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Mother represents my creativity, ability, resourcefulness, and diligence. It is a large universe several years in the making whose medium and story have changed over time, but the characters and style have remained consistent. To me, Mother is one of the most important creative and technical collaborative efforts I have ever pursued.
Mother first began as an inspiration that bloomed into a full-length
feature film screenplay, which I still hope to become a reality
in the future. I adapted five of the scenes from the screenplay
and developed a short 30 minute film with my friends and father.
The screenplay went through a few iterations, focusing on developing
a cohesive story and making the characters more alive. Then, out
of necessity for one of my project based classes at Georgia Tech,
Mother became a platformer video game on the Game Boy Advance.
You can see a full, detailed history of Mother here.
In its several revisions of development and medium, Mother has become more refined and consistent, with a fleshed out, uniform design style deeply rooted in 80s nostalgia and science fiction. The design of the universe itself, however, is meaningless without the ability to experience it. Through my skills, versatility, and resourcefulness I have been able to deliver multiple means to experience this universe across different mediums.
Sometime in March of 2016, I watched Zootopia in theaters. Twice. I fell in love with the movie after watching it and developed a strong inspiration to write something - anything - but I had no clue what to write. The sensation persisted within me for several days until eventually on the bus to a band event, both out of boredom and annoyance, I opened up a Google Doc on my phone and began writing.
I had no clue what I was writing, but it didn't feel as though I had something to write; rather, it felt as if I was discovering a new universe. As black text carved into the white canvas of my phone screen, I was excavating characters, events, ideas. There were people I had never heard of yet felt like I could relate to, and they were very interesting people.
The characters I discovered that day - Avara, Vang, Mussel, and Meuford - had such diverse and iconic personalities that fueled me. I wanted to know more about these people, learn of their backstories and conflicts, but to discover this I had to write.
After about five months of writing, I had developed a 317 page screenplay that, while very rough and not well put together, was still something I was proud of. Mr. Mark Pierce, my tenth grade english teacher whose opinion I admire greatly, graciously read the story and provided me with notes and insights. I continued with revisions to the screenplay for several months until I got a fantastic idea.
What if I made a movie.
Of course, attempting to create a full length movie without any prior professional experience was nearly out of the question, but turning my parents' living room into a makeshift studio for a week was quite feasable. I decided to only film five scenes of the monstrouls multitude in the screenplay; these scenes were both feasable to pull off with a limited budget and drove the story of the main characters. The abridged project was aptly titled Mother: Select Scenes from the Motion Picture.
Filming took place the last week of May in 2017, the day after my high scool graduation. The six weeks spent afterwards were filled with video editing, poster designing, and coordinating a venue for screening the movie. By the end of the laborious period my family, friends, and I had a special collaborative project which we all coontributed to and brought to life. The cast and crew of Mother: Select Scenes had a private screening in July of 2017, followed by a one-night public screening in my high school auditorium on July 27th, for which over 100 people attended. That night was singlehandedly one of the most impactful events of my life.
Then for the following year not very much happened of Mother screenwise. I transferred the Google Doc to celtx.com, a professional screenwriting tool, reformatting the entire story to match industry standards. I would occasionally have periods of inspiration and revision, but college had begun and absorbed much of my time. I discovered Seth Worley and strengthened my writing and often attempted to adapt Mother to the glamorized Storyclock of Worley's design. The screenplay now rests in its fourth draft, which I believe to be much stronger than the first, but still not finished.
Mother continued to remain fairly untouched until the spring of 2019, while taking a class at Georgia Tech titled "Media Device Architecture". The class focused on the innerworkings of hardware and hardware/ software communication, and applied this in the context of the Game Boy Advance, which meant that our projects were essentially video games.
Rather than having a final exam or a term paper for the class, each student was required to generate a game that implements a set of requirements and give a live demo presentation of the game. The game could be any design, theme, or style, as long as it followed the certain requirements. Thus, I turned to Mother as my inspiration, as it was already a well thought out universe with story and design that could be implemented and altered to fit into a video game.
Mother: The Video Game became a puzzle/ action platformer with multiple characters to play, where each character had their own level and unique abilities. I blew away my Teaching Assistants with the game and scored full marks on the project, fully demonstrating my undersanding of the concepts from the course. Additionally, though, the project let me rediscover Mother. It was no longer the Google Doc where I first learned the names and attitudes of the characters I love, but an entire universe which I could express and interpret over several media, with each one providing more insight into the Culmination of Characters, Events, and Ideas.
The design for Mother draws its roots from several different artifacts, time periods, and my personal interests that together create a truly unique and stunning universe.
Several of the characters and species that exist in Mother can be attributed to Zootopia and Gary Larson's The Far Side, which provide a large source of absurdity and diversity to the universe. There are a plethora of half-human species such as agressive Lobster men and tribal Axolotl people in the universe, along with sentient animals such as intelligent cows that take over a farm and plan global domination utilizing a chicken army. On a more tame side, characters are often referred to as a certain animal, such as "rat", "pig", or "sheep". If you are familiar with either of the previously listed inspirations, I think it is clear to see how they have impacted the universe.
Another integral component of Mother is the cultural style. Mother
is a deep-rooted 1980s nostalgia machine with names, costuming,
scenes, dialogue, posters, and music serving as an homage and
continuation of the beloved decade. Obviously, for an individual
who spent six months in the 20th century, integrating this time
period into the universe was quite the undertaking. I researched
extensively, listened to hundreds music albums, and analyzed
several science fiction and culturally impactful movies from the
time period. While working on the screenplay, I often tried to
find an explanation for the 1980's prevalance in this universe's
culture, from a mass exodus to space in 1986 to a worldwide
appreciation for the decade, but I eventually settled on "do I
need one?".
Aside from external entertainment and cultural inspirations, Mother is, as all works tend to be of their creators, indicative of myself. The universe is composed of my interests, humors, and outlook on the world. This includes a planet full of dinosaurs, a mysterious gang in an old west town that wears plague doctor masks, using "bean bag" as an insult, highlighting the importance of adventure, skeleton space police pirates, witty bantering between characters, a moon inhabited by giant bugs... And the list continues.
These different inspirations and interests are quite unique and diverse and have come together to build a very different universe. I believe it would be quite difficult to quantify or restrict Mother's design with numbers or words, as it is just so complex and carefully conceived that it lends itself to be out of the box. It is an abstract, absurd universe far from what we have ever seen, yet elicits emotion, nostalgia, and critical consideration of the world we have now.
Mother has been expressed in several different media, from a screenplay to a short film to a video game, and with each medium comes its own set of challenges and skills required to deliver effectively.
After writing the first draft of Mother, I delved extensively into screenwriting, character development, and story structure to make my screenplay the best it can possibly become. I discovered Seth Worley, a writer/ director of short films who focuses on character-driven comedy and high-concept spectacles. I found his online classes Writing 101 and Writing 201 both humourous and inisghtful, and put his teachings to practice. I reworked my story on a fundamental level, focusing on only telling the minimum viable story and stripping away unnecessary characters and events. I developed the ability to analyze my own work and decide what was important. In this endeavour I have strengthened my creative writing, researching, and critical thinking skills, and have delivered what I believe to be a much stronger story than what existed before.
Since I had never directed or edited a live action film of any length, adapting Mother to the screen was quite an undertaking. It required collecting a talented cast and crew, researching props, costumes, and set pieces, and rigorous planning and organization. Aside from the logistics that went into creating the film, the hardest task for me to complete as director was completely translating this universe in my head to a viewable artifact.
For my final project in Media Device Architecture, which I took in spring 2019, I developed a pixel platformer whose theme came from the universe of Mother. I took several of the main characters, looking at their costuming in the film, and developed them into sprites. Each of the main characters was given their own level that was based on an event in the story.
For example, Vang hacks into a computer system to access some valuable data. In the video game the player must navigate through a "computer grid" to hack into the computer. Obviously translating this story to a video game required a strong computational background; the project was built in C and involved state machines, complex gravity, and wall climbing, among other game mechanics. Mother: The Video Game was one of my most favorite projects to work on and adds to the creative universe.
