Life Updates

I'm writing this on August 23rd, my 26th birthday. I'm making this as an entry to give people updates on my projects, but for anyone who isn't familiar with me already, my name's Adam Lauture and I'm a big nerd that juggles a lot of projects and I'm passionate about animation.

One of the things that I do in my spare time is edit video essays. I'm currently working on an essay about the history of the english dub of Dragon Ball Z Kai.

• I've had my partner Jay "jiorupears" Pastrana and friend "GangstaLuigi613" edit visuals for this.
• I've used clips from my interview with Brina Palencia in this and just need to find a way to implement them in the video.
• I will have a special ending segment with other friends .

I also will need to do a thumbnail for the video, but considering I am not a great artist I'll likely have to commission someone for a thumbnail.

I have other projects, but I may want to take a break from videos for a while, aside from a potential trailer with bashdash4, who I collaborate with on a regular basis. The last Genesis X trailer we made was really involved and I do want to try to make a video explaining how we created it, as it involved live action footage Bash filmed, and some compositing of VFX that I hadn't done before.

A goal for this website that I have is to also be a link to resources. Getting to this point meant I had to teach myself a lot of skills, and I've also had a lot of information told to me by others that can't easilly be found from YouTube videos. I take the idea of helping people very seriously and I'm hoping that I can do breakdown posts on skills that I have learned, or just link to other sources of information.

Lower priority videos would be:

• A retrospective on Toonami's Giant Robot Week
• Going through my old CD-ROMs
• Talking about the importance of Power Rangers

I also really want to start my Initial D retrospective as it's been talked about for 5 years now.

I don't think making video essays or doing editing projects makes me less of a creative compared to people who do more traditional projects in this field, but I absolutely want to stretch my creative wings this year. So... I'm working on that.

I'm working on a story idea called "FRAGMENTS" (title tentative). It's a urban sci-fi action about a young black woman with amnesia and cyborg parts trying to understand a world she doesn't belong in, and ends up becoming its hero fighting against a corrupt techbro who rules the city. I want to bring sensibilities from Japanese hero shows (Kamen Rider, Super Sentai/Power Rangers, Astro Boy) with ideas, experiences and iconography that are authentic to the urban / black experience.

I am writing characters and basic story ideas, at the moment my partner Jay Pastrana has been helping with revisions and making character designs. I'm not sure the format this will eventually take, but it will be something some day. Let me know if you'd ever want to see updates of it on this blog.

I'll put more life updates on this blog as well as general thoughts. Music I'm listening to, things I'm working on, etc etc. I'd love to get back into chiptune, or just writing more on things that just don't make sense to be a video (yet).

Because of all of this, the KashCast, my interview podcast, has been on hiatus. It'll be back eventually. I'll reach out when I'm able to, because I'd love to interview more people (friends, peers, even people beyond animation). I'm likely going to be helping ArtieceTB with Indiecember 2024 as well whenever that's up, so if you're working on any projects please reach out! I'd love to give some form of support.

The website is still under construction, but I'm definitely happy with the way it's coming along.

Thanks for all the support, and thanks for reading everyone.