Note: this page is a bit of a work in progress. There might be more stuff added later, so check again if you're interest!

Who is Ian/Iana Spencer?

Ian or Iana Spencer (that's me, we're doing this bio-style, in the 3rd person!) is an experimental multi-media artist blending creative styles, mediums, and genres (when they aren't just making whatever they're artistic drives desires, that is!). They are a music producer/musical artist, amateur filmmaker, 2D and 3D visual artist, indie game developer, and writer of both fiction and non-fiction.

Mx. Spencer, who's currently in their mid-twenties, is someone who grew up in the 2000s using desktop and laptop computer, and thus does most (if not all) of their creative work on the computer, with programs like Blender3D (CG suite, ofc), Krita (raster program digital painting), GIMP (also a raster program, but for photo editing; it's an unfortunate acronym, yes.), Inkscape (for graphic designs, which Spencer kind of inadvertantly learned while learning art and getting curious about typography at one point!) Shotcut (a powerful, albiet very obscure, video-editing program, not a lot of good tutorials for it but it's the best free one I've found. I like it better than Premiere Pro, which actually isn't a good metric of comparison bc Adobe products kinda suck bu- oh yeah they supposed to be talking in the 3rd person bio-style sry!), Live 11 (their DAW of choice, and one of the few commercial software they actually enjoy using, they use the Intro editon bc it was cheaper and the 16-track limit accidentally ended up being a boon instead of a limit bc it stopped them from overproducing!)

If you wanna know more about Ian/Iana (or hear them talk about themselves like a human person instead of a artist bio!) check out the About page!

A Sampling of Some of Mx. Spencer's best works!

Alright, that was fun for the mini-bio bit but let's go back to regular first-person perspective (of myself, I mean!).

I'm gonna give you a bit of a sampling of (in my humble opinion) some of my best works to date!

A random assortment of some of my best paintings

I'm gonna do a couple of these!

1. "Red Ekko"

I do like this paint a lot. It's just a character portrait of my sona Ekko, but it's got this certain sense of angst and style that I like a lot. Not much else to say about it

2. "Elf Lady, I Guess."

This one was mostly an excersize in energy, with the polluck-esque paint strokes moving around this unnamed character in 3D space. Perhaps it's some kind of spell she's casting, or some sort of colorful dust she's moving through. That's up for you to decide, as it's very abstract apart from the subject

3. "the best paint I've ever made or will ever make." (Or, "This Has Major Implications For The Tired Cinematic Universe")

This one was a bit of a satirical one. It began as me just doodling random characters, when I looked at how I had positioned them and realized "hey, this looks like, a rly shitty superhero team" and I ran with that. Appropriately, it ended up being a jab at the MCU (something I, and a lot of other people, grew quite tired of after the initial Infinity Saga arc ended and they decided to keep dragging the overarching narrative on anyway, even if where it's supposedly going is not well spelled out and it just becomes a bunch of noise on screen, as James Gunn said). The aesthetic of this piece is something I quite like. Two art things I'm a sucker for are trippy red skies and rly comically rancid vibes. The background being just a discolored sky image and a concrete texture meeting at the horizon line definitely adds to the weirdness. Ofc, I was very inspired by the work of Ville Kallio when making this one, and I'm quite sure that influence shows!

Let's try some music!

1. The God From

This song was off my more recent-ish album No Rapture. The lyrics are about how the wealthy and powerful often (and especially right now) think they can impose their will on reality,, until reality comes crashing down, economic bubbles burst, idiotic buisness ventures fail and fascist empires fall due to both the people they intent to sell to and/or oppress, and the hubris of the regal to think nothing bad could ever happen to them, and that their ideas can and will be imposed on reality, until reality bites back. Yes, it also references Deus Ex quite extensively

2. Change Our Minds

this is one of my more confrentational songs, for sure. It was inspired by certain voting decisions made by the masses that were ill-advised, to say the least. It also contains probably the two rawest stanzas I've ever put into a song: "I will not have sympathy / look what you sick fucks took from me / all we asked was inclusivity / but I guess that's what we get for being minorities", immediately followed by the even less sugarcoated: "Cuz I'm a degen faggot / for now I get away with it because I'm a white bitch / but I know someday they'll come for me / writing this song now while they're still someone to speak out" (that last line in particular referencing that "First they came for the Marxists" poem), stay safe y'all a lot of the world is run by lunatics for the time being!)

3. xxx_meant_2_b_xxx

Alright, how about something a LITTLE bit lighter! This is one of those "the lyrics sound like a love song but it's actually a metaphor for something else" sort of deal, in this case this song is about learning to accept myself. It also has a really driving techno beat, lush synths and trap-style drum patterns during the verses. definitely one of my "poppier" art pop songs for sure, but I quite like it!

4. Moonrave

No singing on this one! It's a mostly straight-forward electro-house banger. I grew up with this stuff, got into into around 2017 (the golden era of Monstercat) and a made this song as a bit of a nostalgic treat to my inner 17yo who wasn't yet competent enough to make music like this. But now I am! Part of the reason I'm including this in the QuickstART is because I started out learning music production by making EDM, though it was actually music production that introduced me to EDM, not the other way around. I originally wanted to make music like the industrial artist I was listening to at the time, in the peak of my rivethead days, but most of the relevant tutorials at the time were from EDM producers, so I kinda was force to give EDM a chance and I'm glad I was! It ended up influnencing my production style to come in incredible ways, so many of the crazy weird techniques I use are just EDM techniques, like how I use OTT and saturation of basically everything to get a thick sound, or that pumping sidechained synth technique you heard in that previous sound

5. Off Your Mellow

Just wanted to stuff one more EDM banger in here for the hell of it. This one's a Drum n Bass (Neurofunk) track

6. Memory Is Precious

This song is about the entertainment industry, how it's become caught in the tech industries thorns, how it's begun to eat itself and resent the artists that allow it to exist, and where headed. Totally Unrelated: Do you know what the Hollywood Studio Collaspe of the 1970s was? Basically the big studios took power away from directors and artists, ended up losing all their talent to the Red Scare via blacklisting, started pumping out unwatchable shlock that know one went to see, left previously smaller directors like Lucus and Spielburg with fresh new ideas to take the mantle of the new auteurs. (Granted, there was a weird period in the early 70s, inbetween the collaspe and the new auteurs, where a bunch of coked-out doomers were making edgelord misery-porn dramas soo... that might also be something we see for awhile...)

So anyway... speaking of films, I'm sorta into making those

My Filmography

A note about me self-describing as an amateur filmaker: Some of you may feel the word "amateur" is a bit self-depricated or "fishing for compliments" so to speak. Yes, I am aware I'm a lot more compentent than a stereotypical "amateur", but I really use that term more to describe the stage of getting into filmmaking I'm in rather than the skill-level. I've been studying films a LOT longer than I've rly been making them, and as of yet my first real feature-length web-film is still only in pre-production (I'm sorry, I need to get one that) so even though my short films are pretty to look at and reasonably well-shot with visual-storytelling in mind, they are still just shorts, I haven't been making films for very long in the grand scheme of things, my knowledge of these various kinds of shots comes from learning about it (because taking film in highschool peaked my curiousity, and I started learning more on my own time) and observing how I saw it applied in existing films, so in other words, I'm reasonably skillful in how I compose shots, do VFX, edit in post-production, etc, but I'm still not very *experienced* in filmmaking, just bc I've only actually been putting what I've taught myself into practice for a fairly short amount of time, which is why I consider myself an amateur, at least til I've been doing it for a bit longer (unless A24 wants to give me a call, but don't rly think I have the clout, the experience in live-action or a big enough portfolio for that lol)

1. "Ghost Room"

Short Film, Surreal/Arthouse

I'm putting this one first bc it's a fairly straight-forward art film. During a certain time I was making a lot of faux-claymation films bc I had just figured out that technique (for those curious: done with Blender's sculpting tools, and using single image render, rendering it frame-by-frame and manually saving/naming each image while animating straight-ahead, much like real stop-motion. Ofc, no rig was used, nor were any of blender animation tools, really). This one's even more akin tone-poetry than most of them, the plot being non-existent (or at least non-sensical) rather than just surreal or abstract. A lot of moody shots close-up facial shots and medium close-up POV shots between the two characters, bizzare-yet-etheral energy, all topped off with a Kubrick scare (while ekko is looks up slightly, overtly directed less at the other character and more at the actual camera) that's less unnerving as it baffling and urges you to further question what exactly it was you just witness

2. "Null Intentions"

Short Film, Psychological Horror

This one's a bit spookier. No jumpscares, all unnerving psychological atmosphere. The animation is very limited, appropriate given the slower pace, but the over-blown film grain more than makes up for that stillness. It's got a real sense of uneasy melencholy, non-literal angst and psychosexual horror. I wanted to do something a bit inspired by the Freudian monster designs of Silent Hill, the first shot might honestly be my favorite, in all honesty. I often think about composing a shot like painting a painting, where you position each element affects both the aesthetic appeal and the visual storytelling. The checker-patterned wall lit by the green light, while the light shining on the visible side of Ekko is red, making the "actor" feel almost cut off from their surroundings, like a cutout, almost. We hear the monster before we see it, then once we do, I start adding in those spooky dutch angles >:3

3. "Interview With The Horrible Little Man Who Lives Under The Sink"

Short Film, Mockumentary/Surrealist/Comedy

This one's a bit of a goofier one. I went to great length to make it look stylistically styleless, so to speak, dilberately adding in a background noise sample and color-grading it to try to make it look like it was shot a a crappy camcorder from the 2000s. It's meant to illicit that "home video" vibe. It's an "interveiw" with a CG "claymation" flesh homoculus creature who was (in his words) "born from the hearts of evil and power men" but he also remarks that he's "actual pretty chill". His voice in just a old-school Microsoft Sam text-to-speach with the params meticulously set to give him a thick but unidentifiable accent.

4. "The Donut That Makes You Sad"

Short Film, Horror-Comedy/Absurdist

This one's goofy and unnerving. I kinda don't wanna spoil it but I'll point out a one thing: That painting on the wall. What the fuck even is that? It's just there to give an even more weird and rancid vibe lol

5. "Normal Mall"

Short Film, Comedy/Surreal/Arthouse/Absurdist

Back to something a bit more etheral. There's a bit of surreal comedy going on here, with Ekko looking at a price tag that doesn't make any damn sense. (This mall is not normal at all!) That first shot, while really just a still image, is beautiful nontheless. That one close-up reaction shot (the one right after the "price") is kinda funny, I think, just a face sheer "I don't even fucking know, dude."

Games!

Now, some of these will be browser games, but others will be an itch.io download, just fyi

1. STONKS!

Let's kick it off with a browser game! This one is a silly one, basically a fake stock market where stocks go up and down in random increments, you start of with a bit of money, and you have to invest "wisely". I put "wisely" because all the stocks are absurd and satircal, from a trashy dating app called "Fuckr" to a games retailer called "Goonstop" that assures you unprompted that it is "not a mob buisness"

2. I Dreamt Of Sanguia

This one was based on a dream I had about a fantasy world that was dying. It's basically a surrealist micro-Skyrim, you're given no instructions, you just go out and go on what swash-buckling adventure you want in the tiny open-world filled with dungeons, enemies and wonder

3. Hellcaster: Raven's Awakening (Cancelled videogame version)