Mad Rag – Issue 1

I started to dream up Mad Rag some time ago. I love the unruly styles of zines and street mags, and have always wanted to make one. When thinking about making Mad Rag I wondered how I could incorporate animation, sounds and video too. It’s also a big part of my creative style and practice to have outlets that I can experiment, blurt and have fun with while I work through my ideas. So, bringing all of this together, ta-da! I present Mad Rag – Issue 1.

Mad Rag is as intentional as it is unintentional, full of experiments, play, just for fun, no rules, sketches, and ideas that I want to see in action. Many of the sketches in Issue 1 are from my sketchbooks. About a year ago I began to sketch an image every morning. I intentionally made it a really small space on a passport-sized note book so I could quickly draw my ideas, so for Mad Rag I’ve brought some of these sketches to life.

Animating the jellyfish came from playing with a new animation app I was using on the iPad. I was interested in working across two frames of movement to make their tentacles wobble. The 3 faced cloud creature is from a sketch I did, and I am interested in how often I sketch characters with multiple faces displaying contrasting emotions. I wonder if they’re all me?! I also bring myself into the frame, with a nonchalant attitude and narrate exactly what’s going on in the animation, as a kind of breaking the fourth wall. And to take the breaking of walls further, I break out of the animation into ‘reality’ filming my hands puzzling pieces of the animation together in real life to then snap back into the animation. I love the twists and turns of the unexpected, the essence of Mad Rag!

In the second last scene I include some cute dinos from a Kawaii drawing tutorial I was doing on YouTube, and then mixing up the media, it cuts to a photo where I animated a graffitied dog’s fart. Again, the very essence of Mad Rag!

My favourite thing to do in all my videos is voice overs and sound effects. Sometimes I’m finding sound effects online, but mostly I like to create the sound effects myself, sometimes with my voice or using objects to mimic the sounds. I then put audio filters on my sound effects to amplify them, for comedy value, of course. 

Finally, to share, that the theme music is totally AI, it was scary how easy and accurately it came up with this song:

The full Mad Rag theme song, by a robot.

So, that’s the Mad Rag rundown, watch Issue 1 in full below. It’s so fun to play and experiment and try new things, I encourage you to try something out, just for fun, today and everyday§!

With hugs and love,
jda