M.algamate is my thesis project from Animation College, in which 3 characters are trapped in a strange building and seek an escape, but instead discover they are forever trapped in the medium.
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The thesis part of the project was to marry metalepsis (fourth wall nonsense) and transmedia (stories told through multiple mediums) together into one big project in which the metalepsis gags and the ever growing medium is the key plot point for the entire narrative.
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Unfortunately, the project relied heavily on a Flash Player, but as of late 2020, that has now shut down.
This project started off as an exercise at school, in which I had to design a video game concept and a faux Kickstarter page to go with it.
my concept centered around 3 characters with the simple goal to escape a vague base type building, inspired by Aperture Labs from Portal.
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The 3 heroes included M. the
happy go-lucky child, their
demon pal, Nex and some kid
with a box on his head, named Arkac. Utilizing M.'s charm and Nex' brute strength, these 2 would be controlled by the player through stealth missions and puzzles. Arkac on the other hand, was to act as an suspiciously unreliable guide to help you navigate your way out of the base - but he clearly had his own goals in mind.
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Another fun aspect I had in mind for the game, was the good ol' art of morality! You'd be given choices for M. to be either good, bad or neutral and their alignment would be reflected in Nex' design - like a Tamagotchi, but much grumpier!
This is the demon evolution chart, with the left most side being a result of the player choosing M. to become evil. Nex would gain sharper shape language, with spikes, and then becoming more and more akin to a parasite, as he'd be literally be feeding off of M.'s negative energy.
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The right being more morally good, Nex would adopt more of a protector role as illustrated by the blockier shape language and exposed bones becoming a shield of sorts.
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The neutral route would make Nex seem more spindly and leaner - not entirely knowing what he should be, he'd become weaker with tendrils and poor center of gravity
After making the Kickstarter trailer, I was extremely unsatisfied just tossing this away as a finished thing. So the following year, for my capstone project, I decided to develop it into a story.
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Determined to make this Kickstarter trailer canon, I decided to create a narrative to lead up to that moment - something to flesh out the characters a bit more, expand on the logic of this world, give life to the antagonists and develop the concept that was riddled throughout the kickstarter - metalepsis - as well as applying some funky existentialist themes!
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Needless to say this was far too ambitious, and creating an animation for this project was an impossible feat, so I settled for a comic - however creating a comic based on a kickstarter, added transmedia to my overflowing list of content.
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I used metalepsis with transmedia to brainstorm a few ideas of how I can get the characters to not only break the medium, but have them transition from one medium to the next. I narrowed to down to 3 stages - a book, a webcomic and an animation - and then pinpointed each of the medium’s qualities.
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For example, a book is a printed medium - printing can have errors, paper can be ripped or folded into pop-up elements - then I would think of how my characters could use that to their advantage and progress the plot.
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from there I created a script that essentially joined the dots of all the metalepsis transgressions, some plot lines that I hinted at in the kickstarter video, as well as establishing the themes of my world - and all the while leading up to give the kickstarter trailer video some form of context.
(Drawings by Madison Johns, Jack Andrews and Cameron Day)
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The fun part of this project was the actual execution - I not only got to create a story using styles and mediums I’ve never used before, but I got to deliberately break the rules of those - as mentioned before, I used misaligned colors to create a printing error effect and one of the characters jumps out of the panels to rip the page.
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But more notably, to get out of a dire situation, one of the characters actually draws their escape, but end up getting trapped inside of their own drawn version of the world.
To achieve the level of authenticity I was after for this short gag, I got 3 children, around the same age as the characters, to redraw the model sheet of the characters, so that I can replicate them with my left hand.
(My replication. there is a typo in ‘Backgrounds’ but everybody I showed said it was cuter if I kept it like that.)
That works as a nice segue into how I created the backgrounds - since this comic project was supposed to seamlessly flow into the kickstarter trailer, I had to make the drawings, the shading style, the photo-realistic backgrounds all consistent to the trailer.
Initially, the backgrounds were made from a photo, I took of a shopping mall car park, which I photoshopped to look more like the asylum/jail-esque building the story was set in.
Before
After
For the website portion of my project, I had assistance by Joshua Smellie, who created the website for me, and worked with me to make sure my ideas were actually practical and worked within this medium.
I had to whittle down ideas like the characters grabbing the cursor and a parody of ‘The Outer Limits’ opening in which the screen would flatten into a line - this was deemed impossible without javascript.
Throughout the webcomic, the characters break time by becoming animated in a world of still images - Initially this was going to be done through .gif’s but a gif as large as the other pages, that still kept the same quality, to give that seamless flow of the narrative, was too much for photoshop to handle, let alone someone’s internet - So I used .Swf’s instead, and relied on the user having flash player to play these animated pages - this unfortunately meant phone users wouldn't be able to view them.
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The .Swf feature allowed for limited amount of audience interaction, like having the reader allow the characters to become animated, but also having a more direct involvement by having you actually save them from danger.
Within the context of the story, this is how Arkac gets the idea to reset reality into the initial video game Kickstarter that started this entire mess - by having the reader (you) control the art and directly battle the Author (me)
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Unfortunatly, however - Arkac uses up all the budget on the trailer video, and as a result, the medium is reverted back before the .Swf interactions, back before the digitized web comic, back before the printed book, and arriving at pre-production... a script.
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Arkac of course figures out how to utilise this to his advantage, but not before M. and Nex decide to leave him - finally deeming him as dangerous.
Without illustrations Arkac decides he can just edit the words of the script - making sure M. and Nex dont leave him, and that HE controls the story.
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this is where this go a little off the rails - Arkac destroys the website
