Saturday, March 26, 2011

[Question] What other medium of story telling would you create a TG story for?

Any investors out there wanna invest in a studio?

You have very in depth and fully realized ideas for your captions. What other medium of story telling would you create a TG story for if you had the choice?


I have Jennifer (of Jennifer's TG caps of Defiance) to thank for this wonderfully thoughtful question (and compliment... thank you!).  I guess first thing I need to consider is what other mediums are there? I can think of film (videos...), literature (stories, poetry, books), images (photographs, paintings...), audio (music, audio stories...) are the few I can think of at the moment.

Now in any format of art, I have would want to retain a high level of quality.  For example if I were to choose the film medium, I wouldn't want to use the video camera on my phone.  I may not demand HD Hollywood style production quality, but I wouldn't want this to look like some yahoo made this on a budget of $100.  That being said, lets take a look at what would be required for each of these.

Film
This may be the most difficult to fully realize. I love good quality movies, and there is a lot to be compared to.  How many hours of television and movies do we each watch each year?  Anything produced video wise, would be instantly compared (no matter how fair/unfair the comparison may be) to what we see every day.  Just consider my last cap made for the haven "DOMINATED! but by who?".  This would involve an actress and an actor (willing to do sex on camera!).  It would require a room that looks like a lab.  It would require costumes (a sexy candy striper outfit, and a hospital gown), makeup (the lipstick MUST look fabulous!), and hair styling.  It would require a good video camera and accessories (lenses, mobile tripod), lighting, and sound recording equipment (and no that is  not the microphone built into the camera!).  Thats just off the top of my head.  I'm sure as 'production' began to roll, I would need more than that.  Even if we take cost out that isn't an easy list of things to acquire.

If I could get my dainty greedy little hands on all of that, I would still have to write a story with the intention of it being filmed.  In 'Dominated!' how would I show the voice in Pablo's head?  Would I use a voice over for his internal thoughts?  Would I even show the techs, or just a speaker where their voice is coming from?  Would I need anything to set up the story, like a short sequence of a man getting an injection?  Would I even try to show the transformation of either Pablo or Calvin?  Writing something that is to be read, and something that is to be 'viewed' are two different animals.

If I could get my hands on all of this stuff, and have time to 'play' with it all, I think this would be an interesting way to tell a TG story. But the reality is, this wouldn't be something that I could do good quality work with on the part time basis I use for making caps.

The inexpensive way to do this would be to take existing video clips, edit them together, and write a story around that.  If you like that idea, check out TGtales on youtube.

Literature
This is an area that I have been considering for quite a while now.  A full fledged TG story.  To me, it is the natural next step for the style of caps I make.  My caps have already gotten quite long winded, and its hard to get an image set to go along with the stories I tell (consider the first three panels of "Girly Girl" which I made for Jennifer).  Without taking time to consider the shorter attention span of most cap fans, and the image restrictions caps start with, I could just write and write and write.  I think the longest of my caps would only qualify as a short story.

But this is still a vastly different beast than what I do.  Most of my caps take a few hours to write.  Some of the TG stories I really enjoy take a few hours to READ.  I would need the focus to sit down and start something that I know wouldn't be done for days, weeks or even months.  And without all the pretty pictures to soak up someones attention, little things like grammar, word choice, phrasing, pacing, and punctuation would be just about as important as the subject of the story.  These are all areas that I struggle with now.  To have the quality work I would want, I would almost assuredly need a good editor.  And not someone who is going to read it and come back with the comment 'That is hot!'.  I would need someone that could read a draft, and tell me that the section involving the lipstick and the vacuum cleaner takes to long to set up, and and drags on for to long; rewrite it, or can it.  This person would need to be a stickler for to, too, two, tutu, their, there, they're, and a punctuation nazi.

I don't know anybody that could do that, and I don't know if I have the discipline to sit down and write a full fledged, fully realized story without dropping it halfway through.

Oh.. and I suck at poetry, so that is just out.

Images
As many of you may know, I used to work as a photographer.   I have the ability (as rusty as it is now) to set up a and run a professorial photography studio. I would LOVE to take some of the wonderful cap ideas, and make them into a photo set.  But there are still blocks to this.  A studio is an expensive endeavor.  I can easily imagine spending tens of thousands of dollars on the camera and lenses.  Tens of thousands of dollars on the lighting equipment. Tens of thousands of dollars on the miscellaneous equipment 'around' the studio.  Not to mention the cost of the studio space itself.  A house MAY work, but realistically I would want a large almost industrial space so that I could set up any setting I want, and leave it for days on end.

And of course one of the biggest sticking points would be getting models and props. I haven't done many caps (around 90 I think?), but each cap has used different photo sets.  So just to produce what I have now, I would need 90 different sets of models.  Even living in a large metropolitan area (which I do NOT live in) this wouldn't be easy.

Photography is about the only still image format I have interest in doing. I have no talent when it comes to painting.

Audio
Audio recordings are a format that I honestly don't think of that much.  I have listened to a few of the samples at Strapped in Silk and they are interesting, but I am a much more visual perosn than I am an auditory person.

The cost outlay would be much lower than the other formats here.  As I understand it you would need some professorial audio recording equipment.... and thats about it.  The writing would be much the same as video in the sense that you have to hear everything, instead of reading it. But unlike video you can have it in the style of a narrator, or of the characters speaking.  The narrator would make this more of an audio book... so you could simply write a story out, and have someone professorially read it.  The characters would require voice actors, and I'm not really sure how much 'setting' you could do.   I don't imagine it is as interesting to hear someone talk about the smooth red velvet couch that they are bent over.


So those are the other mediums that I can think of.  I'm sure I'm forgetting one or two that would require a face palm.  But out of these, I would have interest in telling a story through film, or photography.  I think that would spike my creativity meter.  At least temporarily I would be producing and producing products as I feel my way around the new (to me) medium.  But both are just plain cost and logistically prohibitive.

But I can always dream!

So you tell me... what mediums have I overlooked?  And most importantly what other mediums would YOU (you being my dozen or so readers) like to do, or see more of?

3 comments:

  1. A good question, indeed.
    There are many of us, who will pay anything to watch the movie related stuff, then again that is quite expensive as you say, i would stick with literature, i think i'm pretty good setting up stories and expanding them in a never ending universe, but as you say it just takes too much time to come up with a good one(Sometimes i have been struggling with a story in my head but without the right words to express it)
    The images well stand alone pics that could work with few words are simply hard to find, that's why i love the mix between literature and pics, and the last choice audio recordings, that's not my cup of tea, i'm more of a visual person as yourself...

    What about paintings, do you know how to make a good drawing?

    Hugs and Kisses Alectra

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  2. I would be first in line for a Caitlyn movie! But I do have to mention Graphic novels. (Comic books)Now, Of course you would have to have an artist or some skill your self. But there is plenty of TG Comics out there.

    I've wrote a couple of comic book story's my self. (Horror short stories) My brothers are artists so they have been drawing them up, based on my general outline for the story and dialog. Of course, I'm not saying they will be any good, just that I've played around with it.

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