go here.
the finalists in the Seeds of Tolerance competition, and Racist isn't among them. The
good news is that the Current TV staff really liked the piece, and will be airing it on their
network some time early next week (I'll post the exact time here once I find out what it is).
In addition, they are interested in having me create more content for them.
There's not too much else to report at the moment. I'm starting a 2-D animation about a
hungry, little scavenger critter and a bulbous, gourd-shaped creature that's trying to
protect the egg in its nest. I don't know how it will come out, since I've never made
anything of this nature that's anywhere near this complicated. If I like it, I'll put it
on the site. If not, I'll staple it to a dead clown.
utilizes proper thumbnail images instead of loading the entire catalogue of photos at once.
I've had a couple friends offer to help me reprogram the site to have a blog-style comment
system, so moonpotato.com may be in for a major overhaul soon. I have no idea when it will
happen, but I'll post updates as I know more.
I'll be pretty busy with school until December, and will be mostly focusing on filmmaking
exercises and experimental projects. If anything especially neat comes of it, I'll make sure
to put it up on the site, but it may be a while before I finish any films that I think are worth
sharing. One of the classes I'm in is focusing on 2D character animation, so whether or not I
have anything spiffy to show off from it at the end of the semester, I'll have a new medium to
exploit in my future work. I'm kind of excited about that.
Lastly, my new camera is back from being repaired, and is working great. My work will be shot
with that from now on (at least until I can afford to go HD), and the ol' Handycam is taking
up residence with Ian.
for the Current Tv "Seeds of Tolerance" contest. When I say last minute, I actually mean last two
minutes. That's how much time was left before the deadline when we finished uploading our submission.
The contest was an open call to filmmakers to produce a 3-5 minute non-fiction short on the subject
of tolerance. At some point, a panel of celebrity judges will pick the top 5 entries for the website's
viewership to vote on. First place gets $100,000 dollars. Second and third get $10,000 each.
Here is our entry, One Minute Racist.
The video isn't working at the moment (3am on 10/3), but I'm assuming they just need an admin
to make sure it's not footage of a cat in a microwave and approve it. If it doesn't show up soon,
I'll host it on this site.
It has a lot of rough edges due to the huge rush we were in to finish it in time, but it also has
a lot going for it. Even if it's not considered for a prize, it's a nice film, and we can always
polish it up a bit and submit it to festivals.
I know I promised an update to the photos section soon, and with One Minute Racist behind me,
that will be next on my list.
This one has been a somewhat strange experience - Uth TV decided that the original ending sequence
was too "unsettling" for them, and that I should change it. I'm sure you can imagine that a cartoon
dealing with eccentric fetishes might cross some lines at a youth-based media website; footage of
breasts, penises, vaginas, and buttocks might be a little much for some younger viewers... but this
episode didn't have any of that. I don't think the worms even have those things. So, what
was censored from the episode? A nose.
Normally, I'd have some strong feelings regarding artistic integrity, and would put up a fight
about the matter, but it struck me that a nose censored with black bars is a great deal funnier
than an uncensored nose. This solution made me happy, made Uth TV happy, and has generated a
positive response from everyone I've showed it to. Still, there's the other side of the coin -
someone else made the decision to change what I considered to be a finished film. That's why I've
decided to put the original version up here. I don't even like it as much as the revised
cut, but I feel like it should be available for people to see if they want to.
Some brief updates regarding stuff:
-Vermis will be on hold for a while. Uth TV has decided to stop funding independent productions
for the time being. They may decide to resume this later, and if not, Ian and I will hunt
for a new producer. I'll keep you all updated on the matter.
-On Friday, Caveh and I will be putting the final touches on Seven Exercises in Reenactment,
formerly titled Fiction/Nonfiction, formerly titled The Film Within The Film.
Caveh hasn't decided whether he wants this film up online or not, and my feeling is that
he's leaning towards "no." It is a pretty arty, conceptual piece, and although it has
some neat moments, it has an overall feel more like an experiment than a polished film.
So, it makes sense to reserve it for just the film festival audience in Austin.
-The photography section on this site will be updated soon. Mielle and I took a trip up the
coast this weekend to the Gualala area, and there were some remarkable views. The
wildlife was very cooperative with my efforts to photograph them.
-I bought a new camera! I've been yearning to upgrade from my shitty little 1-chip handycam
for ages, and I've finally replaced it with a Sony PD150. It's in need of minor
servicing, but I'm very pleased with the image quality, and it will be a welcome
addition to my studio once the tape playback is fixed.
I've caught a cold, or something of the sort, resulting from an elevated coffee/sleep ratio.
Finishing a project like this always takes so much out of me. Once I get to the stage where
there's only lip-synching and editing to be done, and there's no physical work to tire me out,
I never think things like you've been working for six hours straight - take a break. It's
always things like the color balance on this clip is off - fix it, or you've got some good
momentum going - finish a couple more clips before you go to bed. And, I always figure it's a good
idea to listen to these voices in my head, because it's very hard to get momentum going on a project
this complicated. Even wrapping your head around everything that needs to be done is a task in and of
itself. Then, I end up staying up until 4 or 5 in the morning trying to get everything done that I
wanted to. Every time I work on an animated short, I remember Mark Osborne's words:
"Every experience I have making a film pretty much kills me. It's like the worst experience ever.
[While] making Greener, I remember, every day I would try to figure out how to get out of
the project... but I had alreay invested too much. In every project, I end up biting off more than
I can chew... It's always a really hellish experience."
I don't feel quite as bad about it (nor are my films quite as good), but that statement really resonates
with me. However, there's a certain joy in biting off more than you can chew. Any task that doesn't
involve creative problem solving or trying/learning new things gets old fast, and part of me gets
excited when I can give myself an opportunity to figure out something new. It took me a long time
to find a career that I felt intrinsically motivated to pursue. I've changed majors twice because I
pictured myself going down a road of frustration, boredom and alienation if I didn't change course.
This is why I do what I do, and why I feel the need to push myself... and it makes me feel good when
what I've created turns out halfway decent. I just wish I was better at organizing my efforts and
pacing myself so I wouldn't feel so overwhelmed by large projects.
I started getting bandwidth usage warnings from .Mac just a couple days after launching
moonpotato.com, and they were going to charge me an arm and a leg to upgrade my account
to something suitable for the amount of traffic I've been getting. After shopping around
a bit, I settled on a hosting company that's giving me three times the transfer bandwidth
of a basic .Mac account at less than half the cost, and probably has a better uptime record
than Apple. I've done a preliminary recoding of the site to adjust things to the new
server, but let me know if there's anything that's not working correctly.
In filmmaking news, episode three of Vermis, titled "The Jackpot," is in production
now, and should be done within a week. Caveh and I are very close to finishing what
was, until recently, titled The Film Within The Film. After trying several different
structures for the piece, we've decided to go with a split-screen setup displaying the
narrative segments next to the documentary segments they're based on. They fluctuate in
and out of synch in some pretty interesting ways. We just need to piece together a good
ending for it, which will most likely involve rooting through the footage on several DV
tapes and finding some good moments to composite together in a sequence showing brief
exerpts from the 8 days of filming we did for the project. My other ongoing project,
Hairpin Hairpin, is slowly but surely moving forward. This film is a stop-motion
adaptation of a surreal love story written by Qianqian Zhang. The two of us have been
storyboarding and designing sets and characters for the past couple months, and we're
about halfway through building the puppets so far, which are turning out to be the most
intricate (and best looking) puppets I've made to date. I'm hoping to launch a production
journal on this site within the next couple weeks to share photos and details of what I'm
working on.
collection of shorts, stills and music by artists at Uth TV. It starts off with the
first episode of Vermis, and goes on to a spoken word piece, a couple comedy
shorts, and a slideshow of photos and 2D art set to music. If you haven't seen episode 1
of Vermis, or are curious to see what other artists on the site are doing, it's worth
checking out. It's also available in the iTunes podcast section, for those who prefer
an .mp4 file.