Morning has broken...

I had great intentions to post all weekend from Amarillo on the shoot but things were just too hectic and WiFi coverage too spotty to follow through.  In Denver Google and the Airport seemed to have a grudge match going on and in Amarillo...well I spent very little time in that airport.

The shoot itself went really well and as always the folks in Texas were friendly and gracious.  I ate far too much stuff that I shouldn't and slept in a bed that was about the size of my WESTFALIA (I am not kidding).  The menu of all days there was BEEF of course (Amarillo being the largest beef processing city in the world).  My colon may take weeks to recover, but every good thing comes at a price.  Thank goodness Director had the good sense for us to stop for lunch in the city at Pho Garden for a bowl of steaming goodness.  Mine was stocked with shrimp, Broccoli and Bok Choy and man it was good.

Rest of Sunday revolved around walking about in a stupor and winding it up with the season Premiere of SHERLOCK which had been languishing on the DVR.  Well worth the wait.

So I have more notes but those will come in further posts.  Need to get into animation land now.

TTYL

SFO - Waiting #1

Sitting near Gate 76A in the UNITED Terminal at SFO, flight is not for an hour or two so I a doing the usual "SFO CHARGER WALL" thing, which means I am sitting next to an outlet with the Macbook plugged into the wall and the iPhone plugged into the MACbook.  Additionally my now-returned-wandering-iPad is taking up the other socket.

I call the iPad that  because I was so intent on guarding the black case with the Camera gear in it that I left it at a gate when Director and I went to grab breakfast.  Luckily the SFPD picked it up before some light fingered Louie and it was quickly returned to me.

Of course if you came to this post from FACEBOOK you already know that..at least today.  Social media is like traveling in the TARDIS, posts like this are like fixed points in time...unchanging through the years unless edited.  The timeline on FACEBOOK on the other hand is like an ever moving stream.  You mention a post and then it moves on, the current sweeping foreword with the news of the day and photos of what you ate.  Static "old skool" stuff like BLOG posts and news stories stay fixed like reefs or rocks protruding from the ever moving torrent.  Unfortunately the current that is the social media is driven by the same force as drives the motion of our lives, leaving static words like a message in a bottle.

On the way to SFO my Director and I were discussing how fast everyone drives and, by extension, how they live their lives.  There is always that rush, like a Silver BMW snaking through traffic in a hurry to get...somewhere.  We, on the other hand, "maintain an even strain" as we obey the traffic laws.  The end result is predictable.  On 19th Ave we find ourselves behind the same Silver BMW whose frenetic charge through the herd earned him the right...to be 12 feet ahead of us.

Show me the way to Amarillo...again

Woke up at 3 AM, typical as I am usually dehydrated by then or have kicked the comforter off and need to gather it up off the floor.  I put the artificial rain back on and was just settling in when I got a Text from my Director with a Video for the song I am enclosing herein...thanks man.

Bags are packed...I'm ready to go.  We are staying at the client's house which I wish we weren't.  When I travel I like having my space in the form of a hotel room where my time is my own.  Since I will be at the client's that means I will have to be "On", meaning entertaining.  Ah well.

Off to the showers.  I have a plane to catch.  I will be posting from a couple of airports today as I have plenty of time during the 6 HOURS IN LAYOVERS...

....notes from the attic (and thoughts on privacy in a Social Media World)

One of the more surprising things I have discovered since I came back to BLOGGER is that all of my original blogposts from all the BLOGS I started are still here, safe and sound. The very thing that drove the hubris that made me leave BLOGGER in the first place, the horrifying idea that all of the stuff I write is archived forever on Google's servers, is turned around.  Now I find that all the stuff I wrote for all those months/years are still on Google's servers...SAFE.  Since I am having to try and recover a lot of my WORDPRESS writing from damaged databases behind shoddy firewalls I appreciate this fact more and more.

It remain surprising to me that this deep into the new information age we still have so many luddites and ignorant boobs who have no clue of the way the world works.  They continue to thunk that they can log into websites, click on adverts on said websites, chat in web forums and still have some form of privacy.  The way I see it is that from the first time you logged into any website anywhere you tacitly gave the world approval to have access to your wallet.  You cannot post about every facet of your everyday life on FACEBOOK and then scream because the NSA, or WALMART is tracking your every move.

Now I know a couple of people who attempt to keep up with internet security and I wish them well.  At the same time though I see that as they lay down more and more layers of protection they are building higher and higher walls around themselves.  Seem a lonely life to me but then I am still recovering from being hacked.

Getting back to all those old posts, I have been reading some of them and I am finding interesting in sites into my life over the last few years so I think I will start posting them here on occasion.  In the past I spread myself too thin to actually accomplish anything creatively and now I am actively trying to reverse that trend.  Why did I have so many BLOGs to start with?  Well that is something for another posting...

On the Road Again...

Robert Frieden, one of the funniest guys I have ever know, once sat in a fast food joint and prevent me from eating whatever glutenous mass I had before me by conjugating the Willie Nelson son "On the Road Again".  That particular song was regularly featured on this archaic device we often used, an FM car radio that had stations that sounded different from one another. Everytime I went to take a bite he sang another new verse and I had to stop in mid bite for fear of decorating my shirt with condiments and...whatever else is in a fast food hamburger.  The only verse I remember now is "I'm a Toad Again" but you get the picture.

Tomorrow I hit the road again myself, off to my second shoot for work in Amarillo Texas.  The flight will take 5 hours because I have to stop over in Denver so I will get a good look at the pre Superbowl madness that will no doubt festoon the Airport.  Social archeology at its best.

The Photo here is a great silent description of how I see the next few months of my life.  My Shoulder Rig and my Canon along with my newly bought Timbuk2 suitcase.  I got some extra sleep last night and will be searching for more tonight.  The boss and I have an unknown number of Testimonials and B-Roll to shoot on Saturday and an 8:30 flight out of Amarillo on Sunday.  We will be staying at the client's house and he has told us to bring our swim trunks...I am not sure what is more ominous, the offer or the thought of me in a pair of swim trunks?

Dreams of Artificial Rain...

I sleep at night to the sound of artificial rain.  It's like something from a Ray Bradbury story.  Each night I turn off my lights and huddle under the cover, then I plug the earbuds first into my ears and then into my iPhone. A couple of gestures and I have my choice of "Wet Rain", "Soaking Rain", "Rainy forrest with singing birds" or (my favorite) "Gentle rain on the canvas of a tent".  I think I like this one best because of the years I spent sleeping in the WESTFALIA.  The white noise relaxes me and after a time I begin to have this strange conflict in my mind.  The retinal, logical part of my mind knows that the rain is only an audio recording but the soft animal side wants it so badly to be real that it spread over my conciousness and that is when I know I will soon drift off to sleep.  I like that part most because I often have trouble shutting off the "voices in my head" that clamor with what NEEDS to be done loudly that it keeps me from the sleep I so badly need to get any of them done.

The Governor declared that we were in a drought last week but anyone who has lived for any period of time in California was well aware of that in December.  Natives, like myself, know the rhythm of the season here, dry towards the end of the year but with the taps opening and drenching us through the late winter and early spring.  There is no sign of that this year, and it was not much in evidence last year either.  Californians are also used to the cycle of fires, we are used to the natural order of things and when the state will catch flame and burn for a time.  We are used to the pictures of the flames from space and most Californians can tell from just a hint of smoke in the air what is burning near them and when.  The cycle usually starts in late May or early June and peaks in August and September.  This year though the South has already begun to burn.  It doesn't bode well for the year and no amount of digital precipitation will help the forrest that stand as tinder waiting a match.

How Raquel Welch saved my bacon...

It's funny how things seem to interrelate in a positive way...when you let them.  I have been working on some animation for work that involve blood flow, growth nutrients and corpuscles and stuff and in truth I found that I was at a loss to visualize what the heck this stuff looks like.  I mean it is not like anyone has ever actually driven a tiny little submarine through someone's veins...

Then I thought of Raquel Welch

Now this is not an odd occurrence during a lonely morning of modeling and animating. I mean when I was in middle school I often bugged my sister Leslie to take me to TOWER OF POSTERS (which would have been more appropriately named if they called it TOWER OF BONGS) to buy decorations for my room.  A lot of those were posters of Formula 1 Drivers but when puberty hit Ronnie Peterson gave way to Raquel Welch. I mean at one time I had the Myra Breckinridge poster beside the "1,000,000 years BC" fur bikini shot and the larger than life size B&W "walking on the beach casually so as to drive young testosterone fiends wild" snuggled in behind the door.

In this case thought there were things more than hormonal involved because anyone who knows the BODY of Raquel's work knows she was the sole female inhabitant of the Proteus, the microscopic submarine in FANTASTIC VOYAGE.  After I pushed past the images of Ravishing Raquel in the form fitting neoprene suit I realized that the concept designs for the veins that the crew battled rampaging white corpuscle was perfect for what I wanted! I mean the film DID win an academy award for special effects after all!

So behold the FANTASTIC VOYAGE veins of the LPRF...and tonight I am going to buy FANTASTIC VOYAGE on iTunes (I can write it off, right?)

...is a SECOND Chance Really a THIRD CHANCE or does the counter reset?

Up early again, but I went to bed early so I expect that makes it normal.  I went to J last night and told him that the animations I am working on were going to take longer, amazingly enough he was understanding.  I must confess that is a trait in a boss I am for the most part unfamiliar with. Still, it inspires me to push all that harder.  I haven't felt as "project motivated" as I do these days.  Not since Lucasfilm in fact.

It is odd to compare current gig to LFL, one was a true dream job that most people would call just that, this one is as a camera man and animator for a start up but to me it is more then valid.

Not many people get a second chance, let alone TWO second chances, but that is what I feel as if I have gotten of late.

The FIRST second chance came when I got a chance to work at VELOCE MOTORS WEST, working on a lot of amazing vintage race cars for some really nice people.  Unfortunately I was not up to the task with that job, it was a dream that had come true some 23 years too late.  It is not that I believe in the agist mantra that drives our society as such but it is a simple physical fact that hanging upside down in the cockpit of a Chevron sports racer trying to feel your way to removing a stuck 1/4"-20 Nyloc in a piece of $4000 fiberglass is something of a young man's job.

When I realized, back when Carter was in the White House, that I wasn't going to be the next Niki Lauda I sold my race car and went back to college.  What I went back to college to study was video production, filmmaking and communication.  So it only seem right that the next second chance I got involved all those things.

I made my first regular 8 movie when I was about 11, won my first award for editing when I was 17.  I went to Santa Monica in 1987 to try and get into the film industry.  I took my original job at Lucasfilm with the hopes that I would find my way from the games side to the film side (didn't happen).

When I got back to California after my adventures in Austin I got involved with a WEB series for my pal Taunya Gren.  The work I did was not my best but it served to re-light the flame of my interest. Special effects, merged with film...that was where some smoldering embers of passion remained in my heart, still burning in the part of my soul where they were ignited during an evening showing of JASON & THE ARGONAUTS at the WESTERNER drive in Rialto California (located at the end of Route 66).

I got side tracked

At lunch today I showed the latest animation I was working on to my co-workers (including the company principles).  One of them actually said:

"...you made that?"

I smiled and said I sure had.

There are times I have to almost literally pinch myself to remind myself that this is actually real, that after all the trial and tribulations.  After all the people who ill used me and made me do things contrary to my own desires, after all that I finally feel like I am in the place I was meant to be in.  Rather late than never I guess but this scene from a favorite film of mine pretty much sums up how I feel about all that has gone before in my career.

Why I have come back to BLOOGER

So I started with BLORRGER in 2002 and had a pretty good run of it, thank you very much.  Before it was purchased by GOOGLE in fact I was right up there on the front page as a "BLOG go Note", meaning the editors of BLOGGER read my stuff at that time and liked it so much they thought they would tell others about it.  In a time before adverts and click through I saw my hit counter go from lassie to spinning like the dials of THE TIME MACHINE.

Then I discovered WORDPRESS and I decided that I could DO IT BETTER and BE MY OWN GUY, nobody owns MY STUFF (well except Facebook and any other nameless website that I chose to enter information on for whatever reason).  So I went it on my own and it was good for a couple of years.

Working with WORDPRESS I started any number of BLOGS on any number of subjects.  So many in fact that I went from posting everyday to not posting because of the sheer weight of the possibilities.  Add to that that I acquired someone who was my most loyal fan, read everything that I wrote and often took comments I made as personal affronts. An endless stream of fiery e-mails and texts (yes this person has my phone number) is enough to stifle anyone's desire to open up and share.

The final straw came when I got hacked.  My ISP says my passwords were sloppy and they got in that way.  I scanned my MAC for key loggers and trojan horses and the only ones to be found were in files I got from that same ISP.  WORDPRESS's community was unhelpful and at times insulting.

"If you don't use 128 bit key encrypted NSA style Passwords then you DESERVE to be hacked!"


I won't equate that sort of crap to rape as that is inappropriate but the behavior you must admit was pretty damn similar.

Additionally, despite it being the backbone of an entire web design industry WORDPRESS remains OPEN SOURCE.  That is great for both developer AND spotty-little-bastards-who-like-to-mess-with-other-peoples-stuff.  I call them that because I am attempting to avoid using the term "hacker" and, by extension "hacking".  The mindless Golem that is the media has lionized those terms so much that they have stopped being the description of thieves and avaricious telemarketers and started being seen as "rebels" and "heroes".  That sort of "brand recognition" is heady stuff in a society where social norms do their very best to, as gently as possible, pound the living individuality out of every child before they go to middle school.

So since WORDPRESS is "Open Source" there is no tech support, other than web board full of anti social proles who love to prove they are smarter than everyone else by describing things that only...well people like themselves can understand. Because it is "Open Source" the people who profit most from it's existence can thrown up their cheeto stained fingers and say:

"Your problem dude, not ours...!"

So here I am, no great fan of what Google is rapidly becoming but also SICK TO DEATH of cleaning out infected php files and resetting passwords.  I know it is a dangerous thing to assume ANYTHING anymore about ANYTHING.  I have also had to deal with Google's "tech support" but at least they have one.  Additionally if I am blogging on BLOGGER my stuff is resident on firewalls that THEY have to tend to.

So welcome back BLOGGER, you have gone from being the enemy to the lesser of two evils.

So this is how it's done...

In the kingdom of the nerds there is one surefire way to get hits on your BLOG, your youtube channel or whatever nexus serves as the focus of your little roadside turnout on the net, tutorials.  There is a booming business in turtorials.  They will tell you everything you ever wanted (or didn't want to know) about just about anything you can think of.

The reason I bring this up is that I am working on a project for work and I needed to know a simple way of simulating blood flowing through a vein.  We have all seen the kind of animation I am talking about, pillowy little corpuscles sailing placidly through a sea of plasma without a care in the world.  Sometimes they bump into each other like fat German business men on the underground...

"WHOOPS!"

"Mein apologies mine freund!"

Simple enough.  Then why in the world was it so hard to find a tutorial that told me how to do that?