Monday, November 17, 2014
These guys are watching my every move!
I don’t know, I could probably do this every two months.
Good news since my last post, like Hall and Oats say, “She’s gone”. Nuff said. Ding dong and all that.
I'm still in retakes and really just sitting on my can waiting
for stuff to comeback from the animation company so we can finally put it
together into one big old, watchable show. I go to the web a lot during the day now. Maybe I'll update my Linkedin profile to something a little more professional. Currently, it says:
My animation career began, like most, when I was forced out of the lucrative world of apartment management by telling someone that she smelled like carpet cleaner. Clearly she didn’t have the sense of humor that I require in a boss, so I figured it was time to move on. As it turns out, that was the best decision I have ever made. Not only did it make the security guard let go of my arm, but it allowed me to go out into the snowy world and find a new calling.
After lying about my ability to paint cels, I became a cel painter at a small animation shop in Chicago that I found by accidentally getting on the wrong elevator.
Since then I’ve blundered into every job in animation from emptying wastebaskets to Directing, and not once has anyone ever asked me to make a birthday card for someone in the office. Life is good!
Currently I am a Producer for Disney’s Phineas and Ferb, which is a pretty big hit. I’d take all the credit for the show’s success but, like I said, I don’t do the birthday cards. If you're unfamiliar with the show, it’s the story of two forty-year-old women who don’t know the meaning of propriety. They also have a pet gorilla, who is a part time scuba diver. Trust me, it works.
After lying about my ability to paint cels, I became a cel painter at a small animation shop in Chicago that I found by accidentally getting on the wrong elevator.
Since then I’ve blundered into every job in animation from emptying wastebaskets to Directing, and not once has anyone ever asked me to make a birthday card for someone in the office. Life is good!
Currently I am a Producer for Disney’s Phineas and Ferb, which is a pretty big hit. I’d take all the credit for the show’s success but, like I said, I don’t do the birthday cards. If you're unfamiliar with the show, it’s the story of two forty-year-old women who don’t know the meaning of propriety. They also have a pet gorilla, who is a part time scuba diver. Trust me, it works.
I was watching some of the old shows on YouTube a couple
days ago and we really did make some good ones. maybe I'll use this dead time to put together a more current writer's reel. Or not. I’ve had the most freedom on this show that
I’ve ever had. It’s going to be hard to go to another show and start all
over. But, that’s what we do.
I think the trick is to slide in quietly and ask a lot of questions. This makes the guys who are already there feel less threatened. I also plan to take it easy and quietly turn over some solid stuff without really picking at things. That is really hard to do because I am a bit of a perfectionist, I’ll just behave myself until they hire another new guy who comes in and asks me questions. Then I'll be officially established. It’s the same with cities; you never really live in a new city until someone asks you directions (And you actually know the answer).
I think the trick is to slide in quietly and ask a lot of questions. This makes the guys who are already there feel less threatened. I also plan to take it easy and quietly turn over some solid stuff without really picking at things. That is really hard to do because I am a bit of a perfectionist, I’ll just behave myself until they hire another new guy who comes in and asks me questions. Then I'll be officially established. It’s the same with cities; you never really live in a new city until someone asks you directions (And you actually know the answer).
The job prospects all look pretty good and I should be
making a decision pretty soon. Certainly, before get around to writing another post. Next time you read this blog, my only follower, I'll have a new job. I may even end up with a couple jobs. Although, there is one job in the gate that I may not take. Because the person who came up with the concept
is accused of rape. This is a new one for me.
Normally I’d just say, “innocent until proven” but, not so much anymore.
This kind of publicity, even if it isn’t true, can get a show scrapped faster
that if it actually was true.
Eh, We’ll see.
Eh, We’ll see.
Next month: My new jobs.
Wednesday, September 03, 2014
Retakes hell.
The show is over. All of the little artists have left and
are working on other things. And a new
show is slowly taking over our space.
But, we still have work to do.
Well, four of us do. Retakes, is
where you watch the animation and fix it before the show airs. Apparently, the process is to watch the show an and bitch about everyone who isn’t in the room.
I can explain.
I transferred over to retakes near the end of the show, when
the directing was done. And, as the new guy in that department, I’m a little depressed at the
routine they have fallen into. When the show was being made, we would shoot out
ideas, talk about story points, sharpen up the jokes and basically, have fun.
Animation is fun! Work was fun!! But, there is no fun in retakes. I don’t think
they know they are in animation. Every
little comment that isn’t directly related to the clip we just watched, is met
with a librarian like disciplinary reprimand. There is no joy in the room. If
there was, they would kill it.
One person in particular is constantly mad at everyone who
isn’t her, which leads me to believe the one she’s really mad at IS her. What can be done?
Here’s the double standard:
If it were a dude, I’d say, “Either lighten the fuck up or
get the fuck out. It’s important for the show that we analyze and punch up the
humor as we go and you make it very hard to do that when you shit on
everything.”
But she ain’t, so I can’t. HR is right down stairs and I can’t
risk her making a stink about me.
I can’t just ignore this person because, it seems to me, her
behavior is a direct response to someone ignoring her at some point in her
past.
I can’t make friends, because she doesn’t want any. That is the mistake the other three retakes
directors made with her.
I think the best thing to do is just stay out of there and
find my joy somewhere else. She wins!
Friday, May 30, 2014
Where the hell did you go?
Yeah, by my reckoning it's been about five years since my last post. At the time we had just moved to Valleywood California and I had started a new job on a show that hadn't aired yet. I should probably read my last post to see if I even mentioned the name of the show.
Should I? Hummm.
The show, as it turns out, became pretty popular with the kids and if I mention the name the meta data may bring sensitive young minds to my twisted little blog. I wouldn't want to shock the children. I will say it is a show about two kids and their pet Platypus. There's an Evil scientist, a robot, a zebra that calls everyone Kevin, horse in a bookcase, a farmer's wife, an unpaid intern, a sensory depravation tank, and a bunch of things that haven't aired yet.
It's been a good run, seven years is a long time in TV, but now it's ending. Disney, for some reason, is refusing to make amy more of its most popular show ever and that means it's time for me to move on to another show.
it's been a while. I hope there's something good out there. So far, what I've seen looks pretty dismal. But, hey you never know. Whatever happens it couldn't be as bad as what happened in Singapore.
So, I guess I'll take another whack at this Blog thing. I don't know if anyone does blogs anymore, or even reads them. And I'm pretty sure that whoever used to read this one has long ago gone on to other new things like this newfangled Facebook and Twitter and all that other short attention span stuff.
I have a twitter account where I tweet little cool things about making cartoons. Specifically the one with the talking Zebra. I show models and rejected ideas and fun animation stuff. There are about 500 followers and three real fans. It's nice. They can ask me anything and I try to tell them as much of the truth as the Mouse will allow. Maybe that's why I cracked this blog/nut thing open again. I'm getting a little tired of publicly saying nothing of substance. ...Smiling so much my teeth are chipping. I can't even say that we're not going to make any more shows. They don't want the public to think the show is canceled. ...Yeah, I don't get it either. ...chip!
I think working for a corporation has changed me. It's a little emasculating at times, but it pays well. When I was younger I used to steal stuff. I'm not proud of it and I could make up a lot of justifications for my behavior but I won't. There was one time I got very close to being caught and It made me think. When you get something for free you keep going back to get free stuff. After a while if you're good it becomes a regular thing. Pretty soon it becomes something you do to maintain your lifestyle. The problem is, after a while you start to get carless and that's when they get you. I figured that if you did everything on the up and up you would eventually get accustom to that type of lifestyle. Then you could relax and stop thinking the cops were going to burst in. So now, I'm looking for another safe, secure, high-profile job because I'v grown accustom to a certain lifestyle. But I live in fear of just going for the money instead of the integrity. I fear the art cops will burst in and revoke my artistic license. Is that growing up?
Anywho, the show is a lot harder to do now than it was in the beginning. We've overachieved so much it's getting harder to top ourselves and stay within what Disney considers a budget. We're starting to repeat ourselves and we're delving into the land of parody. So far we've been lucky enough to not get caught. here's a picture of one of the successful parodies:
Next time: A trip to the theater props department.
Should I? Hummm.
The show, as it turns out, became pretty popular with the kids and if I mention the name the meta data may bring sensitive young minds to my twisted little blog. I wouldn't want to shock the children. I will say it is a show about two kids and their pet Platypus. There's an Evil scientist, a robot, a zebra that calls everyone Kevin, horse in a bookcase, a farmer's wife, an unpaid intern, a sensory depravation tank, and a bunch of things that haven't aired yet.
It's been a good run, seven years is a long time in TV, but now it's ending. Disney, for some reason, is refusing to make amy more of its most popular show ever and that means it's time for me to move on to another show.
it's been a while. I hope there's something good out there. So far, what I've seen looks pretty dismal. But, hey you never know. Whatever happens it couldn't be as bad as what happened in Singapore.
So, I guess I'll take another whack at this Blog thing. I don't know if anyone does blogs anymore, or even reads them. And I'm pretty sure that whoever used to read this one has long ago gone on to other new things like this newfangled Facebook and Twitter and all that other short attention span stuff.
I have a twitter account where I tweet little cool things about making cartoons. Specifically the one with the talking Zebra. I show models and rejected ideas and fun animation stuff. There are about 500 followers and three real fans. It's nice. They can ask me anything and I try to tell them as much of the truth as the Mouse will allow. Maybe that's why I cracked this blog/nut thing open again. I'm getting a little tired of publicly saying nothing of substance. ...Smiling so much my teeth are chipping. I can't even say that we're not going to make any more shows. They don't want the public to think the show is canceled. ...Yeah, I don't get it either. ...chip!
I think working for a corporation has changed me. It's a little emasculating at times, but it pays well. When I was younger I used to steal stuff. I'm not proud of it and I could make up a lot of justifications for my behavior but I won't. There was one time I got very close to being caught and It made me think. When you get something for free you keep going back to get free stuff. After a while if you're good it becomes a regular thing. Pretty soon it becomes something you do to maintain your lifestyle. The problem is, after a while you start to get carless and that's when they get you. I figured that if you did everything on the up and up you would eventually get accustom to that type of lifestyle. Then you could relax and stop thinking the cops were going to burst in. So now, I'm looking for another safe, secure, high-profile job because I'v grown accustom to a certain lifestyle. But I live in fear of just going for the money instead of the integrity. I fear the art cops will burst in and revoke my artistic license. Is that growing up?
Anywho, the show is a lot harder to do now than it was in the beginning. We've overachieved so much it's getting harder to top ourselves and stay within what Disney considers a budget. We're starting to repeat ourselves and we're delving into the land of parody. So far we've been lucky enough to not get caught. here's a picture of one of the successful parodies:
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
The Hills above home
The Daily walk took me up the hill into Griffith park. Up here above the horse shit of the equestrian center the smog can be clearly seen. And most of the animation companies in the valley can also be seen. Make sure you click on the picture to get the full image.
It's kind of cool, the way things end up. When I started this blog I was sitting in a snow bank waiting for something to happen and now here we are, high above all the animation companies and the horse shit.
It's kind of cool, the way things end up. When I started this blog I was sitting in a snow bank waiting for something to happen and now here we are, high above all the animation companies and the horse shit.Friday, March 13, 2009
I love my phone
When I first got the I phone, after a pretty frustrating time with the pock bespattered dolt at the AT&T store (who, by the way, has been immortalized in a pilot script about bureaucratic fuck-ups), I was in heaven. Normally I'd go back and fix that sentence so that it made sense, but you know what? No! This is my blog and I feel you are going to have to work a little. Isn't it enough that I really try to fix the spelling? (Get it? Try?)
So I get the phone and everyone else who has one welcomes me into the club. There was a sort of silent respect for each other as we fingered our apps and snorted at all the Luddites with flip phones and palms. They could not join our club, they'd never understand. What I never really said out loud was that I thought most of the apps were crap. Come on. There was an app that looked like you were drinking a beer. The first person to show me this actually had a real beer in his other hand! Okay, handy restaurant finders, mortgage calculators, body mass index indicators... all that handy crap, was after all, crap! Until the day I found "Loose It".
This program is great. What you do, for those who don't know, is you enter your weight, enter your target weight and enter a time-line in which you wish to achieve said weight and Loose it. Dig?
Then it tells you how many calories you are aloud to have every day to achieve your lofty goal.
So you enter what you eat and how much exercise you do. The more exercise you do, the more you can eat. Brilliant!
This is good for me because I really don't know how much I eat. I go, well I had a sandwich for lunch and a pretzel here and there and there was some chocolate after lunch and again at three. and now I go, well I had a sandwich, a large coke and a bag of chips at 12:15 and seventeen pretzel from 1:30 to 2:15 and about 900 calories of chocolate between 9 and 5. AH!
That was a real eye opener.
Also, I used to exercise and go, "...there I exercised. Rob good!"
Now I think, as I hoist my tired ass out of bed, "If I run for a half hour and walk to work I can drink tonight." And it's up and out into the rain for me!
So far? Not bad. It's been two weeks and I've managed to stay under my limit every day except three. There was the first day I got it, last Friday and tonight. (It's almost beer thirty now!)
Is it working?
No, not really. Two days ago I weighed 218 and this morning I weighed 220.
Break out the swimwear!
But I still like it! Maybe, by the time I'm tired of this app I will have developed better eating habits.
Eh?
So I get the phone and everyone else who has one welcomes me into the club. There was a sort of silent respect for each other as we fingered our apps and snorted at all the Luddites with flip phones and palms. They could not join our club, they'd never understand. What I never really said out loud was that I thought most of the apps were crap. Come on. There was an app that looked like you were drinking a beer. The first person to show me this actually had a real beer in his other hand! Okay, handy restaurant finders, mortgage calculators, body mass index indicators... all that handy crap, was after all, crap! Until the day I found "Loose It".
This program is great. What you do, for those who don't know, is you enter your weight, enter your target weight and enter a time-line in which you wish to achieve said weight and Loose it. Dig?
Then it tells you how many calories you are aloud to have every day to achieve your lofty goal.
So you enter what you eat and how much exercise you do. The more exercise you do, the more you can eat. Brilliant!
This is good for me because I really don't know how much I eat. I go, well I had a sandwich for lunch and a pretzel here and there and there was some chocolate after lunch and again at three. and now I go, well I had a sandwich, a large coke and a bag of chips at 12:15 and seventeen pretzel from 1:30 to 2:15 and about 900 calories of chocolate between 9 and 5. AH!
That was a real eye opener.
Also, I used to exercise and go, "...there I exercised. Rob good!"
Now I think, as I hoist my tired ass out of bed, "If I run for a half hour and walk to work I can drink tonight." And it's up and out into the rain for me!
So far? Not bad. It's been two weeks and I've managed to stay under my limit every day except three. There was the first day I got it, last Friday and tonight. (It's almost beer thirty now!)
Is it working?
No, not really. Two days ago I weighed 218 and this morning I weighed 220.
Break out the swimwear!
But I still like it! Maybe, by the time I'm tired of this app I will have developed better eating habits.
Eh?
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Safe at home!
After the move Friday, as I was washing up, I noticed about fifteen small cuts on my hands. What a day, a knuckle on this molding, a slice from this box lid. anyway, that was just about the worst of it. And now move number 31 is finally in the bag. So, what did we learn this time? I'm glad I asked.
Paint first! Most people do. In fact, I saw a statistic that said, seventy percent of all statistics were off by thirteen percent. The other thirty percent were off by more than fifty percent, half the time. What does this have to do with painting? Be patent sugar, I'm getting to the point. The point is, try to have a week or two to prep the house before you move. And when that falls through because of an escrow company or one of any number of any monkey wrenches that fall into your soup, don't be too hard on yourself. (sorry the cleché machine is down for the day)
Also, paint as fast as you can!
What else...
Oh, right! The moving company pulled a fast one on us on the day of the move. On the contract, we initialed the little box marked, "packing materials" which signified that we would pay for the tape they used to hold the blankets on to our sofa. Last time we moved with half the stuff we now have this cost came in somewhere around $70. Not bad. This time it cost us about $700. It was announced to us when most of the stuff was already on the truck. Good time to go completely mental, right? But Jen and all the kids at the reservation tell me that I must keep my temper... I wish I had a happy ending to that story but I don't. They got away with it. How's that for keeping my temper?
So, don't let them do that to you when you move.
And that's pretty much it for moving. Unless we come into a lot of money, we're pretty much where we are going to be. And the money thing is pretty unlikely for a sucker that pays $700 for tape.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
It's about fucking time!
Yes! The housing loan that we have been pushing up that big hill has finally been approved. It was a long hard paper-filled journy and I won't go into too much detail... but let me tell you about how I felt, when about 30 days into it, when the mind numbingly, over regulated and sorely bused mortgage company we were using went up against the bureaucratic black hole that is my former employer. Oh, how the paper flew and the unreasonable demands were slapped away.
If you really want to know what the pit falls are of buying a house in this market and having to deal with gun shy mortgage companies, who's solution to all of their self-imposed internal turmoil seems to be to not approve anyone, please ask. But make sure you do it over drinks, and leave the children at home.
The end result of this tail of this nice family of four who make good money, have bought five houses and have sold two, and who have immaculate credit and have never missed a mortgage or even a rent payment is...
We have a new house.
Caution, actual house may be less, "barny" and the location slightly more, "Burbanky".
I'm not sure but I think the rigors of moving for the 31st time will be a dog-shit free walk in the park compared to the loan process.
So, what have we learned?
Good time to by because:
1) Prices are low
2) Interest rates are low.
3) Realtors are desperate (but they'd never let you know it)
4) The new stimulus package offers a $15,000 intensive to first time home buyers (that's 10% on a halfway decent home anywhere in the US besides California)
and it's a bad time to buy because
1) Mortgage companies are run by baboons.
Horay!! Let's all move!!!
If you really want to know what the pit falls are of buying a house in this market and having to deal with gun shy mortgage companies, who's solution to all of their self-imposed internal turmoil seems to be to not approve anyone, please ask. But make sure you do it over drinks, and leave the children at home.
The end result of this tail of this nice family of four who make good money, have bought five houses and have sold two, and who have immaculate credit and have never missed a mortgage or even a rent payment is...
We have a new house.
Caution, actual house may be less, "barny" and the location slightly more, "Burbanky".I'm not sure but I think the rigors of moving for the 31st time will be a dog-shit free walk in the park compared to the loan process.
So, what have we learned?
Good time to by because:
1) Prices are low
2) Interest rates are low.
3) Realtors are desperate (but they'd never let you know it)
4) The new stimulus package offers a $15,000 intensive to first time home buyers (that's 10% on a halfway decent home anywhere in the US besides California)
and it's a bad time to buy because
1) Mortgage companies are run by baboons.
Horay!! Let's all move!!!
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