Shrimp People featured on Manawaker Studio's Flash Fiction Podcast!

The short story Shrimp People is now online as the latest episode of Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast!

The Flash Fiction Podcast has been one of my favorite quick hits of science fiction short story goodness over the past year, so it was quite an awesome experience to hear narrator CB Droege’s dulcet tones reading words I’d written.

The Flash Fiction Podcast logo, by Manawaker Studio

In the short story, a woman deals with unexpected cross-cultural issues when she takes her two alien crew-mates out for lunch to her favorite lunar restaurant.

And, as a bonus, here’s one of my concept sketches that I made while first writing the short story, of a Yutu Spacer (aka Shrimp Person):

The Story behind the Story: A Spaceman Walks Into a Bar

So, pretty much every character in the Star Wars universe, no matter how brief or small an appearance, has a name, a detailed backstory, and a dedicated entry on Wookipedia. Take, for example, the famous Cantina scene in the OG Star Wars (aka A New Hope, if you’re an utter revisionist philistine)

See this guy?

Why that’s Hem Dazon, an Arconan Scout, of course! Here, you can learn all about him here, on Wookipedia:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Hem_Dazon

What about this raffish wolfman gent?

That’s frequent bar patron and Defel fortune hunter Arleil Schous, duh!

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Arleil_Schous

What about this rando?

Danz Borin, bounty hunter, pilot, and Wookipedia page subject.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Danz_Borin

I think you get the point, but literally, almost everyone in this relatively quick, dense scene has a whole life explored in the Star Wars expanded universe.

https://sites.google.com/site/starwarswhoswho/home/who-s-who-in-mos-eisley-cantina

Almost everyone.

There’s one guy who has no history, no known name. An anonymous figure in a 1960s era yellow pressure suit, casually walking through the background of the bar. Known only by the cryptic moniker Cantina Spaceman.

And I’m not the only one who noticed this background mystery.

This guy has an action figure…

(Technically fan made on Etsy but hey, I’ll count it)

…but no backstory.

Until now.

Click me to learn the true truth behind the Cantina Spaceman!

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Okay, so a little more background on this story; some of my favorite random details when researching this whole crazy thing.

The suit Cantina Spaceman dude wears is called a Windak Pressure Suit, and it’s British in origin, from the 1960’s:

https://everexcollett.wordpress.com/windak/

This led to the idea of a Cold War era teleporter experiment done by the Royal Air Force, in partnership with the United States Air Force. My personal headcanon is that the USAF didn’t want to test a potentially unstable technology on American soil, and that they partnered with the British to do it ‘safely’ across the pond, in case things went wrong.

RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge are real military bases in the UK, both had some level of involvement with the USAF as well, and they really were referred to as ‘The Twins’. They were involved in some spooky stuff in real life; both bases were the sites of UFO sightings, RAF Bentwaters in August 1956 (the Lakenheath-Bentwaters incident), and RAF Woodbridge in 1980, with the Rendlesham Forest incident.

But what really sealed the deal for me as the setting for this story is that RAF Bentwaters has a structure with funky, retro-futuristic brutalist stylings affectionately known as ‘the Star Wars Building’:

From Bentwatersparks.com

So there you have it, one possible answer to the mystery of the Cantina Spaceman, and a little peek into the mad glee that goes into these kinds of short stories. If you enjoyed the story and/or this blog entry, consider joining our mailing list here! And thank you for reading!

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PS: One final note, I hope anyone who reads A Spaceman Walks Into a Bar will have a very different take on this classic sound effect from 2:05 the next time they watch Star Wars…

New Zine out today! THE KILLBOT LURKS

Skitter has been accepted to Genreblast Film Festival 2023!

Check out the premiere of the upcoming horror short at the Genreblast Film Festival, happening August 31 to September 3, in Winchester, Virginia!

Writer and director Ted Hogeman checks the camera on the set of SKITTER

Actor Brian Terrill and Assistant Director Christine Haley on the set of SKITTER

The cast and crew of SKITTER: Ted Hogeman, Christine Haley, Gopi Jayaprakash, Brian Terrill, Sudeshna Mukherjee

How we used Midjourney in our 2023 DC 48 Hour Film Project

We like to get a little experimental with our 48 Hour Film Project shorts. There’s nothing quite like testing out new techniques and tricks in the heat of a timed filmmaking project, and for 2023’s Washington DC 48 Hour Film Project I decided to put the generative AI app Midjourney to the task of helping us create several scenes for our short, INFORMATIONAL HUMAN CENTRIC VACATION FILM.

As an image generator, the way Midjourney works is that when prompted with a few lines of text, it uses machine learning to create a new image, drawn from patterns learned by sorting through a dataset of many, many other images, and Vox made a great video explaining how this all works much better than I can, available here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVcsDDABEkM

The first time I used it, it felt almost like magic (and much like magic, it has a bright side and a dark side, something I’ll be talking about in another post, soon). In the interest of transparency in the face of a new technology, I wanted to share the prompts we used for each of the Midjourney generated images included in our short:

PROMPT: A massive flat flying saucer with black windows and red stripes hovers over the US Capitol Building on a bright sunny day, blue cloudless sky

PROMPT: Ice palaces on an alien world, towering spires made of translucent ice amid a snowy alien landscape, realistic photograph, drones shot, --ar 16:9

PROMPT: Looking down on a snowy alien landscape, blizzard blowing, spires of ice rising up towards the sky --ar 16:9

PROMPT: Looking down on a snowy alien landscape, blizzard blowing, spires of ice rising up towards the sky --ar 16:9

PROMPT: Two people sip wine as they look over a fancy modern architechture balcony at a sea of endless sunset thunderstorm clouds, golden hour lighting --ar 16:9

PROMPT: An industrial platform floating among the clouds at sunset, golden hour, beautiful view, --ar 16:9

PROMPT: A spider-webbed beach at night, dark blue, alien world. Chittering arachnids. Thick clumps of webbing on alien trees. Landscape shot. --ar 16:9

PROMPT: Futuristic Sci-fi space station with large rectangular picture window looking out on the Earth's horizon from orbit --ar 16:9

PROMPT: A futuristic science fiction mineshaft. Underground. LED lighting. Rock walls. --ar 16:9

PROMPT: Propaganda poster design for an alien empire, black background, stylized red graphic of a flying saucer firing energy beams --ar 3:4

(Used as the poster in the background of a couple of shots, the flag over the White House in the ending credits, and also the background for the film’s poster)

PROMPT: people at a fancy high-tech restaurant biting into squid and tentacles, photograph, full frame camera, realistic, shallow depth of field, led lighting --v 5.1 --ar 16:9

PROMPT: A buffet inside a restaurant where all the trays are filled with carnivorous alien creatures --ar 16:9

PROMPT: A buffet inside a restaurant where all the trays are filled with carnivorous alien creatures --ar 16:9

Side note, the first time I did this prompt, I accidentally misspelled it as ‘Buffett’, which led to this hilarious image of Warren Buffett at a Buffet:

PROMPT: an all-that-can-eat-you buffett

PROMPT: A dinner plate with a sentient vegetable begging not to be eaten --ar 16:9

PROMPT: alien-newt-squid-starfish-monster having a great day terrorizing tourists on the national mall with its many claw tendrils

(There were several variations of the aliens in the end credits, something Midjourney makes remarkably easy. I also further modified them in Procreate to give them eyes)

If you’re interested in a more in depth look at the process of generating each of these images, and the practical aspects of how we integrated them into the short, drop a comment below and I may make a behind-the-scenes video of how we used Midjourney in the edit in more detail!

And if you haven’t seen the short, here it is!