I’ve been making a bunch of remix comics based on the Section 92a cartoon by New Zealand’s gift to comix, Dylan Horrocks

Here’s some  of them.

Yeah, that’s that for that lot.

On Wednesday I get to take down the sign at HAPPY Bar that says “All recording is prohibited” for an entire hour.

The reasons why I want to release Emissary are pretty varied, but there are a couple of pretty big reasons:

1. Emissary is about the internet, and how I am part of it. Morally I couldn’t just riff on the internet without saying it was okay for other people to do the same. Well, I could, but that would be a dick move.

2. I want people to feel like they have a measure of ownership over the satire and amusement that was produced for them, and I want them to feel like they can use it, that they can share it and that they can build upon it. You buy access to an event with a ticket, you should be allowed to have a record of it under your own control too.

3. Remember Section 92a of the Copyright Act? I had started piecing together the show when the Labour Government had just flagrantly lied that the public had not bothered to consult with them on the bill. I was still writing it when the protest at the Bee Hive happened because the new government were just as asinine as the last. Possibly more so. That got me steamed, and I realised that if I didn’t actually step up and release my stuff in a way that allowed others the same rights that I desperately wanted, I would be at the mercy of what ever small to middle sized industries (like a teen with a bottle of scrumpy, it don’t take much) bought out New Zealand politics. The license is a toasty little jacket that keeps me from freezing in the open air of the public domain and suffering heat stroke inside copyright.

4. Some of what I’m doing is satire. New Zealand is no Guatemala, where you can be thrown into jail for a twit or seditious Youtube video and I’m no Jonathan Swift, but gosh darn it we kiwis have a healthy respect for the law. This way if one of my ideas takes off the other nerdly and diligent kiwis will be able to share the idea, and an idea can only grow if people have access to it.

And that’s why I use that Creative Commons thing for Emissary.

NZ on Screen launched this week. Thankfully they made sure to have a high quality and low bandwidth modes, which is choice considering how  many kiwis are still on dial up.

 Amusingly, the first I heard of it was a bunch of teen girls chatting about it on the bus. Go viral marketing! 

 Obviously, the site is in its infancy, and hopefully we’ll get more than just the slim excerpts of series and shows than what is currently up there. I for one have heard really good things about Mcphail and Gadsby and would really liked to have watched more than just an episode to know what the fuss was about.  What interested me was how Skitz hasn’t made an appearance yet; considering that the Gibson Group is all over the place (one of the first people interviewed is even Dave Gibson) and Jemaine Clement and Rhys Darby are part of the Conchords phenomena, it could have been a boost to the initial campaign. 

Strangely there is also a lack of Havoc and Newsboy, Jeremy Wells (Newboy) gets a lot of love with having Eating Media Lunch, The Unauthorised History of New Zealand, and his Intrepid Journey to Libya shown. Maybe they just got Wellsed out and something had to go? Maybe Mr. Havoc threw up in some ones bathroom? I dunno.  Speaking of noticeably missing content, I do feel a strange relief that they haven’t many historic stinkers for the opening gambit; I smell no whiff of Melody Rules, to use the ur example.

The other really part of the site is the awesome sounding Screen Talk, which currently is very small and much of the content is stuff that the average person won’t find that interesting. Things like production biographies for example. Thankfully, I’m not the average person and quite enjoyed poking around. I noticed that the Creative Commons was also utilised with Screen Talk. I love the Creative Commons, so am really chuffed to see that some of this is being used. A history of a program with a little criticism attached to it is a fantastic way to generate a useful piece of creative cultural capital. I hope that users or atleast, a variety of different critics are allowed to access and generate this content with the site. 

It’s a good start, and I’m hoping to see more good things from them shortly.  Because, they just seem to be more onto it than the group who desided to make TVNZ’s website keyword centric. Yeah.

UPDATE: Brenda from NZONSCREEN is my hero for being so hard hitting about the flash facts.

This little guy’s name is hearty the heart. Aww.

Just a note: Yes my New Zealand Fringe show has been accepted, but there ahve been significant changes to what I was going to do. Watch this space? Yeah, why not?

My final assignments for my honours papers have been due in these last weeks, including my scripts. So I’m just a little bit dead in the brain.

EDIT: Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connel did most of the work on this specific project. I needs to reads more carefully.
The Dream Cafe, which is the place where, amongst others, Steven Brust, writes, (the guy who writes the Dragerea Novels,) are three pages into their “21st Century Business Models for Artists” blog series” which is shaping up to be a interesting  read. It’s also a Creative Commons document, so hopefuly we’ll get a bunch of other creative professionals adding in their two cents and creating a useful document culster. 

And now I flee back to my word processor.

The first being that I am really quite interested in development  diaries. I enjoy both reading them and writing them. When I was doing undergraduate theatre at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW for short,) we were required to keep a workbook which we would hand in every so often for evaluative measures. The students who didn’t hate writing it often had really interesting stuff in their books. Often, technical development journals , while often incomprehensible (to me at least, especially when they start posting foreign code), are also, if not fun, then at the very least interesting reading; who doesn’t get a little thrill each time a project forks? This blog is written for people like me, who took that as a rhetorical question.

The second reason is that I hope this could be of some use to other theatre, comedy or improv people who are trying to build themselves a show. All too often theatrical people are terrified of sharing technologically, or try to hide behind a veneer of mysticism. It’s as they are losing value or status by sharing with other performers. Anyone who has tried to research the lighting designs of a “certain well known American lighting designer,” can see how persnkitty theatrical people are about protecting their processes and about their intellectual property. This has an end result of keeping Theatre skills and facts inaccessible to all but the few who aren’t hampered by the tyranny of distance. I don’t see how it could hurt me to show people what I’ve done and letting them examine my successes and failures for their own benefit.  So, considering this, I’ve decided to release this entire site on some sort of Creative Commons license. I must admit that I’m still not sure if I will give the final work to the commons or not, but there is a good chance that at least a chunk of it will be.

The third reason is totally selfish. I hope that by making an effort to blog about what I am achieving and how I am doing it, I am giving myself another excuse to keep on slogging through these hard yards. I, of course, hope that I am  able to succeed and succeed well, so good luck to me.

I guess I should really get to work on it then.