This is the new media art portfolio of cory allan, a collection of my works currently online and in and out of production. These works range from narrative comics on the web, to animation, programming, video production, original music, and professional projects.
 |
From left: Joquain, from an unfinished Band webcomic; Dos, from At The Gym; Loom and Fork from Quest: Episode 1Hover over any icon on the left and click to read more about each project. From there, you can navigate to their respective sites.
Click on
to reread this information.
From ANT (Another Nice Try), an animated tryptic about my relationship with ants as a child, the loss of innocence, and life and death
Cory Allan is the continuation of my first attempt at a journal comic, Allan. It's ongoing and updates sporadically, though my intention for it is to return to daily updates whenever possible.
The comic started on January 26, 2017 when I began feeling comfortable working my salary position post-college. I talk a little about the struggle of working full-time while simultaneously making art, and also why I took such a long hiatus from the original Allan.
Click any icon to go to that strip! There are a lot. I'm not sure if it's really a "serial" strip, but feel free to:
Jack of AllTrades® (or JOAT for short), follows Elizabeth Greene as she ventures into a new world of Tech Companies in Silicon Valley. Inspired by my life as a Tech Writer and peppered with real-life events and relationships, it's a symbiosis between my life and my imagination!
Unlike my other projects, JOAT is released in chapters. This way, chapters are more consistent and follow an arch that is cohesive. The development process takes longer, so chapters have been released annually. I attribute the process of developing JOAT this way to my IRL job as a Technical Writer; before having to produce some 300+ page manuals, I never had considered "dropping" webcomics in chapter-sized portions. Nowadays, I produce technical manuals that have upwards of 800 pages, so I figured I could handle 30 comic pages.
Allan is a journal comic which began in 2007 and continued through 2014. It follows its eponymous hero through the dramatic, funny, light-hearted, and thoughtful moments of life. Occasionally in color (but usually rendered quickly in ink), Allan was illustrated with the intent to convey a feeling of general familiarity, a piece of art anyone who's had a journal and doodled in it might relate to. I wrote it to reach out to a common audience and to tell a story no one else knew how to tell.
The comic was was wholly vertical, with an emphasis on scrolling through a story. I was trying to maximize a comic's ability on the web and on the page. Some disliked the endless scrolling archives but others found it effortless. Personally, still today, I prefer it to horizontal comics.
Consistently pop-culturish, spectacularly dated, permanently preserved, Allan is not only a timepiece but an honest, embarassing, occasionally inspiring, relateable regaling of events passed, opinions, thoughts, and poems.
Author's Note: Due to server issues, I'm still recovering fragments of the archives. Please be patient while I restore pages 301 - 1000, and thanks for reading!
Blue Circus is a slice-of-life webcomic that plays with storytelling and character development in a mix-and-match vignette of sorts. It stars three female main characters (Amy, Emily, and Sarah) and their escapades through academic and social adventures at an out-of-state university.
Blue Circus was an early experiment in compelling and entertaining storytelling, occasionally mature themes, color theory, and character design.
The comic consistently updated back in 2011, reaching 60 comics before 2012, but updates have been few and far between since. The comic is still entertaining to me, but I haven't moved forward due to other interests.
A spectrum of projects, the Future Universe is my grandest attempt at collaboration, scale, and even transmedia.
It began development in late 2011 and development continued through the middle of 2012 until actual production began in March. The project features an "open source" universe known as The Future Universe Wiki, which anyone on the web can contribute to and edit. The result is synergy: a grander, better universe that is more imaginative and varied than one created by just one creator.
From races that might later appear in a comic (see: Id-Thun) to bacteria that wiped out a race of sentient beings, nothing couldn't and can't be created within the Future Universe and put to some kind of narrative means. Use it as a basis for your fantasy world, roleplay / concept diplomacy with a shapeshifter's diplomatic envoy, design a group of space pirates who rule the 7C-z, you can come up with something, somewhere, someone, somehow, or somewhy too and contribute to a thriving sci-fi collaboration!
Meanwhile, in the midst of the open-source world, I was creating and producing a webcomic titled The Future Universe (TFU) set to act as a baseline reference point for the universe—stories that followed a crew of space documentarians and their mission to understand and empathize with "aliens" in lieu of a xenophobic society.
The comic progressed 20-some pages into the universe before taking a hiatus due to educational demands.
From Venn: Documentarian, a short, pretty sidescroller that follows its protagonist with watchful cameras as she discovers an alient secret.
An experimental project concocted by myself and my friend Ryan where each of us created 10 comics a day, every day, in November, 2009. The number of comic strips at the end of the month would total precisely 600, hence the name.
The comics are immature, childish, bad, fun, stupid, quick, bad, offensive, and provocative, and bad and the project itself was an outrageous undertaking decidedly making or breaking our work ethic. In the end, we are proud* of this project as it assisted our evolution into bigger and better projects.
* We apologize sincerely to any they offend as we made them during our adolescence when we were not as socially aware.
** The 600 is hosted at The Duck Webcomics temporarily
Humans are incredible pattern-recognizing machines. We can imagine any familiar symbol within functionally random shapes and lines. When you look at a scribble, what do you see? The scribble as a line on paper? Or perhaps a face? A pig with an idea? A samurai about to strike? A dinosaur? Or maybe nothing at all? The idea behind doople is that you can generate a quick scribble to get some ideas, and then draw on top of 'em!
There is no install process (though you may need to download Java) and the controls are simple. You can draw (and right-click to erase) with your mouse or tablet and adjust the brush size with 1 through 3. Press / hold the spacebar to generate a random doodle—press Q, W, or E to change the level of randomness! Don't like the drawing or color? R will randomize your color palette and X will clear the canvas. And press S to save!
If you want more info, there's a readme.txt file included in the .ZIP file.
DOWNLOAD DOOPLE HERE, FOR 32x/64x WINDOWS MACHINES
- Download Doople for 64-bit Windows machines [4 megs]
- Download Doople for 32-bit Windows machines [4 megs]
- Download Doople for Linux and Macintosh [coming soon]
You're free to use the program any way you'd like as long as its not for commercial profit. And please, share your dooples online with your friends (and with me)!
A spatial, strategic card game created by Cory Allan and Chris, ORC WAR was developed with the idea that any surface you're playing on can be the gameboard, and each card takes up one space of it. It can be played with as few as two players, but 3 or more is recommended—more players means more conflict!
Destroy your opponents, or infiltrate their frontline defenses to win the ORC WAR. All the rules are accessible online [RULES 
], and a database filled with files you'd need to print your own deck is currently NOT available for download [COMING SOON!].
Music & Sound
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAA A A A A A AProfessional Work
yes it's me the pro
Experimentation is the catalyst of creativity to me, so I like to explore different approaches to familiar visual mediums; sometimes that means shooting video and making a sketch, and sometimes that means shooting video and overlaying animation to figure out how to integrate 2D assets.
Part of a photography series I call Focus, I photograph still elements where we're forced to wait. "Watch life go by."I care about composition, lighting, color and mood. I care deeply about the way things affect people and how to better convey a message or an emotion. I'm always trying to improve, and I encourage constructive criticism whenever possible.
A Planet Called TESLA was a short sketch video following my friends Sam, Chris, Lindsey, and myself, as we discover alien life in Silicon Valley and find it's more relevant than we knew.