The Commuter Challenge

This month is the second half of the Long Form Challenge.

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The Commuter Challenge is going to finish out the year much as it did last year, with a chance for each participant to plan out extended, personalized challenges.

For the first week of November, decide upon one or more personal creative projects that you intend to pursue for the rest of the 2015, and plan it out logistically. Your schedule should aim to have some sort of measureable goal that you can aim to achieve every 1-2 weeks until the end of December.

Submit your plan by November 9th. That schedule will then define your challenges for the rest of November and all of December. Then, at each milestone, you should submit a brief report of your progress and (if applicable) any adjustments that you wish to make to the original plan.

Note that it is not required that you actually achieve your goals in order to satisfy the challenge (beyond submitting the initial plan) — only that you make an effort to do so.

This Long Form Challenge was conceived with the hope that it will drive us to invest in projects that mesh with our existing creative activities.

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The October 2015 Commuter Challenge is to generate “cover art” for at least one October 2015 Song Fight.

To participate in this Commuter Challenge you do not actually have to submit cover art for consideration at SongFight.org, nor do you need to meet the SongFight.org submission deadlines, but you do have to follow their general submission guidelines.

Approximately every 12 days a new Song Fight title is posted at SongFight.org. The main aim of Song Fight is for people to compose and submit songs with that title, but cover art is also generated for each title. The cover art consists of an image that is ostensibly related to the Song Fight title, and most often includes the text of the title within the image. Sometimes the words “Song Fight!” also appear in the image, but that is not mandatory.

The image must be submitted as JPG images in three sizes: 400×400 pixels, 150×150 pixels, and 100×100 pixels. The different versions can simply be the same image in different sizes, or they can be variations on the theme. The size limitations may affect the resolution of the cover art, so keep that in mind while designing your entries – the ‘front page’ cover art is the 150×150 pixel size, so fine details may be lost if you need to reduce the image size to fit the guidelines, and you should ensure that any text in the images is legible at each size. For examples, see any of the hundreds of entries for previous Song Fights.

For this Commuter Challenge, any entry or entries are due by midnight, October 31st. If you would also like your images to be considered for the actual cover art at SongFight.org, those must be submitted to that website by their due dates, typically within a day or two after the due date of each song.

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Compose a list of 10 instructions. Your list should have a title that ends “… in Ten Easy Steps”. There is no upper or lower word limit to this challenge. The only constraint on your submission is that the instructions should describe something that is generally an inside activity (as the warm weather slowly drifts off with the coming of autumn).

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The August 2015 Commuter Challenge is to create a cover/dustjacket for an imaginary book. The concept for the book should be your own original idea, but you do not need to do any work on the text of that book other than generating the title for the cover.

The following links to lists of “weird books” are suggested for inspiration, but you may take a more serious approach to the project if you prefer.

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Create an artwork and/or cartoon depicting a real-life event or story. The event in question should either be something that happened to you, or was told to you first-hand by a participant — in other words, not a fictional event. (However, fact-checking is not a requirement of the challenge, so illustrate the story that you remember or were told.)

There are no requirement on size or artistic medium. If you draw a cartoon, aim for roughly the length of a Sunday strip.

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Write the lyrics for one big number for a musical theater production. The theme of the musical should be something that has not been turned into a musical before (or at least not done before to the best of your knowledge), like “The Walking Dead The Musical”, or “Paul Blart the Musical”, or “What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic the Musical”.

For extra credit, do anything extra related to the fake musical. Examples: write lyrics to more than one song for the musical, write music for the song and/or record a version of your song, or make title art or a fake Playbill for the musical.

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Create a work in four parts, one for each of the four seasons. The sequence can be four stanzas in a poem, four quarters of a drawing, four verses in a song, or whatever strikes your muse. If you decide you need more room to stretch, then you could instead create a sequence of four separate works, like four violin concerti. I hear that’s been done, though.

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Pick a painting, drawing, photo, poem, story, novel, song, film/video, or anything else that is in the public domain. If it is a poem, story, novel, or song, create one or more illustrations (or photo, or video) for it. If it is an image or film/video, write a poem, short story or song for which that image will be the illustration.

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Compose and perform an original song in the style of the blues, gospel, or field holler. There are no restrictions on the matter of the lyrics, and in fact you are encouraged to explore beyond the normal range of subjects. The recorded song should be at least two minutes in length.

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