Archive for September, 2006
106 items.
I was on campus making prints from negatives for almost 12 hours. It was horrible. In that time I only got six done! Plus, with two of them I really should have gone back and fixed them even more, but I just didn’t have patients for it.
The above pic is a photo of a print I made (the real print doesn’t have the glare on her forehead, is in focus, and the color tones look better). This is my Aunt Laurie when she married my Uncle Tim two weeks ago. This photo is seconds before she walked down the isle. I made a print of this becuase we need to have one with a blurred motion. So I just loved how her hands are blurring from trying to cool her self off.
2 Comments
[Click above photo to enlarge] Today, all the news is from MySpace. This time “Blade” actress, Jill Wagner, posts that Spike TV has canceled the TV show.
Remember this from last week? I won “Xenosaga III” from Wizard. Well I got it this week in the mail but they sent a mess of other stuff too.
-Wizard
-Animie Insider
-Toy Fair
-Jonah Hex #1
-Jonah Hex #2
-Wildcats #0
-Hero Squared #3
-Exalted #4
There was a massive job fair on campus Wednesday. The school’s career center bragged that its American University’s largest job fair because there were nearly 200 employers. Of course, for film and writing, there was no one for me to talk to, but there were FBI and CIA recruiters. The FBI people are the cluster at the top right of the above photo.
I made my way to the FBI recruiters. Acting nonchalant, I walked and stood side by side to one of them. I waited a few seconds and then leaned toward him whispering, “So aliens exist right?”
The guy pulled down his glasses, looking at me with his brow raised. So I said, “Comeon. Be straight with me. They exist right?”
Keeping a stone expression on his face he says, “I can’t say right now. They’re watching.”
I burst out laughing and then spent 45 minutes talking to the guy. I told him I’m a grad student working on a screenplay and that I had a bunch of questions about how FBI jurisdiction works and all that kind of stuff.
It was actually a bunch of stuff I needed to know for rewriting “Summer Girl,” the novel I’m working on. The guy was super helpful and now I just need to give the Ocean City police chief a call to ask her some questions and I’ll be about ready to do some re-writing.
Jon Favreau, director of the new “Iron Man” movie, posted the following on his MySpace blog:
“It is true. Robert Downey Jr. is Tony Stark. I am about as excited as I can be. I saw what he can do and he is extremely enthusiastic about playing Stark. I can say with absolute certainty that there is no better choice. The humor and emotional dimension he brings truly raises the bar on this project. Get ready.”
So come February, Downey, the well known drug addict, but amazing actor, will portray Tony Stark, Marvel’s well known alcoholic. Between that and Tony Stark being a total dick, the roll shouldn’t be a stretch for Downey.
We have three major projects in my photography class and the first one is due next Thursday. For it we have to have three prints (a print is a photo you print/develop from a negative).
Since the semester started I’ve used 12 rolls of film, so I have a lot of photos to chose from for the assignment. I think some of mine are so good that I’ll even be able to use some for the second assignment.
I’ve very excited because I now have all 12 rolls developed. I’m very sad because I still have to make 7 contact sheets and print my six prints (The pic above is actually of some of my contact sheets I already made).
I know printing a print doesn’t sound like a big deal but it’s a bitch. It’s 100 times worse than developing a roll of film. See first you have to make several “test” version of the photo you want to print to try and figure out how long you want to expose the negative to light (The more light you use the darker it will be).
Then after you have the right time for the overall photo you have to “burn” and “doge” which means over exposing and under exposing parts of your print so that some parts are darker and some parts are lighter.
Burning and dodging is a pain in the ass. I can do it in a matter of seconds in Photoshop but doing it in the photo lab can take hours and hours and hours! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh.
So needless to say, Saturday from noon till midnight I will be at the photo lab printing my six prints. I’m even worried that in twelve hours I won’t have enough time to do all of them.
The one good side to all of this is that I officially have two more rolls of film I have to do for the class. After that I’m allowed to switch to fancy digital cameras that the school is letting us use for free.
Also, next week, we get to learn how to scan our negatives onto the computer. Once I learn that I’ll scan all my negatives and set up a gallery.
This Amanda. She is hot (for some reason my other photos from my cell are blurry so this is the best I had).
Whenever I’m on campus on Thursdays I have a break from 2p.m. till 5:30p.m. Today I spent most of that in the photo lab working on our first major project that is due next week but from 4 till 5:30 I chilled in the big lounge where I normally chill.
So as I was “chilling” today this girl came over and sat down across from me. She was talking on the phone and fighting with her boyfriend. I could tell she was upset. He apparently was ditching her for dinner and going to something for the “row team.”
Being the pimp I am I said to her, “Yeah, you should just dump him. He’s obviously gay if he’d rather be hanging out with a bunch of guys than a hotty like you.”
She must have found me charming because we spent an hour hanging out and got dinner from the cafeteria. I learned that she’s 21 and a junior and has been dating the guy for six months. After we hung out she asked for my number. Still being Pimp-Daddy-King, I told her “I would give you my number but to be honest I’ve broken up soooooo many couples that I’ve learned its best to not give it out to beautiful girls who are dating assholes. MAYBE I can give you my screen name or email or something, but I really don’t think a phone number is best until you break up with your boyfriend.”
She was very excited to get my AIM screen name and used her cell phone to add it to her buddy list right away. …NOW I just need her to break up with her boyfriend, but we all know that girls like this NEVER do that.
This thing is really called a “Geek-a-Cycle.” I think it’s the stupidest thing in the world. I mean if you want to exercise, THEN get off your butt and do it. I’m sure people will buy this thing and just never use it like most exercise equipment that people buy.
Of course Sarah thinks this is the greatest thing ever. She told me she wants it. Of course I’m not about to spend the $350 on it so I can give it to her for her birthday, though I spent almost that last year as a gift.
The Scott McCloud Clan has posted the first Winterview. This is an interview conducted by McCloud’s youngest daughter Winter and filmed/edited by his oldest daughter Sky.
The McCloud girls are holding the Winterviews with various comic book creators that the meet across the country on their 50-state-tour.
This first one is with Raina Telgemeier (of "Smile" and "Babysitters Club" fame) and Dave Roman (associate editor at Nickelodeon and creator of "Astronaut Elementary" and "Agnes Quill"). There isn’t too much to be gained about comics from it, but its nice to watch to just how cute of a couple the two cartoonist are.
Wizard (the magazine publisher and convention coordinators) is launching a new film festival that they plan to make an annual event. The actual competition will happen at Wizard World Texas and winners will be screened at Wizard World Lost Angeles.
There are four categories; dramas 5 minutes and under, comedies 5 minutes and under, dramas 60 minutes and under, and comedies 60 minutes or under.
I’m 96.7 percent sure I’m going to submit “Hundred Dollar Bill” into the 5 minute drama category. I just need to talk to Kevin and I’m waiting to hear back on an email I sent Wizard.
There aren’t any crazy prizes or anything for this festival. Actually there is only one prize. The best of the four finalists will receive a “Best in Fest” award at Wizard World Texas. Then next spring at Wizard World Los Angeles, the winner gets an 8ft table for free at the show (One of the questions I emailed was if Wizard World pays for transportation and lodging in L.A.).
It would be a lie if I said I wasn’t interested in the DVD format war. I know I’m a geek but this is a HUGE deal. You see back in the 80’s there was VHS and Betamax. Betamax was a better quality but more expensive. So the country was split with some companies backing one version and some backing the other. Eventually VHS won the battle, but it slowed the progression of the medium and made things more expensive for us normal people.
Right now, all the major studios are backing either Blu-Ray-DVD or HD-DVD. Even the Playstation 3 (blu-ray) and Xbox 360 (hd) are picking sides. For us consumers, things were NOT looking good.
Until now.
Just last week, a British media technology company put a patent out for technology that allows blu-ray and HD format to be put on the same DVD. It works by putting a thin-multilayer on the DVD which cost about 9 cents a disc (current DVD’s cost 5 to 6 cents a disc). This week, New Medium Enterprises announced that they were the ones to put out that patent and that the technology does in deed work.
"Current technologies to create multiple layer disks mostly don’t work. We’ve created a technology for mass production of multiple layers that does not suffer from the well known problem of low yields," said NME Chief Technology Officer Eugene Levich in a press release.
A low yield means that many DVDs coming off the manufacturing lines are not working and have to be discarded.
So anyway I’m super excited because if this is all for real then the DVD format war could be over. It wouldn’t matter which format studios backed because they would produce one DVD that would work for both.
Of course, I believe that the next step after blu-ray/hd-dvds is a more advanced version of Video-on-Demand. I think it will reach a point where all TV shows and movies are kept online in a database. Then when you buy a movie/TV show you are allowed permanent access to that show and can watch it streaming off the web from any TV, computer, or portable device.
With regular TV networks, instead of shows JUST airing at 8p.m. time slot, they will instead be posted/published on the web at 8p.m. and can be watched at anyone’s connivance.
Heroes? is a hit, according to the numbers of the season premier. It did 8.8(share)/13(rating). Then it combined with ?Deal or No Deal? (8.2/13) and ?Studio 60? (7.5/12) gave NBC the win for the night. It has been a lonnnnnnng time since NBC won a night with scripted dramas.
I think ?Heroes? and ?Studio 60? are by far the best new shows of the season (Though I still haven?t seen ?Ugly Betty? yet). I?m so glad that NBC pulled them from Thursdays and decided to have them run on Mondays. Monday is by far my new favorite night on TV.
F U CW! Hahahhahahahahahahahahhaha! This is what you jerk executives get. You cancel “7th Heaven.” You give the show a series finale. You renew “Everwood” but THEN at the last minute before Upfronts, you announce that you changed your mind and scratched “Everwood” so you could afford to bring back “7th Heaven.” Hahahhahahahahha. Us “Everwood” fans get the last laugh! Your stupid Camdems only pulled 2.9/5 in thier season premier. Those numbers are 23 percent off from the show’s premier last year and 46 percent off its season finale! Hahahahahahahaha
This is a really bad book and you should not waste your money on it. I mean just skimming it in the book store I should have known it was going to be total crap, but I wanted to have a little faith in David and gave it a try.
The biggest problem is that there is no order to the book. Most writing books start with smaller concepts and build on those. David wrote his like a stream of conscious where it just keeps shifting into the next subject without any real connection. The book has chapters, but you only know that from the table of contents. You could never tell by reading it.
The second problem with the book is that David has nothing important to say. Every concept he talks about is done very lightly and better covered by other writers. At one point David it admits this saying, “Scott McCloud has written about matters such as these at far greater length, and with far more expertise, than I could hope to achieve.”
Everything David writes about is a diet-version. At one point he talks about the traditional three act structure. He does his best to explain plot points and pacing, but it’s a generic point of view that can easily be found on numerous websites. It would have been nice if David elaborated or added his own view/twist to these types of things. Instead, if you want to know about plotting, structure, or pacing you’re better off reading anyone of Syd Field’s screen writing books.
I love the part where David talks about character arcs. He tries to explain how characters need to grow from the beginning of their journey till the end of their journey. He also makes a comment about mentor figures being popular, but doesn’t really spend time explaining archetypes. It was so frustrating to read because he was clearly talking about Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, but he did a hack job of explaining it. If you want to really know about this stuff than you are better off reading Campbell’s "Hero with a Thousand Faces" or Christopher Voight’s "The Writer’s Journey."
Another odd thing David does is constantly makes pop culture references. I understand the need to reference well known material to make your points, but he over does it. There are times when he says “Look at Pirates of the Caribbean where they did blah blah blah..” when it would have been better if he had taken the time and elaborated more.
“Writing for Comics with Peter David” is too watered down for anyone over the age of ten to read or gain from. Do not waste your time buying it or even skimming it for free when in a bookstore.
