Daily Crapbook: Anxious

...still no word.

Daily Crapbook: I Just Wanna Know

Nate and I are very stubborn people, which explains why our search for a house has taken a year and a half and counting. This past Saturday, we found sweet, spacious, bright little house in the Old Fourth Ward and put in a bid. It is now five hours past the bid deadline and there's still no word yea or nay. Until this matter is settled, I'll be absolutely useless.

Daily Crapbook: Oy!

Alice in Wonderland

I should have been hard at work today, but I ended up doodling some "Alice In Wonderland" type doodles...

Many many many months ago, I wrote a blog post about my growing dissatisfaction with Tim Burton's films. Now that I've seen trailers and screenshots from his next movie, all those nasty feeling feelings are bubbling back to the surface again. I don't want to repeat myself by going off on another rant, but I will say one thing. I used to love Tim Burton's movies because his creepy, ghoulish sense of style also had a very appealing quality. But these days his films seem to have abandoned appeal in favor of a distorted, and frankly, ugly design sense. The images from his Alice movie had me squinting- I could tell where I was supposed to be enchanted, but it just looked... ugly. I read all sorts of comments from Burton fans saying that Burton's simply staying true to the book, and the book is very dark and twisted. Well, I've read the "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", and I fail to see how its dark and twisted. Its an amusing tale of nonsense peppered with nods to English culture from that time period, ranging from politics to schoolyard jokes. I guess since we're reading it out of its original context, the goings-on in Wonderland do seem trippy and psychotic (Just think of someone in a hundred years watching "Napoleon Dynamite" and trying understand what "your mom goes to college" really means.) I did like the story, but the sexy notoriety attributed to it in recent years is undeserved. And that goes double for Tim Burton.

Daily Crapbook: Bikini

I am anxious to get to the beach before summer slips away. Damn my Floridian childhood! I'm like Dracula, except instead of sleeping in a coffin of Romanian soil every night in order to stay alive, I have to take a nap in a cabana on a sandy beach twice a year.
..it makes sense to me. Shut up.

Daily Crapbook: Brainchild

Daily Crapbook

Ehh.... just...this for today.

Daily Crapbook: Wasp Waist

I finished up at work a bit early today, so I spent some time playing with Alias Sketchbook. I have the program at home, but never found it to be a satisfying tool. But at work, I have that magical device known to the natives as a "sin-TEEK". I actually enjoyed drawing in it, and the results were not gut-spewingly awful. It will never replace paper for me, but its nice to know I'm not entirely hopeless when confronted with technology.

Daily Crapbook: Pretention

Daily Crapbook

I ran across an ad with a lady wearing this hat...

Daily Crapbook

Here are some designs from a few months ago- a job that never got off the ground.

Daily Crapbook: Harry Potter for the Wii

Nate insisted we pick up "The Half Blood Prince" for the Wii today. I sense that my productivity is going to suffer...

Auditions

Most other animators I know say they love what they do because its like acting without having to get up in front of anybody. I guess I'm the odd duck, because I like acting because its just like animation, except without all the fuss of drawing. Its just so immediate, and so much fun! That why every so often I get the bug and decide to audition for a local play or musical. I never get in, but I won't forgive myself if I don't try. Today I went to an audition for "Sweeney Todd", a musical I adore for reasons I've already written about in this blog. I think I did all right- it wasn't near the fiasco of my last attempt at an audition (someday I'll tell that tale, but its too soon for me to relive that event without fainting from humiliation). Anyhow, he's what I imagine I looked like today, singing my audition selection.

Monkey Rag Update

Ok, so Monkey Rag is going slower than I expected. But its still going, and that's what counts. Instead of starting at the beginning, I decided to tackle a small chunk from the middle, Sc. 12, which incorporates lip sync and walk cycles and "dance breaks." Since I find the technical aspects of syncing/organizing/calibrating animation the most grueling, I figured I should do this scene first and get it out of the way. Its disappointing that I've been working on this for so many months and this is all I have to show for it, but I can rationalize that since the scene is 11 seconds long, but with two characters, I could say that I've animated about 22 seconds. That calms my anxiety for the time being.

Sonny on the Nostalgia Critic

The brilliant Nostalgia Critic recently reviewed the Top Eleven Cereal Mascots of all time. I enjoyed this review for all the reasons I normally do (clever writing, funny gags, decent video work, a deep respect for Animaniacs and Batman:TAS) but also for an extra special reason. Sonny the Cuckoo Bird was given a pretty high ranking, and the NC used a lot of clips from Cocoa Puffs spots that I had worked on. Its funny, because seeing those particular clips in the review made me happier than than seeing the commercials on TV. Of course, the review wasn't about how swell the animation was- it was about Sonny's pitiful addiction to chocolaty breakfast cereal. Thats the obvious and ubiquitous reaction to the Cocoa Puffs campaign: "Sonny has a problem". Hell, every four out of five comments on YouTube is about Sonny's crack-tinged habit. I do wonder why the ad agency keeps pushing this angle when thats the conclusion everybody draws from it, but oh well. Sonny's freak-outs are fun to draw. And it actually doesn't bother me in the slightest- I always thought Sonny "going cuckoo" was just exuberance. He just really, *really* loves chocolate cereal. As long as he goes to the dentist, whats wrong with that? If there's anything offensive at all about Cocoa Puffs, its the box art. Seriously, take a close look at it next time you're in the cereal aisle at the supermarket. Some designer somewhere got cheeky.