Resume Workshop

There's a bug going around the undergrad floor so writers club meeting was kind of cancelled this week. I hope everyone feels better. I forgot the thumbdrive with this weeks script at school so I'll upload it tomorrow.

In Business of Animation Class we went over our resumes. Mine was more or less in order but needs some revising. I'm going to try to send it out to Nickelodeon with it is done.

SAG awards celebrity watching

The screen actors guild awards were today across the street from my school at the Shrine. My friend Cecilia and I stood out there for some good old celebrity watching. We recognised Tracy Morgan, Alex Baldwin, Christian Bale, Stephan Corell, Warren Beaty and Steve Buchemi. Also I think I saw Danny McBride. I've been in LA for a year and a half and haven't seen any celebrities yet. It was cool to see all of them today.

For work I finished a few storyboards and wrote a rough draft of a cover letter and resume. I finished a script for writers club tomorrow. It is based off of three random words I picked out of a hat last week. The words were "Rabbit", "Police Officer", and "Priest". I ended up writing a script about a Rabbit Cop. I couldn't fit the priest part in there. I'll post it tomorrow.

TUT Update

It is in my understanding that the story for the project we are sending to Japan is more or less done. A few edits and details may come up but the overall story is there.

For those who haven't heard it yet, it is this; There is a rodeo championship. A young rider is a bit nervous while waiting to go. The gate opens and he is riding a bucking horse that he easily defeats. The second round is about to start and he is a bit more confident now. The gate opens and he is now riding a bigger horse but once again he wins. Now it is the final round. By now the rider is pretty cocky. The gate opens up but this time he finds himself riding a truck. The truck bucks him off after a few seconds.

I'm drawing up a few quick sketches for how each story beat should look and to finalize some good gags for it. With any luck the whole story shouldn't be too much longer than a minute.

For Pre-Thesis I've scanned my rough storyboards in and I am now drawing them digitally. I really don't like this part but I need to have clean storyboards that other people can read.

Thesis Advancement and Virtual Camera

Today during Pre-Thesis I showed my revised animatic. I got some really good feedback from it. Now, I have a good ending and the relationship between the two main characters is easy to understand. I've already started revising my storyboard and a new animatic should come in the next couple weeks.

During Motion Capture class today we learned more about the virtual camera. The thing is really cool. All it is, is a small monitor attached to an XBox controller with some tracking markers on it. When using it though you can scan around a virtual scene. It's hard to explain but trust me its cool

Writing Club and Business Class

A good amount of people went to Animation Writing Club today. I'm very happy about that. I'm going to talk to the grad council this week and see if I can get some sort of funding for the club. Perhaps we can get free food for our meetings. We read a couple scripts that we had written; a fake ad for the Fuggie, a Snuggie designed so that you can have sex in public, and a script I wrote about a man trying to but a toaster. I'll post the toaster script but I got some good notes and will rewrite it sometime this week.

Business of Animation is a good class. The teacher is really pushing us to go out and get connected in the field. We also spoke about how shows are pitched and funded. The professor knows alot about the subject and I'm very interested in what she has to say.

Finished a first pass on the Aquateen script. It has potential I think but is still not very funny.

Toaster Script
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B_uqQ1LjPndlZWUyMzUzNTMtY2JhZC00NjVmLThhY2UtZDFhYmI5ZDlhMjg0&hl=en

Lazy Sunday

Today was a really light day as far as work is concerned. I finished voting for the Annie Awards. Toy Story 3 got my vote for best animated feature. How To Train Your Dragon was good also. It had a better design and layout than Toy Story 3 but the story and animation was not as good. The animated shorts this year were a bit weak. Night and Day was interesting at first but got boring once the premise wore off. The other canidates were pretty forgetable.

The catagories for best childrens programming made me realize I haven't been keeping up with my kids cartoons. I ended up watching a bunch of episodes online. The Regular Show is really funny. I can't believe I hadn't heard of it until today.

I finished up my script for Animation Writing Club. I'll post it here tomorrow. Also I started writing a fan script for Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

TUT Meeting

I had a meeting today about the story for our Tokyo University of Technology project. Basically some of us are going to do the pre-production on a film and have Japanese students animate it for us. Right now we are developing an idea I came up with. I'm pushing to simplify the story. Others want a more complex storyline. Its a good writing exercise. I'm used to writing whatever I want but now I have bosses telling me what to write. Frustrating but I'm learning a lot from this.

Wrote another draft of my script for Animation Writing Club. The first real meeting is Monday at noon. I hope it turns out good. I got a lot of interest in the club but I don't know how many people will actually show up.

VFX Bake Off Review

I went to the VFX Bake Off last night. Basically it is where seven movies that are up for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects get to talk for a few minutes and show a reel of the work that was done on the film. Tron, Inception, Hereafter, Alice In Wonderland, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, Iron Man 2, and Harry Potter 7 were the nominees. I wasn't eligible to vote but those who were got to narrow that down to four choices.

My vote would have gone to Inception. The effects were pretty amazing but still felt real. Iron Man 2, Hereafter, and Harry Potter did a good job as well but I was too aware of the effects and it took me out of the film a bit. Tron, Scott Pilgrim, and Alice were essentially animated films with a couple people thrown in there. All these films were great though.

I still don't have any major project to work on. I'm working a little on writing and will try to cut down my thesis story board by a few seconds today. I bought a new controller today for my Wii. I'm going to try it out on Mario Kart. I tried talking to ITS about hooking it up to the internet but with no luck.

Reviving My Blog

I decided that I wanted to make a blog this year and it turned out that I actually had one for about three years and didn't know it. After deleting the old posts which were pretty much. "Hey, this is my first blog post" and "Wow, its been a while since my last blog post" I'm starting over fresh.

School was pretty laid back today. My only class started at 630 and I can't work on Shark Cop again until music arrives. That should be tomorrow or Friday hopefully. All I really accomplished was writing some notes on scripts and playing Tiger Woods Golf on my Wii for a few hours.

At my seminar class today we had Vicky Jenson. She was the director of Shrek and Sharks Tale. It was really entertaining and helpful. If I had to complain about it at all I'd have to say she never really hit any roadblocks. She slowly but steadily rose the animation food chain over her career.

Here's a script I wrote last week for Animation Writers Club. Its not good but fortunatly it is short.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B_uqQ1LjPndlMThlOTg1MDUtZmQ3My00ODFiLWE3NjItMTRiNTFlNGI5NDM4&hl=en