journal page 26

august 26, 2004
4am
tired, juggling a bunch of chores. i stop and start in many directions. see as don rises from the muck.. in LA last week assembling the very first cut of the film with rebecca, very strange and exciting to watch and was surprised to find we're pushing 15 minutes and will probably be in the ballpark when we eventually lock picture. for the first time we're editing in final cut pro instead of on a traditional 35mm flatbed and i have to admit it's pretty cool and rebecca is a whiz at it, though as a tool it can be a bit tempting to over-edit or not give yourself enough time to think. there's still plenty of stuff in there to repair and replace, and spent last week behind the camera again.. the long outer space shot needs some work and to fix i'm carefully inserting new animation to cut into the existing footage.. have been studying the shot's photography notes from 2001 or 2002 in order to reverse-engineer the exact positions of the camera and recreate the frames to blend in there. it's been very strange overall watching scenes from last night blend seamlessly with these scenes from three and a half years ago. i've accidentally turned nocturnal again thru the last two weeks though, more trouble shutting down to sleep and more thoughts that don't want to go away. last night i soaked in a fancy sulfur spa which was meant to be hippie oil soothing but was mostly smelly. then i dreamt of a giant ape crashing through a fence. it was a nice drive though and out the window i got to look at a lot of cows and trees. right now on the olympics there's pony trotting.. the horses prance around in a circle on a white line and are judged on their alternating hoof work. athletic champions, all of these animal trainers. also been fascinated by the table tennis, in that there aren't any ball boys and the players must every time run off and fetch the ping pong balls that fly off the table. was disappointed with this year's synchronized duck catch, but the relay nut throw and the greco roman card tricks were great. cell phone commercials are implying that if you don't own one you are thus paralyzed from ever contacting anybody and are a social retard, as though regular phones have altogether ceased to exist. and the newer ads assume that every loser must own a cell phone by now, but the social retard that you must next avoid becoming is he who has static on his line that prevents him from ever speaking to the pretty girl sitting next to him in the cafe with the newer phone service. i read an article the other day about a giant fat woman who withdrew from society entirely and literally got stuck in her couch pooping on herself for six years and died. reminded of the news article from june 13, people purposely locking themselves away and just disappearing. there is something scratching around above my ceiling

july 31, 2004
the latest camera test came back clear and light leak free again, so have spent the last few nights charging through all this footage anew. i'm guessing those camera adjustments i made have finally nailed the problem (knock on wood).. if the motor is still not calibrated with the shutter after all this, it'll be a real head scratcher. has been a bit demoralizing having to recreate all of these shots, but am almost halfway there now and am trying to find little ways to improve upon the lost footage. i was just writing to a friend that this still hasn't been quite as bad or embarrassing as the time years ago i spent two weeks shooting footage every night before realizing that i hadn't loaded any film in the camera yet.. yeah. always learning new curse words over here in photography. yesterday i watched a thing on the history channel about a lost ww2 bomber found in the libyan desert in 1958. the crew's bodies were found scattered many dozens of miles away, having wandered across the dunes. according to a journal that was recovered, their severe dehydration caused them to go blind when their sinuses dried up and their tear ducts could no longer clear away the dirt accumulating in their eyes. the show had re-enactments with hollywood actors staggering around a desert in flight gear, clutching their heads and pretending to look really hot

hey tomorrow is my birthday and i will be this many fingers old. here are some more poems i wrote for you clipped entirely from spam texts..

july 2, 2004
the new footage came back looking good, really good. i've been up and down with the film for a long while but getting confident again i can make this work. the camera motor still has some minor issues living with the shutter so i can't shoot again until a test comes back.. already seems like i've had too much time away from the drudgery of it though and my head is feeling really lazy and out of shape, probably shellshocked with this sudden change of daily routine from the last few years. have been writing and organizing more of the next film pretty much just out of boredom, and trying to keep busy. i've gotten really good at playing a couple elliot smith songs. i need to come up with a better way to photograph the sunset scene, which is the only significant thing out of the new footage that needs to be redone... need a much smoother way throughout the scene to handle all the complicated moving color over the lights. i was actually thinking about somehow constructing little devices on wheels to slowly pass the colors one frame at a time in front of the lights, rather than keep track of them all again hanging in space with tape. then its just shooting those last star shots which are waiting here finished, and we can take a first crack at editing. you have no idea what any of that really means but it feels good to write it all out somehow. i was sitting outside the laundromat yesterday as an old guy with a baseball cap stood at the pay phone loudly mumbling to himself while repeatedly lifting and hanging up the receiver for about three minutes. he asked to borrow my pencil to write something down and then placed a call to his daughter. he told her he loved her and he was proud of her and that one day they would "finally have their day". then he said "fantastic" a lot and hung up. although it looked like the wind had been knocked out of him, he presented the pencil back to me with a little flourish, as though he were proud no harm came to it while in his possession.

june 21, 2004
carted the camera motor down to my old german friend in LA a few days ago for tinkering and repairs and we replaced a bad switch in its guts. he's possibly one of the last people on earth who knows how to properly maintain this gear and i've been trying to learn as much as i can. he mentioned the last time he'd worked on my camera was thirty years ago and even then it was considered to be old. it's all glass and steel and basic electronics though, so barring damage a rig like this could lead a very long and happy life. eventually finished off the roll of film and have a few days off now while i wait to watch it all and start shooting the next round.. in the meantime there's actually nothing more to animate and faced with some sudden time off i've been overeating, watching chaplin dvds, reading about douglas mawson eating his sled dogs, learning how to play "candy says", arguing with women, and falling asleep on the beach. i took a few more preliminary stabs at writing and reorganizing the next film yesterday but don't want to get sucked too deep into it before more of this is off the plate. the new film is about life and this next one looks like it will be about death. no kidding. i am so very deep and cosmic.

june 13, 2004
from the news: TOKYO (Reuters) - The pajama-clad skeleton of a Japanese man has been found in a vacant apartment building -- 20 years after his lonely death. The skeleton was discovered lying atop musty "futon" bedding earlier this month when workers getting ready to raze the derelict building entered the second floor unit where the man had lived, domestic media reports said on Thursday. A newspaper dated February 20, 1984, was on the kitchen table. Police believe the man, an employee of the construction firm that built the apartments in 1973, moved in after the building was vacated when the firm managing it went bankrupt, the reports said. The man, then 57 and divorced with children, suddenly stopped coming in to work two decades ago but none of his relatives ever asked police to search for him. "I had no idea that the apartment even existed," the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper quoted a 65-year-old neighbor as saying. "After I heard the news, I thought 'Oh, it's here.' It's as if time had stopped in this one place."

i think i've finished penciling and prepping the final outer space opticals.. those bits could have taken many weeks to animate but i've been trying to find smarter ways to photograph them so i can get what i want out of the camera rather than having to sweat it all out of the art. last night spent eight hours shooting what should be the last scene in the film, a very long shot throughout which there's a lengthy sunset effect done entirely with a complicated mess of subtly shifting shadows and colored gels. i got lucky as i was making up the timing and colors of the entire thing as i went along and it looked really beautiful on the table so i hope the camera saw the same. unfortunately tonight i'm home early because the camera stand's control deck appeared to malfunction and wouldn't stop shooting, as though the trigger was stuck. i had to pull the plug before it did anything adverse to the footage and when i poked and checked around the wires on the deck's underside, sparks flew out like on "star trek" so that's not good. the funny thing is less than two minutes before the problem i had thought to myself, gee the gear is looking old, i'm surprised all these wires and parts are all still holding up.. so clearly my dark brain made it happen. very frustrating, i am still in mid-shoot and don't want to have to interrupt the scene.. i have yet to double-expose some stars fading into this sunset, although right now i fear it may be wiser to make off with the footage i've already finished in there for now and the shot will remain starless. it is sobering, there are fewer and fewer people in the world who know how to help upkeep these old camera stand animals and they are growing older and not being replaced by anyone

june 2, 2004
for the last month i've had this jaw disorder, the thing i guess you get when you clench and grind all day and carry your stress in your hinges and lately it sounds like there are grape nuts in my jaw and i mostly can't close the left side all the way without it feeling like a rail road spike is leaping through my head. i'm told there's really no treatment other than "learning how to relax" but i guess i will visit the doctor if it locks or things start dropping from my mouth. it's made me notice a weird unconscious habit i seem to have of tapping my teeth together with my mouth closed to the beat of a song, or chattering them to strange alien rhythms while deeply thinking about something, as though one side of my brain is sending a secret morse code signal to the other while i'm asleep at the wheel. have been shooting for the last five nights, more inking and pencils during the day. was planning on being in there again tonight but instead i've been refining the artwork and throwing some things out last minute to re-animate and improve. many sequences i've ended up animating fully one way, then decided to chisel off 75% or more, leaving the structure to fill in over again with better ideas and movement. it's a very time consuming way of going about it and is sort of like trying to approach a scene with the kind of freedom as when you rewrite a paragraph.. sentences and words change around but the points are the same. i've never "rewritten" this many drawings or tossed out so much alternate artwork from a film before, but it's been getting some good results and is sort of lifting everything up, as when one section gets better, the adjacent bits have to improve as well to match. the shooting overall seems to be going well, i'm pacing and scheduling it pretty good so its not too overwhelming each night and it's getting harder to believe i'm slowly running out of things to ink and polish. amy says she wants to find a way to turn my brain off. maybe soon would be a good time to start into hardcore drugs. i've been trying to learn how to cook more, which is a good excuse not to work and enjoy the therapy of shucking corn and pretending to know how to work the oven.

animation show year 2 is somehow slowly coming together meanwhile.. mike is buried right now shooting his new movie with luke wilson and i am rarely able to come up for air, but we are getting closer to finalizing the program.. it ought to be an interesting one, there are quite a few films i like that i suspect no one else will. i thought the first show dvd turned out pretty good, kinda dry but a very good start. my favorite review was one that said it was a blessing just to own these indie films in any form, which is all too true.

i've been listening to brian eno a bit lately and the little repeating bells and plunks remind me of staring at the big yellow toy machine in the airport at five am. after looking at medical pictures i think i might have a skin virus but i'm not sure

april 22, 2004
4:17am
i was reading an article somewhere the other day that was praising mel gibson for his spectacular marketing and merchandising genius and projected that after total world sales from his jesus movie he was going to personally walk away with $300-400 million, as the film's principal investor. maybe i'm really naive, but shouldn't he be like.. giving all that money away to christian charities and the red cross or something? isn't that the truly christian thing to do? i'm not a christian but if i were i think i'd be extremely upset to hear about mel gibson pocketing $300-400 million largely from church groups. everywhere i've read though, catholics are hailing him as a hero for pulling off such a "risky financial investment", as though somehow a shitload of money is his just reward for merely following his faith and his beliefs. aren't faithful people doing that every day volunteering in african aids shelters and in the peace corps and things? it's very strange and scary, the whole american backwards thing with material wealth equaling spiritual wealth. i guess i don't understand how mel's profiting from religion is any more respectable to christians than a late night televangelist's profiting from religion. what's worse is you have this movie where jesus says these beautiful things about loving your enemies and forgiving everyone and sharing everything, and when the lights go up most of his followers wipe away their tears, drive home in their luxury SUVs and resume throwing their gay children out of the house and making a killing on the stock market. and pocketing $300-400 million to not distribute to the less fortunate. oh and on an unrelated note i've also never understood why the pope always used to ride around in a bulletproof car. he's not really the sort of guy you'd think should be afraid of dying

so i'm going to have to reshoot the smoke scene stuff but i think i have a much better handle on how to go about it after seeing the footage now. currently in a long stretch of animating followed by a longer stretch of inking and then i think i can get through a full 400 feet of film and see where this picture is at. the final shot is going to require some very tricky lighting, something i will have to figure out and construct from scratch. i am also not entirely sure yet how we're going to pull off the difficult dialogues in this ending but it should be fun. i keep forgetting to water the plants and i think i've lost their respect

here is a poem i made for you out of spam subject lines..

april 11, 2004
i think i came up with a new ending for the film a week or two ago which ought to finally complete the puzzle after all these years.. when it fleshed out in my head for the first time i shied away because it seemed so different but i have been curiously looking it over from all angles and it continues to poke and nag which means that it's almost definitely the way to go. bad ideas tend to reveal themselves after a day or two, the good ones won't leave you alone. so i was in a very good mood the day it all came together, for a brief spell of a few hours the whole film finally merged in my head and looked like it would all work, before clouding up again with details and things to do.. i think it's all there now stitched together just underneath the head murk. it's a somewhat strange ending but seems like the only way to go and i think it will relieve weights from the film in a rather peculiar way and is somehow more personal, so am looking forward to putting it all together.. the old ending was really not going to work at all in tone, structure, or anything, tho i think i can still blend in some of its bits and pieces. altogether it's looking like the finished film is not going to make anyone laugh out loud or weep in their seat but rather overwhelm and make you happy.. i guess sort of like a comforting old sweater that is delivered upon a very large wave. um.. a waterproof sweater. so there will be a lot more character animation to plow through now after all... also have a few more things to finish up before i can start shooting again, probably by the end of the week.. don't have too much to reshoot from the last roll which is good but still about three day's worth. at the coffee shop today the trivia question was, what is the only mammal that cannot jump? and the coffee girl said the answer was an elephant. and i said what about a bat? and my dad said what about a whale? and the coffee girl looked annoyed and said it had to be mammals with legs.

it sounds like the animation show dvd will be delayed another week or two.. the disc is all finished, but there are some irritating labwork things that need to be cleaned out like hairballs

march 31, 2004
shot the opening sequence last night which required a storm of experimental smoke effects that i'm still coughing up and getting out of my hair. ash was literally falling onto the artwork as i was shooting it which was somewhat exciting tho there's a fine layer of soot covering the camera stand now and i hope i didn't jam up too many motors. i am probably the only person in the world with an animation stand that's sporting minor exterior flame damage. let's cross fingers i don't have to go in for additional takes, plus tim is getting tired of climbing up and down the ladder to remove the fire alarm every time i film more of these flames and smoke things. i think that shot was actually the very last new sequence that involved character animation, so it might all be effects shots and patching up from here on. today i got my first look at all the completed footage so far, currently totalling just over seven minutes and extremely depressing to experience as all rough cuts are.. the usual angst and fury and angry pacing and vows of retirement followed by watching the tape a thousand more times starting a new round of notes and wondering how on earth i'm going to patch up everything. very familiar ground altho the time invested in this particular monstrous itching bad medicine project is adding quite a bit more weight to it all. which sucks because if i'd only spent a year on this so far i'd probably be thinking this rough cut was looking pretty ok. anyway all the footage plus the maybe one or two minutes left in my head is adding up to a bit of an incomplete whole, feels like there's still a scene missing in there somewhere that i haven't put my finger on. another trouble in the new footage is i've been pencil testing for too long with a video camera and gotten too used to the way the picture moves on tape.. this gives it a slightly faster frame speed, rather than how it truly moves when shot on film.. it's always been an approximate process and a relatively close match, but the filmed versions are all moving a beat or two slower than my pencil tests and intentions were now, which isn't disaster but terribly annoying because it's throwing all the timing off. so will have to go in and reanimate a bit and reshoot a few of the more important-movement bits since they were created with the slightly wrong speed in mind. i remember noticing this same thing when i finished the 'end of the show' film last year, which had been animated to be a bit faster-paced with those lasers and things than the final filmed version ended up.. i'm feeling rather stupid about it at the moment but it's never been a problem before which means i am either improving so much as an animator that these intricacies are becoming ever more important or i am slowly turning into an obssessive critical twisted wreck who will notice ever more miniscule flaws as time wears on until the film unravels at its stitches and all his skin falls off. let's hope for that first one. i have been listening to a lot of tom waits and "what's he building in there" is making me laugh and snarl a little too much. i really want to start writing again i feel like this film has been finished in my head for so long it's beginning to feel like i don't really need to make it anymore

march 19, 2004
the restoration of billy's balloon is driving everyone up the wall. the old home video version of the film that everyone's familiar with looked like it was playing through a dirty screen door. who'd have guessed a dirty screen door would be so difficult to improve upon? we must have telecined the film three or four different times now and are still having trouble pasting a viable version of it together from these multiple takes. our films are notoriously, notoriously difficult to get looking right through every step of every production process. all that pristine white across the screen in every shot always leaves zero room for errors... every speck of dirt, scratch, or shift in color shows up like rocks in snow on there, and there's plenty of all of the above when you're working with 6 year old film elements that got less than perfect treatment in lab storage. add to that mix the surprising fact that *there has yet to be invented a telecine machine that can properly transfer 16mm to high definition digital* and you have a nightmare of a job. so we're nearing the deadline and right now it's basically choosing the best looking shots throughout the film from these alternate 16 and 35mm transfers and hoping they'll all match up when stitched together. unfortunately no version is 100% perfect, as if such a thing exists, so it's often weighing the compromises like choosing whether to amputate an arm or a leg. the colors look richer in this version, however the image is more cropped than it should be. the picture is nice and less grainy in this version, however the telecine was not entirely steady. ETC. madness. of course most of the audience will no doubt be watching whatever final version we make high as a kite on their 10 inch monitors with one color tube blown out and their left speaker missing.

i've been spending the nights shooting, that's all gone pretty smoothly and tomorrow night i think i can wrap it up once i film a very short special effect involving real fire.. tho i haven't quite figured out how to do that yet without burning the studio down. so a trip to the hardware store tomorrow afternoon. and a trip to the emergency room tomorrow night

march 11, 2004
wow it feels really, really good to be shooting again. guns that is. shooting big guns. no. this roll of film ought to be knocked out in a week or so while i animate the title thing during the day. i think i might finally check out the big mel jesus movie this weekend. i've read a lot about it and i guess most people have been disappointed because it's just not very funny. ha ha ha
march 9, 2004
time flowed palpably slower in aspen which was really weird and relaxing and i was even able to scientifically prove it with my calling card, which only charged 3 minutes from 40 minutes of conversations. the higher elevation must make time go slower up there compared to sea level like some sort of relativity thing. i was in town for over four days, thru which i only had to introduce two screenings of the film and answer about five questions... so the shabby excuse for a business trip vacation is gone and today i cleaned up the camera and tomorrow i'll defrost the film. it's weird being back in town tho, going from 20 degrees to 80 degrees in a few hours. i must be back in LA for more dvd work tomorrow and then thurs through the weekend i think i'll be able to start shooting this now-finished chunk of character animation, basically the last ten months of drawings and the second major half of the film. tonight i've begun designing and animating the title sequence which will thankfully all be in pencils

march 1, 2004
lately i've been thinking a lot about all the assholes in the world and how outnumbered we are.. then getting depressed wondering about the hopelessness of all action in the face of so much dumb evil out there. while at the same time wondering if it's normal to have detailed rage fantasies of bashing a drunken idiot's head in with my car door for offending me and what an entirely satisfying crunchy sound that would make. everyone though has been a bit under a cloud and down lately, i guess it is cyclical. so far it's seeming like a real weird week to have to go visit a comedy festival. a month ago i dreamt i was being attacked by an elephant seal

the animation show dvd has reached the stage where i can comfortably take a step away and pat rob and rebecca on the back for doing such an overall great job and not really have to worry about it anymore. it is easily the highest quality and best compilation of indie animation on dvd i've ever seen. yeah we rock. i even recorded a very short commentary for something the other day that didn't come out too bad. also rob had been tugging at my sleeve to dig up some never-seen production pictures from out of storage for billy and the trilogy so i spent last night burrowing through memory lane uncovering heaps and heaps of doodles and production stuff i don't even remember drawing. thank god i don't throw stuff out anymore. i could build a fort out of old production sketches.

so i think the week i get back from aspen i'll be able to shoot that next round of stuff for the film and see what we have. the beauty of this journal is starting to reveal itself.. you can now go back through five years of entries and discover that i am always pretty much writing about the same thing. beep beep blopp

february 6, 2004
manic weeks continue.. still having trouble sleeping, bouncing around the walls with too much energy.. my brain was feeling particularly hot today and i've been coming up with more ideas and solutions for this film than i am easily able to write down. it may have been one of those landmark days where 'everything is starting to come together'. i think i'm cutting (or rather, won't be bothering to shoot) a finished sequence from the climax-near-end-scenes, one that had been bothering me... what's interesting is that it's not so much that the sequence doesn't work anymore, but the scenes and animation around it have improved so dramatically (ie, i keep getting better at animating this stuff as these months go on), it is just starting to pale in comparison. so all of the connective scenes were taken apart and rearranged and put back together and i think it's going to work extremely well now. it's only a little heartbreaking since the cut sequence probably took 3-4 weeks to complete, but it's something that must be swallowed and done, rather than risk dragging down the rest of the animal. meanwhile it looks like i may have only four more relatively-short creature sequences to animate and then by allah i may actually be done with character animation for this film after all these years. and more impressive, i will at that point be ready to shoot another roll of film, and then move on to the very end of the film effects work..
february 4, 2004
have been awake for about 36 hours again but i haven't been sleeping well at all lately anyway, i guess riding another weird manic crest. at this point i should probably stay up for a few more hours to be able to rotate my waking hours and be awake in the mornings again. i took a nap earlier tho which was a big mistake because now it feels like there is a brick inside my head. doing this feels a lot like being very drunk all day long, with exactly the same risk of passing out asleep on the kitchen floor.. at the same time tho you are oddly sharper than usual at certain tasks, probably because you are so tired there is no energy for pretense upstairs. your senses also seem hyper-real for some reason and things taste funny and the voices on tv sound like real people in the room and you can hear snails crawl. all you can really do once it gets late in the game on the 2nd day like now is ink, because any work requiring greater responsibility risks embarrassment. 'i'm glad we called this financial meeting today. i'm especially glad to see that tony in accounting with the ant head was able to bring his magic sack.' telecine went pretty good last week, i was in there for 9 hours and rebecca 13 but we eventually knocked out everything and i felt pretty all right about it. i'm not good at telecine at all because there's too many options and the quasi-permanency of it all freaks me out. we did everything in hi-def this time plus also used the original 16mm elements for "billy's balloon", which i'm not sure had ever been done before so that's looking a lot crisper than any of us remember.. we also got the trilogy optical effects a little bit brighter and more vivid than they'd been, tho i've never been satisfied with how i shot that fire effect and am still on the fence with how it looks now. i'm also already second guessing the color temp we got out of billy. filthy evil telecine poison. so the next step in the process is digitally removing all the dirt, scratches, and dead bugs from all of the frames, of which there are many. i think this animation show dvd is still supposed to be released in the march-april window but it's the beginning of feb and i'm still helping design the very basics of the menus, so we'll just have to wait and see. meanwhile the flying critters are all inked and done now and in just three days i've torn thru the entire following sequence of creatures and am inking them already.. i may soon be actually approaching the "all downhill from here" mark for character animation in this film.. and still feeling real positive with everything, thank god.. think i'm going to get a fancy media computer in the next week or so and get some software lessons from tim so i can start some sound work experiments for this stuff from home. meanwhile still can't shake the need to take the first serious stab at writing the next film real soon and just see what happens. with all the spur of the moment post-it notes littered all over the floor from over the past month its probably half finished already, just a matter of gathering them together on the same page. going to need to make something real fast and cheap next time and possibly in pencils-only because i want to bury all of these fume pens in a deep deep hole and plant a tree on top. say, did i tell you i went to the doctor a couple weeks ago and learned that i am not, in fact, dying? all of my knobs and blobs are benign. in fact they are all very good friends. the cyst nub atop my head may or may not grow bigger.. i can elect to cut it out if i like, however i may just let it slowly grow enormous over the years so that i may gradually fashion it into a proper horn. so thats always good news