Tyler Gibb – Writer, Director, Editor, Filmmaker

I’ve got nothing.

I maintain this here web log to – if nothing else – give myself something to write every week or so. Lately though, I’ve been writing so much hors-blog that I don’t have a lot of steam left for a self-indulgent, hey listen to me because I have a net connection, opinion piece.

How will the world go on spinning?

Today I am a vacuum. I have put out and put out and put out to a point where a void for creative energy has been created inside me. I can feel it sucking. Like being thirsty from within your brain. The output has reversed itself. I feel I need to absorb. To suck up energy. Stimuli. To consume.

Just in time for the holiday season.

And it’s good. A good time to let the process of creating reverse itself.

So I’m going to let that happen, fair reader. I’m going to indulge. Recharge. Attack my DVD collection or stare at the twinkling lights on my xmas tree.

Just for a little while.

My wonderful wife-like person has a desk job downtown. As we’re coming up on the end of the year, she decided it was time to do a little desk clean up. In one of the desk drawers she found a small jar of honey that she had stowed there some time ago. She’d brought the sweetener to work to have with her afternoon tea. Evidently she’d misplaced the jar and forgotten about it. She asked me if I thought the honey could still be edible.

Ah, my sweet woman… One more reason to love you. You give me opportunities like these to validate my archive of trivial knowledge by applying it to common, everyday situations!

The honey is definitely edible, I declared. Honey is the only food, in fact, that doesn’t go bad. Jars of it were pulled out of an ancient Egyptian tomb once upon a time and the samples were still good to go.

Those bees know what they’re doing. Not to take anything away from the ancient Egyptians of course, but the pyramids are hardly what you’d call pristine anymore. As a matter of fact, you’d be hard pressed to come up with anything man-made that has the lasting integrity and appeal as bee-made honey. And these days the expiration term on things is just getting shorter and shorter.

But not honey. Because bees don’t mess around. They don’t get distracted. They’ve got their one thing and they keep working on it. Day in and day out, generation after generation. They hone it. They refine it. They make it pure. Elemental.

That’s how you make something with lasting integrity. Lasting appeal.

Mankind Book 3 is still in the works. Just taking a little break here while Photoshop recovers from my working it too hard.

Before Mankind it’d been a while since I’d picked up the drawing pencil, focusing more on the typewriter. Getting back into illustration has been fun. It’s also got me thinking about a question that I used to get asked a lot, especially in art classes. “How do you make up things up from nothing, and get them from your head onto the paper?”

The truth is, I don’t. Not exactly anyway. I think the impression from artists who illustrate the world around them is that people who draw from their brains are working in the same way. Copying the imagined image onto the paper. But it’s not really so – at least not in my case. When I start to draw, I know conceptually what I’m going for, but I can’t say it manifests itself as an actual image in my mind. And every pencil stroke brings with it micro adaptations and recalculations that are ultimately going to effect that image. It’s like constant back and forth between the juices in my head and the physicality of the pencil and paper.

I saw this back and forth play out in a similar fashion when I started directing. You have a concept in mind but there are simply too many variables in the universe for you to ever re-create that exact scene. So you adapt. You recalculate. You have to. I’ve seen – and we may often hear about – directors who have meltdowns when they are unable to adapt in this way. When they try and ultimately fail to recreate what they see in their heads in front of the camera. As though the process of adaptation is a compromise. To the contrary, that’s where the actual skill is required.

I’m glad I don’t have that problem. After all, I’m the only one who knows exactly what I had in mind to begin with so for all intents, what winds up on the paper (or screen) is exactly that.

Photoshop has stopped its brooding. Back to work!

Just in time for Christmas and slightly too late for Halloween, Pride and Prejudice & Zombies with an “illustration” by yours truly.

Have you seen these things? Complete, classic works of literature printed on a single sheet of paper – and they’re totally legible too… From up close.

From a distance however, you can bask in the genius of simplified cut-out illustrations like the one I hatched for the Seth Grahame-Smith redux of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, now being adapted into a feature film / great fucking idea, wish I’d thought of it first: Instead, see large cut-out illustration for which I got paid… A free poster.

All seriousness though, quality prints that you can hang on a wall because turning pages is for suckers.

Here’s the link to Spineless Classics, the publisher of the posters. Make sure to tell them that for you, it’s all about the illo and that hot shot, Tyler Gibb.

I’m starting to get letters so…

Fear not! Mankind Book 3 is in the pipe. It’s on the way. It’s written, it’s drawn, it’s lettered, it’s being coloured as you read this. That’s right. Right this minute.

It’ll be worth the wait. This, I promise.

In the meantime… How many people have you infected today?