Sunday, March 09, 2008

Gamera Vs. All Mankind: Act III: Act 2

Cleaning up around here at the Pylon has meant finding piles of unfinished posts that either went half completed or only partially written, or were simply a collection of scrawled title ideas without any text to back them up, nor were many of these scraps encumbered by even the slightest little reminder of what the hell I wanted to write about anyway at the time of their scrawling.

And somewhere deep, deep in the Archives of Pylonic Things Unpublished, there was a post that truly should have been. Back in May 2007, I finished reworking the third act for the animated short upon which my brother Mark and I were then deep in production: Gamera Vs. All Mankind. On November 10, 2006, I had posted on my main website, Cinema For Space Lovers, the initial rough version of the first two acts of our unique kaiju opera, assembled to fulfill an assumed birthday request by my pal Leif. On that very same day, seventeen months ago, wintry elsewhere but still clad in late autumn sunshine here, I also posted my libretto for the first two acts here on the Pylon. [Click here to read that initial post.] And after that May follow-up, the Gamera project has for all intents and purposes, ran out of the fuel needed to allow a giant flying turtle lift-off, let alone that needed to allow him to roar along in monstrous harmony.

Time passes, other ideas and plans take your attention, and family matters and the other affairs of real life loomed far larger for my brother and I than a silly, completely not-for-profit, vanity project. Not that everything we do is not silly in some manner (we are, after all, Silly 'N Serious Productions), but the project's focus seemed to dwindle infinitely once we posted that first, exhausting (especially for Mark) installment. My attempt to jump-start the project anew by drastically reworking my first attempt at writing the third act didn't really take, and since around June, Gamera has been grounded.

But, in reviewing the project's status this morning, I discovered two things: 1) I haven't done crap to the Space Lovers website for equally as long, and 2) I never posted the lyrics for Act III. I thought I had posted them, but a search within Blogger revealed this to be a misnomer on my part. So, I spent much of my time since 5 a.m. reworking Space Lovers, practically relearning how to use the Bravenet website wizard in the process. It wasn't too difficult; my options are very limited at the moment on that site, due to my not wishing to spend undue amounts of cash on getting full service there before I have actually designed the look to my liking (something else I have been methodically putting off until later for two years now). Since I now regularly deal with ftp sites and online website updates, it only took a few minutes to get reacquainted with those options.

And so the site has been updated. Act III lyrics have been added, bad links were removed, new links were added, and I also accepted the first person to sign my Guestbook there (none of my friends have bothered to do that, so special thanks to my first guest, writer Chrissy McVay). There is a look and a purpose that I wish the site to attain in the future, but that will still have to wait. In the interim, it will chiefly continue to hold that first rough draft of Gamera, as well as the now updated, fully laid out libretto.

If you haven't seen Gamera Vs. All Mankind yet, please check it out, sign my Guestbook, or leave your comments here on this post with your opinions, good or bad. (Let me anticipate some of them, due to things people have said before: "I can't understand what they are singing! It's hard to follow what they are singing!" Yes, I know, the voices are synthesized through a computer program. To get the most out of your viewing, resize the window showing the film to half of your screen, and then open another half-screened window showing just the lyrics page, and then read along while you watch. It's very easy to do with just a modicum of browser experience.)

I don't know if we will ever get around to completing the film. I am hard at work on a different film now, and my brother has his musical projects and wondrous fatherhood taking up his time. Plus, we both have careers that eat up our attention. Maybe we will wend our way back to Gamera someday, but if not, please take some time and enjoy the modest trifle we have put together for your entertainment. For a short while, and an even longer "post"-while, we enjoyed making it.

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