About
If you’re reading this, than I suppose I should properly welcome you to Stratasfear Productions. (Thanks for coming out).
Yes I realize this isn’t how you spell “stratosphere”, and yes I am indeed mostly a one-man show rather than a fully functioning production company (per se), but trust me when I tell you that all will be explained – and if you take the time to read the following I think you’ll get a fairly good idea of what I’m/we’re all about here.
Stephenson Price
As has already been stated elsewhere here at SFP, my name is Stephenson Price (that’s a professional name – my friends call me Ryan – long story short, it’s to make sure you can always find me and anything I’ve ever done when you visit Google, and to make sure I’m never confused with another Ryan Price; because trust me when I say that with a name that’s apparently this common in the English language it tends to happen).
I was born and raised in the Great White North – Timmins, Ontario – I’m an honours graduate of the Carleton University School of Journalism in Canada’s capital – Ottawa, Ontario – and I currently reside smack in the middle of downtown in Canada’s largest city Toronto.
In its subtle origins, SFP was a project that I had the framework for stashed away in the back of my mind for years as a teenager (and a really crude website online starting in 2003) but it wasn’t until I discovered an online web design competition in 2005 shortly after I went away to university that things truly began to take shape.
Things around here had started out simply as a way for me to display all of my different interests – as many personal websites do – and to try and get feedback on some of my creations and artistic endeavours. As time passed and more and more projects accumulated – in many different areas of artistic interest – it started to become clear to me that a simple project site wasn’t going to remain the answer for the web solution I sought.
After a stint in the summer of 2006 as the web and marketing coordinator for a non-profit organization I took to redesigning the site (what I now refer to as SFP v.2.0) to better accommodate the plethora of miscellaneous things (I’ll stop trying so hard to write such eloquent prose here and just call it artistic shit) that had started to pile up on my desk with no real outlet to display them: ranging from print publications, web design, photography, musical compositions, short films, short stories/screenplays, and finally the odd physical drawing/painting or ridiculously ambitious mixed-media project.
In the end though, everything eventually came back around to the original concept of Stratasfear:
I’ve always been a huge fan of pulp, horror and science fiction. I can recall watching films when I was probably about 4-years-old that I absolutely should not have been watching – Star Wars, Terminator and Alien among them – which ultimately led to my understanding and strong optimism that technology and sociological advancement will continue onward and upward into the future. But while the people on the ground might fear what lies just over the horizon, I began to wonder, what then would the things just over the horizon be afraid of – hence Strata’s Fear.
Science fiction has always been the one genre to take great strides forward in society – the earliest examples of Frankenstein and Dracula delving into the ideas of creatures of the unknown and the creation of life from lifelessness; pioneers like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne dealing with sub-aquatic and astronautical modes of travel before they even existed; and more recent authors like Isaac Asimov, Philip K Dick and Michael Crichton dealing with robotics, telepathy and cloning: each of these topics now at the forefront of research in contemporary science.
In similar fashion then, Stratasfear Productions became an unrestricted media adventure into the depths of the unknown and the farthest reaches of the imagination: a platform for whatever interesting little tidbits (or Timbits®) I happen to happen upon, or by chance, happen to come up with. Whether the content be something incredibly scary or a little more on the comedic side is….well…..I suppose, kind of a subjective opinion-type situation – I guess it depends on what YOU’RE afraid of…
Musically, SFP took a slightly more crooked turn down the road.
Music has always been one of my greatest loves and interests, ever since I was a 5-year-old boy trying to figure out songs I heard on the radio on the junky piano in the front foyer of my family’s home.
The musical project known as Tridia grew up out of my desire to find a musical outlet that would allow me to straddle my favourite musical genres (rock, punk, metal, and prog) and yet still produce a product that would be hooky and marketable – as it is my desire to get more people interested in the world of progressive rock; I just need to create a bridge for them to cross.
The word “Tridia” – which I discovered afterwards can refer both to an old computer program of the same name, as well as use as a proper name – was originally conceived during a high school calculus class in late 2003. For whatever reason, the word ‘tritium’ – in reference to the hydrogen isotope, which was the subject of a ‘half-life’ math problem – seemed to strike a chord somewhere in my mind (I believe it was a G#).
Much as a single ‘medium’ of expression is part of the greater grouping of ‘media’ (such as radio, print publication, canvas art, film or the interwebz), I wondered why a group of these atomic structures of tritium could not grammatically be called a “tridia” – the “t” changed to a “d” to avoid mispronunciation much as Led Zeppelin was spelled.
Ultimately this led to a reformation and restructuring for the musical group of friends that was at that time seeking a new moniker, though it has since that time become more of a solo project, a transformation that going off to university and eventually moving to Toronto would undoubtedly bring about – I suppose I figured that if Trent Reznor, Dave Grohl and Lenny Kravitz could do it, why not me.
The SFP side-project YAPMO Productions came about one night in 2008 when my friend David Weisz approached me for our first piece of collaborative freelance journalism. While we were ambitious journalism students looking to cut our teeth on some really juicy news material (like a good medium-rare steak) what we ultimately sought was a way to create a news endeavour that would be uninhibited by the boundaries and guidelines of traditional television, print, radio or online media.
As such, we branded the project YAPMO Productions and would continue to use the moniker for future collaborative projects.
While trying to come up with a name, David recounted a story to me of how when he was a child, his grandfather would often use the exclamation “YAPMO!” to describe a sensation that he was feeling about a situation he happened to be in. Many years later, David learned what the exclamation meant: “You Are Pissing Me Off!”
With this interpretation in mind, YAPMO Productions came to embody a two-sided concept that fuels the passion behind each project undertaken:
TYPE A:
If there is a person, a project, or an event that is happening in the world that bothers us (or pisses us off) we want to tell people about it so we can enact change.
TYPE B:
If there is a person, a project, or an event that is happening in the world that no one else knows about; THAT bothers us (pisses us off), so we’ll want to tell people about that too.
As such, there are a plethora of stories that fit under the YAPMO banner, so keep your eyes and ears open to hear what we have to say, or to tell us about something we don’t know about yet so that the mission can continue.
I hope that during your time here you enjoy the site – whether that’s because you creeped me on Facebook, are checking up on me for a potential job, because you saw my picture and thought I was cute (I kid you not, this has happened), or stumbled across it purely by accident. I’d greatly appreciate any feedback you’d be willing to give on anything you see or hear during your visit: until the time comes that you can recognize me on the street to do that in person though, hit the contact link in the site’s header bar.
<3 Stephenson
