Before going on summer break for the month of August, get some tips, tricks and motivation to pick up a new storytelling hobby or to take your work to the next level.
Advice for recording your first album from Gordon Vetas.
Advice for creating comics from Alondra Lopez.
Advice for transitioning from stage to film acting from Eric Millward.
Join Liz as she tries out a brand new video game, something she rarely does and totally sucks at. https://summonersfate.com/
"In the Telling" will be back in September. Enjoy the break! Catch up on content you may have missed. Take time to create and share your story. Maybe even try something new!
John Cleese said, “Nothing will stop you from being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”
Before going on summer break for the month of August, get some tips, tricks and motivation to pick up a new storytelling hobby or to take your work to the next level.
Advice for recording your first album from Gordon Vetas.
Advice for creating comics from Alondra Lopez.
Advice for transitioning from stage to film acting from Eric Millward.
Join Liz as she tries out a brand new video game, something she rarely does and totally sucks at. https://summonersfate.com/
"In the Telling" will be back in September. Enjoy the break! Catch up on content you may have missed. Take time to create and share your story. Maybe even try something new!
John Cleese said, “Nothing will stop you from being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”
Welcome to in the telling episode 11 a summer break special where I celebrate four months and over 100 content uploads with taking a break. I'm trying something new. Don't worry in the telling, we'll be back in September. This episode features a handful of awesome local guests. We'll start with advice from musician Gordon, fetus about recording your first album in studio, then comic book artist and illustrator, Elandra Lopez about making comics and then here from stage and screen actor Eric and the Lord about moving from acting in theater into film. Finally, I go on the street with the creators and developers of the coming soon video game Summoners fate, whom I met at the[inaudible] 2019 salt Lake city gaming con. I'm not a video gamer, but these guys walk me through a demo of their game and I had so much fun. You get to hear me try something new and out of my comfort zone as well as get a behind the scenes preview of an awesome upcoming adventure game. So listen close to musicians, artists, actors, and gamers because here it is all in the telling.
Speaker 2:My name is Gordon Vitus. I'm from salt Lake city. I've been a professional musician for about four to five years now and some advice I have for artists who are wanting to get in the studio and record their first album is just do it. Don't wait until you feel like you're going to be ready because if you wait until you feel like you're, you're ready, you never truly are going to be ready so you'll be waiting forever. Just do it constantly. The trepidation get in the studio and start recording and it's a numbers game. The more you can get in the studio, the better your tracks are going to sound. Just like any skill, the more you report and get in the studio, more familiar, you're going to be with that and better your, your songs are going to be some tips I have for when you do get in the studio, come prepared. Know the BPM and the tempo, which is the tempo of the song and know the key. The songs and I knew these two things when I went and recorded my first album and it cut my time in the studio in half, which in turn meant it cut my costs in half. I had to pay half as much as I thought I originally it was going to have to pay just because I knew these two things of knowing BPM and knowing the key of the song. This will help the engineer a lot. Also, another thing you can do to prepare, call the engineer beforehand, ask him if there's anything he needs or if there's anything he needs to bring. He might say, no, just bring in your instrument and we're good to go, which is great. But you might also be surprised at what he doesn't have or what he will ask you to bring in. This not only helps you and helps the time because it helps. It helps this go faster. It helps the engineer help him do his job better. So overall you're gonna have a better recording, um, and a better, a better time in the studio if you come prepared when you are recording, if you can always, always use a click track, which is a metronome. For those of you who don't know always, this just makes your song sounds so more much precise, more precise and cleaner. If you're using a metronome, if the song tempo changes a lot, and if the key signature changes a lot, that's fine. But if you can always use a metronome, another thing you can do to help yourself record yourself at home a little bit, even if it's on your phone, you'll be surprised at the things you need to change from chord yourself at home. Make yourself feel happy with those recordings and then get in the studio. Um, this will help a ton with the time and energy you and the engineer have to put in. Once you do all these things, enjoying your music, do it again. Do it as much as you can and it'll make you a better musician.
Speaker 3:Hi, my name is Alondra Lopez and I am a comic book artist and illustrator. I'm some advice that I'd give to someone looking into comics and illustrative storytelling of would be to um, not be afraid to tell your story. Uh, comics is very diverse from the mainstream superheroes. Um, so don't be afraid to just start your story. Uh, whether it's a comedy, romance mystery or really anything. Um, there's an audience out there always looking for new things. Um, the best thing to keep in mind is just write what you love. The next thing I would probably say is to have a productive workflow, whether it's writing down your story, just a basic general skeleton of the beginning, middle and, and steroid boarding, sketching, inking coloring and fonts. There is a lot that goes into comics and creating a comic and it can become overwhelming for new artists to finish and complete a story and to have a good workflow can definitely help you get to the end product. And sometimes doing something short can also help you figure out your workflow. Uh, for me personally, I've been doing weekly comics and they're usually around three to eight panels and I've been really enjoying doing those compared to long form comics. Um, for me they're just a lot less stressful and I've been able to finish those in a relatively good amount of time. The next thing I would say is to find ways to be productive and to stay motivated. Comics are hard work and for me personally, I've stayed motivated through collaborating with others and getting feedback and bouncing off ideas. Find a support group, find a community on Lego, said a group that you can get into to share your ideas and have other people to share their ideas with you, find what inspires and motivates you to create stories. Sometimes that extra support is what can get you to the finish line in completing a story. And this, the next is to get it out there on any sort of social media platform. Print cons, you know, everyone has a story to tell on comics is just one of the many ways
Speaker 4:the question gets brought up a lot. Is there a difference in acting on stage? And acting on film or in front of the camera. Of course the answer is yes and no. Just like there's a difference in acting in onstage, in a musical as opposed to acting in stay on stage and a straight play. You're acting, you're creating a story, you're telling the story, but you approach it very differently. Same with film in front of the camera. There is a difference in the way that you handle the overall production of doing it. Um, uses a lot the same skills. You just have to tweak it a little bit in the same way that you would the different genres on stage. Um, so people ask, how do I get into film? There's a lot of different ways you can do it. Um, my suggestion, if you're starting out, get out, get into, um, an extra, become an extra on stage, get on on the set to see how it is. Um, see if it's something you can handle. A lot of actors can't handle it in stage. You are rehearsing, you are doing, it's always action. You're going, you're going to can't stop. You're performing all the time on film. You may be called on set 12 hours a day. You may only be in front of the camera for an hour and a half. You have to sit and wait a lot. It's great. I'm not for everybody, right? Vice did in front of a camera. Go do a student film. Get on, be an extra, get out on set, see the differences, see those things, get that experience and see if it's something you like and enjoy. Once you're there and you find that it is something you enjoy, you'll find a lot of little nuances that'll change as a starting out as an actor and going from stage to film, you'll find it. There are a few difference. Um, one of the differences being volume, um, as a big one. And you can tell with a lot of starting out, um, transitioning actors from stage to film, they find that's a little different in theater onstage with volume, you're having to project to the last person in the audience, whether that be the final Rose 25 feet away from you or it's in a large auditorium, you know, 125 feet away. Your voice has to carry it out. Last in the row we're on, stay on film. The last person in there, your audience is the microphone. That's as far as you have to project. Being able to pull back and realize that that's your audience. That's where you have to project, um, is the big part in there. Um, secondly, it's all about the eyes. In film and film, everything is brought right down into the eyes. The eyes are important there, right?
Speaker 5:I want you to tell me all the things. What is someone who's fake?
Speaker 6:Summoner's fate is a term-based strategy deck builder about winning in the most weird and creative ways possible.
Speaker 5:You said deck builder, but I'm seeing screen. So it's a video game though.
Speaker 6:It's a video game. It's a PC game for a PC, Mac, Android and iOS. Okay. Cross-platform. It's got single player and multiplayer so it's all fantasy based and it's like a combination of if you took Dungeons and dragons, mixed it with magic, the gathering, maybe a little bit of Hearthstone and some final basic tactics that would be someone who's fake.
Speaker 5:Hey I am, I have played D and D once. Okay. Okay. And I've not played magic the gathering, but I played munchkin, which is sort of killer bunnies and those are card based games. So, okay. So let's see. Take me to your games. Okay, awesome. Where should we do this at? Uh, yeah. Let's go head on over here. Okay. Do you want to have a seat? You're all talking through. Do you want to play or do you want me to say play and talk you through what's happening? You talk to me through. I'll try. I'll attempt to play and can I just die too fast because I suck at video games then maybe we'll have someone else go for it. Go for it. Okay, cool. Okay. All right. Tap play there and you're good to go. Okay. Play. I'm on with like a tablet here. Yeah. This is an iPad. A mini. Your screen is a window to another world as inhabitants look up at you. Decide their fate. I am deity in the SAS. You are up. You skip that. It's okay. I'll give you the recap. It's work seven baited your forest and you are an inspiring young Druid. You must lead them to victory by acquiring the secret weapon, the staff of squirrels, the staff of squirrels, my characters. Super good looking girl and I feel really happy. Thank you. Sylvia felt the hand of fate upon her guiding her to victory. Yeah, she has[inaudible]. She's a brunette like I am. I'm biased. Her hair, her eye colors run with us. All right. Hello? Is someone up there? Yeah, it's me. What do I do to help her out? Okay. Okay. Oh goodness. I tapped her gotta be, I haven't chosen into the debate as it had left. Lead me to strike down these invaders. So do I just like walk her along this path and like yep, yep, yep. That's basically it. There you go. Now it's your turn and now there you go. Your Jack, your hero over the goblin to attack it. Deal cable. What heads, what's going to happen when I let go? Cause there's like this arrow should go forward. Take a chance. Kill the odds. Dead and sweet. Excellent. You're, it's can be ordered one for turn your move at attack and a single command. So I can just keep going. I don't have to like wait for the orcs to do anything.[inaudible] so now you got to end your turn. Oh and my turn is that this I am satisfied. So I check enemy turn. Oh like a Stratego or chest or something. She has instincts. I didn't do anything and she counterattacked Hey I get to do that once per round. Yup. Sweet. Oh because I can't counter attack. She's looking at me like can I please stab this guy behind me now? Yeah. No. May Sylvia, I love that there are butterflies flying around while I am slaying orcs. That's all this guy Peter here is our artists. Extraordinary. How much, how much time does it take to create a video game world? Some time working on this for three years now. Three years. Three years. Oh, I get to claim a thing. I have cards and um, food and money. Yes. Okay, good. Explore. Let me, if I can go anywhere that way is where it's drag your summit or to the exits head. Sylvia. That way. Um, I mistakenly assumed I had to stay on the market's path, but I don't know. Yeah, you can go anywhere. I can shortcut a chorus of strings pulling tight as already all eyes and arrows are pointed at her now is not the time to save your buyer power. Okay, so time. Just so these things over here, this is like my stash. Those are your cars now. So kind of like in munchkins or you click your little weapons in cards. It's like that. Do I have to like go? Like how do I activate my usage for one of those things and just go ahead and touch one. Okay. Works with arrows. Purple, purple, lightning bolting. Touch them in. It'll show description. Oh, okay. Cool. So gravity blast, pull all enemies in front of you. Vice versa. I was like, get away from me stuff I shards. Ooh, that sounds like that can happen from a distance. Nobody got the last one. Meteor shower. I want to do that. It's a good choice. I think that's a good, how do I use that? I just give it to her. Don't drag it on her. You don't want her die in those fires. I drag it at those people. Okay. Oh my gosh. That's awesome. Look at all the death of works. They're squealing in pain from the fire like kill the tree, but the butterfly lives, she wants to do more. She's still looking at me so I get an attack. The other guy, nicely done. Even through my ear buds and all of the like convention sounds, I'm still hearing them. Really nice blade sound and a little squishy sound. That's awesome. Victory, slow. The butterflies are just really nice. I like this foot thing too. That happens when I slide around the details. Right is like those butterflies I give him, I give him the seal of approval and the game is getting progressively more complicated. I've got like dudes with armor and bigger weapons and more of them and at brambles ticket, the Ford had nearly beat her there so why not give them a final push? Okay, we're going to see what happens. I really am happy I haven't died yet. And what does this cool card that I have now healed minor wounds. Do I have minor wounds? Is this my health? Your health is right. Oh I should do that. I would be a good content. Great. Okay. There you go. Now she feels better. She, yeah, she's looking at me like thanks. Finally that thing when they stabbed me in a back two rounds ago. Okay, let's, I want to see what purple crazy gravity blast does. Oh, but that's, well that's probably good, right? Cause I'm sneaking up behind them. These guys. Right. Unintentional brilliance. But you knew right? You gave me the car at a time to use it. I feel like this is very user friendly. I like that because I'm not real like adept at this sort of thing. We can't make you feel like a genius if we're telling you to do everything. So if I did that, not enough men. I've what? What does that mean man is your energy. So the cost too, you see the little purple wire and you've got one purple or blue fireside meaning eat something before. I can do that. Now Shanna generates in each turn so, so I'll just go attack him the regular way. When you see the dagger, you know it's a backstab backstop. Units can't counter attack. Hey guys, this is fun. Awesome. Yes we do our job. Tell me about the art. How did you decide that it should have this look?
Speaker 6:So top down, listen, this is all like you're looking directly down on top of a chessboard and squares and everything. So part of why we did that is to cut down on production costs because you only have to draw one character like just the head, just the arms and then they can rotate and you don't have to draw every frame of them rotating. But top down perspective is like notoriously hideous. Like you know why she just tops a heads tops. A heads are boring. They don't let you connect with the character. So that's why she looks up at you because it connects you eye to eye. You make a connection with your character that you normally wouldn't do in a top down game. Glad you're not dead. I'll do my best to to, yeah. What should we do? Let's
Speaker 5:figure this out together.
Speaker 6:Eye contact is so important for building a connection and making you feel like you're part of the world with them on the journey. And so even though you're commanding them like a God, you're still like there with them and they're with you. You know? And then the other cool thing too is that the, when they look up at Sundre, it's signaling you like, Oh, I know I'm supposed to do something now.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Without a whole bunch of like, here's how to play the game. Yeah. 20 pages of manual. That's right.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Our goal of this, this style was to eliminate all the distractions that normally are cluttering games, like lots of excessive UI, lots of rules, lots of telling you how to UI you O yes, UI is user interface. So when the screen is cluttered with all kinds of buttons and you have to go click into menus to find out what you're supposed to do or you see a lot of texts in the screen that's too much to read. These are all kinds of distractions and it takes you away from the experience because you've got to kind of drill into those things and we want to keep people focused within the world around them. So like the fact that you saw butterflies is a good sign. Like you're noticing the details, right? And you're feeling like, wow, there's a lot of things happen in this world and I don't have to be told you are what they are. I just sort of see them like you would if you're walking outside in nature. And that's kind of the feel you want to have is it just sort of carries you along this journey as you explore it.
Speaker 5:I liked that she can go around. I didn't want to run her into the brambles. Orcs died that way. Works did that the Baron bumpers were tough. This story seems like a fairly linear story. Yeah.
Speaker 6:This particular one, yes. Because what we're trying to do in this initial experiences, uh, there's a lot of complicated mechanics of the game in terms of how you can attack and use different abilities. We want to give you a nice, um, onboarding to that so that you can kind of get introduced to things at a slow pace and with a little bit of story wrapped around it for the full game, what we're going to have is something called a procedurally generated world. And what that means is that every time you opened up the game, it creates an entirely new world just for you. And it does a new one each time. And then when you go and play the adventures, you'll be able to explore in any direction you want to go. And there'll be different monsters. You can encounter new characters that you can recruit along the way and you get to make choices about what kind of character you want your hero to become. So this particular case, you're, you're kind of helping this young Druid, but maybe you're teaching like a wizard or you want to have like a, uh, an evil skeleton necromancers your character and you can make choices about getting cards at some and skeletons and dark creatures. Or you can make choices about, I want more fireball destruction spells, I want to burn the forest down.
Speaker 5:So partly what my experience of being linear right now is partly because I'm, I've just started and it's a demo demo teaching me how to play so that I'm not overwhelmed by that option. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So the, in the current demo, what we do is we take you through this experience, we kind of show you how to play and not tell you how to play, but like let you experience it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like I have to kind of, there's, there's hits, right? Like she looks at me and, and then I go, Oh, that's my turn. And I just sort of figure it out. Yeah, I like that.
Speaker 6:And then at the end, the last level of demo you actually get to, you kind of get like a snapshot of a fast forward. So further in the future you'll eventually have other team members. So she'll have um, companions, like one's a cleric healer, one's up a barbarian with a big old sword and then you'd have to fight, uh, another character that can also use the cards. And so that will be a very like kind of test your knowledge of everything you've learned and let you be creative about how you defeat that last boss.
Speaker 5:Okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah. So you build your adventuring party and then you have your little[inaudible]
Speaker 6:the showdown show down.
Speaker 5:Yes, absolutely. Um, tell me where people find this game
Speaker 6:on our website. Summoners fate.com. Okay. And we are currently in our pre-release, so the game is available now. It's not officially launched, but you can buy the game now and join us in our development journey. We are community driven developers. So, for instance, we were, we had, Peter and I were just on Twitch yesterday. We did a stream live and we had members of our community that play the game right now, getting us feedback and saying, I would love to have this goblin champion character, um, throw a whip at somebody. And Peter was in there and giving, giving me the feedback from the Twitch and then we programmed it for those users who are watching and then on the spot and we delivered the new cards into the game. So we actually made them and then gave them to the players and they got to try them out that same day
Speaker 5:that that's, that's a turnaround that I would not have anticipated as being possible quickly digitally drawing in the back. Like how do you make that happen?
Speaker 6:No, not doing, not creating the art. All the art has been created but it's like design choices on like how much health should this character have or how much attack, what weapons should they use. And then we will go back and create art if like for the whip. We don't have a whip yet, but I need to animate a whip now. Here's the fears being modest. Okay. So the way that we're able to do this turnaround is that the two of us have like kind of pooled our collective talents together to create a technology pipeline that allows us to rapidly deliver content on the fly like this. So he's, he's an exceptional animator and he, we worked together to kind of create these animations that can be combined. Um, I w I picture it like Legos, right? You know, like called like the little Lego figures have legs and they snapped the body and maybe that you have a Lego set that's got little wings, an animated wing, and you can attach it to anybody make a Pegasus or make a bat or make a unicorn. It's like, yeah, like if you, we could take Legos and the pieces were modular, you can combine them together and they would animate. That's what we built.
Speaker 5:You've, you've potentially constructed a process that you can be very responsive. Absolutely. Very cool. That's awesome. You guys tell me, what have I forgotten to ask? Because I'm not video game adept. Are you guys on Twitch that has like channels, right?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yes. Twitch, Twitch streaming. That's a Mo. Most people use Twitch to play games and people watch other people play games. Yeah. And that's become like a huge thing like our kids. Um, I'll go on there now instead of watching cartoons, they watch these other like heroes of theirs play video games. Yeah. And it's not just games, it's can be creating costumes. There's lots of cause players that do that and developers or artists. And so we're uh, streaming the development of it. Yeah. Um, how do we find you on Twitch? Um, our Twitch channel is[inaudible] studios. That's our company name. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. And then we're also on discord. That's kind of our forums on there. Yeah. GG dot disco D 20 studios. Say that again. A G. dot.[inaudible] studios. And you can also find that on our main game website at[inaudible] dot com we've got the Twitch link there. And we've also got our discord link there and all of our other links and stuff like that. Awesome. And the game is there too. Of course. That's the best part.
Speaker 5:The demo is showing me like, so a totally different environment at different guys right now and I I got to get farther in the game and companions. Yes, the adventure.
Speaker 6:Oh yeah. So yeah, these were different scenes of different battles that are kind of like happening throughout the sequence of like, you're like, you've got like these sort of glove, we call these, the wizards are like these potatoes, sunken sin guys at the Lich King summons and they'd come out usually dead on dead. Yeah. Like zombie, like creatures, not quite dead, not quite dead. Like dead. They're, they're technically alive. They just had like their life or sucked out. It'd be like if I took everything that was like all your energy and sucked it out and now was left as a triple potato raising person. Yeah. Brady. Right. That's adopted. You call him raising people. That's a good term. Oh, you have a lot of fun environment. Yeah. So it's a river. And then we've got forests and jungles. And so what's cool is like we're, we're working on right now is making it so these worlds will actually assemble so that it'll create like diverse terrains, like forest and mountain scapes and winter scenes. And it will connect these all together so that when you go on your adventure, you can kind of like, you know, do I go through the desert or do I cross over the Marsh or do I climb the mountain or do I go through the cage? You know, like there's all kinds of cool places to explore. How close do you think you are to like full launch? Uh, so our anticipated worldwide release is going to be, um, Q one Q two of next year. What we're Oh for quarter one yet. Yeah. So like late spring, early summer of 2020 and that's another way, so awesome. Awesome. And that's when it'll be like polished and presentable to like your average user. But right now you can buy the game and play it as it is. There's an awesome multiplayer with 200 cards in the game. And then as we finish the single player, you'll get that content and be able to test it, give us your, your feedback. Help us decide where it goes from here. So the beta test space. Yeah. It's kind of like that beta. Totally. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. Guys, thank you so much for letting me play your game. Thank you. Talking me through it. We appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:John Cleese said nothing will stop you from being creative. So effectively is the fear of making a mistake. For me. I've just decided to accept that the first batch of I do are going to be not very good, certainly not as good as they're going to be if I keep learning and doing them, that's okay. Even though I'm a perfectionist, I have just learned that I like trying to make art. I like trying to create, I like the process of storytelling. Even if the end product is completely amateur hour, I enjoyed the creating and the creations themselves will get better, so I'm not afraid of my mistakes in these things at least, and that is very liberating for me, especially since I'm a perfectionist. It's easier to give myself permission to enjoy creating without my own judgments, getting in the way when I know what I'm doing is new to me or not my strong suit. I've started painting off of Pinterest tutorials and I'm taking a comic book class online from Cadenza and I started taking photographs. My mistakes are there, I can see them, but I can see the progress too, and it's been a joyful time of discovery. I look forward to continuing see you in September. Thank you to my guests, Gordon fetus, Alondra Lopez, Eric Millward, Ross, principal, Husky, and Peter Jones. Theme music by Gordon Venus, and the telling is hosted and produced by me. Liz Christiansen. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 7:[inaudible].