ABOUT the ARTIST

Please see my interview of 2/16/10 on Blog Business World

I have been doing a lot of Flash animation lately; please see my Animation Page for a current list.     Over the last three months of 2008, I designed and built this Trade Show Booth for a T-shirt company in Columbia, South Carolina.     I am actively promoting Folklore. A brief synopsis of the first four chapters of the novel follows — no big spoilers.

In a private research facility in the southeastern United States, physicists Oscar Trask and Hutchison Carter are working with classified technology seized from the Germans at the end of World War II. So begins Folklore, a story by Robert A. Cook.

Dr. Hutchison Carter is a conscript. He has no choice about what he does for a living, and Dr. Trask is essentially his keeper. Their experimental device is called a discomposer in official circles, although Oscar and Hutch usually just call it “the centrifuge.” They are using specially modulated microwave signals as “keys” to unlock the mystery of the strange field the machine generates, attempting to devise a testable theory to predict its capricious, often bizarre effects.

left to right, Oscar and Hutch

One day, following a statistically anomalous series of malfunctions, Oscar and Hutch open a door they would rather have left closed.     The creature that falls into their anechoic chamber is terrified, and once she recovers from shock, angry as well. The most unsettling thing about her is not her alienness, but her conventionality. She seems very intelligent, and incredibly, she speaks unaccented, colloquial American English with a few odd twists. Oscar and Hutch do not take this in stride. Her eerie familiarity spooks them. Hutch comes to think she’s delightful after he gets beyond his initial astonishment, but Oscar finds her frightening, “just plain wrong.”     The female gives her name as Maia Kopechne, which strikes Hutch as absurd yet somehow reassuring. Oscar, however, grows increasingly hostile as he realizes that Maia, regardless of calling herself a “vixen” and apparently being some sort of anthropomorphic fox, is really just a person — and a bright, attractive one at that. He deals with this by going into denial.

Maia’s first sight of humans

“It’s probably no more self-aware than Bugs Bunny,” he tells Hutch once they are private. Hutch furiously disagrees, but in the end he has to admit that their options are limited. Maia is a walking, talking security breach, and they cannot send her back. The centrifuge’s field would destroy her before the microwave key could be broadcast. Neither Hutch nor Oscar are aware of any facility for warehousing an alien waif from an alternate Earth. Project Folklore is organized into security cells, and Hutch is only authorized to acknowledge its existence to three people: Oscar; Lydia Cromwell, the CEO of the contracting firm for which both men ostensibly work; and Terrence Harvey, a government “cleaner” attached to the project. They must notify Harvey and let him do his job.     Hutch reluctantly accepts this, but he is obviously upset and Oscar tells him to take the rest of the day off. He’ll get with “Scary Terry” and the two of them will take it from there. Hutch says he’ll be glad to put the whole tragic mess behind him, and leaves. Oscar meets with Harvey and is obliged to sell Maia up the river. He knew all along that protocol made this development inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

Harvey and Oscar discuss Maia’s fate

Harvey is privately overjoyed to have the exotic, officially nonexistent female remanded to his custody, and he easily tricks Maia into accompanying him on a trek through cold, deserted tile corridors and a disquietingly deep ride on a cargo elevator to a room below the bowels of the building — one fully equipped for the dissection and elimination of biological evidence. Maia, who was a nurse in her former life and is far from stupid, recognizes the equipment immediately, but by then it’s too late.     The fact that she has exhibited humanlike expressions of fear, anger and hope, so presumably reacts just as normally to pain and humiliation, has greatly aroused the loathsome Harvey. He intends to test this hypothesis for as long as she can hold out.     Special Agent Terrence Harvey (not his real name) proceeds as one might expect....

...but nothing that comes afterward does!

exists as a script for a series of comics, and is halfway through its first draft as a conventional prose novel. I originally planned to execute every panel of the comic books using a combination of Photoshop compositing, photography, and one hand-drawn character (Maia, of course) as shown here. Every image is synthetic. The backgrounds were made by sampling digital photographs of tile, ceilings, floors, hardware, electronic equipment and so on, cutting them up, distorting the bits into perspective and laying them out in Photoshop, like this:

perspective plan of interrogation room

Here is that same image with the perspective grid layers turned off, and everything else brought up to full opacity:

normal view of interrogation room

If you’d like to peruse the backgrounds for the first issue in a 900 x 600 pixel format, that link will take you to a 17-frame slideshow that concludes by returning you to this page. I like the style, but it’s a very labor intensive process — much more so than conventional comic book illustration — and most people don’t realize they’re looking at artwork. They think it’s a fumetti, or photonovel. That surprised me. Unlike photographs, there is limitless depth of field and no spherical distortion: they are intentionally hyper-realistic. In any event, publishers tend to be conservative and that style is a radical departure from the norm.     At this point, Folklore can best be termed intellectual property. It has grown beyond a scale that can be executed by one person working alone. I am seeking backers. I want to bring more talent on board, and to pay them, not to accept handouts as I’ve been doing.     My friends Alfredo and Gadson played Oscar and Hutch, respectively (I took their photographs separately, with each sitting in the same desk chair at my kitchen table). In the Flash animations on this website, Maia’s voice was performed by my friend Cindy. Composer Michael David Crawford, whom I have never met face to face, gave me written permission to use a brilliant, untitled piano piece in the Folklore teaser. Here is what they charged me: zip.     Serious backers are welcome to suggest the form that Folklore eventually takes, but ideally I would like to see it as a theatrically released animated film. I am capable of producing it. I know enough to know what I don’t know, and would love to hire people more skilled than I am and let them run with the ball.     The concept is solid. Folklore first began to take form in my mind back in 2006, so it was in no way influenced by Avatar, which I didn’t hear about until late ‘09. They’re not even similar, except to the extent that both have an attractive anthro heroine; however, the success of Avatar has convinced me that attractive anthro heroines work. Maia works. People like her. They want to see more of her.     So do I. Interested? Let’s talk.     Still outside the box,          This page was last modified on July 24, 2010.

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