The Many Boring Adventures Of Jab

Marie thinks my inability to compare Doctor Facilier to anyone besides MC Hammer points to the fact that I don't know enough black people. She's right. Now, I say 'black' because I don't know any personally to tell me how politically incorrect that may potentially be.
I am excited about the movie, though, now more than at the time of my last post. I love the fact that Andreas Deja led the animation on Mama Odie. Flexibility always impresses me and after being typecast as a villain specialist, he decided to break the mould by tackling a Greek hero, a slightly disturbed Hawaiian girl and now a 200-year-old bayou priestess. Too bad my favourite animator's character, Eric Goldberg's, is just a standard sidekick.
I wonder how they'll handle voodoo. Of course they'll sanitize the heck out of it (literally), and I'm willing to bet I won't hear the words 'loa', 'mambo' or 'bokor' uttered anywhere in it. Do they even realise Doctor Facilier practically dresses like Baron Samedi or is the get-up just something so cliché anyone thinks of it irst when they hear 'voodoo' mentioned? Of course, The Princess and the Frog will be as formula as it gets, and by that I don't even mean the formula established by Walt Disney himself. I mean the formula their features have been following since their second Golden Age, late 80s until the end of the 90s. It's a super-polished kind of corny. Will the movie be poorly received for it? I hope not because if it does what will be blamed won't be the writing, they will blame the medium, hand-drawn.

Come to think of it, a lot of traditionally animated movies get treated very poorly in distribution, especially in Germany. I had been looking forward to Filmax' 'Nocturna' pretty much since 2002 and even though it was released in 2007 I don't think it was ever shown here. A dub certainly doesn't exist and apparently they never even bothered to make it a direct-to-DVD release. Why this chaps my hide? Well, two of Filmax' other features were at least released on DVD, El Cid and Pinocchio Reloaded. El Cid is just a badly written movie, although at least it's hand-drawn. Pinocchio Reloaded, however, is 3D animation so bad it will give you eye cancer. To buy either movie in Germany is easy. 'Nocturna', although not great, must be imported.
A movie that gets far less publicity than it deserves is 'Brendan and the Secret of Kells', a French-Irish co-production with fantastically designed scenarios. If I'm lucky I might catch an original language showing tomorrow - again there's no dub. What's weird is that they're showing it in Cologne as part of a children's matinee festival. Now, you expect children to read subtitles for over an hour so what they did was hire one(!) man to actually explain the English dialogue! While the movie's running. That is just so friggin' cheap! Anyway, I hope they'll show just the original version. Subtitles I would gladly tolerate - but if they dare show that narrated version I'll demand my money back.
Now, I wonder what they're going to do with Ponyo (which I'm not excited about) and Fantastic Mr Fox. Ponyo is animé and has Miyazaki's name on it and Buena Vista, distributing his movies internationally, knows how to profit from that. My guess is we won't see it here soon because Disney will want the path clear for Princess and the Frog. Fine with me, but they had better release Ponyo here eventually. Coraline was already half a year late, airing in Germany during summer when it was so hot that I didn't want to go see a movie, especially not one like it.
In short, it's The Iron Giant over and over again. Marketing decides they don't like an animated feature because the medium is 'outdated' or the subject matter doesn't relate to 'the target audience' (meaning the audience whose parents will pay money for the movie and merchandise). I might blame this on 3D now but that's getting a tad old. The new enemy is live-action. Yes, Hannah Montana has kicked loose an unholy trend. Cartoon Network will soon launch a new channel called 'Cartoon Network Real', showing new programs like live-action Scooby-Doo (albeit with a 3D dog) - just how fucked up is that?!? They're all just vapid sitcoms with shallow marketing ploys grafted on. Gimme 3D over that anytime!

Work is quite good right now. After finishing my colleague Len's final episode, a not too easy five-second animation loop, I can finally go back to the episode we've been working on for so long, hopefully finishing it for good. It will be a nice little episode but I'm worried our taking over four months on it will reflect badly on my colleague's and my reputation. I don't want to be known as 'the guy who draws well but takes forever'! I know I can work faster, given more favourable circumstances.

Well, it's still November and it's still to warm for this time of year. Hopefully, the temperature drop will come in December. Little frost here, please?

Doctor Facilier, the latest Disney villain. Silly name, stupid hair and an agenda about as hidden as a blond ninja in an orange overall - but he's an energetic schemer with what promises to be a nice musical number.



I wonder why they made him into an emaciated MC Hammer look-alike when he's voiced by voluminous Keith David. Eh, whatever. Honestly, it feels good to be looking forward to a corny, classically aniamted Disney movie at this particular time of the year.
3D has NOT overtaken hand-drawn - it just made it trip and now claims it's faster and better.

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

Current Mood: creepy

Your results: You are Hulk

Hulk 65% Iron Man 65% Robin 62% Spider-Man 60% Supergirl 50% The Flash 50% Catwoman 50% Superman 45% Batman 45% Wonder Woman 40% Green Lantern 25%

You are a wanderer with amazing strength.

There's light at the end of the tunnel of my current animation episode. Still a bit left to do but the majority of my work has been taken care of. I think it will be a good little episode - neither the best-animated, nor the best-written (which I can't help), but also not the worst in a lot of respects. My only grief is it took much too long to get up to this point for which, I think, there are several factors to blame. Well, nobody at the studio pressured us so it was quite OK. For a first episode.
Will there be another for me and/or my colleague? Good question. Originally, they had meant me to work on their next project but that is, momentarily, in concept limbo. The network people they hope will finance it aren't making any decisions at the moment. It shouldn't be too hard a project to sell; after all, it has Christoph Baumgart behind it who collaborated on the rather famous German children's book 'Laura's Star'. A couple of weeks ago he was at our place to discuss the feasibility of artistic technicalities with our boss and some of our computer people. I haven't heard any news ever since and as it will take some months before there is material for episodes animators can work with nothing should happen too soon.
Well, the creator of the 'Rudolf' series we're working on will be at the studio tomorrow, also to speak with us about our work. He finally found time to send us some initial suggestions and corrections for what we've produced until now. Perhaps he can be persuaded to let me/us work on another episode which would be cool. I secretly hope to be working for them until Christmas, maybe even longer. Well, without bigger interruptions anyway.

In the meantime, I set up my PC again, thinking my sound card was acting up. I thought it was because of my headset so I returned it to the shop where I bought it - sans receipt and shortly before closing time on Saturday. They were rather good about it, though, agreeing to keep my supposedly faulty headset there for a check-up and letting me take home a new one - for which I paid, though. Today they told me my headset was actually OK, something I had come to suspect because I had more sound-related troubles with my PC without it. I picked up my old one today and they not only took back the new one (which I wisely hadn't opened), they refunded me without any questions. The most I was hoping for was a voucher which is what I'd have gotten had I returned something to my old 'boss'' shop. He just hated losing the hard cash in his register and also tried everything to tie his first-time customers to him. Figures.
Unfortunately, the sound problems very likely were due to my old headset because it started acting up again tonight, and it definitely has something to do with its cord because moving the plug connecting the cord to the headphones appears to be directly related to the sound glitches. OK, it's back to the store tomorrow. I just hope they won't play the 'no receipt - no refund card' now ...

Going to my mother's on Thursday. She will be away which is good because last time I spoke to her on the phone she was having a killer cold. Which reminds me, will I get a swine flu shot? My gut reaction is, no, not unless someone in my closer vicinity catches it. I still think this got blown way, way out of proportion by the media. Fingers crossed anyway.

PS: Star Wars Clone Wars stinks! It's such unappealing, uncharismatic and bland material.

MyHeritage: Familienstammbäume - Genealogie - Celebs - Collage - Morph

Both of them!
The latest find is Mike Mozart, a huge, cuddly beard-face. Now, what Mike Mozart does with his cuddly beard-face is stick it into a camera and tell us why merchandising is a hilariously soulless, evil force that destroys all the good in creativity.

Examples:

Dora The Explorer goes to hell.


I LOL'ed. Hard!


I just love to see people cracking themselves up.

Created by OnePlusYou - Free Dating Site

I am a new man - thirty years of age now, adult, mature, responsible, respectable - NOT!
I am an animator living in a tiny apartment in Cologne, working on kids' cartoons about a door-to-door rabbit salesman getting the shit kicked out of him on a regular basis by gorillas, octopuses, kangaroos and sloths, a hedonist and computer game fanatic who gets tickled to no end by stuff like this:









That's as close to the secret of everlasting youth as it gets as far as I'm concerned!
My birthday party was OK, with coffee and cake with the family in the afternoon and some nice barbecue later at night. I received mostly money, most of which I already spent again on everyday, sensible things, like a new MP3 player, and some animation books to pour over, Eric Goldberg's Animation Crash Course and the whopping The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. The latter is a hugely nostalgic and starry-eyed account of the Disney studio's glory days of animation but interesting nonetheless.

Last week at work it got terribly annoying when the two directors of our project were at the studio - everybody was falling over themselves to have them approve and edit animation, blocking all the hardware and generally generating stress. I hope to finish my part of the current episode's animation this week or at least early next week nonetheless. About time, too, because I have so far taken much too long. Computer post-production will be relaxing after it all, I reckon. Gotta get my ruff animation approved first, though, so I'm not out of the woods yet.

So what I can say about the last couple of years is that, yes, my life has improved, albeit in small increments (with some major improvements scattered throughout). There's still room for more and that's always a good thing.

Current Mood: good
Current Music: The Irish Washerwoman (the definition of catchy)

Argh, it's going to be 96°F tomorrow, possibly the hottest day of the year. (Somebody will pay if not!)
Strangely, I don't feel like having sweated all that much this summer. True, it's been months since I last slept under my covers and I'd like to get back to that, but I usually don't wake totally soaked. What really annoys me is that the hot weather makes my PC go as hot as 145°F when playing games. Damned Pentium D processors. While it hasn't shut down yet, no PC I've ever owned has, that's not too good for the hardware. Dammit, just yesterday I went back to Mass Effect and I'd like to finally finish this bitch. BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins is coming out soon and I rather fancy it.

Fall now, kthxbye!

Current Mood: too warm

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Current Mood: angry

Current Mood: nerdy

Half-Life machinimas.

Prelude: Hero Beggining (sic)



Part 1: Full Life Consequences



Part 2: What has Tobe Done (sic)



Part 3: Free Man



This is teh lulz. Jab demand Harry Potter version with his mouth!

Current Mood: amused

( Harry Potter and the Bane of Fandom )

( Daisho's Meme )

I just tried, just tried to watch the first two episodes of Total Drama Island. How is such a show possible? It's like someone got the shallowest designers, animators and script writers in Hollywood together to make an animated show based on one of the stupidest reality TV formats in existence. The worst bit, however, is that it's supposed to be comedy. Now, how can you get a bunch of shallow people to make fun of caricatures of shallow people? That's like the blind leading the blind, for god's sake! I couldn't tell whether this was serious, beyond lame or so far beyond lame that it's funny again.
I mean, seriously, what was I laughing at? It sure wasn't what the staff hacks must have meant to be funny - but I effin' can't! Tell!
The first ten minutes was the introduction of the "cast". You can tell any animated show is in deep shit when its principal cast is composed of more than ten characters. Heck, five is too much in most cases! Ten minutes of exposition filled with the most one-dimensionally designed and animated characters I have ever seen! I couldn't bear any more. Honestly, I'd rather watch one of MTV's braindead fratboy/fratgirl "dating" shows, at least with those I only get as many layers of shallowness as I can process.
Total Drama Island is either too subtle for me or a joke so grossly misunderstood by those telling it that it shouldn't even be able to exist on this plane of reality. Logic takes its leave. If I go to hell I won't be going to Total Drama Island - I'll be going to the story meeting that never ends with the iced moccacino-guzzling, fist-bumping water cooler gang that thunk up this undiluted cranial diarrhea!

Current Mood: incredulous

D'aaaw, thassocuuute! Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch!

Also cute. That badge thing kills me!

Here's a small teaser of that indie adventure game I had a hand in.



Really, for a low-funds production it looks spectacularly good. There will be a demo soon and I more or less designed the look of the five scenarios in it which the game's creator, Heriberto Valle Martinez (awfully nice guy) is rendering in 3D. I'll post a link to the download when it's done.

Current Mood: chipper

My bathroom is slightly annoying me again. It's always smelled faintly of wet clay in there and now I know why. Apparently Cologne's extremely calcareous water has left a limy residue in the drainpipe which catches all the gunk I flush down there. Yech! OK, a little dirt has never hurt anyone but I'm peculiar about where the dirt is. As long as I don't have to dip my hands in it I'm OK. I guess. It pisses me off, though. My landlord promised to get something to clean the drainpipe and also replace the age-old plugging mechanism. Until he does that, though, I think I'll pour boiling hot water down there every day to loosen the residue. I'm not trying chemicals on my own after what happened with my shower last time! Lousy, lousy plumbing. I want to move!

Curse of Monkey Island was probably the game I have waited most for in my life until now. Somehow back in '98 I even managed to order an English copy which, considering the internet was still some years away, was quite a feat for a bumpkin like myself.
Well, yesterday I learned that LucasArts is remaking the original The Secret of Monkey Island with HD graphics and a full voice-over and orchestra soundtrack. I'm mildly intrigued, even though the game as such looks like something ambitious indie developers programmed in Flash.
What looks more promising is Tales of Monkey Island, five new adventure episodes to be released as monthly downloads, developed by TellTale Games using some of the talents from the first four games. Even though TellTale have a reputation for making only short game episodes with not too challenging puzzles, I do feel some of the excitement of '98 about this all. I haven't played a decent adventure game in a long while, even though the genre is definitely coming back. Piratey nostalgia!

Apart from that, work is still good and fun and I'm looking forward to having Marie here in less than a month. Hooray for her, a week-long vacation and bloody pirates!

Current Mood: chipper

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Current Mood: content

Everybody except me appears to be at my mother's today, even my brother. I'll go there next weekend when she isn't home again. Even though she promised to leave the car for me, calling her today to wish her a happy Mother's Day revealed that, surprise, surprise, she is taking the car to transport a bike. I knew it! What's really a bummer is that the week after next there will be a long weekend again. I don't fancy spending that here in Cologne but going back to my mother's for it would mean coming back here for a mere three workdays before spending money on a train ticket again. Meh! Marie told me on Mother's Day in America people give gifts to all mothers they know and care about, not just their own. Is that so? Huh. In that case I get off very cheap this year, not being there to celebrate with all the others. Oh well.
Work's going well. I think I should try the special kind of Flash animation we currently do with one of my own characters. It's really a fast way to get decent to good-looking, fully cleaned up and coloured animation. Still, about half of all the episodes planned will likely be outsourced to the Philippines. Oh, you Asians, you - there's so many of you and your demands are so very low.
Seeing Star Trek tonight. I'm expecting an action movie featuring lots of handsome young people fucking. Young Kirk can be a pretentious asshole if he likes; I hear Shatner is, too. All reviews I've heard and read so far say it has bad and good sides, with the good preponderating. My expectations are low - I have almost no memory anymore of Star Trek: Nemesis. Data 'died', right? Yeah, I guess some scriptwriter eventually figured his emotion chip just turned him into an average crew member.

Here's something nice - Don Bluth drawing the jabberwock!



And this must be the effin' greatest fan vid EVER!

Current Mood: good