Jim Munroe

Digital Janitor

October 25, 2011

This month we’re releasing the first 5 minutes of the new lo-fi sci-fi movie, which introduces the digital janitor. In each of the coming three months we will be introducing a new character from our mockumentary. Check it out here.

It’s also a part of the Celtx Seeds program, where we’ve additionally posted a little quick-and-dirty interview with a couple of us. We focused on a tips/how-to approach rather than, y’know, our motivations and artistic aesthetic. Not that that’s irrelevant, but since Celtx is a scriptwriting app we figured most of the people watching would be fellow filmmakers.
Ghosts Materializes

August 22, 2011

In 2040, jobs suck in a whole new way.

Our new lo-fi sci-fi mockumentary, Ghosts With Shit Jobs, is finally finished! Check out the brand new trailer above or at the official site. Click through for my exec producer/writer/co-director notes. (more…)
The Difference Engine Initiative

July 20, 2011

Last year I was speaking at the Game Developers Conference and saw Robin Hunicke‘s excellent microtalk (see it here at minute 24) about the continuing gender disparity in the games industry. Many talks of this type are documenting the ongoing systemic oppression of women, which is important and valid work. But Robin’s talk channelled Rosie the Riveter. It had a “this is broken, let’s fix it” attitude that was totally inspiring.

Mare Sheppard and I decided to start the Difference Engine Initiative.

As part of the OMDC-supported TIFF Nexus, the Hand Eye Society will be running two gamemaking incubators for women in Toronto, one in August-September, and one in October-November. By introducing new gamemakers from under-represented groups into our community, the Difference Engine Initiative aims to diversify what kind of videogames are made. Our first focus is women…

Find out about next week’s info session and how to apply for this free program over here.
David Malki ! and Ryan North Interview

July 1, 2011

I’ve recently been inspired by the amazing long-form interview WTF podcast to revive the Inspiring Creators Series here on No Media Kings. The thing I love about Mark Maron’s style is that he is the opposite of the objective reporter — he’s a confessional, personal, self-obsessed egomaniac, and you end up loving him for it. I think when ever I was doing these interviews in the past I felt like the noble thing to do was to make it all about the person I was interviewing, when really I was most interested in having a open discussion with my peers and fellow cultural workers.

But anyway: Machine of Death. A smart and funny crowdsourced science fiction anthology self-published by a bunch of webcomic creators becomes a #1 best seller on Amazon, is publicly denounced by right wing pundit Glenn Beck and generally flies in the face of every scrap of received wisdom about publishing. Rethinking publishing is something I know a thing or two about, and what’s even better is I know these guys, so I thought it’d be a good way to try out this whole conversational approach. David was in town for TCAF and he and Ryan nicely made their way out to my place overlooking the railway in the Junction. We chatted for about an hour and a half and I cut thirty minutes out.

Machine of Death is available as a free e-book and in a print edition, and if you like it you should consider submitting a story (July 15th deadline!).

No Flash? Download the MP3 here or here.

If you dig this, you might want to subscribe to the Inspiring Creators podcast (RSS2 or itunes) or check out my other (older, more stilted) interviews with videogame maker Jon Mak, comics artist Carla Speed McNeil, or Wholphin DVD editor Brent Hoff.
E-Book FAQ

June 21, 2011

How much do you charge for digital products? For a decade my answer to that was “nothing!” It was freeing to be able to give away stuff, unhampered by material costs of production. I’ve been giving away e-books since 2000, and I’ve benefited from this in a number of ways.

However — in case you missed it — things have changed in the last decade. The print book market has been becoming less viable, and the digital becoming more so. Also the e-book reading experience is becoming more and more comparable to the print one. At a personal level, I’m reading as much on my phone as I am on the page.

So: I’ve decided to charge something for them now. But how much?

That’s up to you. Whatever you think is fair and whatever you’re happy to pay. If you’re looking for examples, read on.

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Design It Yourself… With Others talk and workshop, Breda (Netherlands)

May 5, 2011

I’m going to be doing a talk and workshop in Holland next week on DIY promotion and videogame making. Should be fun! (more…)
Fantastic Arcade Panels (Austin TX.)

September 21, 2010

Fantastic Fest, the amazing-sounding genre film fest in Austin, has added a game component and invited me to be on their advisory board. As if that wasn’t flattering enough, they’re flying me out to speak on a few panels. (more…)
A Graphic Division of Labour

August 19, 2010

A lot of people find quantifying the creative process to be distasteful somehow, but I dig hour logging — I keep track of how much time I’m spending on most of my projects. It gives me a way to predict timelines for similar projects in the future, and there’s something geekily satisfying about all that addition at the end of a day. It didn’t really work well with the movie project I’m working on, too many people and too many working styles, but it worked well with Shannon and I on the Sword of My Mouth graphic novel.

[Shannon, by the way, is currently on tour on the west coast — she’s doing a book launch at Lucky’s on Aug. 24th in case you live in Vancouver!]

So here’s a breakdown of how much time we each spent working on the book.
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Build Your Own Indie Arcade Cabinet

July 29, 2010

Last year I organized a project where we gutted an ’80s era arcade cabinet and filled it full of indie games. Jph Wacheski, the chief retrofitter, wrote the article below for people wanting to do the same in the most recent Broken Pencil.

Lots of people are making their own games these days — point-and-click tools like Scratch and GameMaker are making it more accessible for non-programmers, and it’s easy to get your game out there via the internet. But wouldn’t it be even cooler to get you and your friends’ games out there on an old-school arcade cabinet?

The old cabinets are generally made to play one specific game, but you can re-fit it with a PC and a display and wire up the existing controls to make playing new games possible. Many people have been doing this to run emulators of the classic games — MAME cabinets can run hundreds of old games on a single cabinet. The Hand Eye Society, Toronto’s videogame culture collective, wanted to do a similar thing, but with locally made games. They debuted the Torontron, which plays six hand-crafted games by Toronto indies, at the last Canzine. Jph, who did the retrofitting, takes us through the steps he took.

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Roundsdoctors and Hexslingers

July 17, 2010

Two recent book trades that I felt I got the better deal of — A Dream on Two Wheels and A Book of Tongues.

Wheels is a smart and whimsical cyclist alternate reality written by Sarah A. Chrisman, who not only handmakes her books but also a selection of hats you can wear while reading them. Lovely!

Tongues is a baroque masterpiece. The worldbuilding is as dense and rich as China Miéville’s, and the cowboy sex smells of Jean Genet’s forbidden machismo. The fact that this outlaw confabulation has come from a debut novelist from Toronto and a Toronto publisher of excellent weird spec-fiction just makes me extra-excited.
Sword of My Mouth’s Word of Mouth

May 24, 2010

Review wise, we’ve had a pretty nice response from places like Bust, Boing Boing, and the Onion A.V. Club — check out the blurbs here. Also, tor.com has published an excerpt — you can read the first chapter there.

We got a bit of coverage at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival — the guys from Vepo Studios interviewed me for their great piece on self-publishing comics and I rambled on with the guys with RGB Filter as well. (Sadly, Shannon hates being videotaped.)

More recently we drove to Detroit and did a launch at Leopold’s Books, a fantastic new bookstore with an emphasis on comic/zine/visual culture. Greg, the owner, interviewed us on stage. Probably the nicest thing was hearing that he was worried the comic was going to be another exploitive take on Detroit in the “ruin porn” genre but was pleasantly surprised to see it was not.

UPDATE: Quill & Quire gave it a starred review: “Munroe has created another stunning, thought-provoking work that will linger in the reader’s mind.” The Indypendent has an interesting contrasting review of three Detroit books, including ours. Also, Shannon’s touring the west coast in August! Drop her a line if you want her to come to your town.
Promoting the Hell Out of It

May 3, 2010

Hey, we’re putting out a graphic novel treating the Rapture irreverently — we’re damned anyway, might as well get the word out about Sword of My Mouth! First up — science-fiction powerhouse io9.com is running a contest where you can win a copy of the print edition by rewriting my dialogue. It’s had a hundred entries in the first six hours, but there’s 18 hours left!

Secondly — what with the urban farming theme and spring being here and all, we figured it’d be fun to make seed packets marketed for the post-Rapture world — ones that don’t need the light of God to grow. (The first twenty people to buy a copy of Sword of My Mouth at the Toronto launch get one.) So Scott made a nice design and Shannon went to take some pictures “in context” as it were at a garden centre. The photo and the altercation that followed with the manager follows below. (more…)