journal page 10

august 9, 2000
6:19pm
hey, wow i am writing at the same time i did last time. either that or my clock is broken. i was at the supermarket the other day and a guy picked up and inspected an onion and said to no one in particular, "big onion."

i spent the weekend in las vegas for some reason and won and lost a lot of money. i can't say it was my thing and i sort of need a vacation from the vacation. it was very hot and somewhat stressful and full of sad and angry people. it is strange to go to a place where there nothing really at all remarkable but just a bunch of other tourists.

so i spent the weekend before last at my parents' house and uncovered boxes of old drawing pads. from when i was maybe 4 to 12 i'd spend hours scrawling thousands of pages of cartoons and never-ending series of strange and violent superhero stories. and i couldn't help jotting down some dialogue highlights from these highly thought-out and intricate military operations:

		CAPTAIN ZONG			
	Our meeting for today is to have me and 
	some volunteering soldiers and Rubber Man 
	to fly over and get Dr. Fygar's blueprints 
	for my giant robot. Now you will see what 
	the robot will look like after it is built.
	On the film projector. Unfortunately the 
	Black Glove has one too. He's planning to 
	destroy San Francisco with it. It takes 
	someone to control it. I will.
 
 

 
		CAPTAIN ZONG
	Hello Black Fighter. I just followed your 
	path of destroyed buildings and dead people.

 
		CAPTAIN ZONG
	Ooooh!

		THE BLACK FIGHTER
 	Too much for you am I not?
 
		CAPTAIN ZONG
	Now for my sonic missile.

 
"Two saboteirs tried to free the Eye, the Dark Glove, and his
brother so I think we should just end the war and drop them 
in acid."
 
(everyone cheers)
  

this weekend marks another round of massive dialogue recording for the next film. i promise to fill you in on all that when i have more energy and it's a little more underway. meanwhile, here is something somebody sent:

july 25, 2000
where it is, it's not so safe
6:19pm
so i totalled my car on the san diego freeway on the way home from the comic convention thing. for a split second all i saw was black and i had a weird conscious thought of "i am unconscious," when i realized it was actually the black hood of my car flying up through the windshield, blacking out my view. i am ok and everyone else is ok but the car is blown to bits and cannot be called a "car" anymore. so unfortunately for all of the nice kids i met at the comic convention, i am not dead and the terrible pictures i drew for them are not suddenly worth something.

the rest of the weekend went much better. i met some good people and we had a great screening. "rejected" premiered to an audience of over a thousand and finally proved itself. the cheering began with the appearance of the first title and never quit. a big, fun relief. many thanks to all who came for being so incredibly loud and supportive. so that film is officially wrapped and behind us, and the intravenous drugs may begin.

it was interesting to discover my complete inability at the convention to whip up even halfway decent drawings of billy or lily or whatever people were asking me to draw. i did my best, but i haven't drawn most of these characters in over 2 or 3 years and i simply can't do it right anymore. maybe that's sort of sad considering they're stick people. but the reality of it is simply that when you're animating you're tracing thousands of times into oblivion and rarely ever draw free-hand. so i sat there desperately struggling to draw these deformed little things for confused people while at the booth next door these marvel guys are whipping out perfect spiderman drawings with their feet.

so yes, there will be "rejected" t-shirts made for all of you to clothe your filthy nakedness with. still settling on a design, but i promise it will be foxy. if you buy a shirt i will do a little shirt dance for you. no, still no word on the comic strip future.

all-right... it looks like by the time i write again all these production thorns will be behind us and i will actually be writing about life again... i promise i will have absolutely nothing interesting to say and things will be back to normal

here is the latest viewer contribution. this one is pretty good if you ask me. it is sort of a long download and is extra better if you have speakers.

july 9, 2000
allow 6-8 week for delivering
4:07pm
can you believe yet more soundtrack sync issues? i keep forgetting to live by my own rule of always adding an extra two months to the tail of a schedule, no matter how well things seem to be going. once again tim took extra whacks at sync and we'll see if it does the job this time. we should barely squeak by in time for the spike and mike festival opening screenings in two weeks. burned out on this project and ready to move on. have acquired a love-hate relationship... it tends to grow on me, but it simply needs to be let out of its cage and do its thing. we'll all very curious to see how audiences will react. meanwhile, early pencil tests for the next film are coming along lovely, it's going to be a thing of beauty. hjen left all this licorice over here and i ate it all and now am not feeling well.

i found this on the ground the other day, on a 3x5 card.

poetry. ok, i will let you know how everything pans out this week. cross your fingers for us and we will finally have this cartoon done. here is the latest viewer contribution:

june 26, 2000
chewing on tongue in sleep
6:15pm
wow this film keeps kicking me in the face. more soundtrack problems with "rejected" culminating today but tim and i (hopefully) cleared it up and got the necessary material overnighted, barely in time. i've been literally on the phone all day long with labs and my voice is sort of in shreds and i'm beginning to decide that producing is the one job i don't really like doing anymore. drinking a very large purple slurpee. it's supposed to be flavored blue but it came out purple. it tastes ok though. i think. so now you know that. i need to eat some bread. more soon, lucky you.

june 21, 2000
three cars on fire
it's never going to be easy
2:50pm
sorry it's been awhile since last update. i watched the second check print of "rejected" at the lab yesterday and though the print is fine our soundtrack is predictably out of synch and really muffly, low quality to boot. so we have a bit of homework to do in order to fix those problems (we've never actually had a soundtrack synch up perfectly the first time through) and officially wrap everything up next week, with luck.

meanwhile, saturday was spent back in the sound studio recording with about 50 performers (mostly nonactors) for the next project. i'll spend the next few days going over the entire day's recordings and picking out what we're looking for and DOWNSTAIRS SOMEBODY IS DRILLING INTO MY FLOOR. uhh so once i can compile a master of the performances i need, they'll be handed off to brian to do some pretty massive dialogue breakdown while i take a bit of a break. i can't say too much about this next thing just yet, though i can tell you it will be visually amazing i hope and i'm practicing walk cycles. lots of walk cycles. so saturday was a long, hot day of recording and wrangling everyone, but they all did a great job and i baked cookies for everyone. meanwhile, "being there" was on tv with peter sellers. i had no idea that the cookies would expand so much, so my very first attempt was pretty much a sea of cookie dough that filled the sheet, end to end. i then decided that i should have first invested in some oven mitts. i was sort of able to break the thing up into cookie-like forms but they were sort of burnt. but the next couple tries came out pretty good. does anybody read this journal?

i somehow just wrapped up another feature film screenplay today which is an important one to me. meanwhile, what of the future of 'temporary anesthetics' you ask? i still don't know. believe it or not, it's still tied up in legal hell. el gato is muy grade.