Updating

Sorry for the scarcity recently, I was out of touch w/reality as we had Thanksgiving break. It was a good break, got to see my girlfriend and the family and was nice and relaxing, which was needed because the next few weeks are going to be pretty intense as my final film is due on 12.12.05.

Struggles. Last night I was struggling w/my film, trying to get it to work. My films are too character oriented and I don't have the capabilities to do character development properly, so I have been trying to change to a more shot/scene development. Need a guerilla film by Friday. Lots of work to do until then.

I found a good blog today: Radiohead

Snow!!!

It is now snowing in Manhattan, Kansas!!!!

Mascots

Yesterday I was having a discussion with a friend regarding team/school mascots and their redundancy, or lack thereof. I was arguing that they are quite redundant, as the team name alone is quite sufficient. For instance, over in England practically none of the football clubs have mascots, they simply go by their team name, say Chelsea FC or Manchester United or Tottenham Hotspur. You know what sport these teams play, so what point is there in adding a mascot? For instance, the Kansas City Royals could become the Kansas City Baseball Club, or Kansas City BC; the Kansas City Chiefs could become Kansas City FC. Now, for those of you arguing that mascots give a team personality and allow another way of relating to your team and giving you more team spirit, I counter with this: if you are a true fan, you should not need a mascot to give you motivation to root for your club, the players and the game should excite you enough. Most teams are recgonized by their team colors already, so why not just be called the Boys in Blue or Big Red (Nebraska's football team already uses this one). By not using mascots you allow your team to be taken seriously and do not marginalize them to the confines of some goofy guy running around in a wolf suit. It is about the players on the field and their actions exciting the crowd, not about some mythological creature that does chants to get your fans pumped up. Down with mascots!

Weekend Update

Well, this has been a pretty fun weekend thusfar. Friday we had our studio mid-crit in which we presented our films and some drawings to accompany them, and we had two critics, Patrick Rhodes and Ray Streeter who were quite opposite in their critiques. Patrick focused more on the film and how to use that to describe our architectural ideas while Ray went about it in the more traditional method of a crit by looking more at the drawings and models than by critiquing our cinematic failures. I wouldn't necessarily say that one was better than the other, but I do know that a lot of us came out fairly confused on what to do next. Either way, a few of us went to Belly's for dinner and had a quite entertaining evening.

Yesterday was our annual Beaux Arts Ball, which was quite different than our formal ball at Exploration Place in Witchita last year, as this one took place at the Black Jack Ranch outside of Manhattan and was a techno party. The boyfriend of the girl who lives above me was the DJ and actually did a really good job. We danced around with glowsticks for a while and then came home around midnight. On the busride home we took all of our glowing necklaces and tied them together and put them out of the bus window and had a nice long glowing tail going, until a certain person [no names, but his initials are ERIC WITTMAN!] decided to tackle me, causing me to lose my grip and forcing our glowing tail to be forever lost.

So, today has been a pretty relaxing day, some light reading of the novel that I have been perpetually engrossed in, Anna Karenina, and some watching of The Empire Strikes Back. I will probably head up to studio here in a bit to do some work, but I need to get groceries first.

render, render, render

Well, I've got a mid-crit in studio on Friday, so I'm working hard this week to get all of my stuff done. We're supposed to have a guerilla film due, some renderings, a script, storyboard, plan and section, which is a lot. Here's one of my process renderings right now:




I think it's looking pretty good right now, hopefully that will continue.

First Fridays

Well, I'm leaving in a few minutes to go to KC for First Fridays down in the Crossroads district. My friends Gabe and Don have some work on display, so I'm going to check that out as well as lots of other artwork. Hopefully I can get some good pics!