Posts from — January 2008

Of all these supposedly worthy nominees, I have seen exactly one of them (Ratatouille).  Maybe it’s just as well there’s a writers strike; that way, I don’t have to think up an excuse not to watch the Oscars this year…

BEST PICTURE
Atonement
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood

BEST ACTOR
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises

BEST ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Julie Christie, Away From Her
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
Laura Linney, The Savages
Ellen Page, Juno

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There
Ruby Dee, American Gangster
Saiorse Ronan, Atonement
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton

BEST DIRECTOR
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Jason Reitman, Juno
Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Brad Bird, Ratatouille
Diablo Cody, Juno
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Tamara Jenkins, The Savages
Nancy Oliver, Lars and the Real Girl

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Christopher Hampton, Atonement
Ronald Harwood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Sarah Polley, Away From Her

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Persepolis
Ratatouille
Surf’s Up 

The last animatics reel for our 2-D films has been completed.  Clocks in at right around two minutes, about thirty seconds shorter than the first two.  Of course, we’re talking animatics reels, so there’s a LOT of play in the numbers.  I’ll know the exact run-time after I shoot the pencil sketches (well, maybe not, because it won’t include titles, credits, or trailers)…

WooHOO!!

Well, sort of woohoo…

When I started this project back in… October?  November?  I don’t remember anymore… anyway, I had my sights set on about eight or nine 2-D and a pair of 3-D movies that I wanted to do.  A couple of the 2-Ds have been deferred til later, a couple more died of natural causes - storyboarding revealed terminal flaws in their design.  There are a couple of others that are sitting on the border between life and death, and I wasn’t able to devote enough time to sway them either way.  Then there are the 3-D movies:  my robot movie is still spinning its wheels waiting for some dialog, and the first incarnation of the Bee Jokes movie - after sweating over the script for a month - laid a big fat egg…

Yeah.  Woohoo…

Frustrating?  Kind of, but not really.  I don’t mind the demise of the weaker films - just natural selection doing its thing.  I’m more frustrated by the amount of time I’ve spent working on scripts that have gone nowhere, films that are right on the cusp of being really good were it not for my clumsy writing skills, knowing I’m spending a lot of time on something that will be over in two minutes.  In other words, normal animation stuff…

Whatever.  The real work begins tonight.  I have blank sketchpads, sharpened pencils, tracing paper, freshly-charged batteries in the camera, and a coffee pot armed and ready for some keyframe action.  This weekend is not looking particularly good for robot dialog recording, but there may be some quiet lulls I can use to work on the Bee script.  Time to go to work…

I have two of the three 2-D movies’ animatics reels completed. Both films clock in at around 2 minutes 30 seconds, which will make them longer than any other film I’ve released except for Break Time. Film number three is in the works; should have the reel completed tomorrow. Once I figured out how to run the master editor, putting these together was pretty easy.

One film I am NOT making an animatics reel for is ‘Evolution’. I’ve already had two false starts on this, and I’m afraid trying to do the animatics on it could be the kiss of death. I already know how the story is supposed to go, so let’s just get on with it, shall we?

Speaking of getting on with it, I need to make a stop at the art store to pick up some tracing paper. I figure by mid-week we’ll be drawing our first keyframes. Sweet! Now, up to this point I’ve been working on all the movies simultaneously so I could handle dialog recording and animatics reels at one time. After this last reel gets put together, though, I’m gonna switch gears and go into a one-movie-at-a-time production mode, right up until it’s time to be released. At least, that’s the plan. The odds of the plan staying on plan are not promising, but I’m going to try and be a good boy and actually follow through on this (Actually, the odds are strongly in favor of me working on one film til I hit a production brick wall, then moving on to the next movie, eventually getting back to the first movie when all the other ones have hit their walls)…

Got about twenty percent of the dialog for the new robot movie recorded. As I feared, doing the robot’s voice is murder on my throat, so I have to space apart the recording days. This might drag on through the rest of January. There’s really not that much dialog, though — maybe I have an outside chance of getting all the parts recorded before February. That would be nice…

Slow progress on the animatics reels for our 2-D movies.  Main reason behind the slow-going is the fact that the fancy-shmancy master editor POV script I put together to handle the edits and audio and such is… well… I have no idea how to run it.  This is what happens when you don’t do any movie work for almost two years.  Actually, it’s the audio section that I’m stumbling over.  This is the first time I’ve done a live project with it - or even a test project with it - so there are lots of coding bugs and interface “issues” I’m discovering…

Now that I’m getting into the animatics reels and layouts for the four 2-D movies, I’m beginning to lose enthusiasm for tackling the bee movie script.  This is normal.  I have a tendency to laser in on one particular project, to the exclusion of all others, which makes trying to do multiple projects simultaneously a bit of a challenge.  I need to dig up some motivation to get cracking on the script.  What I have so far is actually pretty good (well, I think so!); I need to finish it, make it better than just “good” (”great” or “outstanding” would be nice)…

No movement on the robot movie.  I’ve been wanting to kick people out of the house so I can record dialog in peace and quiet, but no one is willing to leave.  Might have to resort to bribery…

Finally, I’ve been putzing around the studio, scratching out some new doodles of bugs and monsters and things.  Still wrestling with some comics ideas, but with my brain sucked into the movie-production weirdness I haven’t gotten any traction…

I’ll keep it fairly simple:

1.  Finish at least two movies
2.  Play more guitar

Why did I pick number 2??  I started playing guitar close to thirty years ago, and ever since my gigging days went away (five years ago?  Six??), the old axe has been collecting a fine layer of dust in the closet.  I’m a person who hates hates HATES seeing things go to waste, and the guitar sitting around, unused, represents a colossal waste of time, blood, sweat, and tears.  It’s also embarassing when I do pull the guitar out to record soundtracks and I have to struggle thru simple little riffs that I would’ve blazed through with the greatest of ease a few short years ago.  Therefore, since I don’t want a blood vessel to rupture in my head every time I think about it, I decided to pull my guitar out of its case and start playing again.  The first couple of forays have not been encouraging, but I plan on hammering away at it til I stop looking like an idiot.  Might be awhile.

Normally, I tend to avoid making New Year’s resolutions because the exercise is usually a waste of time.  New Year’s tends to be the dumping ground for those make-myself-a-better-person ideas that apparently weren’t worth considering the other 364 days of the past year.  We all say we’d like to lose those twenty pounds, or call the kids more often, or quit smoking, or whatever, but the fact is most of us haven’t even given it any thought until we gaze at the clock, notice it’s ten o’clock in the evening of December 31st… and completely flip out.  “Oh my GOD!!!!  I need to think of a resolution right NOW NOW NOW NOW… hmmmm… thinking thinking think… you know I’ve always wanted to start going to the gym again - SAAAAY!!!  That’s sounds GREAT! I’ll do it!!  THAT is my resolution for the year ____!  Yay for me!!!!”

Yeah.  There goes one well-thought-out plan.  No possibility of failure there.

Oops, I forgot to mention, at ten o’clock you were on your third shot of tequilia, which is three more than you’ve had all of last year, so the elevator isn’t anywhere near the top floor (more likely it’s dangling by one frayed cable while you heave your guts out).

I’m feeling pretty good about my resolutions… well, the first one for sure, mainly because I resolved to finish these movies three months ago, so it should be immune from the normal post-New-Year’s letdown.  The second one should be okay, too because I realize the alternative is an aneurysm for me.  That would suck…

I’ll keep you posted on my progress.  If perchance a couple of music MP3s appear on Goofy Graffix, you’ll know things are doing fiiiiiine…………