marxist video essayist, 34, writes @godfeels and @vidrev

oklahoma expat living in seattle



SamKeeper
@SamKeeper

the new Godfeels chapter has been out for a few days! while it's not the first chapter to use images or spritework, it's the first that I think really shows off a lot of what we want to do moving forward. the new chapter can be found here if you haven't read it yet:

so one of the things we've talked about a lot in the Godfeels work server is wanting to develop our own language and techniques to push Homestuck spritework forward formally. we're thinking a lot about the camera placement within more detailed and experimental sets as a storytelling tool. so, rather than sticking to Homestuck's traditional slightly-off-orthographic perspective, @girlpillz put together this amazing expansive set of the park that bends back in a sort of fish eye perspective. this let Sarah move the sprites around and resize both them and the camera to get more dramatic effects.

but it also had some interesting emergent formal properties that resulted in some pretty good gags: (spoilers for the chapter under the cut)


sarahzedig
@sarahzedig

i sketched every panel in the traditional frame size, but then janet extended certain panels where it felt appropriate to her and when i put them in the formatting it was like, oh! this does something really interesting! all the panels were preceded by a =//=> initially, but the exact formal affect zoe describes was so immediately palpable i had to cut them. i love this story, i love my collaborators, i love how often we just find these things almost on accident


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @SamKeeper's post:

god i really need to catch back up on godfeels. i think i caught up, like, partway through godfeels 2? and then my attention span proceeded to completely drop it like the distractible ass that it is. ah, the eternal serial webcomic struggle

but yeah, i remember your old article on homestuck's narrative use of the infinite canvas medium and stuff like hyperanimation and thinking it was super fascinating, and its interesting to see how other projects make use of or develop those same storytelling methods and techniques

I'm so glad someone still remembers those haha. it kinda feels like a lot of my contributions particularly the formal ones got sorta memory holed in the fandom, and it often felt like even though there was this vibrant formally experimental scene there wasn't really a theory and criticism discourse to support it like it deserved.

anyway I think midway through 3 is where godfeels really gets going (not coincidentally it's where it starts getting real weird), and fwiw 3.2 is designed to be a jumping on point if the word count of the prior stuff is intimidating. I think it's worth taking a look at again! <-- v biased