As I've been digging around, looking for inspiration for the project, a lot of things from my life experiences have worked their way into the story. One of those things comes from a strange in-between period in my life when I was living with my parents while they themselves were kind of in an in-between place.

I had just left a pseudo-job I had at a camp in Texas where they paid me to do various media stuff for them 2 weeks a month. They fed me and gave me a place to sleep and do whatever I wanted the rest of the time. It was kind of sweet but I didn't really gel with the camp lifestyle. Anyway, I moved in with my parents who were in the middle of building a new (their current) house for themselves in Missouri and were renting a house in Springfield, IL in the meantime. They let me stay in the basement.

It was one of the weirdest places I've ever lived. My parents don't really believe in spending money to use a clothes dryer, so there was always wet laundry hanging down there. The air in the basement, generally speaking, was rich with mildew-y stench. There was also a non-functioning toilet out in the open on a cement pedestal in the middle of the room. We called it the Throne (natch). The biggest and loudest quirk down there was definitely the giant furnace however. Did I say giant? It was gigantic. My parents told me it used to be a coal furnace from like the '20s, and it had been converted into this weird, terribly inefficient central heating system somewhere down the line. It would rumble and clank around inside of itself everytime the heat kicked in. I wish I had taken more pictures of it, but you can kind of gauge just how massive it was in these photos. There were probably 7 or 8 large pipes potruding out in any given direction, all well within reach of my head. I nailed my skull on each of them at least 5 times I bet.

During those few months with my folks I spent my days working on my animation surrounded by this rumbling beast and its metal tentacles, and with Lake Beast I finally have an outlet to try to capture some of the feel of working in that basement during a strange, kind of lost period in my life.

Ah, the glamorous life of an indie animator... Seriously though, I'm glad to be through that phase of my life!