I have not laughed this hard at a video in a long, long time. 
It’s 3 and half minutes, so you can definitely sneak it in between meetings.
I started a new file on my EeePC that I call “Train of Thoughts,” which is mainly to jot down notes and random thoughts I have while on the train/subway. To be fair, often these are things that I have noticed earlier, but didn’t get around to writing down. Anyway. here’s the current batch:
[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]
The floor my office also has a few law firms on it, and so we all get to share the one bathroom. The layout, itself, is somewhat odd as only one person can stand by the paper towel dispenser, and even then, he’s blocking the door. However, what’s really odd are some of the blokes who share the bathroom. My one coworker, for example, was somewhat disconcerted to overhear a guy talking on his cell phone to his girlfriend while the gentlemen in question was parked in a stall “doing his business.” My coworker, being the courteous guy he is, flushed the toilet in the stall next to the guy, just so the girl would be aware of the circumstances of the conversation in case the guy had neglected to mention it.
My own personal favorite event was entering the restroom to see a man standing at the urinal, using one hand to “guide his sword” and the other to tap away a text message on his Blackberry. I can only imagine what that Tweet read.
[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]
You know that it’s getting warmer in the city when the tour groups starting coming out.
[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]
How come we haven’t had a movie that uses the word “deliver” as a threat? Think about it:
Imagine a film about a homicidal maniac working for a courier company, killing the customers that he visits. Right before he disembowels one, he says, “I’m going to de-liver you….”
[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]
My friend Renata had tweeted a quote about leadership she had gotten from a manager or something, which said something like, “Leadership is bringing about events that otherwise would not have happened.”
It’s a good example of why I’m pretty leery of a lot of these management quotes and books; as I posted back to her: “So I’m providing leadership when I call in sick to work so I can stay home and watch TV?” I mean, based on the logic of the statement, the answer would be yes.
I followed up by proving that I could come up with a better quote, using something I thought up during the 5-minute commute into the city:
“Leadership is inspiring ordinary people to extraordinary accomplishments.”
I like mine much better; heck, I’m probably qualified to write a management advice book now.
[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]
I have gained a new covert to the “Tron” film. My coworker had sent me a link to the “Tron Legacy” trailer, and during the ensuing discussion, i learned that he, himself, had not yet seen the original. Resolved to rectify this injustice, I lent him my copy of it, and the following Monday when he returned he merely said, “Awesome movie; now I really gotta see the sequel.”
Another human has seen the light of truth, and has thus been saved. Hallelujah!
[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]
Finally, there were some discussions last week about the Go-Bots and the Transformers, back in the 80s. And it’s funny, because I distictly remember being a bigger fan — much bigger, in fact — of the Go-Bots and wouldn’t give the Transformers the time of day.
Then I saw the Go-Bots movie.
Afterward, I pretty much never watched another Go-Bots episode or bought another toy. In fact, that was when I started going entirely to the Transformers for my shape-shifting robot needs.
Besides the movie just being dull and boring in general (and remember, I was a kid at this time, so my demands of movies were far less than they are today), I also am still struggling to comprehend which executive thought it was a good idea to have the new line of robots introduced be able to shift into the form of rocks.
To paraphrase a scene from the movie “Big:” I mean, here you have all these other robots that change into cars, and jets, spaceships, and now you have a line that transforms into… rocks. I’m sorry, but the excitement of a bucket of rocks doesn’t quite match that of a bucket of futuristic planes, cars, and cities.
This morning I was up early; probably the earliest I’ve been up on a Sunday for a long time (not counting the times at my parents house, where I tend to be up early regardless of my original intentions). This was a planned event, however: I went to bed at around 11 PM. A little before that, actually. I was able to get some sleep, and then was up and out of bed at about quarter after 6. See, I wanted to get a number of things done, but more importantly, I have an important meeting (so to speak) in the city at 9 AM. That means I’ll need to be up and out of the house in time to catch the 8 AM train.
Hey, I might run across Dex on the train. Wouldn’t that freak him out?
Anyway, I decided it would be good to get my sleeping schedule warmed up for this. Tonight I’ll be in bed before midnight, definitely, and probably around 11 PM again, so I can be up early again tomorrow. Then, tomorrow night I have basketball at 8, and thus will be leaving right afterward to get home. So I can get to bed! Yay!
[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]
So Bill Livingston of The Plain Dealer posted a column about how Eric Mangini is not getting the credit the coach deserves for building the Jets into a Superbowl contending champion.
I find this rather bizarre given that I seem to recall Livingston making a lot of disparaging remarks about Mangini earlier in the season. Certainly, the man is allowed to change his mind, but it’d be nice to actually see him say something like “I was wrong about Mangini….”
[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]
I’ve been making some progress on my side video/animation project. Slowly, to be sure, but a good part of that is just refreshing myself on how to use Maya, AfterEffects, and Illustrator. So that alone has been good — nice to touch up those skills — but also this method taking the project in bite-sized chunks is also handy as it’s keeping things moving forward.
The really hard part will be coming up soon, though, which is trying to do some hand animation. I’ll have to do some tests and see if I can do the rough approach that I would like, but otherwise I may have to go the (very) long route of scanning in the drawings, then redrawing them in paths via Photoshop/Illustrator.
Stay tuned.
My ever-trusty demoreel! If you watched the other videos (not too mention still images) on my main site, you’ll recognize a number of pieces, but there’s also a lot of work-related content, as well as some animation bits.
I made this storyreel for the song “Your Fault!” from the musical “Into the Woods.” The drawings were made over the course of a few weeks during my lunch breaks when I worked at Disneyland, and as you’ll note from the costumes, I placed the characters in modern times, rather than a fairy tale setting. Why, you may ask? Well, why not?
Man, I hope I can revisit this someday….
This was actually made for my Sound Design class at Parsons, but the basic idea I had already developed from a different class, which was a bunch of unruly trainees learning how to become tour guides in Hell. While the animation remained fairly simple (that wasn’t the point of the class, after all), working with the audio was a joy. I had about 8 people record a huge number of lines — in the very professional recording studio we had, no less — and then went through ProTools and crafted them all together. The voice work by my friends was great, the sound effects fell into place, and the background music was absolutely perfect. I had so much fun making this, that, as I said, I really hope I can actually make this a full-featured short.
Oh, and that voice in the beginning? That’s me, with a little help from ProTools’ reverb.
This was a short, short project I made for my Maya 3 class in Parsons. That opening shot of the lightning reflecting in the glass bottles took way longer than you might first think, and introduced me to the world of render passes.
A story of trust, betrayal, hope, and redemption. Or it’s just about a mutant golf ball. We’re not sure which.
Here it is — the first music video I edited together for an animation series. “The Stylophonia,” by Two Little Boys, using scenes from “Chip n’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers.”
What I first most amusing about this one is that I actually edited this together using an VHS to VHS editing deck. This is back when you needed two monitors and had to assemble the video pretty much one clip after the other, as there was no way to shuffle up and down the timeline as we can do today. Considering the number of cuts I had to make, it was quite a bit of a learning curve.
It’s also a bit scary to realize that I made this over a decade ago.
After listening to George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone,” it struck me that it really seemed to be talking about Negaduck. Mind you, this was when I was deeply immersed in the Disney Afternoon culture, so I probably could have drawn parallels between Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor and the Junior Woodchucks. Nevertheless, I thought the music video I edited together worked pretty well, at least in that I still enjoy watching it today.