My name is Ian Wallace, and at the time of writing this, I am a recent MSc English Literature Graduate who has a breadth of interests that border on near obsession, and have made this website to count as my little constant corner of the internet. This website is maybe going to have a more specific identity in the future, but that’s something I need to figure out with some time. Right now, this is a mental off-load in some respects, a creative valve in another, but most importantly (and I cannot state this more than once), this is to help establish my creative history.
Over the course of my deceptively short life I have achieved a decent amount of work and projects, in forms of volunteering, course work, and personal interests. The hope for this site is to compile all of that together into one place, which can continue to be the centre-point for future creations. How I want to do that is to explain my creative timeline, from past to present, and possibly glimpse into the near-future.
Video Production
At a far too young age I was inspired by the content I consumed, which in the late 2000’s was mostly fail compilations, Halo Machinimas, and Call of Duty Montages. So, naturally, I began with making tutorials… Okay, so already consistency was an issue, but it evolved from there.
I suppose I started with tutorials for the main reason that those were the majority of content I consumed at the time, as I wanted to make the same videos as all those YouTubers were making. So I watched hours of tutorials on video editing, export settings, how to do transitions, animation, audio editing. Throughout my time making videos, I only got more involved, and well-versed in the industry-standard programs and software, leading to my relatively skilled comprehension of Adobe Creative Suite’s core programs (Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop). I don’t consider my skills to be extensive, but they have been enough to filter into many other projects and interests that I have a confidence behind my skills. Not professional, but good.
I don’t consider there has ever been a start nor an end to my “YouTube” career, as it never really was consistent enough to be called that. What it has been was the longest creative outlet I have had in my life, going on over 10 years now, it has been the most consistent interest in my life, and has fed into much of my later interests, including my recent academic ventures.
Dancing
The second most consistent passion of my, and the one I have found myself becoming the most involved with, is dancing. Whilst this covers all my dance training, mostly Jazz, I am most certainly talking about Hip-Hop and Street dancing in general.
Starting at around the age of 14, I was inspired by so many silly things at the time, like Step Up 3D, the Party Rock music video, America’s Best Dance Crew, and these really “obscure” French dancers called Les Twins. All these inspirations spurred me on, and led to my current dance career, which has involved dance shows, University societies, national competitions, awards for my performances and choreographies, and so many other things, even working for Alexander Rybak at a brief moment in my “career”.
The amazing thing about this passion is it’s only getting bigger as time goes on, as I currently hope to have the chance to compete in more high-stakes competitions now that I have concluded my University life. Hopefully one day competing on a big dance stage someplace.
Storytelling
Now this one is tricky. Storytelling has been, in essence, everything I’ve done and more. From my “YouTuber” aspirations to my dancing. Stories have been engrained in my mind more than anything, and you need only look at what people spend most of their spare time doing nowadays, consuming media. From news to novels, YouTube videos to films, stories are all around us. So, if storytelling is so broad, how can I say it’s in my history?
By the simple fact that I spend so much of my time thinking about stories, writing about them, and even crafting my own. Both my University dissertations were all about Video Games, and whilst that seems odd for a literature student to write about, I wasn’t focussed on the money-making aspect of the industry, or really even the gameplay; I was focussed on the stories you could tell in a medium like Video Games. What has gripped me about this medium is the wholly unique feature that most mainstream media rarely explore, and briefly touches on in experimental works, and that is the interactivity.
Nowhere have I managed to experience this more than in my most recent vested interest, and my second most obsessive hobby in the past few years, Dungeons & Dragons (oh we all knew this was coming). This has been such a crazy investment of time in the past few years that I have taken the Dungeon Master hotseat for pretty much the entire time, and have had a consistent game running for over a year now. That game, as well as the one before that, is set in a fictional world I have crafted entirely from scratch for my players, and which I might explore more on this site, but that remains to be seen. I honestly don’t know what else to say about this other than that this game has radically changed my view of creative media so much to the point that I honestly believe interactive media is the greatest re-discovery of the 20th and 21st centuries.
I say re-discovery as Pantomimes, interactive theatre, and games have existed for centuries. What has shifted in recent decades is how we’ve been able to explore its storytelling capacity. I can go on and on about the subject as I have written entire dissertations on the topic, but what you need to know is storytelling is a foundational passion, and nowhere else is this more exemplary than in my love for games.
Undefined Projects
This is a bit of a cheat if I’m honest, a catch-all, but this part of my history has to do with the bigger feats that have involved most of, if not all of the skills I have developed from my other avenues. These include my University dissertations, both of which have been partially explained. The gist of their topics is that they have to do with the meaning behind “Interactive Storytelling”, and what we have to consider when tackling such a field. This topic was the bookend to my education, and will linger with me until I write another piece about it, and hopefully make a game someday.
Other projects include a Digital Humanities project that was working with the National Library of Scotland’s (NLS) Indian Medical Papers dataset (found here). A heavily academic project, we explored a collection of Indian medical papers filed between 1850-1950, that were digitised for data analysis and cataloguing by NLS. We did both of those things, exploring all pages of the collection, conducting both a group and individual analysis of the corpus. It was a fascinating project, and much of my skills were put to the test given the limited timeframe due to Covid-19 lockdown restrictions at the time. It was chaotic, but we pulled it off in the end.
Finally, I have done many other projects as well, from advertisement for a local church, establishing a livestream project to help my dissertation research, all the way to helping create a Yoga instructor’s website for related services. The last one is still currently on-going, but led to me remaking this site, as it reminded me the importance of having a presence. Most recently I have signed up for the Fall 2020 RPG Workshop, which very clearly feeds into my storytelling passion, as well as my D&D obsession. I am always aiming to push myself, ever onward and hopefully forward. This is honestly at the core of this website; to be creative. It’s why I have written this history, why I feel compelled to share it. There’s a story to be told here, and I don’t honestly think it’s worth anyone else’s time to be concerned with my history. But I’m telling it because I want this for my record, to let me reflect over what I’ve done.
This might inspire, this might show something, but it’s honestly here to act as a reminder for me more than anything.
Ian D. W. 