up Next? Location Scouting!
You can read about the style I’m going for this project and see a few test shots here: http://jrblackwell.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/noir-test-shoot/
- The Zombies Are Here!
- The Lost Film of Empire State
- Creative Director
- 2011 In Review
- In Defense of LARP
- In Defense of LARP
- My Unpopular Opinions
- I Think It Just Got Real
- Persistance, Work and Friendship
- Why I Watermark
-
jrblackwell: Thank you! I'm really excited about this new job. ...
-
Richard Green aka Mainframe: Congrats! You rock! And good taste and judgeme...
- Jared Axelrod » Blog Archive » Building The Skyguard: [...] reader of her blog–and why wouldn̵...
-
danielwarner: Great news! Congratulations! Go and conquer! Lo...
-
Aaron: Hello First time visitor, first time poster, lo...
Subscribe
Subscribe to J.R. Blackwell's Blog
