Wow, just 2 weeks left until 2018 and the big shift. This is episode 069, Almost. Because after 67 episodes, not counting 009 the lost episode we’re almost done. For 16 months straight I’ve gassed on and on, unfolding the 12 going on 13 year history of Daughter of God, sketching out a personal exegesis, foisting half baked creation myths and blustering about the meaning of life. Going all theoretical and yammery, full of mad vision and talk, talk, talk.

This Daughter of Godcast Gentle Release has been an introduction to my unfinished opus, the movie Daughter of God, and I’ve tried to tell the story of how making this movie made me, Dan Kelly aka Shri Fugi Spilt.

Rambling recollections and ranty revelations have set the stage for what is about to happen.

Daughter of Godcast Episode 069, Almost from Daughter of Godcast – dog.movie on Vimeo.

This is either the last or the second to last episode of the Daughter of Godcast Gentle Release.  We’ve been digging around in an archeological midden heap, brushing off artifacts, rummaging around in the basement. Now let’s climb in the elevator and ride up. Get in on the ground floor of an epic artistic adventure. The Daughter of Godcast Crowd Completion.

I am not sure this has ever been done before. Plenty of movies test screen before going into distribution, but I’ve never heard of audience feedback starting so early, before the final cut.

Fundraising sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Gofundme encourage fans to donate money to projects. Daughter of God isn’t looking for your money, we want you to collaborate with cognition, by sharing your ideas and opinions in the months ahead.

During the Gentle Release, I’ve rambled, offering recycled and factory fresh metaphors about movie making and human existence. Often shining with insight, other times inscrutable, and occasionally cliche. Maybe these radical theories I’ve spouted about life and movie making are just a lot of hot air.

We’re almost ready for theories to be tested, to turn all this talking into a happening, proof, a movie. I’ve listened to these podcasts just as you have – doing dishes, driving. I too have wondered if all these words amount to mostly gibberish or genius. Time to stop the tell, and start the show. The telling so far has been something of a show, granted… now I’m geeked to convert conjecture and assertions into the tangible, together.

In the next two weeks I invite you to transition the Daughter of Godcast experience, to get more interactive and visual. To offer your notes, critique and  gut reactions. Even though there’s going to be more things to look at and opine about, I’ll do my utmost to keep this podcast a viable stand alone audio experience. Probably.

I’ve done about 7 Episodes on 2016 so far, an action packed year. Let’s recap, filling in the gaps as we go. We’ll wrap the history in this episode, almost.

in episode 056 and 057 I talked about the Uncle Joe emerging from the tunnel on his bicycle shot and showed the version that I roughed out in late January of 2016. I had reactivated my rotoscopers from India, Richa and Eshan to mask off Joe and the bike. I’d slammed together a bunch of toys and nick nacks and done some auspicious foley.  The resulting proof of concept changed everything, inspiring a new approach to VFX, the Toy Universe. When I finally got around to watching The Grand Hotel Budapest in 2017 I realized Wes Anderson had already fallen down this rab

A podcast about movie making and the science fiction featurette, Daughter of God, with Director Shri Fugi Spilt, (Dan Kelly). Daughter of Godcast, Episode 068, Golden. Starting a contemporary American civil war in 2016, (if we’re lucky) vs the superimposition of a global utopia flowing from empathic criteria.

Declaring ourselves to be what we are might feel both empowering and risky. in the words of Morrie Warshawski, by putting ourselves out there, we magnetize the field and invite the like minded to come and play with us. We’re ready to be found. On the cosmic level, we are also inviting resonant resources to show up, flowing into our desire.

For those fixated on duality, everything has an opposite. Existence implies non-existence, and vice versa. Dualism can be confusing though, opposites aren’t always obvious. What’s the opposite of monogamy? Being intimate with lots of people (polyamory) or being intimate with no people, celibacy?

Then there’s right and wrong, judgements based on arbitrary or empathic criteria. For instance, it’s wrong because the bible says so is arbitrary, while it’s wrong because I wouldn’t want that to happen to ME is empathic.

A fundamentalist Christian might take issue with my categorizing the bible as arbitrary criteria. To be fair, ALL authoritative tomes are packed with arbitrary criteria, including chemistry textbooks. Science is a kind of religion too. I’m using arbitrary to mean outside of our own experience and feelings, external as opposed to internal.

Interestingly, the golden rule – do unto others as you would have done unto you – pretty much sums up empathy, and that’s from the bible!  Like other religious texts, the bible codifies both arbitrary and empathic criteria. Variants of the golden rule are extant all over the Earth, the idea could be universal… but the specifics of what we would have done or not done unto us is dependent on culture and personal preference.

In 2016, episode 010, I opined that the rise of Trump might presage a contemporary civil war, if we were lucky. With all the controversy lately about what is right and wrong, the intense polarization, I am wondering if the civil war isn’t already on slow simmer. I have a brother I don’t agree with but that doesn’t mean we’re going to start shooting at each other. We just don’t form a viable polity, we don’t share culture.

Did we ever share culture? We might have shared a story, once upon a time. How about the Velveteen Rabbit? American democracy is like the velveteen rabbit, a stuffed toy who desires to become a real rabbit through the love of his boy. Americans have been snuggling a stuffed rabbit, wishing and dreaming, but our rabbit still isn’t real and perhaps beginning to come apart at the seams.

The national rabbit started out as a patchwork of unpleasant things. Founded on genocide, thriving on slavery for the first hundred years, the USA has since transformed supposed citizens into revenue generators (consumers) to finance a forever war. We have no idea who is actually running the show, but on behalf of consumers, the USA has crushed functional democracies, squandered global resources and oppressed people both within and without it’s borders.

Can we love this rabbit real in spite of his horrific origins? I like my

Howdy and welcome to the Daughter of Godcast, Episode 067, Belief. A podcast about the longest little movie ever, the movie that made me, and coming up the collaborative completion in 2018. Meanwhile we’re mopping up 2016, aswirl with hints, secrets and clues.

Here’s a true story of 2016 converted to a parable, one might say shamelessly exploited, a duct tape and tin foil allegory, but we take the connections wherever we can find them.

At the end of the summer in 2015,  the day Ben left, we chained the big buoy and doom raft to the bottom of Crystal Lake with two massive anchors, 600 and 300 pounds respectively at 20 feet of depth. Summer turned to Fall and I eventually brought the raft in, but procrastinated on the buoy. Fall turned to Winter and a hard freeze locked the buoy into the ice. Bennie and I had walked out on the frozen lake and pretended to be Scully and Mulder investigating an alien space pod.

The Winter blew and blustered into 2016. The spring melt came in April and  as the big ice plates started breaking up, the wind rose and overnight the ice pack dragged the buoy and the two massive anchors a football field to the west. The power of nature. I converted my rowboat into an icebreaker and busted through the jumbled melting plates to unchain and recover the buoy. The primary anchor was nuzzled into a sand crater in the shallows, but still 6 feet below the surface. Two scuba expeditions were needed to winch and roll it all the back to my place, out of the shallows and back into the deeps. What did I learn?

I learned that sometimes interesting things happen when we procrastinate, not necessarily bad things. Embarrassing perhaps and with luck metaphorical. Deeper appreciation for the wild forces and how easily they can shift our ephemeral beliefs.

When Ben and I filled the 55 gallon steel drum with gravel, 8 bags of portland cement, and a gnarly steel core fabricated by Alex, we incarnated a belief system, an idea of massiveness, of immovability. Keeping a doom raft from drifting to shore on a storm tossed Crystal Lake, certainly. But pure trivia when grabbed by sheets of ice and a little wind. An anchor pretty much not even there at all.

Letting the buoy freeze into the ice was probably not simply laziness. This was my way of calling bullshit on beliefs generally, especially my own. Let the seasons change, the sun shine less directly on this little patch of Michigan, and my idea of massiveness is negated. A metaphorical demonstration, a critique of belief.

Why was I wanting a belief critique? Because beliefs can be tenacious, especially about myself, reinforced over 40+ years. Calcified thoughts that make life frustrating. Core assumptions about limitations and unworthiness, while at the same time knowing, feeling magic all around. Like to tear a man in twain.

Making the Daughter of God was akin to discovering the owners manual for the universe. There on page 53, I discovered a detailed description of my vastness, my unique quest and awesome powers. I’d been operating impoverished, a bag of beliefs masquerading as a man.

Now 2016, having the cosmic blueprints laid before me, the formula for practical magic plain as day, my beliefs were so much trivia. The magic was primary now, my human adventure. All beliefs were now up for evaluation, did they support the flow of magic or not?

If not, then gently and delightfully assert a belief that would. By swapping one belief for another as easily as changing t-shirts, is to be liberated from the tyranny of belief altogether.

So the morale of the Anchor and the Ice? Seeing this huge hunk

Daughter of Godcast, Episode 066, Impossible. More fun than a flu should be, thanks to belated Wim Hof restart. The USA’s 2016 democracy simulation inspires a silly video, another precursor to this podcast.

Daughter of Godcast Episode 066, Impossible from Dan Kelly on Vimeo.

Hi and welcome to Daughter of Godcast, Episode 066, as in that romantic American Highway, Route 66 and two thirds of the mark of the beast.

Last week in episode 065 we took a 48 hour hiatus from DOG and attempted the ridiculous,  slamming together a music video for Dede and Josh’s new song, Strange Lullaby.  Even with production help from James Weston Schaberg and a couple hours of child care by Sharon Jones, this was a far fetched objective, pretty much impossible.

To maintain peak spiritual fitness, I recommend attempting the impossible at least 3 times a week. Arthur C Clarke even wrote a law about this, “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

Discovering limits is not like discovering a rogue asteroid or discovering how to substitute bananas for eggs when baking vegan cornbread. Limits are transient, fickle. Next time we venture into the impossible, they might not even be there. Even if they are, eventually, like tongues licking lollypops, desire dissolves limits. Limits are as candy to desire.

Once we know what we want, we’re gonna find a way to be, have or do that, even if generations come and go in the process. The point of venturing into the impossible is to figure out which delicious limits we want to lick.

We’re back in 2016 in this episode, that year so full of fun, not just for me but for the whole of the United States! Smack dab into the impossible, America plunged headlong. Donald Trump became president. Gak!

Yet here we are, a year later and pretty much business as usual. What did we learn? Replace a crafty, suave and charming black guy with smarmy, befuddled, white, whiner – the poles apart – and America is still pretty much the same. Endless war, Christmas shopping, binging on Netflix. Smack dab in the impossible… notice anything?

The president doesn’t matter. Who Americans elect has zero effect on the overall trajectory of their nation because the United States isn’t a democracy at the moment. Maybe hasn’t been for the better part of a century. A democracy consists of citizens… not consumers.

Not only has there NOT been a nuclear war but the economy is humming along. Which is all about consumption, so there you go.

That’s what’s excellent about Trumpy as president! This last year proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that American democracy doesn’t exist. If having a incompetent, groping, dope in the nation’s highest office was really a problem, the world would be way worse off. We’re pretty much where we were with Mr Fabulous, Obama, the drone wizard. So thank you Trump for plucking the mote from our eyes.

We could revisit the other unspeakable horrors of 2016 including Hillary Clinton and the DNC, when Bernie stopped the role call. He looked so tasty in his giant carrot costume, dangled before us during the democratic primaries. “Look at me! I’m smart, I’m a socialist!” 2016 was brilliant theater.

After the primaries I made a little video from the bathtub to try and get America to vote 3rd party. Because, America.

Because, America

Silly really,  pointless… but you know what’s cool? Along with my science fiction narrati

Episode 065, The Dream. Dede Alder, Josh Holcomb, Ayo May Alder Holcomb, James Weston Schaberg and Dan Kelly aka Shri Fugi Spilt attempt a 48 hour music video with almost no preparation. In this hour long episode, we describe our creative process. Helpful to watch the video episode, but 93% coherent with just the audio.

Transcription coming someday maybe.

Another episode of Daughter of Godcast, the odd podcast, the unusual podcast, the podcast beyond precedent, surprise packed and never twice the same. This is episode 064, Sexy… as in Dan Kelly dot. That’s my voice acting web presence, established in 2016.

Last week we spun the dials of the time machine a little too vigorously and hurtled all the way back to the 1980s! A few minor adjustments and expletives later, we reestablished contact with 2016, just prior to the inception of Daughter of God’s gentle release and this podcast.

Oh, those were the days, folks. Lounging with frosty mint julips, great smouldering spliffs of cannibis, being fed grapes by scantily clad warrior princesses, soaking in steamy epsom salt baths re-reading Philip Dick short stories. Life before podcasting.

How did this whole podcast get started? Like most other stories told here, I love a running start. Striding down the runway, carbon fiber vaulting pole firmly gripped, we plant and take off, soaring up feet first and over the bar, weightless for a split second while turning and giving the pole a light push back, then the long drop to a gorgeous and triumphant flat back landing in the pit. Metaphorically of course.

What we’re vaulting over today is the accidental / auspicious origins of episode 001 of the Daughter of Godcast.

Modern movie post production involves a lot of screen staring. Some post production jobs are purely visual, like hours and hours of setting  bezier curve keyframes, which in plain english means that during rotoscoping the brain’s language centers are mostly idle. Wait, that could be a little plainer still. Try this – I like listening to audio books while cranking out VFX. YouTube lectures. Podcasts. I discovered StarshipSofa, a fan driven science fiction short story podcast hosted by Tony C Smith. Soon to be followed by Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, Drabblecast. When I wasn’t tuning into my favorite music on SOMAFM, I was listening to genre audio fiction.

The stories are read just as frequently by passionate fans as they are by professional voice actors. As an actor and fan, I fit both categories. After hundred or so hours, I made the connection. Doh, *I* could read for these podcasts.

Fellow voice actor Bennie Matesich and I decided to audition for genre podcasts. Sweat equity at first and then eventually paying gigs. On March 16 I pushed my demo out to YouTube. a short story by Alfred Bester, the Lost Child. I hit up all the podcasts and started getting gigs, roughly one a month.

My first paying gig was for Clarkesworld Magazine and the gifted Kate Baker. My prime objective for readings was always more strategic than financial. I was looking for an audience. A following. Establishing my very own cult of personality that could pave the way for the release of Daughter of God. Which, I had decided, would start that August. Somehow. I didn’t quite know how. In the meantime, genre narration was a way to get my name out there.

I thought writing might be another way. I brushed the dust off a few genre short stories I’d written over the years and submitted them to some of these podcasts. I could have sent them to old school magazines like Asimovs or  Fantasy and Science Fiction, but the downloads for genre podcast sites blew away the magazine sites. I also applied to the Clarion writer’s workshop. Rejections, rejections.&nbs

A podcast about movie making and the science fiction featurette, Daughter of God, with Director Shri Fugi Spilt, (Dan Kelly). Daughter of Godcast, Episode 063, Emergence. Coming out of the closet big time about knowing how the universe works, the meaning of life and how dreams come true.

What a wonderful adventure. This is episode 063, Emergence. Sipapu, where we pop out of a hole and enter creation. That’s a Pueblo people’s myth, at least that’s what the white skins said back in the early 80s when I was tramping through the Canyonlands in Outward Bound’s 9th and last Leadership Development Program. We’re not going back that far in this episode, mostly early 2016 when I was writing every morning, doing focus wheels and rampages of appreciation, techniques for following an unproductive thought or feeling to the inherent boon, the blessing, the revelation.

My conception of the cosmos had been reorganized in 2015. My heart break experience was auspicious, because I was uniquely prepared for the story told by infinite intelligence via this lovely woman Ester Hicks. Yep, that lady who channels.

In 2004, I saw What the Bleep Do We Know in the theaters, with Bob, Cynthia and Brent and eventually ended up with two sets of the DVDs. Channeling had been on the periphery of my radar, I’d been exposed to the Seth books but they didn’t stick. What the Bleep put channeling on my radar, and the entity Ramtha. I wasn’t all that impressed with Ramtha, he seemed full of himself for an enlightened being so I was kinda skeptical about channeling.

As we’ve established in this podcast, I’m pretty open to the whole of human experience. The scientific method is very useful, a fantastic tool. That’s all science is, a helpful tool. Where the science obsessed folks stumble is in missing the obvious, that we are living a miracle, in the Arthur C Clarke third law sense.

Which is – Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I’m surrounded by magic and miracles, technology so advanced that we might as well call it magic. We human beings are the highest technology walking. We live on a giant living starship, a talking starship and plenty of people never give this a second thought. They cling to a version of science that is primitive in the extreme and call themselves skeptics, rational.

I found What the Bleep to be both intriguing and slightly hokey, similar to another documentary released in June of that year, Micheal Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. Adjusted for inflation, Bleep did about 10 million in box office compared to Fahrenheit, the highest grossing documentary at $119 million. I make this comparison just to illustrate the zeitgeist, political machinations vs the nature of existence, what were Americans more intrigued by in 2004?

These box office numbers might also reinforce my theme park Earth premise. We’re more into the dirty details of this mortality simulation than our divinity, because Earth is what’s for dinner. We came here deliberately. Rarely do we think about our income taxes while screaming on a roller coaster. Earth is a hilarious and hair raising ride, super immersive. That’s an apt analogy actually, feeling fullness is about as interesting to some folks as doing their taxes. I love this!

The main reason I found Fahrenheit hokey was the lack of curiosity about the anomalous physics in the twin towers collapse. We had to wait for innovative internet phenomena like Loose Change and Zeitgeist the movie to get that party started.

Tangents, gotta love them too. So… What the Bleep was my first exposure to channeling, and the entity Ramtha lef

A podcast about movie making and the science fiction featurette, Daughter of God, with Director Shri Fugi Spilt, (Dan Kelly). Daughter of Godcast, Episode 062, Summary. How Conan the Barbarian got off the Wheel of Pain with the Power of Desire, an allegory for the unfettering of this podcast from precedent and genre.

Welcome to episode 062. I had a dream last night of high end art directors gone rogue. Fantastical creatures who usually lurk in ad agency corner offices, emerging only for clients with deep pockets. Brilliant autistics fused with a rapacious billing infrastructure. Meme prostitutes, transforming schlock  into campaigns and branding, sinister and hilarious iterations of the dominant paradigm.

For whatever reason, the 3-4 art directors in my dream decided that maybe they didn’t give a fuck anymore about money. There was a vague house fire in the backstory somewhere, call that motivation. The main guy was a version of myself, in a charcoal grey Armani suit, or whatever passes for haute alpha male fashion in days to come, because this felt slightly futury.

They were developing a campaign to slather the streets with clandestine art… for arts sake, or awakening, or both. Felt a bit abstracted, but also cool.

As I was waking I was tinkering with desire. Desire as the driving force of the cosmos, of our lives. I’ve been so mixed up about desire, in the past associating desire to lack. As so many seem to do – I wish I had a girlfriend or I wish I could pay for my kid’s college. That’s not desire, to my way of thinking, that’s a horror show, the perspective that keeps us trudging around in circles, pushing the Conan wheel. Stuck.

A podcast about movie making and the science fiction featurette, Daughter of God, with Director Shri Fugi Spilt, (Dan Kelly). Daughter of Godcast, Episode 061, Test. Dan talks with makeup artist Nicole Enger at Brew in Traverse City, Michigan about her experience listening to the Daughter of Godcast. A focus group of one, getting in the groove test screening in 2018.

There’s no transcription for this episode yet, but here’s a quick recap. I met Nicole Enger on the set of Thaw of the Dead in April of 2014 and when the cast and crew got back together in February of 2016 to watch the near final cut, I told her about my 6 month old podcast, the Daughter of Godcast. She started listening and amazingly, didn’t stop. At Thaw’s world premiere in Royal Oak, Michigan just last week (October 23, 2017), she told me she’d really gotten a lot out of the Daughter of Godcast.

A podcast about movie making and the science fiction featurette, Daughter of God, with Director Shri Fugi Spilt, (Dan Kelly). Daughter of Godcast, Episode 060, Camp. Impressions from Wordcamp 2017 in Ann Arbor Michigan, empowered misfits and outliers.

Daughter of Godcast, Episode 060 Camp. Campy, camping, camper.

I’ve got a super full plate this week, so this is really just a hello and check in. A brief meander together.

Back from Wordcamp. Went with that connoisseur of the weird, Joe Cissell.

Talking about self distribution and clearing the deck for test screening in just a couple of months, I’ve identified two learning curves to climb. CSS and SEO.

In episode 058 and 059, I talked about SEO, the way search engines find our project and basically that I didn’t have any to speak of.

CSS is about getting WordPress to jump through hoops, to look nice. Nicer than it does currently, at least. But more than that, CSS and SEO are kind of tied together conceptually.

I suppose I could hire folks for both, but I’m dedicating my budget to the final stages of DOG production. Plus Daughter of God is mighty weird and as I learn more about SEO and CSS, I’ve realized they might not only be mission critical but waiting to yield crazy boons if touched by a creative hand. and since I am the most amazing artist I know…

So I’m banging away on SEO, and the fog is beginning to clear. Still pr