Support the Art(ist)s...

My good friend Jared Chapman illustrated this book by Phil Vischer who also happened to come up with some cartoon or another about some chatty bouncing vegetables? Anywho... this is definitely on my to buy list as Jared is a phenomenal arteest

Another Weekend

Another weekend finds me with a list of things to complete and little desire to do so. I'd rather sit and read a book, work on some animation or be having an engaging conversation with a "particular friend." Could be awhile...

High on the priority list was a revision of my syllabus again. There was just still too little animation and I'd rather my students have some nice animation for their reels than a rudimentary rigged character and little animation to show. I'm still gonna teach facial rigging, but a basic leg rig and stretchy spine can be done following any multitude of tutorials to be found online. It also happens to be something I've been able to specialize in, so might as well let them learn from the mistakes I've made and learned from. The course is a "lil" different than the syllabus I was handed, but I'm still hitting all the "core competencies." All I really care about is getting my students to a point of having work that might get them a second look at a studio when they graduate. If deviation is an issue, I've got a day job.

I finally got a hold of a buddy yesterday who's been dodging my calls (yeah, I know you've been avoiding me, Keith;). He's a fantastic animator and an instructor at Ringling which consistently puts out excellent story tellers. Anyway, he told me to do another check on Keith Lango who's been doing some pretty honest sharing about the animation industry. He's going on my daily blog stop list. Great tutorials and thoughts there as well.

It was a balmy seven degrees this morning as I walked over to hit the elliptical at the clubhouse. Prolly hovering in the negatives with the wind chill. It was kinda nice. Not that I have any pretense of desire to stay for long periods of time out in temperatures like that, but for a brief moment it's nice to have the chill nip at your ears and nose, to feel the wind bite and feel very much alive.

If I was having to live in it, I think my tune would change rather quickly. Watch "The Little Match Girl"...

I've got some serious thoughts on a couple of books I've been reading but don't have time to delve into them at present. You'd be surprised how much in similarity there is to be found between the insights of a scholar of sociology and the last meditations of a priest who served in India.

One of my buddy's websites I was transferring this weekend is down, back to it...

Weekends Rock...

It's been a good week and weekend for the most part...

• Moms are awesome - It usually goes without saying that when I go home, I end up forgetting something. This time it was my extra camera battery and charger. So, she sent it in the mail and happened to pack some Reeses Peanut Butter Cups in there with a little note. My mom is awesome.

My awesome mom and I

• Finished my Syllabus - I finally got a good handle on my syllabus for this semester. There wasn't quite enough animation exercises in it initially for my liking so I added a few more exercises. My goal is to get the students doing as much animation as possible. I don't remember what animator it was who said, "You've got 10,000 bad drawings in you, so you might was well get through them as fast as you can." It applies in 3d as well, we learn by making mistakes and the more work we do, the more we'll grow. I'm gonna do my darndest to do all the exercises with my students cause, frankly, I don't get to do a whole lot of full body keyframe animation at work and I miss it. It'll be a good reason to finish Olaf as well (I'm trying Cory!)
  
• "The Brothers Karamazov" - The beast is completed. I started this behemoth of a book about six months ago and have been struggling through it since. It was an absolutely fantastic read though a bit verbose. You could easily split it into a trilogy and still have three complete books. The book follows a very screwed up family of a dysfunctional hedonistic father and his three sons. There's a murder, and fantastic trial and more insanity than one would think could be crammed into a novel...yet crammed it is.
  
• My Cousin's Improv Show - Thursday night, I went to an improv show's opening night that my cousin is spearheading with another improv friend of his. There were four improv troupes for two hours of comedy for the low low price of $5. It was a lot of fun. If you live in Chitown and want good comedy for not a lot of money, check it out. It meets in a little arts center at Western and North, but you can check the site for more info. There going to have different groups each week so it won't be the same show if you wanna try it a couple of times.
  
• "The Office" is Back - There was a new episode of The Office this week and....wow...just wow...no show makes me cringe one moment and then roll over laughing the next like this one.
  
• New Year Resolutions - So, I need to make some resolutions, so here they are:
• Visit the following:
• My best friend Ryan in Oregon to do some fly fishing
• My uncle in Colorado for some horseback riding, hiking and, frankly, cause I don't see him enough
• My brother and ragamuffinephews cause I don't see them nearly enough
• Come up with another Short film and get it AT LEAST through the story board phase
• To finish Olaf
• To do at least 30 seconds of reel worthy full body hand key animation
• To get more involved in volunteering somewhere
• To kick the snot out of my student loans

That is all.

Book Thoughts : Oliver Twist

By some cruel twist of fate, I was never properly aquainted with Mr. Charles Dickens in my high school reading. This is strange because while back home recently I discovered a list from my high school senior english class and "A Tale of Two Cities" is smack on the list. I don't remember a word of it. I wanna say that we never got to it, but anyone who knows me knows that my memory isn't my best feature and it's highly possible that the book simply took no hold on me at the time. Regardless, it's back on my list.

I finished Oliver Twist last night and it was excellent. It's a bitter sweet tale of loss and bliss at the same time. From the stupid introduction I learned that it's one of his earliest books and not thought to be one of his best. It also annoyingly revealed a major plot point which then caused me to cease reading said intro.

Lesson - Don't read the introductions to classics before reading the book.

I read some Jane Austin last spring and enjoyed it immensely, however Dickens paints the victorian world in decidedly different hues. I don't know enough of the era to know all of the facts, but I don't think I'd have wanted to have been a pauper in those days.

He is a master of illuminating description even in this early work; I can't wait to see what he does in his later ones. Here's one of my more favorite passages in which someone is calling to his mind faces from the past:

He wandered over them again. He had called them into view and it was not easy to replace the shroud that had so long concealed them. There were the faces of friends, and foes, and of many that had been almost strangers peering intrusively from the crowd; there were the faces of young and blooming girls that were now old women; there were faces that the grave had changed and closed upon, but which the mind, superior to its power, still dressed in their old freshness and beauty, calling back the lustre of the eyes, the brightness of the smile, and beaming of the soul through its mask of clay, and whispering of beauty beyond the tomb, changed but to be heightened, and taken from the earth only to be set up as a light, to shed a soft and gentle glow upon the path to Heaven.

Beautiful. Writing like this reminds me why I love books so much.

Book Thoughts : The Da Vinci Code

Short of it - Good writing, interesting characters, and exciting ride.

Long of it - So, apparently this is a pretty well known book, eh?....;) I decided to see what all the hype was about. I actually started with Angels and Demons which was a great novel and was glad I did for some of the allusions to that story found in The Da Vinci Code. However, having finished the second and first books, I have to say that it seems pretty apparent that Mr. Brown has some major issues with the Catholic church. I'm not Catholic and didn't really take offense, but it's pretty blatent. That being said, he is a very talented author who weaves a pretty engaging fictional tale. I really enjoyed both books.

There was quite an uproar right before the movie came out (I didn't see it cause I hadn't read the book) from some Christians who wanted the movie censored. As someone who tries to follow Jesus, I gotta say that I don't think that was a good way to go about it. Yes, there's some pretty wild claims put forth by Mr. Brown, but if someones faith can be rocked by a "historical" piece of fiction, they need it to be shaken so that they can figure out exactly what it is they believe. The "fact page" of the book really doesn't go so far as to claim (in as much as I can see) that Mr. Brown is purporting his theories as fact. The details of the "fact page" are intentionally narrow in scope. In particular,

All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.

I imagine the descriptions are quite accurate. His interpretations and theories are very much open to debate- as is painfully obvious by the uproar:) I'm not gonna go into detail on why I disagree with certain theories. I don't know that I have a good enough memory nor the knowledge to write intelligently to that, but I've read many of "extra" gospels he refers to in the book. He doesnt' refer to all of them - there are quite a few and he does a fair bit of cherry-pickin'. In my early 20's I went through a phase of questioning my faith and I read a lot of texts that are beyond the "cannon" of the Protestent Bible and in doing so, it was painfully obvious why many of the texts didn't make the cut. However, the Catholics have a few more books that the protestants (namely, the Apocrypha), and the Eastern Orthodox others still. As far as I know, most of those have to do with the Old Testatment. In regards to the "lost gospels", if we suddenly found a document that claimed to be a testament of the life of Abraham Lincoln and it said that Abe in fact led an invasion of western China we might just pause a moment to compare that to what we already knew before just accepting it at face value.

I'm comfortable with the idea the Bible I have is the one I have for a reason. I imagine that most people will believe what they want to believe as the character, Robert Landon, himself points out in the book. If you want to believe that Jesus was just a man and has no claim on your heart and are willing to accept fiction as fact, this book is a very entertaining way to get you there. If you want to find out actual facts, perhaps starting in the non-fiction aisle is a better place to begin.

Minor Updateage...

Here's a test render of Tiko last night from my freelance gig that should (crosses fingers, knocks on wood, prays intensely) be done this month. This particular shot is being animated by my good friend Keith Osborn who was kind enough to help me out in getting this gig done.

In other news:

• By buddy Keith (from above) started a new company - Lasso the Moon Animation. I can't wait to see what he does.
  
• My brother started a blog. He has a passion for writing as well and is a very talented guy.
• Started reading another by C.S. Lewis and am continually amazed at his ability to communicate the most complex of concepts in laymen's terms
  
• My workload at work for E3 has slowed down after the big push last week. I can't wait till this game is done. It's looking absolutely amazing. So, with some down time Scott and I are fixing to start on some R&D for facial rigging for a new game. Fun stuff. Scottie is a scripting genius though he doesn't like to admit it;)
  
• Vonage is rocking!
  

L.A. Day One

First things first, I got my kickin new camera AND my business cards yesterday which was quite the treat. So expect Lots - o - pictures.

I started off the day to about 3 hours of sleep on account of scrambling to get some stuff together I had been counting on Kinkos to help me out with the previous evening. (Kinkos, I’m sorry, but we’re done) It would be ingenuous to place all of the blame squarely on their shoulders as I could have taken care of a lot of it earlier in the week, but I didn’t - I’m a goob.

So I finished up everything about 3 am and got up at 6:15am or so sans alarm (the internal clock is still beating my digital one by about 40 minutes every day) and went and worked on on the mind numbing treadmill, got up and around and my roommate took me to the airport about 9:45. It’s awesome not traveling on the holidays, it took next to no time to get through security and to the boarding area.

I hit the jackpot on my seat in the plane, I was in the first coach row after first class and my seat jutted out in the aisle a little so I had all the leg room I could possibly want (that is for my short little hobbit legs). It’s the mental comfort of knowing IF I was 6’ tall, I’d be just fine. My co-row passengers were a mom and daughter coming to Cali to decide if the daughter wanted to take a job here. They were nice folk and the mom was reading Captivating which was written by an author I really enjoy so we had something to chat about for a bit AND she gave me a stick of beef jerky and some big pretzel sticks so my meal-less fight wasn’t such a famine.

When we were done chatting, I through on the IPod and enjoyed one of my favorite pastimes - reading. I finished one book and started another. The second was about a laugh a page for most of the remainder 4 1/2 hour flight. Donald Miller is an author that weaves insight and mirth into a fine tapestry of story that speaks to me in a way few authors do. He’s a bit like C.S. Lewis but more “everyman.”

The shuttle ride from the airport to the hotel was entertaining. For one, I saw this:

Heck of way for a dog to get around.

I ended up sitting with an Australian girl named Lea (I think- my memory isn’t the best) who is a nurse and is taking an 8 month holiday. Now, I ask you, why is it the europeans and the aussies take these 6,7, 8 month holidays and we Americans take like a week, two weeks max typically? Is it because we’re too busy? Honestly, I’m not sure I could go that long without “working” but I think taking more time to live life than get ahead isn’t such a bad idea.

After I got to the hotel, I dropped off my stuff and headed out to try out the new camera while I waited for my friend and her husband to come pick me up for dinner. Here’s a bit of what I saw.

Lots of expensive cars

But these were more interesting. (They're to the left of that car)

Then, my ride came. Dinner was a lot of fun. I’d not seen Selina since being in D.C. in 2001 and I had never met Dave before. We went to this “in” place called Domick’s with small delicious portions and big numbers on the menu. However, you don’t do stuff like this very often, so it’s one of those, “Eh, I’m prolly never going to do this again, so what the heck.” We got all kinds of stuff. For an appetizer, we got a grilled artichoke and some special spinach. I’ve never had artichoke before and it was amazing though I learned that trying to eat the leaf doesn’t work so well. I’m still not a fan of spinach in any cooked form. For entrées, Selina got the veal and Dave and I got the spaghetti and meat balls (the meat balls being the size of small tennis balls). We shared a little so everyone got to taste and it was amazing. Desert was even better. We got the triple gelato - banana chocolate chip, butterscotch and (I think) vanilla AND some fritters with chocolate dipping sauce.

Wow. It was good.

After that, they took me to see San Rodeo Drive and we walked around a bit commenting on the stores and Selina telling us all kinds of relevant pop culture tidbits. We moseyed along for a bit and then they took me back to the hotel where I crashed the instant my head hit the pillow.