digital painting

Action Tonight

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I play in a band called Lord Master. We play rock. Our influences are varied to say the least. Folks, including ourselves, find it hard to put a finger on exactly what it is we do. Definitely, it draws from the music and television from the 1970s. All the members of the band were born in 1973. While our memories of those years actually spent in the 70s are hazy, we certainly grew up with the decade on TV. The shows were in heavy syndication in the 80s whether you had cable or not. That said, we were equally or more influenced by those 1980s which were happening all around us. In fact, we firmly embraced that too.

Our bass player, Jim, came up with the idea of writing the song Action Tonight based on intro music to 1980s action shows. You know, stuff like A-Team, Magnum PI, and Riptide. The song is pretty short at 2:08. For the video we decided to base it in the classic montage-style intros of those 80s action shows which are about that length.

Having that somewhat basic formulaic intro made it both easy and challenging. It was easy in that we didn’t have to adhere to some kind of linear narrative. For those television shows, the intros were a bunch of quick edits extracted from various episodes throughout the season. I suppose the purpose was to fire up the viewer for what was about to proceed. Or, perhaps its aim was to quickly immerse the uninitiated viewer into the world the characters inhabit. This also made it challenging. We didn’t have a full season of footage to draw from.

To guide us along, we concocted a basic premise for the show. It was very loosely based on the series, The Fall Guy, that was about a stunt man that also did some bounty hunting on the side. The Action Tonight series is about the cast and crew of an action television show that also solves crimes on the side. Fairly preposterous? No, totally preposterous!

Each member of the band played a character on the show. Ben was Sam Stone, the aging actor turned director who reluctantly finds himself back in the action. Tristan plays Tess Montgomery, the tough-as-nails studio executive who is simultaneously at odds and in love with Sam Stone. Jim plays Hank Popadopolis, the wacky props guy. As for me, I played Don Bronco, the impetuous star of the show who is no stranger to danger.

With all that established, we were able to shoot a series of fun shots as we imagined the world these characters lived in. To up the excitement factor, we were sure to include plenty of action. We brought in our friends Damion and Frank to play the toughs. Frank served as our fight and stunt coordinator. We even got Cooper, Ben and Tristan’s dog into the action. All the shots were done with iPhones and edited with Adobe Premiere. The crappy explosion and special effects were done using After Effects.

The Norman A Normhall logo was designed an animated by myself using Illustrator and After Effects. I was going for those classic production logos like the Glen A. Larson ones you would often see after the credits of those classic action episodes. The music for this was created using GarageBand.

To promote the video, Ben and I collaborated on the poster done in the cartoony styles of 1980s VHS covers.

I also put together a quick commercial designed for social media. While shooting, I conducted a few quick behind-the-scenes interviews to gather content for this. That coupled with footage, both used and unused, was enough to throw this little spot together:

The Escape KeEP

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The Escape KeEP

Planet Yoon #30: The Escape Keep

This radio show was put together during the summer of 2020. Bad news was in abundance. Strife was rife throughout the nation. Fires burned away precious forests and homes along the entire west coast. While I was relatively safe from the conflagrations, the air quality in Portland was deemed hazardous. You couldn’t, or shouldn’t go out in it unless you really had to. Not too much of a problem; I was already doing a whole bunch of that thanks to Covid-19.

Confined to the indoors, I longed for the carefree days of exploring mountainous terrains, breathing in the refreshing pine scents, and being exhilarated by the ocean roar. Really, anywhere besides the three rooms I’ve been living in would do. There was a constant longing to just escape. But that longing needed to just go unfulfilled. Sure, I could still technically go outside, but not without a certain small degree of peril. Instead, I chose to turn inward.

The computer has become my window to the world. Looking out of it, you can choose to see horrors or delight. Sometimes you don’t get to choose. Sometimes you don’t know what is horror or delight. Sometimes it is an ambiguous mixture of the two. But that is just speaking for web browsers I suppose.

Most of my escapes involve creative endeavor. Much of my many hours alone are spent behind this machine doing creative stuff. Whether it is building playlists for the radio show, recording songs, tweaking layouts, or experimenting with digital painting, it always feels like time well spent.

Anyone who spends enough time on a computer will know that they sometimes just fail to function. Or, the computer is functioning and the software doesn’t acknowledge the computer anymore. In these cases, the Esc-key can be essential to getting you back into the groove. And if you can’t, there’s always a hard reboot.

The idea for The Escape Keep came to me suddenly while cooking dinner. I had recently seen a number of album covers that featured an ancient temple in either a jungle or a forest. Here’s a space that is both remote and well fortified. It is a perfect spot to escape.

The style was inspired by those progressive rock album covers. I’ve always loved Roger Dean and stuff like that. 1950s science fiction covers were also inspiring to me. Photos of Incan temples from Machu Picchu were also referenced for color and composition.

The temple was originally drawn in pencil on paper. While there are tools for this on the computer, I found it more illuminating and therapeutic to just do it old school with a ruler. Also, I had been studying old drawing instruction books about this and was eager to try my hand. The pencil sketch was scanned into the computer and then the basic shape and lines rendered in Adobe Illustrator. That was exported to Photoshop where I used various brushes to paint the landscape and figures.

While I was able to pull off the general idea, I felt more detail could have been added. However, I gave myself a day to complete the painting since the audio portion took much longer than expected. The show was airing in less than a day and needed to be promoted. This concept is cool enough to revisit at some point when my painting skills are better honed. It was certainly a great exercise in perspective drawing and quickly executing a fairly weird concept.

You can listen to the 2-hour episode (Planet Yoon #30: The Escape Keep) of Planet Yoon HERE.