11Second Club November Entry Complete.

This is it. I feel like I should have left the lip-sync in stepped keys. It looked better since it was such fast dialogue. I didn't have time to really tweak curves on the lip-sync so it looks a little hinky. Also, I tend to have slightly spastic animation. I need to settle it down a bit, or at least make the spasticity look more controlled.

New WIP.

This is some blocking for the 11 Second Club November entry. I have to haul ass on it though since I need it done by Sunday night.

New Demo Reel.

That's all you get. Now fucking hire me.

Animation

I'm having enormous difficulty just now. Well, the past three months really. I stopped animating about three months ago. I stopped modeling sometime in July, baling on a project for PBS entirely. No reading on the subject. No practice. Nothing.

It's just not there for me right now. There's no creativity. None. No drawing. No new ideas. No sketching anything out, or blocking something new. I can't remember the last time I even opened 3DS Max or Maya. Blender 3D, a program I fell in love with, I abandoned almost quickly as I fell for it. I don't know why. I can't explain it.

And it has me pretty frightened.

These are skills that have to be worked on continuously, every day, every week, every month. You don't get better by just reading and watching tutorials. You have to actually work on shit, and I haven't worked on anything in months. I was already pretty average. Now I'm probably pretty novice again, if even that, and that's not conducive to employment for anyone except those that produce the shittiest animation out there. You know, the kind for law office commercials. Oh shit, now that's going to show up in ads on the periphery here.

I haven't followed any of my favorite blogs - Animation Mentor, Keith Lango, Victor Navone, VFX World. None of it. I've unplugged from everything. And I can't pin down why. What the fuck could be my malfunction? I have to get to the bottom of it, but I don't even know where to start. I just don't have any idea where my mojo went.

Fuck.

Andy Ostroy; WTF

Here is my lengthy comment to Andy Ostroy's post over at HuffPo.

Joe Scarborough Show Yet Again Why He Could Be President One Day

I mean, honestly. Why is it that the Right continues on it's crash & burn strategy of elevating the obviously unqualified? Is it the star power? Does Scarborough even have star power? I don't get it.

Anyway, here's my comment, which had to be shortened of it's penetrating insight and wit to fit HuffPo's gestapo-like requirement of only 250 words.

First, you must have missed the grenade he threw at President Obama. That is, that Obama "failed" to bring the Olympics to Chicago. He went there to cheerlead the idea. He wasn't doing any of the heavy lifting or work to bring the Olympics to Chicago, so I hardly think that he "failed" to do anything. In fact, nobody failed. The committee selected Rio over Madrid and Tokyo, not just Chicago. Did the King of Spain fail to bring the Olympics to Madrid? Did the King of Japan? No, 'cause there's no King of Japan, but if there were, no one would say he failed.

Secondly, Scarborough would need the support of the Republican leadership- you know, Beck, Limbaugh and Steele- and I don't see any of them taking any time to praise Scarborough or his politics. In fact, I can see them working against him with their usual gusto, or in the case of Steele, working against him with his inept support of him.

Thirdly, every tantrum, every incompetent utterance, every misguided comment on a subject he knows nothing about, every eye-roll, every snotty remark, all of it, are preserved for all eternity on video and would play endlessly in any campaign. He only comes off as an amiable Conservative fella that enjoys a meaningful discussion when he happens to write that about himself and there are hours and hours of video that show he's actually not that amiable a Conservative fella that enjoys a meaningful discussion. There's no way Scarborough could tolerate that sort of intense scrutiny of his "record" on issues, at least not for very long. He's far too thin skinned and petulant. He'd last one month, then withdraw because "the discourse" has become so vitriolic.

Fourth, any schmuck can wax eloquent about how bad the discourse has become. It doesn't mean you get to be president, or are qualified, or that you're Party needs you, it just means you get to wax eloquent about how bad the discourse has become. There are a gajillion blogs. Lots of them say meaningful things and are probably written by people that know a whole hell of a lot more than Joe Scarborough, but I couldn't see any of them as president of anything besides their own blog.

No, I don't think he's angling for anything other than some attention, perhaps a segment or two about how awful the some of the comments were in his post, or whatever, in order to illustrate his own point about the discourse being so very very awful. Mika will console him, his panel will agree with him, or two of them will and the third will risk his wrath by saying something out of line. In the end, he'll get the attention he wants.

Anyhoozle, I'm also posting it because HuffPo tends to treat some of it's bloggers with soft, kid gloves, and often times wont post any comments that smack of opposition to their crazy fucking notions. I tried to take apart Star Jones when she posted a thinly veiled ad for her ridiculous blog and didn't get a comment through until I posted something that said how awesome she was and how ready I was to learn something from her. So now I'm on record for liking her attention whoreishness.

Just awesome.

From just before Obama announced he was going to run for president...

"Texas ort"

Just thinking about Molly Ivins today.

New posts.

I really have to get something up that's new. Ever since I screed about RW (I'm not typing out his name), google crawled my site and now all the adsense ads are about you-know-who.

Maybe I should say something about Animation Mentor. Maybe I should say something about Apple and the iPhone. Maybe I should say something about sheep fucking. You think maybe there's an ad for that?

Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover

I'm not sure I want to write about this tonight. I want to first get past my anger and grief over what's happened to this boy. You can read about it over at The Advocate.

School Yard Bully by William McGinness

It doesn't happen often, but...

...right now I really miss home. I just want to go to the beach and lay in a tidal pool. Well, when it gets warmer, anyways...

¡Mi hermanito está saliendo por tres meses!

My little brother is going to southern Colorado for three months.

Ronaldo es muy triste.

Rick Warren aide explains Talking Heads cancellation, says something stupid

Rick Warren canceled his appearance with The Steph this weekend, claiming to be exhausted at the preparations necessary to celebrate the zombification of Jesus. Or at least his aide did. Or tried to, anyways.

Rick is facing a little Christian Consternation over saying that he never really supported California's Proposition 8, even though The Googles can show you video of him supporting California's Proposition 8 in about 2.1243345543 seconds. An aide emailed The Politico's Mike Allen with a lengthy explanation about why he couldn't make the Saturday taping of This Week with George Stephanopolous. Mixed in with the "he's exhausted from Christianizing and huffing fumes from his awesome new pulpit (Now with More Pompousness!)" was this little doozy:

“Throughout his pastoral ministry spanning nearly 30 years, Pastor Warren has remained committed to the biblical definition of marriage as between one man and one woman, for life — a position held by most fellow Evangelical pastors. He has further stressed that for 5,000 years, EVERY culture and EVERY religion has maintained this worldview."

Really, Aide to Rick Warren? EVERY culture and EVERY religion has maintained this worldview? None of them allowed a dude to have multiple wives? Ahem! (Mormons...) None of them allowed a little guy-action on the side while still being married to a woman? **Cough!** (all of them...) And by the way, since we're on the subject of the Biblical Worldview (Now with Easier to Obey Understand Language), what does the Bible have to say about divorce? What is Jesus' worldview on men putting asunder what's not supposed to be asundered? My understanding is Pre-Zombie Jesus had more to say about divorce than he had say about The Love That Dare Not Speak It's Name. In fact, word has it he never spoke of M4M or even 2M4M, but on divorce, he was specific. And pretty verbose compared to how much he had to say about The Gays.

But I digress. My pointless here is - the truth is always simple and lies are always complicated. Instead of a simple "He's exhausted and we'll be on next week", we got to hear about how "the hands-on preparation for an anticipated 43,000 Christians stopping by for The Word combined with fumes from his new pulpit and, and, his car wouldn't start after his alarm didn't go off 'cause the power went out in the middle of the night and his wife couldn't wake him 'cause she's been, you know, cooking all week for 43,000 Christians so she's tired too and blah blah fucking blah..."

Now, please Reverend Warren, for the Love of God (Thor) and his rock-hard hammer Mjolnir, get rid of that ridiculous fucking goatee.

Right Wing Epic Fail. AGAIN.

Well once again the boys and girls on the Right have effed up entirely. In yet another attempt to scare the bejebus out of America over the issue of same-sex marriage (which apparently now constitutes a "gathering storm" or some such stock footage + scary music), they have formed a new group called the National Organization for Marriage. That's right. The boys and girls against gay marriage have formed a group for marriage. You figure it out. I can't.

Oh but it gets better. They have also decided to call their marriage campaign "2M4M." Once again missing the meaning of terms that people living in reality are familiar with (re: Teabagging), they apparently have no idea that this abbreviation is used on craigslist.org to signify a search for gay threesomes. "2M4M" means "two males for male." HAHAHAHAH! Get a brain, morans!

I'd like to link to their laughable video, but I don't want to give them any further traffic. I beleive they are the proverbial "cranky fucktard with letterhead" that used to keep the networks scared to death over their programming, never knowing it was just one guy with a printer. Some are taking them seriously, but knowing now how it's done, I'm not impressed. Anyone can do this sort of video in an afternoon, maybe two if you want to polish the acting.

What a bunch of losers.

Splin Doctors Challenge: Christian Bale Rant

Oh this is just awesome. I usually follow Daniel Huertas' blog because he's a good animator and his work gives me a good idea of what I should be working towards. He made this entry for the Spline Doctors Challenge : Christian Bale Rant and won second place. I love it especially because I regularly hurl expletives at my computer whenever projects aren't going right. I mean, it's not my fault it's screwing up right? I think I make those faces, too...

Enjoy.

WTF?!? Part Two: Gays That Hate Being Gay, but Love Dating Fag-Hags. Or Their BF's. On the Next Tyra...

Oh dear. The really fun part comes at 07:15 when Tyra tries to understand all this nonsense. She does a pretty good job until her neurons all fire at once and make her head explode.

P.S. Love the audience hottie with the red tie. Call me.

WTF?!?

I want both of these people destroyed. Immediately.

Shouldn't I be animating or something?

Just for fun.

BEHOLD!

This is the result of loading up a shotgun full of keyframes and shooting it at a timeline. And then just converting all the tangents to "shameful."

I was trying to get some blocking done on another dialogue shot and was getting frustrated with the process. I feel like I have to suss out my process every time I start work on something. It's my purgatory I suppose. My animation soul, it appears, must first be purified before being accepted by whatever animation god (Thor (oh some of you will find that funnier than others)) I've pissed off this week. I have to be more disciplined and start animating every single day.

Anyhoozle. Take a look at this and feel free to critique. Any words are helpful, even if you are not an animator. Even though I've marked it a WIP, I probably won't revisit it. I was just playing around and need to finish up the other dialogue piece (or two) and the other stuff, too, whatever they turn out to be.

P.S. I'm well aware of the hiccup at frame 77 (or so).

New Character Rig from Jason Baskin

Here's a new rig, Blake, from Jason Baskin, creator of the Bloke, Blik and Blok rigs. The rig comes with a variety of physical appearance options built in and very dynamic facial controls, including a nifty control called "autoLid" that keeps the eyelids traveling with the eyes. Blake is served up with a how-to YouTube video. Go check 'em out.

No Photoshopping Required. All-Natural Epic Fail.

I wish I knew where to start with this one. Another winner from yesterday's Tea Party, or perhaps Tea Bag Party is the proper term. Who knew? Maybe this is why they needed a permit, though I'm shocked to hear you can get a permit to do this in public. All the men hiding in the bushes at Cheesman Park will be pissed off when they find out all that rolling around in pine needles was unnecessary.

So that's what the riders on Michelle Malkin's short bus where up to...

Michelle Malkin has decided to host "Tea Parties", or some such crap, across the nation to protest the president's proposal to aid homeowners in financial straights. Few showed up, but the ones that did had awesome signs that have, no doubt, changed everyone's minds and foiled the plans of our Islamo-Fascist/Communist/Socialist president. They've saved America. Good job.

Original photo at the bottom of the post. The red arrow was added by Bob Cecsa (Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog! Go!) to indicate the wingnut's baby was trying to escape. Let's hope it found freedom.

Playing with Inkscape

I've been playing around with Inkscape, an open source vector illustration program that is the free equivalent of Adobe Illustrator. I'm whipping up a few more logos for a graphic design splash page for my career adviser to hand out. She keeps telling me that there are more graphic design opportunities out there right now. More than animation, anyway. At least in this area. In any case, these are simple, which is typically how I like to design. These are also lower quality images since for some reason the BlogoGods have taken down Photobucket for maintenance. I'll put better versions up tomorrow.

*new images uploaded 2/19

Imbolc!

Ok, so I'm watching Star Trek II last night and as the Enterprise is kicking shit out of the Reliant, stuff is blowing up on the Reliant's bridge and suddenly I notice some guy dangling from the overhead. I almost said ceiling, but ships don't have ceilings, they have overheads. They also don't have floors, they have decks, no walls only bulkheads. Anyways, WTF? Where did that guy come from? What was he doing up there? Was he up there trying to rub one out real fast and then BOOM comes the phaser fire? Was he changing a light bulb? They have those in the 23rd century? What a way to go. You step up and decide to change a bulb, think maybe you have time for indulging the in the art of self pleasure then WHAM! The Enterprise kicks your ship in it's collective space nuts and there you are, hanging upside down with your Eugenics designed gonads flopping around for the whole world to see. And I bet he didn't even get to finish...

RTD Southmoor Station Spaceport

Kind of like Mos Eisley, but without all the charm and grace.

My Awesome 39.999th Birthday

The 11th was my birthday. It started out well, with only one snag.
I'd wanted two things for my birthday. I wanted to meet my new friend Brian, and I wanted Waffles. I'd been harboring a hankerin' for waffles for some time. We'd decided to eat at the Village Inn in Cherry Creek. Alas, there is no more Village Inn at Cherry Creek North. Village Inn Fail.



Snag! We went to the "vi" on Colorado Blvd and had waffles and conversation. Both were excellent. Brian is wonderful. Oops, he might be reading. Brian is AWESOME. We walked Cherry Creek Mall afterwords and talked some more. It was great.

Later that night was dinner with the boys and girls from school. We went to Pasquini's for really good Italian. Attending my 39.99999th birthday were Max the Magnificent, Eric the Sturdy, Diana the Ultimately Awesome, Janora the Always Enjoyable and Wynn the Downright Pretty. Wynn was under the weather. Food doesn't seem to agree with Wynn's colon. It's a constant battle for supremecy, with the colon often winning the day. I was happy he was there, though. I was happy they all were there. Here's some pics! Pics!

Something I just threw together

I read today that the DOJ wants to redefine "service animal" to mean "dogs only" and exclude any other foreign or domestic species. This includes helper monkeys and miniature ponies.

So I came up with this, just for fun.

Remembering why I love Colorado.

I want to marry John Legend. Right. Now.

Lizard People officially seated until Minnesota outcome decided

Christmas Present for my sister

My sister got one of those "Christmas Miracle's That Only Happen in After School Specials" kind of presents. Her dog Kody died just a month ago. She'd had him for some time, since 1994. He was an odd dog, an American Eskimo with his own "personality" that defied description. She already missed him a lot.
Well I just found out today that on Christmas Eve, my mom heard a dog yelping in the alley. It was a puppy probably not more than six weeks old wandering around by himself. They scooped him up and drove around the neighborhood to see if anyone was missing one from their litter. No on would claim him. So they took him to the vet and had him checked out. Now he's part of the family. They named him Saint Nicolas. I'm not kidding, this is right out of some awful made for tv movie, with all the requisite cuteness, but it's true.

Two Thousand and Nine

Happy New Years. Let's make this the best 2009 ever!