I finished the Taako drawing, so now the set of these are complete! I wanted to illustrate some of my favorite quotes from the podcast, since they’ve continued to stick with me since I finished it :’)
In 2013, Arlington-based Synetic Theater took their signature cinematic style to a new level when they flooded the stage with water for a production of The Tempest.
The physical theater company, well known for their wordless productions of Shakespeare plays, had previously created a water stage for their 2010 production of King Arthur. Known for their creative use of mixed media, Synetic Theater utilized the water to add an extra layer of magical realism to that production.
The Tempest was to be the 9th installment of Synetic’s popular Wordless Shakespeare series and Founding Artistic Director Paata Tsikurishvili was inspired to use a water stage by the way in which water is closely tied to the plot.
“The exiled Prospero is sent to an island, surrounded and inundated by water,” Tsikurshvili said. “His power and magic grows from it, and even the inciting action is created by water when Prospero uses a storm to bring his enemies to him.”
Water is a versatile theatrical element, conveying a variety of emotions and feelings. It can be at once dramatic, comical, magical, and lyrical. Additionally, the hypnotic combination of water and physical theater captivated audiences’ imaginations in a totally new way.
Once Tsikurishvili decided on the watery world his Tempest would be set in, he tapped Synetic’s Resident Stage Manager Marley Giggey and Technical Director Phil Charlwood to figure out the logistics of getting water into a pool onstage. “It was the strangest combination of terror and excitement I have ever experienced,” Giggey said of her first meeting about working on a water stage.
Technical Director Phil Charlwood had worked on King Arthur three years prior, and this time he strove to improve circumstances for the actors. The biggest challenge was keeping the water at a comfortable temperature. By using large heaters, Charlwood was able to keep the water warm during performances.
Charlwood also used his innovative design and building techniques to create one of the most compelling elements of the production, a piano fountain that served as an important piece of the set.
Filling the pools and keeping the water clean and safe fell to Giggey. “The water came from several hoses running from two sinks in the laundry room backstage and in the lobby,” she said. “The drain was a series of PVC pipes that connected together and went to a hose. We would bring out all the pipes and connect them - going out the loading dock door and leading to a floor drain in the parking garage that could accommodate all that water! Before each performance I would do a half drain and fill.
“We would drain about half of the pool and then fill it back up to show levels with hot water. On Fridays and Sundays we did a total drain of the pool and a very through scrub and clean. Then we let it dry for at least 12 hours before refilling. It was a time consuming process, but keeping the pool safe and clean was key.”
Once the water was on stage, Giggey was faced with more challenges. The stage lights made it difficult for the actors to consistently see the spike marks. This problem was solved with a grid system that allowed the actors to line themselves up with the left and downstage points.
The actors movement in the pool created a lot of splashing into the audience. Synetic offered branded ponchos to patrons in this “splash zone” and those seats became the most popular for the production.
Lighting designer Andrew Griffin enjoyed working with water and overcoming the challenge the water gave him in designing a light plot for the show.
“The light would reflect and refract because the water floor was reminiscent of a mirror,” he said. Griffin used several low-angled sidelights to exploit the angles of light that would scrape across the floor, rendering less of a reflected impact on the architecture of the space. This effect made it seem as though the water was dancing along with the characters. “Through a lot of careful planning, we created some pretty great effects,” said Griffin.
When working with water, there was also the question of mold and mildew - particularly concerning costumes. The costumes were all treated with camp spray to help waterproof them. “Cleaning the costumes was very tricky,” Giggey said. “They had to be thoroughly washed so we turned the back room of the theater into a ‘dry room’ with fans blowing from all directions and drip buckets to catch all the water. The last thing any actor wanted was to put on damp costumes or shoes when they came in the next day.”
Working with water required Synetic’s creative team to master a free-flowing element that is not easy to control consistently. Synetic was able to overcome many obstacles and use the water to their advantage with the help of various theatrical elements, all while taking the necessary steps to protect their performers.
The hours of maintenance required to keep the pool clean and functional and the additional challenges of working with water in a theatrical setting paid off. “It was a moment that was so immersive and dramatic that it was difficult to believe it was happening live in front of you,” Giggey said. “The energy in the theater as the actors were jumping, spinning, and splashing was electric!”
Overall, the creative team, crew, actors and audiences appreciated and valued this rare experience. The professionalism, ingenuity, and talent of the production crew, actors, and artistic team helped to make The Tempest Synetic’s highest grossing show to date.
okay i just had a bad epiphany but corporate interest’s influence on the internet is going to become so much stronger now that generations that are internet naturalized have grown up and starting working as “social media consultants”. advertising is going to become so much more subtle, manipulate your behavior to a greater extent, and completely pervade every aspect of our lives the more we rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to social validation.
what im saying is its scary that corporate twitter accounts are getting good at twitter. to have the same avenue a human would to express themself. its like, an extreme anthromorphism of a brand, and that brand representing a corporate interest, and successfully passing itself off as a sentient entity on twitter, thats really weird to me.
like this is so fucked up. it doesnt immediately read as an advertisement, conceptually it executes the levels of irony and deconstruction that usually make for successful memes in this genre or whatever. its almost subverting itself, but ultimately it still succeeds as an advertisement. it makes me sick. for every misfire of corporations trying to relate (pepsi protest commercial), theres another company getting better at it
okay but like my thing about this is… who is actually eating at these places because shit like this? yeah it’s funny but i never go to wendy’s because a meme, if i go to wendy’s it’s because i want a gross burger and a frosty, same with taco bell and mcdonald’s and wherever the fuck.
i really think that you’re blowing this out of proportion and having very little faith in people’s ability to decide what they want for themselves. it’s just not that deep.
It’s not about the effectiveness of the ads in question, but their complete omnipresence in every aspect and moment of life, and how bizarre and sophisticated the mechanations of advertising have become. If people don’t call attention to these things, they become normal.
The effectiveness of marketing isnt one-to-one, like, “ad says burger is good, I think burger is good, I eat burger.” That was 50 years ago. Y'all, since then these multi-million dollar corporations have been hiring psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists to study how best to get under consumer skin and theyve figured out it’s not about making you WANT a burger,
It’s about creating a Brand Identity - an anthropomorphized personality that your brain fits into an established schema (system of thought) so it’s easier to just drop into the background of your everyday life. It’s not about making you want a burger, it’s about making it so, when you DO want a burger, the first place you think of is Wendy’s, because their ads have made you think about them five time already that day. And most importantly, it’s about making sure you dont realize how often they make you think about them, so you don’t resent how pervasive they’ve become. They do that by tricking your brain into thinking of them as just another human-like personality. Your Funny Meme Friend Wendy’s. Wine Aunt World Market. Woke Jock Nike. Even your Endearingly Unhip Uncle Geico.
(hey also if you want dozens of terrifying examples of what I mean, just type ‘brand identity schema’ into Google like I just did and take a gander at all those scholarly articles discussing how best to acquire consumers, like we’re a fucking commodity)
one time i said i didn’t like the wendys twitter and got called classist for hating retail employees
this shit works. it makes people like Brands. gets under their skin and in to their minds. when i said i didnt like the wendys twitter i personally offended people that viewed wendys as a friend, that viewed the wendys social media manager as a friendly individual that they respected.
the wendys social media manager is not your friend. they don’t even really exist. there’s no one person that writes the tweets for wendys. there’s a team of 20 something year olds that casually observe the latest meme trends and crank out mspaint memes because they know they’ll get retweeted if the memes are relevant.
they trick you in to thinking that Wendys is a hip friendly young person, and they manipulate you in to thinking that disliking marketing is somehow a “problematic” “un-woke” thing to do.
and it works.
install ublock origin. on mobile, block every promoted tweet you see. don’t let them convince you that this shit is normal.
its even worse than brand anthropomorphism tbh, just read the wiki for native advertising and feel your skin crawl
“Product placement (embedded marketing) is a precursor to native advertising. Instead of embedded marketing’s technique of placing the product within the content, in native marketing the product and content are merged.
An important aspect of advertising in general is net impression, which is a reasonable consumer’s understanding of an ad. The power within native advertising, however, is to inhibit a consumers’ ad recognition by blending the ad into the native content of the platform, making many consumers unaware they are looking at an ad to begin with. The sponsored content on social media, like any other type of native advertising, can be difficult to be properly identified by the Federal Trade Commission because of the rather ambiguous nature. Native advertising frequently bypasses this net impression standard, which makes them problematic.”
This type of advertising has become its own sub-sector filled with start-ups calling themselves ‘innovative agencies’ or ‘creative agencies’, and this is a model they tout. It’s never explicitly stated that they are advertisers. Take for example this blog post on ‘Building Audiences and Delighting Fandoms on Social Media’ from ‘creative agency’ Flying Objects:
‘We needed to make truTV become part of that community, so we became experts, and brought two megafans into the team to co-create the content. Just like the fans, we relentlessly posted a new gif and joke every single day for the entire season. We also created four ‘hero moments’ which gave fans new, funny and substantial material to get their teeth into and share. Our guided meditation video was the real deal and lasted an epic 11 minutes. We were frankly thrilled when RuPaul herself retweeted our fictional iSashay Tracker wearable.’
Literally, fans became employees for a brand, blending fandom as both advertisement and recreation. This company’s entire job is to make their advertising content look like and act like a fan in a fandom, and from there their message spreads in an already-existing social network. In some (see: most socia media-based advertising) projects, fans are free labour for advertisers:
To get the word out around Bloomsbury’s publication of the Illustrated Harry Potter, it was clear that the existing Potter fandom was going to be our first port of call — indeed, with a very tight media budget, we were going to need them to do the work of spreading the word for us.
Many arts organisations are turningto ‘creative agencies’ like this for production and distribution support. The ‘creative agency’ is the euphemistic job title for native advertising companies. These companies see the work (i.e. the art, the production, the experience, the event) as both product and advertisement, and the consumer as the advertiser. Their whole job is to blur the line between pop culture consumption and advertisement, and to reinforce the consumer’s association between a cultural experience/object and the brand producing it.
griffin mcelroy: Let’s go! AAHHHAHAHA AHHH HA AHHHH HAHAAAA HAAAAA UHH UHH UHH UHHH! OH, OH GOD, oh God what have I done, OHH NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO, OH NO NO NO NO, OH NO NO, OH NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! OH GOD, OH GOD, OH NO NO, OH JESUS, GOD, NO –
[ID: a tumblr post saying, “that bit in the skyrim monster factory where griffin spawns a million dragons and then spends the next 30 seconds just screaming is a mood” /end ID]
okay i just had a bad epiphany but corporate interest’s influence on the internet is going to become so much stronger now that generations that are internet naturalized have grown up and starting working as “social media consultants”. advertising is going to become so much more subtle, manipulate your behavior to a greater extent, and completely pervade every aspect of our lives the more we rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to social validation.
what im saying is its scary that corporate twitter accounts are getting good at twitter. to have the same avenue a human would to express themself. its like, an extreme anthromorphism of a brand, and that brand representing a corporate interest, and successfully passing itself off as a sentient entity on twitter, thats really weird to me.
like this is so fucked up. it doesnt immediately read as an advertisement, conceptually it executes the levels of irony and deconstruction that usually make for successful memes in this genre or whatever. its almost subverting itself, but ultimately it still succeeds as an advertisement. it makes me sick. for every misfire of corporations trying to relate (pepsi protest commercial), theres another company getting better at it
okay but like my thing about this is… who is actually eating at these places because shit like this? yeah it’s funny but i never go to wendy’s because a meme, if i go to wendy’s it’s because i want a gross burger and a frosty, same with taco bell and mcdonald’s and wherever the fuck.
i really think that you’re blowing this out of proportion and having very little faith in people’s ability to decide what they want for themselves. it’s just not that deep.
It’s not about the effectiveness of the ads in question, but their complete omnipresence in every aspect and moment of life, and how bizarre and sophisticated the mechanations of advertising have become. If people don’t call attention to these things, they become normal.
The effectiveness of marketing isnt one-to-one, like, “ad says burger is good, I think burger is good, I eat burger.” That was 50 years ago. Y'all, since then these multi-million dollar corporations have been hiring psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists to study how best to get under consumer skin and theyve figured out it’s not about making you WANT a burger,
It’s about creating a Brand Identity - an anthropomorphized personality that your brain fits into an established schema (system of thought) so it’s easier to just drop into the background of your everyday life. It’s not about making you want a burger, it’s about making it so, when you DO want a burger, the first place you think of is Wendy’s, because their ads have made you think about them five time already that day. And most importantly, it’s about making sure you dont realize how often they make you think about them, so you don’t resent how pervasive they’ve become. They do that by tricking your brain into thinking of them as just another human-like personality. Your Funny Meme Friend Wendy’s. Wine Aunt World Market. Woke Jock Nike. Even your Endearingly Unhip Uncle Geico.
(hey also if you want dozens of terrifying examples of what I mean, just type ‘brand identity schema’ into Google like I just did and take a gander at all those scholarly articles discussing how best to acquire consumers, like we’re a fucking commodity)
one time i said i didn’t like the wendys twitter and got called classist for hating retail employees
this shit works. it makes people like Brands. gets under their skin and in to their minds. when i said i didnt like the wendys twitter i personally offended people that viewed wendys as a friend, that viewed the wendys social media manager as a friendly individual that they respected.
the wendys social media manager is not your friend. they don’t even really exist. there’s no one person that writes the tweets for wendys. there’s a team of 20 something year olds that casually observe the latest meme trends and crank out mspaint memes because they know they’ll get retweeted if the memes are relevant.
they trick you in to thinking that Wendys is a hip friendly young person, and they manipulate you in to thinking that disliking marketing is somehow a “problematic” “un-woke” thing to do.
and it works.
install ublock origin. on mobile, block every promoted tweet you see. don’t let them convince you that this shit is normal.
its even worse than brand anthropomorphism tbh, just read the wiki for native advertising and feel your skin crawl
“Product placement (embedded marketing) is a precursor to native advertising. Instead of embedded marketing’s technique of placing the product within the content, in native marketing the product and content are merged.
An important aspect of advertising in general is net impression, which is a reasonable consumer’s understanding of an ad. The power within native advertising, however, is to inhibit a consumers’ ad recognition by blending the ad into the native content of the platform, making many consumers unaware they are looking at an ad to begin with. The sponsored content on social media, like any other type of native advertising, can be difficult to be properly identified by the Federal Trade Commission because of the rather ambiguous nature. Native advertising frequently bypasses this net impression standard, which makes them problematic.”
Here they are! About a month before Rose City Comicon this year, I frantically thought “Shit, I need something new to sell,” and thankfully this idea has been rolling around for awhile now (though executed another way that will definitely still be happening later).
Say hello to the current Fantasy Fluffle group, a bunch of buns, ready to adventure away. Don’t worry, I’ll be getting Monk, Wizard, and Fighter done sometime soon (plus Gunslinger because I love a certain white haired disaster boy).
I drew this poster for Jon Acuffand his FINISH book tour. Big thanks to Jon for this collaboration, his book has some great ideas about how to complete creative and life goals.
Love this, but reblogging it specifically for “Get rid of secret rules.” That’s one of the most amazing illustrations—and points—I’ve ever seen.
so important especially for perfectionists who procrastinate and never finish, or even start because they set such high standards for themselves.
