03:51 pm - More Practice
Krissy asked me to color the Wall-E thing, so I tried.
Krissy asked me to color the Wall-E thing, so I tried.
My rules for selection:
It must debut as a webcomic. It can't be scans of a printed book or strip.
It must still be going/updated on some sort of regular basis (which excluded Girl Ninja by Rebecca Simms, for instance).
My favorites:
Bayou, by Jeremy Love and Patrick Morgan.
History and Nonsense comics by Kate Beaton.
Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch. *To be fair, this one might get printed in papers first. I don't think so, though.
The Ten Doctors by Rich Morris.
Spadefoot by Matt Dembicki and Andrew Cohen. Eventually changes host site. See following link.
Spadefoot, continued, by Matt Dembicki and Andrew Cohen
.
Phoenix Requiem by Sarah Ellerton, but mostly for the art.
What are yours?
Actual voicemails from a loser trying to get a date. Worth listening to because it gets crazier and crazier.
Dimitri the Stud on FunnyOrDie.com
Nice version that takes a short amount of the voicemail and turns it into a skit:
Demetri of "Douchiest Phone Message Ever" Orders a Pizza on FunnyOrDie.com
You have NO idea just how bad their teeth will be. Watch it and let the tension build like a horror movie.
Les McClaine draws really good comics. A while ago he let a few folks request very affordable commissions and I leapt at the opportunity.
I got The Monarch.
Krissy and I went to Crafty Bastards in Silver Spring on Saturday morning. Her friend Brandt from Tennessee was in town and we wanted to meet up and say hello and do something unique but light. I got to see my friends Jeff and Tina from my podcast because Tina had a booth. It was super-damn-hot, though. My energy level therefore was just about non-existent. I hope her friend didn't think I was boring or rude. I was just dragging in the sun.
After that, we drove down to Norfolk, VA, which took a little over 5 hours thanks to some traffic. Still, we were down in time to relax at a hotel room we booked, get some dinner, then get to the Norva, a music venue which that evening hosted Krissy's favorite band, Modest Mouse. The venue was actually fantastic. Smoke free, packed, but spacious enough that there was some air conditioning to help out. There was a brass jazz band that opened who I dug. Modest Mouse puts on a really strong show, too. Isaac is out of control with his energy. Guy looks like he's gonna give himself a stroke. After a few hours, I have to admit that I was in a lot of pain. I just can't stand for hours on end. My shoulder and lower back were firing jolts of pain, but I just sucked it up. Didn't have to deal with it for TOO many songs. I wanted Krissy to enjoy everything, including the encore.
The next day we got to sleep in and headed back home. First I fueled up the car. Gas was "only" $3.91/gallon there. About 25 cents cheaper than it goes around Northern Virgina.
We also stopped at a music store I saw when we entered Norfolk. It said it had a huge going out of business sale and had CDs, DVDs, and music equipment. Krissy and I went in and were the only customers there. And we quickly realized the store was not built for us. The music equipment was a few pieces of DJing stuff. The music was broken down into the following categories: RAP, JAZZ, SOUL, GOSPEL. The DVDs all starred Wesley Snipes. I also saw a porno on sale called CRACK HEADZ GONE WILD. We realized it didn't have much we'd want and headed home.
We made good time and were home by the afternoon. That night we went to see WALL-E. It was brilliant. Just heartwarming, and exciting, and romantic, and cute and wonderful. I heartily recommend it. Pixar knocked it out of the park. It's probably my fav of their movies, followed by INCREDIBLES and RATATOUILLE for whatever that's worth.
I wrapped up my weekend with episode 47 of my podcast. By the way, episode 46 is up. Enjoy!
This probably will get yanked soon, but damn, does it look amazing:
While I was never a fan of Michael Turner's artwork, I've always heard he was great to his fans, hit his deadlines, and loved the business. Plus he fought cancer for 8 years! That's hardcore. 37 is a pretty short time on this world. He made the most of it.
Just call or email my podcast and describe how you'd adapt an existing book, play, comic book, videogame, etc. into a cool tv show and we'll mail the best suggestion a sonic screwdriver pen and other cool tv show office items.
televisionzombies(at)gmail.com
206-336-0661 (Seattle phone number-automated voicemail)
Professional laughingtock of the comics world Graig Weich must not be meeting the bills with his one comic that he made years and years ago.
Apparently he is trying to sue more successful folks so that he can retire on their $10 Million.
http://dockets.justia.com/docket/co
You tell 'em Larry.
Larry David: Help A Bald Brother Out on FunnyOrDie.com
Dan Harmon is one of my heroes. He's deeply versed in what makes a myth, and writes stuff that I believe is A)funny and B)well-structured. You can see a lot of his projects at www.channel101.com (and the apparently defunct VH1 show acceptable.tv), which you may recognize as a site I recommend from time to time. You may have seen something else he wrote like MONSTER HOUSE or maybe even the HEAT VISION AND JACK pilot that Fox never picked up. Dare I suspect some of you may even be familiar with his work on the comic book SCUD, THE DISPOSABLE ASSASSIN or LA COSA NOSTROID?
Anyway, I like the guy's work. Not only do I like his work, I like his attitude. He's just funny and he doesn't take shit and he tells it like it is.
Like this instance where he was discussing on the Channel101 forums what it's like to write for a movie like KUNG FU PANDA:
I'm sure nothing I contributed ended up in there. We wrote a bunch of scenes they kept not using because we were changing too much.
My hats off to anyone that can write a Dreamworks Animation film. They have a unique process.
First they storyboard the entire film. That is the first step. Not kidding. No writers, no script, just a story, and an entire film drawn on pieces of paper.
Then Katzenberg watches an animatic of the boards and says, surprisingly, "this needs a lot of work. You have a month."
Then they hire their first writer. And spend that month changing as much of the storyboards as they can, which is about 20 to 30 percent.
If the 30 percent change isn't the right kind of change, people get fired. Maybe the director, maybe the writer, maybe both.
Sometimes, only the writer gets fired and an additional director is hired to help out. It all depends on who is better - at pointing a finger with one hand while covering their own ass with the other.
I came in about four writers into the process. It's kind of hard to write a "better" scene than the last writer when the rules are that you can only change 30 percent of each scene or completely change 30 percent of the scenes, per Katzenberg screening. So, for instance, in this scene, the panda comes up a flight of stairs carrying a bucket of water, slips on a banana peel, says something to two geese and does an air guitar. The good news? There can be anything in the bucket. Your mission: make the movie better.
It's harder than it sounds. Especially when the larger "bucket" that the movie is contained in cannot change: the fact that the story has to be about a panda who is informed he is the chosen one, destined to ...beat up... a guy who has escaped from prison and who is spending the entire movie walking to town, in order to...try to beat him up, because that's the prophecy. And I won't spoil the movie, but the bad guy doesn't win. Because he's not destined to. But just to make sure he doesn't win, and because there's 70 minutes of time to kill before he gets there on foot, the panda is trained in the martial arts. it's kind of like Karate Kid, but if Mister Miyogi had long ago banished the Kobras and was running the karate tournament.
That resonates, right? We've all been in that situation. Oh, yeah, but we weren't the "panda." We were the "bad" guys, walking from Nazareth to Jerusalem, hoping to help people, only to get nailed to a fucking cross by the "good" guys. For instance, I had this job once at Dreamworks Animation...
I tried to divide my time there between the tasks of writing 30 percent of scenes, being hazed by storyboard artists because I didn't know how to do 30 percent of my job, yet, and explaining to the producers that Messianic myths (like The Matrix, which seemed to have a slight impact on their story) usually resonate because in the beginning of the story, things are bad, not good, and the good guy is usually the one overcoming insurmoutable odds and attempting to reclaim something from systems that have the magical ability to beat the living shit out of them no mater what they do.
I said, could we please dedicate this month's 30 percent change to making the bad guy be the ruler of the town, and the prophecy is that this panda is supposed to dethrone him.
Well, the prison scene is already drawn. And Jeffrey really likes it.
All right, can we make it like Demolition Man or Austin Powers or Cat Ballou, have the bad guy break out and everyone's panicking and they go and get the guy that according to legend is the biggest bad ass, but he's out of shape, out of his element and kind of a dick.
Hmmm, okay, but in that case, why is he coming up a flight of stairs, and what's in the bucket?
I don't know. There's food in the bucket, because he loves food so much, and ...he keeps his food in the basement, and he's coming up to answer the door because the stork is knocking at it and beseeching him to be a hero.
Well, the stork never knocks on a door, though. And Jeffrey likes the stork not knocking on doors.
So we quit. Actually, I believe we were fired.
They do this cycle like 30 times and the end result is a movie created over three years by 7 terrified directors and 20 pissed off writers, none of whom get any back end because it's an "animated" film, therefore no matter how bad it is, it turns like an 8,000 percent profit, and they make another one and another one and another one until Katzenberg is finally dead at the age of 117 because he uses all the money he saves to rejuvinate his body with the blood of poor people who die at the age of 50 because their hearts got clogged while eating Lion King Meals.
Which, honestly, sounds like the beginning of a great story. If someone would come along and blow up the whole god damn building and then piss on the rubble.
Unfortunately, it's real life, and the rich guy is writing the story, so the stories are about rich people beating the shit out of everyone who wants the building blown up.
Which, Katzenberg assured me, is a story that's been told from the beginning of time. And he told me I should get this book by Ted Kopell and Joseph Campbell called Hero of a Thousand Journeys or Something. Actually, he offered, because he liked me so much in our first meeting, to have his people send me a copy. To help me write his movie.
And I said "oh, that sounds great," because I had been coached for that meeting by the directors and producers, and one of the rules was that if Jeffrey said anything about story structure or Joseph Campbell, I was supposed to pretend I'd never heard of him.
Not kidding. Not exaggerating. Except for the Ted Kopell part.
Anwyays, 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, sounds like another hit. I hope there's a shot where the panda leaps in the air and it freezes and orbits him. The storyboard guys love that stuff. And it's their movie. I was under foot.
Oh, and I don't know about Rob, but the reason I'm not credited on imdb is because I emailed imdb and pretended I had never heard of Kung Fu Panda. I figured I owed that to Campbell.
Fascinating. Patton Oswalt riffs on the same stuff in his latest album. I've seen some reaction to Dan's rant where folks condemn him for not understanding that animated films get storyboarded before scripting. To which I reply, "THAT MAKES NO SENSE."
It ain't great, but I'm practicing various techniques. One day I'll get there.
Please. Please stop making these movies, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. I know teenagers will go see them, but you're not even making jokes. You just refer to something that exists and then hit it with a rock or something and then someone farts. Those aren't jokes.
Doodlin'. Plan to use this to practice coloring:
I'm not in a bad mood, but there are several little things that have been irritating me lately.
First of all, it's not that cool in my office. I don't know why. It's not especially hot today, and was mild this past weekend. Last summer we had a new, "state of the art" cooling tower installed. What's the point, if I'm sweating in a short sleeve polo shirt?
I definitely had a nightmare last night. I can't remember any of it, and I'm not trying to, because of that odd phenomenon in which you try to remember a dream and it only withdraws further from your memory. But all day I get the tiniest flash and I think I'm going to remember but it's just not enough to go on.
Sigh.
I'm very, very curious to hear the results of this week's Television Zombies podcast. When we recorded last night, we were interrupted five times. Twice, one of the hosts kicked out his usb headset which caused him to disconnect. Three times, my friends' kids woke up crying. It lead to us just taking a moment and then pushing forward but we did the segments out of order. I wonder if that will come through in any way, like energy levels rising and dropping? I'm sure the audio will sound consistent throughout.
On Saturday, we had our annual DC Conspiracy bbq party. Except, not quite.
Basically, as my friend Jason was setting up the grills in his apartment quad, the groundskeeper came up and chewed him out about what we did last year, saying we damaged the lawn (I don't believe that at all). He's a crank and threatened Jason with eviction which was really extreme. He told us we had to limit the number of guests.
This is all just minutes before the official start. Unfortunately, Jason and I had to call all our friends and explain the situation. Essentially disinviting people. It stressed me out pretty badly. I felt like a shit. Then, when folks arrived, we had to explain it to them and rotate people in and out so that not too many folks were there. So, it was ok and fun but I had a deep sense of guilt underlying everything. Next year we'll simply have to reserve a park. It's at the point where there's at least 50 people that will come. Sigh. Krissy and I brought a pinata, though, and we let Jason break it since it was his yard. That went over well. That's something.
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