journal archive
1999-2007:

january 17 2007 - april 9, 2007
everything will be ok at sundance
"animation show" 2007 tour:
seattle, austin
animating chapter 2 of ok
electroshocks and camera trouble
january 11 2006 - january 14, 2007
bitter films dvd production
ok editing
burbank motels
ok narration
school field dream
seal dream
hypothermia fever
ridiculous amount of work
waffle cereal
hiking skull island
jaw pops out
bathtub death dream and snail
more spam poetry
comic con
finishing ok
talking to oneself
deserted department store
black demon
awake for 39 hours
march 7 2005 - december 27 2005
"animation show" 2005 tour:
sf/berkeley, detroit, austin
designing everything will be ok
abomination
animating and shooting ok
bitter films dvd production
old film restoration
life-size postmen and demon puppies
summer's here
hollywood motels
rochester event
murder dreams
philosophy and time
september 7 2004 - february 28 2005
higher forces are conspiring
barely finishing the meaning of life:
final sound mixing, editing, special effects
elephant carcasses
sundance 2005
endless soundtrack remixing
LA gallery show
"animation show" 2005 tour:
LA, seattle, vancouver
formidable sunning lizards
fan art
multi pronged
february 4 2004 - august 26 2004
experimental effects
disappearing people
pencil test trouble
jaw disorder
endless photography
edit, animate, rewrite
a new ending
aspen
no sleep
restoring billy's balloon
camera malfunction
spam poetry
star photography
august 22 2003 - january 2004
animating flying animals
black prosthetic feet
around the clock
"animation show" 2003 tour:
seattle, portland, milwaukee, SF, LA
NYC, boulder, minneapolis, santa fe
january 26 - august 9 2003
outer space photography
production of show trilogy
shock and awe
missing plant
dreams, sleep, work
in the ocean
"animation show" 2003 premiere
september 6 2002 - january 1 2003
the meaning of life still in production
drunken new year idiot
juggling projects at once
cartoon network rejects rejected
new film starts photography
bad sleep cycles
skin eaty fungus and bad dreams
the fate of the universe
march 16 - august 23, 2002
the meaning of life in production
anesthetics book
sweating apartment
studio junk
lusty plants
increased anxiety
december 30 - march 5, 2002
television censors
bootlegs
home surgery
"don n bill show"
scary neighbors
chuck jones
miniature insects
september 2 - december 11, 2001
making the rejected dvd
unearthing spanky
bad poetry
memphis
a day at the beach
new camera
production never ends
july 24 - august 24, 2001
tattoos
animating the meaning of life
time and space and life
fear of fire
bleary production
june 9 - july 10, 2001
work work work
paper veins
production paranoia
bootlegs
april 9 - may 24, 2001
the meaning of life in production
cereal lies
antibiotics
march 10 - march 27, 2001
oscar prep
don losing his voice
rob vs. kenneth branagh
bow tie maintenance
oscar recovery
february 14 - march 3, 2001
academy award nomination
out of control spike n mike shows
local film fest and gasoline
happy animation industry ranting
january 21 - january 29, 2001
daily entries from
rejected at sundance
december 31 - january 14, 2001
dentist, broken car
animating the meaning of life
soundtracks
off to sundance
november 8 - december 15, 2000
animating the meaning of life
production report from rob
happy video clips
amnesia daze of road
work, work, work
august 29 - october 25, 2000
animating the meaning of life
burnt out
olympic fever
story from rob
happy video clips
barking spoons
travel
gas mask guy
june 21 - august 9, 2000
finalizing rejected
vocal recording the meaning of life
a story
happy video clips
comic convention
premiere of rejected
very old drawing pads
march 29 - may 31, 2000
memphis
production reports from rob
rejected final sound mixes
rejected last minute edits
reincarnation and embyro defects
broken car
computer virus
happy video clips
january 9 - march 22, 2000
rejected editing
rejected sound recording
giant baby eye
rejected sound mixing
don in a panic
december 3 - january 4, 2000
OCD people on tv
new years story
roberto
old photographs
big tumors
editing rejected
october 30 - november 28, 1999
gas mask guy
conjoined twins
roberto
meteors and rare moons
building the animation studio
september 28 - october 19, 1999
fish astronaut, spooky dream, death
more death
rejected art finished
cat brain, bad interview,
jack in the box woman
bad computer
august 3 - september 17, 1999
building the animation studio
animating rejected
old photograph
broken oven
rob in LA
pretty moon
a toast
june 7 - july 22, 1999
billy's balloon in cannes
animating rejected
broken car and dreams
high fever, corpse museums, death
retarded children's clothing
march 31 - may 17, 1999
shopping list story
animating rejected
judging in texas
sad runover squirrel
off to cannes
march 17 - march 24, 1999
LA
gas mask guy


read more about this sort of thing in the interviews section



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don's journal
july 24 2008 5:12am
it's been a strangely busy month.... heres the latest news, in convenient vertical form:

... i'm going to tour with "i am so proud of you" throughout october and november. you are invited. we'll have a list of cities + news of what's going on in the next few weeks.
..."proud" is just a few frames away from being a locked picture now and i'm almost ready to let it go.
... for reasons unknown in the off hours of staring at the movie's soundtrack this month i've begun writing and drawing what looks like a book. i'm as surprised as you are. i don't like the word "graphic novel" because it sounds desperate so let's just say book.
... i bought another animation camera! it's another giant antique acme, but younger than the one i have. good to have a backup and if i hadn't picked it up the poor thing probably wouldve been dismantled
... why is it impossible to find a replacement pair of shoelaces for the weirdly light gray - off white colored ones that came with the shoes but broke?
... a couple other things are brewing but this will have to do for now. like, rawk

july 6

cough
we might still be under evacuation warning but i think things are beginning to clear. blankets of ash continue to snow all over the cars and bushes and it's humid all the time. the sky has been spectacular and muddy, i drove around thursday and hadn't yet realized the full extent of it all, roads closed, firetrucks whizzing in all directions, the hills all lit up demon red, a big fat guy jogging aimlessly in front of my car with a big gulp cup. there's been three days in a row with long blackouts, often right as the sun goes down and you can hear the whole neighborhood groan each time it happens. it's over 80 degrees in the middle of the night and the stars come out brighter than you've ever seen them if you can find them through the haze and neighbors knock around in the dark with candles and dead mobile phones. i'm told people are getting stabbed, and everyone drives their cars very strangely. there's also short, intermittent blackouts throughout the day so i can't really get a lot done on the soundtrack without risking losing my progress or frying my gear. i made it to the grocery store on a very orange evening for more candles and batteries and decided to buy ice cream so every time there's a blackout i can say "well, i guess i better go eat the ice cream before it melts". the regular candles were long gone so i had to buy a giant old lady one that smells like melon.
today ive been feeling sort of bored and happy which is actually notable because i think i'm mentally done with the movie. there's still busywork to do but the familiar feeling over the last 18+ months of having your head pressurized and focused only on one thing seems to have passed, and now i want to go outside and climb on rocks or something. there is a weird moment at the end of the leni riefenstahl documentary where she's 90 years old and sitting at the bottom of the sea stroking the back of a giant black manta ray, and in a sleepy state for some reason i interpreted the ray as a long dead and reincarnated friend of hers, possibly hitler, now gliding around the dark ocean floor from unknown decades ago. i've noticed i seem tospend a long time on flickr looking at strangers' vacation photos.
july 1 a team of ten baby spiders was discovered attempting to build a web between the soap bottle and a comb. that's the latest from here.

june 28 i can say without hestitation now that it's my best movie. just a few more weeks to go now and hold it together. i think i'm going to remove that guitar bit after all. oddly, it helps the scene it's in and is really pretty... but it kinda weakens the following scene, where there's a bigger music cue that doesn't have any tension leading into it anymore and makes it feel a bit redundant. when you begin to realize your tweaks are doing more harm than good i guess that's when you know you're pretty close to being finished. my shirt smells like play doh
june 22 two nights ago i added a very last minute guitar track to a short sequence... i didn't think i'd have to pick up my guitar for anything this time around, but the scenes were missing something and it feels like it works now. i'm still hesitating a bit because it seems like the movie's got wall to wall music, but the flow seems great and subtle so maybe i should let it be. the ipod is playing leonard cohen and the weather is still ridiculous and last night i dreamt jeff daniels was doing something
june 20 early screenings of the movie require a sentence or two of synopsis for program books and press. i'm really bad at this and struggled with coming up with a synopsis for 'ok' and now i'm really struggling to come up with one for 'proud'. there's so much going on i'm not sure how to whittle it all down into two easy sentences. that's either really good or really bad.
june 18
got roll 13 through the camera a couple weeks ago and i think i have all the footage i need now. the ending and one other scene are demanding more attention but otherwise the movie's pretty much finished. going to spend a couple weeks finetuning the soundtrack and re-recording bits of narration and it should all be no sweat from here. the movie is fantastic, dark and deep and operatic and sad and strange. hiding out swimming and burning in the sun, fat girls playing netless badminton in the parking lot. hello summer. we were seated at a copper table today and had to move, the strong sour metal hanging in the air freaks me out and i don't understand how people can eat off such things, ijust had my arms briefly on it and they still reek of horrible greasy copper. they keep finding feet, now they are up to five rights and one left ; map
may 28 im beginning to notice white hair coming out of my face. i leaned on a tree today and got sap on my hoodie so i scrubbed it with the concentrated orange stain remover spray. the sap is gone but now it smells like someone threw up orangina all over me
may 26, 2008
yesterday some guy with a hose blasted all the sparrows nests off the neighbor building's second story awning, raining mud and little broken eggs down into the parking lot.
unbelievably i still have more film to shoot. all the new footage moved us closer but there's still five or so things i want to take extra cracks at. the good news is i'm further along than expected with sound, with several chunks of the movie more or less done now, and soon it looks like sound will be more finished than picture. most everything's in place and am at the point of just watching the movie repeatedly every day, taking notes, and carrying on until i can't find anything left to fix. i've still got a couple months of busywork ahead but i think the hardest parts are over with and i'm beginning to get weird about what my next project will be, if it's chapter 3 right away or not. i guess i should figure this out.
this fall if we get our act together i'm hoping to tour some theaters and say hi with "i am so proud of you". we should have announcements to share and miscellaneous pantaloons in the next couple months. why doesnt anyone improperly use the word pantaloons anymore? today the sparrows have already begun to stubbornly rebuild and i'm not sure i feel happy or sad for them.
may 14 2008 this is rather amazing animation someone sent to me from buenos aires: muto.
finished shooting the last(?) roll of film last week and the narration is getting closer to being locked up, so now starting to wade further into putting together sound effects and music. the weather is beautiful and its hard to stop eating. when i close my eyes i see parrots.

april 27 2008 coming up for air. these last several days have been swinging between depression and burn-out and it's getting hard to keep the energy going. the movie will be great but i'm at serious risk of shriveling into a weeping mummy thing before delivery. i'm back in photography now, which i can't believe, with a new round of experiments and maybe a dozen other new or re-animated shots to get through. i've also just finished creating decently structured narration tracks for the whole movie, which was a big step, and now i can begin to fine tune the edit to that and then fully submerge into sound. thank you for all the kind encouragement as my brain continues to melt through this, and sorry if sometimes i don't have the time to write back. i'm also seeing messages about the animation show. go see the animation show! they're good people and all those artists still need your support.

here's some more screen grabs from the current cut

april 22 2008 editing continues.... when i got the latest cut in today and saw the running time - over 22 minutes??! - my eyes did a sort of roger rabbit thing and my bow tie spun around. based on the music cue i've got in place for the ending of the movie, i've apparently overphotographed the sequence by 2 minutes. clearly there's still a lot of work to do. today was actually my first time seeing the movie put together (soundless) in full, with no "scene missing" cards anymore and i'm in that weird love/hate zone, the usual mix of vague excitement and "good lord what have i done?", and general nausea. my "reshoot" list keeps growing and i may even go back in to animate a couple new scenes and as usual it's weird to have the whole movie suddenly in front of you, with all the obvious dumb narrative things you should have thought of months ago parading around naked. right now my head is going a million miles an hour with notes and new ideas and highs and lows. happily i've managed to build a few little miracles in the sound editing this week and while that job shouldn't take as long as "ok" did (knock wood), it's still very slow going... i'm about a week in and have constructed bare bone tracks and recordings for about the first 8 minutes. but there's small and amazing glimmers now of how scenes will work, and suddenly seeing a sequence unveil itself for the first time with the music swelling just right after spending another day in front of protools makes all the binging on coke zero and toast and passing out at 7am seem like a good idea.
april 17 2008 the movie still seems to be hovering just under the 20 minute mark. i got the bare bones of the sound edit officially underway this week, organizing effects and music, and began recording my narration two nights ago (or was it last night?). the performance is easily the worst part of the process for me and i've really dug a miserable hole for myself in keeping continuity and having to narrate all three movies now, but i'm getting some decent takes for about a two hour window each night before my energy drops or my throat hurts, and i'm doing my best to sound the way i did two yearsa go. i obviously can't listen to music during sound work so instead i just eat a lot of candy.


april 10 2008
chapter 2 of "everything will be ok" is called "i am so proud of you". here's a few screen grabs from the current edit:

was in burbank the other day to see the latest footage for the first time and some of it's downright jawdropping... this camera continues to amaze me. there's still a few things left i'd like to reshoot though and i didn't think i'd still be shooting anything but credits this late, but there's some heavy new experiments in there that just need to be pushed a bit further. hope to have a locked pic by the end of may. have begun cobbling together effects and music for the sound work meanwhile which will be another massive mixing chore but luckily everything else is looking so solid i'm hoping it should mostly just be connecting all the dots..

march 26
officially finished shooting last night and am a little shell shocked and restless now with nothing to do as the last rolls of film go to the lab and i wait for editing to start moving again. i guess i might start some sketches now for the tv project, and i still have a lot of reading and research to do for that. gonna skip town this weekend.
march 23
finished animating everything on the 18th and have been in the studio for heavy photography about 7-8 hrs every night since. when i crawl home and close my eyes i see nothing but dancing blobs of light. it's grueling stuff, the end of the movie is very dense, having to burn multiple layers of effects and things all over the frame and it's hard to tell if i'm making something beautiful or a mess of visual soup. but for now the movie should be all wrapped after another few nights..

it's all here where i keep it
it's all in the submarine
march 16 2008
last week i decided it was time for me to part ways with the animation show. it's been five years and three tours and some good memories. they have a new tour rolling through theaters this summer and i don't know what will be in it but i encourage you to go check it out

march 13 in the discount bin at the drug store there's a santa claus doll with missing eyes and dirt stains all over his white trim. his embroidered sack is twisted upside down in his arms so that it reads oh, oh, oh.
march 10
we've started editing... the first fat assembly added up to just over 19 minutes (!)... got a lot of trimming to do in there but that's still without the end of the movie so it may actually wind up being that long. any day now i should have some screen grabs to post here. i've only got two more scenes to animate now til that's all done and this week am heading back into the studio to shoot the movie's ending. i bought these strange hippie potato chips and they taste like burnt salt. it's like a potato that grew up wanting to be a rice cake and ruined everything. this is a portion of a sentence i read in a book last week: "belly distended with pigs and missing children".
february 16 the other night i dreamt there was a popular little seaside town at the bottom of a roaring cliff and the only way you could get there was by climbing up the rocks and then slowly wriggling down a very narrow wooden tube, with your arms pinned to your chest, hoping somebody wasn't wriggling up the other direction. the next night i dreamt there were horrible crustaceans slowly growing out of the bathroom floor. i don't know what that means but it made me go clean the tub. i'm real close now to being done animating, i can see the finish line with just a few more scenes to go. i think i'm done messing around with rewrites too, maybe. the other day i found another forgotten roll of undeveloped 120 film that i must have shot in 2004. heres my favorite picture from it

february 5 most of the new footage looks amazing, a big relief. at the bottom of my shot notes i wrote, "i think this is going to work". now i just need to finish conjuring up the ending and a couple extra scenes i added. on the side of the freeway i saw a woman's tennis shoe, filled with leaves.
february2
down, down, down
january 31
something smells like paint in here. i've heard nothing but bad news all week.
january 30 have been doing more rewrites. now i just need a small push to finally finish animating. i think i have ch2 at a point now where it plays great in my head and hopefully all the footage will match. going back to burbank next week to see the latest reels for the first time. i think ive also maybe got a much firmer idea of how chapter 3 will eventually play out. this morning i watched the sunrise in la x and stared longingly at little flecks of color in the carpet that inspire movement
january 29 kauai
january 15 finding myself nipping away doing still more rewrites tonight. trying to clarify and smooth a bunchof things and adding some little scenes.
january12, 2008 1:44am
have spent every night all week deep in photography and by monday should have another 7-800 feet ready for the lab.. after that i could be only about a half roll or so away from having the whole movie in the can. i only have the ending and a few odds and ends left to animate. the studio has no heating so ive been working in a hooded bundle with multiple pairs of socks but i seem to be moving quickly through it all.. there's a handful of tricky compositing here and there that i'm curious to watch and a couple moments where i've held so many little bits and pieces of things in place beneath the lens that ive had to flip over the viewfinder switch with my nose. shooting has sort of made all the days and nights the same though and ive been moving around in a blank robot blur and extended solitary confinement is not turning out to be a verygood thing either. tonight smells like mustard.
all these years of seeing flat envelopes that read DO NOT BEND OR FOLD, and i never before realized they were meant to be friendly words of encouragement.

january 3, 2008 you know what i hate? i hate when they draw the new year as a fat baby in a diaper and the old year as an old man in a sash wandering off to die
dece,ber 31, 2007 it's getting windy outside and little rocks are plinging against the window. my head's been feeling out of shape and lazy this month. today i finished animating a long sequence that took a couple weeks and am happy to come up for air and look around.. will have a solid chunk of photography waiting for me in january and then will be drawing the end of the movie. i have a bad habit some times of over thinking the future and the past while letting the present kind of slip by un-noticed. 2007 started well and ended sort of sadly and weird. it's another new year tomorrow and it looks like it could be a busy one. i hope you get the renewal, forgiveness, and auld acquaintances that come with it
december 18, 2007 tonight i am coloring a scene with sidewalk chalk. the chalk sticks look like sugar and i want to eat them. the tide has been really low lately revealing a strange wash of black shiny pebbles and heavy sea snails that have those swirly shells that end in sharp points. am animating through the holidays and then gonna shoot what could be the last roll for the movie in early january before i go disappear and take a break. meanwhile it sounds like my little thing for tv is a go once the budget is figured out. stay warm out there. go see "the diving bell and the butterfly". hello 2008

november 17, 2007 last night i dreamt i was part of a space shuttle crew. i was scared leaving for the shuttle and as i was loading my car i couldn't remember all the things i needed to pack and all the safety questions i had for the guy on the phone. but when we got up there it wasn't as bad or scary as i'd thought. and there was a lot of ice cream on board. somehow it was believed that eating ice cream would help prevent you from having a stroke as we rapidly returned to earth. as we were preparing to go home everyone was also nervous that the shuttle might explode on re-entry. and as we were descending i was eating an ice cream bar and secretly hoped that if something bad had to happen, the ship wouldn't explode, but just everyone else would get strokes.
november 15, 2007
the science book i'm reading describes the following experiment that has been repeated many times but never explained. a person's nervous system is monitored while being shown images on a blank screen. sometimes the person is also placed in an MRI. a computer chooses at random intervals whether to show the person a calm image (waves, clouds, bunny) or an emotional image (car crash, sex, murder). each image is on the screen for only a couple seconds and disappears. as expected, the person involuntarily reacts when he sees one of the emotional scenes - measured by a big spike in skin conductance, heart rate, or blood oxygen levels in the brain - while the calm images that are shown generate little reaction and the monitors stay flatlined. what shouldn't be happening though, is all the involuntary reactions to the emotional images clearly begin to light up and climb just moments before each emotional image appears on screen. (remember that the viewer is unable to anticipate when each image will come up, and does not know what type of image it will be). in other words, the brain appears to be reacting to events that haven't happened yet.

november 10, 2007
in theory i am now animating the last 4-ish minutes of the film.
sleep this week has also been theoretical_)
here's one more old photo that i like

october 15, 2007
in chapter two bill comes across a hundred year old photo album. i love old photos and it was a lot of fun to "age" these, even if they'll only be in the movie for a glimpse:

october 12, 2007 5:14am discovered some lost holga shots while cleaning, maybe 2002-2003. i like these


october 6, 2007something's wrong with the speakers i've plugged into my computer. for the last few weeks theyve begun to crackle and pop, even when they're not playing anything. it was irritating at first because it made all my music sound like it was on vinyl but now i kind of like it because it makes it sound like there's a fire in the room
september 26, 2007
hello austin where are you?
september 24, 2007
atlanta
let me axe you something
september 15, 2007 had a late night in la watching all the new footage, about ten more minute's worth that had been waiting here in the safe. overall looking good, real loose and wild, some of the most experimental stuff i've seen, kinda all over the map. i need a few reshoots but can't wait to start editing to give it the kick to see how it all connects. even more things will probably be cut now or rewritten, i might have already said this but i don't think i've reshuffled and reimagined a piece so often like this since rejected.. it's all in the name of good news but there's probably going to be more deleted scenes from this movie than any other. i think i could be done with picture by the end of the year if i can get a little more motivated. meanwhile the OK DVD is now done, right before my deadline to sign off on it i decided to add one last minute hidden extra, which you will discover by pressing right or left from the special features menu, just an interesting new way to watch the movie. more animating this weekend and monday im off to atlanta to pitch that new thing for tv
september 2, 2007
feels great to be shooting again. as i go i'm finding camera notes and ideas i'd forgotten about... one scene caught me completely unprepared, needed to frame a character down through a layer of leaves and sticks attached to the camera. which explains why i was tearing branches from the foliage of the neighboring industrial complex in the middle of the night.
august 26, 2007got a cold. think ive got the camera fixed and shot a test today. the animation's really piled up while waiting for the cam so once im back in photography it'll take a really big bite out. only got two pages of story left to animate beyond that
august 18. 2007 >i think i may have found the ending. listening to music just now suddenly made everything fall in place. did more shuffling and rewriting and two more things cut out. it's the same ending more or less but the music will change everything. there are two scenes in there that hadn't been written with music in mind but i think they should still perform as well. and i think i can adapt a longer scene to still fit by cutting it up and cross-cutting to it. which made me realize, in 12 years i don't think ive ever cross-cut to anything. how is that possible? i think this is going to be an amazing ending.
"remember that time in the room when you punched me in the neck?"
august 17, 2007 the hills are still on fire. fifty thousand foot mushroom clouds float over the city every morning and snow weird ash down on everything, swirling around thick in the street in black and white flurries. every other day the sky goes muddy and the shadows blue and orange. ive been sleepy, been working too slow. the number of things i see david L juggling at once makes me feel unbelievably lazy. havent figured out a small scene, so animated around it for now. cutting a few other minor bits. hope to be back in photography before the end of the month. also trying to plan a trip in sept for this possible tv thing. everybody here has headaches.
romantic comedy seen in a parking lot: woman is leaving man. she has all her luggage out and a friend is helping her load the minivan. man is on his knees begging, swearing there were no other girls while she was away. she's having none of it. he's sobbing loudly.. screaming "it was just the internet!" ..look into my eyes! look into my eyes! he says over and over. fat neighbor woman in her underwear with a barbed wire tattoo wanders into parking lot and stands there watching. the friend is off her cell phone now and says something. man turns red and snaps at her to shut the fuck up. they trade insults. he's not crying anymore. he says he's sorry for beating woman, but after all, she beat him sometimes too. "remember that time in the room when you punched me in the neck?" the minivan is loaded now. he stands in front of it so she can't drive away. "i guess you're just gonna have to run me over". friend starts driving anyway and he walks backwards. now he says he's gonna lie down in the road, he swears to god he's gonna lie down in the road. then he climbs on top of the minivan and says they're just going to have to drive down the street with him on it. he is called a "worthless, jobless sack of shit". they start driving away with him. he says, "and don't forget who's got your motorcycle! yeah that's right bitches, you ain't getting that back!" friend hits the brakes and screams at him to get the fuck off her car else she's going to "get out and start throwing punches". man slides down the hood. they drive off yelling insults at him. he might be crying again. as they finally turn the corner he yells "fucking cunts!" they're gone. he's all alone in the parking lot and suddenly the neighborhood is quiet again. he looks at the ground and starts picking up some loose change that he had dropped there.
august 17, 2007 scenes recently animated. this is just scanned production art
july 29, 2007
made some final, final fixes and tweaks to OK's sound mix tonight for the upcoming DVD. all but one is a minor change. things that had been bothering me. if anyone actually notices the changes, you will win a prize
july 25, 2007
unnecessary fact: when a cotton animation glove gets sweaty i put it on top of the lamp to dry and wear another. and somehow all the hot drying gloves smell like baking cookies. i am 93% sugar. tonight animating a shower. work on the "ok" dvd is almost done. i've been repeatedly watching this car crash. guessing most of you have probably already seen it. but the more i study this guy hurtling through the air surrounded by smoke and glass, the more strangely beautiful it seems. best viewed with no volume in slow motion. it's almost hypnotic.
obviously, the cat is killing people july 7, 2007 i found this giant weed growing in the street. it's sort of amazing. wouldn't you think a car would have run over this thing by now?
ive been back in photography and had a couple of good nights but ran into camera trouble this afternoon. it seems to be the exact same problem i had 2 years ago with another burnt out microswitch. the camera has been having a difficult year. i had been thinking about picking up a second camera rig to have as a backup and now im thinking maybe i just hurt her feelings.
july1,2007
portland
pterodactyl claw,pterodactyl claw.
tell me about it.
tell me about it.
june 14, 2007
burrowing here in the bay area getting the ball rolling on the "OK" DVD. animating a scene involving phantoms. was rewriting and moving things around the ch2 story before i left and wound up transplanting a scene from ch3 into there. every little thing is getting interesting. the weather is hot and by day the cats are some sort of pliable liquid. it is only when the air cools that they seem to harden and assume a catlike shape. i have been posting production art but i may have some actual ch2 screencaps to share soon

june 7, 2007
i'm gonna pitch a tv series. i've had a little piece of an idea for a couple years, and this week it suddenly seemed to come together with some other stuff and really make sense. chapter 2's coming along fine and i should probably be chipping away at writing chapter3, but totally veered off writing this other thing instead. in all these years i've never thought i had a good enough idea to frame a tv series around, so this could really be something. and i think at this point i would really welcome getting onboard with something new that for once i wouldn't have to animate every single frame of, alone.
this is a spanish tv translation of "rejected", re-translated back into english. the sad thing is it sort of improves the movie.
june 1, 2007
5:11am
may 26, 2007

may 6, 2007
there's a new kentucky fried chicken commerical on tv that shows off how insanely popular they are in china, how their fried chicken chains have replaced all traditional chinese dishes put together as the most popular chicken in all of china, and how there is literally one new kentucky fried chicken restaurant opening every single day in china, and i thought what a strange thing for a fast food chain to focus on and brag about, to actually consider it a good thing to be slowly eroding and destroying local cultures and traditions around the world by replacing one locally owned resturant at a time with their homogenized trash. there's a similar taco bell ad that boasts how 2 out of every 3 burritos eaten in the entire world is a taco bell burrito.. and they genuinely seem to expect us to be happy to hear about that. last week while driving to fedex i daydreamed about having a very young son who accidentally sliced off three of his fingers in front of me at an amusement park and having to suddenly spring into action and calm him down and yell for a cup of ice from a snack bar vendor. i could be back in photography tomorrow night. tonight i am animating a scene involving a monster eating a sheep. only all the sheep i drew came out looking like dogs so instead now it's a monster eating a cow. but my train came out looking pretty good
april, 29, 2007
have spent the last two weeks animating a train. there is a lot to draw on a train.
april 13, 2007
little scene animated tonight
april 11, 2007
i keep picking away and reshaping the script which is good but getting annoying because now i'm cutting and replacing a shot i'd just spent three days on. no more guy attacking bear shot... which, insult to injury, the animation had come out kinda nice on. but the pace and tone were from a different planet. last week i also threw out the ending i'd written, and now that's wide open again.. wish this thing would eventually settle..