I was listening to Priscilla Ahn’s Dream today (yay for shuffle mode). Childlike reflections with a touch of hope for the future, Dream has a folksy, enchanting melody that makes me smile whenever I hear it. Much thanks to Penguin for introducing me to Priscilla’s music.
Even though I wasn’t listening to Dream at the time, I think this song really captures how I felt when I was drawing Daydream Believer
This quote from Ms. Ahn also made me smile (because I’ve been there before):
I think I had 2 nervous breakdowns in the past week. Not bad breakdowns though—the fun kind, that last like 5 minutes. You know the kind—the ones where you think you’re having a heart attack, and you feel utterly alone and lost, and then the tears start coming and they don’t stop—but then you spot something random, like the vacuum cleaner in the corner, and you wonder where that extension piece for the hose went because you always put it back in the little clip when you’re done using it—did your boyfriend use it and forget to put it back?—why do I always blame him right away?—oh wait, I think I used it as a cane when I was dancing around pretending to be the Planter’s peanut, and then I find it on the floor in the middle of my office; and now I’ve stopped crying, I wipe away my tears, and move on, feeling a little lighter. So, something fun like that!
– Priscilla Ahn
I came across this document about story structure over at DVXuser. It’s basically a collection of notes from a variety of Truby, Vogler, Hauge, Snyder, Howard, Iglesias, Seth, Gulino, Williams, Marks & Chitlik.
It’s a great resource for any screenwriter. Not only does it go through the basics of story structure, it provides handy visuals and references. It has lists of virtues and vices, questions to ask your character, and common screenwriting vernacular. It even has a handy checklist to help you with your rewrites.
Starting the morning off right with The Morning Benders‘ cover of The Cardigans’ Lovefool. Just one of the songs off of their The Bedroom Covers CD, an aptly titled album of only covers reordered inside their apartment with one mic and one laptop.
Apparently, there’s a script floating around Hollywood, but everyone’s afraid to mention who wrote it. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it seems like the consensus is that the guy has poor grammar, confuses common words like “their” and “they’re”, “to” and “too” and has other grievous spelling mistakes and formatting mistakes.
Egon & Donci is a free for download CG animated movie. It’s about a an amateur astronomer, Egon and his pet cat, who discover a “map” to Earth.
The animation is pretty good. There are some nice shots and good use of the medium. The scenes in space are beautiful, full of color and atmosphere. Unfortunately, that’s really all that’s good about it.
There are so many times where the film feels like a really long tech demo. The camera flies around a little too much. The plot is mainly just a vehicle to show off the environments and animation. It takes too long to start and by the time any tension or drama comes in, you’re kind of bored.
To download it for free, you have to sit through a short ad before the link is served.
One thing I really have to give to the filmmakers is their willingness to put almost everything online for download. I haven’t had a chance to go through it, but they made all the sound effects they used in the film online. There are also texture maps and cloud sequences.
This is by no means a comprehensive guide to organizing digital pictures, it’s just what I do.
I have a Perl script that copies all the pictures from my compact flash to my HDD. Why a Perl script? Because my Canon XT splits up the pictures into different folders in sets of 100. When you have a 4 GB CF card, that’s a lot of folders to look through. The script looks in each folder and each file and sorts them by date. It creates a folder on the HDD for each day in the format YYYYMMDD.
Once the card is dumped to my HDD, I go through and rotate all the pictures by opening the folder in thumbnail view. This gives me a good idea of what I shot on that day and if they need to be subcategorized. Example: If a shot a park, then my friend dancing, then a waterfall, each of those would get their own folders. These folders are prefixed by the date and then a letter and then the subject of the pictures.
Over the years, I’ve taken about 50 GB worth of pictures. Archiving them becomes an issue. How do I retrieve the pictures from the 50 or so CDs (now I’ve moved to DVDs)? I physically metatagged each CD with the date and the folder structure. I then put this same information into a spread sheet and numbered each disc, essentially creating an index.
Why not use software? Because most software creates its own database of the pictures. I’m also not looking to tag each individual picture. This solution also makes backing up things a lot easier because it’s application independent.
You can download my simple script. ***Note: You have to have Perl installed on your machine. Download the Perl script
Happy Monday, everyone! I hope you all had nice weekends. Here’s another quality free font to add to your collection. Meet Lacuna from Glashaus Design.
With love from me to you! Listen to my muxtape here.
What’s the underlying theme that connects these songs? Erm, not much, sorry to say. These are just some tunes that I had forgotten about until I started listening to iTunes in shuffle mode. Contrary to popular belief, I do have more than Radiohead and Death Cab for Cutie on my playlist. ~__^ (info links and purchasing links are provided after each photo)
Oh, yes! Not 1, but 2 free, rocking fonts for your Monday!
Metalista is an expression of undying admiration at the persistency of the metal culture. Angular face of nearly monolinear proportions combines upper and lower case letterforms. The strengthened horizontal strokes are aimed at softening of the “gothic” feel of the face, and add to its contemporary character.
Fakir is a contemporary take on the blackletter genre – a streetwise gothic, so to speak. It examines the edgy structure of the textura alphabet, as it was written with broad-nibbed pens for centuries, but also looks at lettershapes used in graffiti pieces.For decades, blackletter was abandoned – it was almost a taboo, with its confusing connotations of fascism, heavy metal rock, and beer. But the genre has seen a remarkable revival, and it’s cool again to use and wear it. Underware taps into that newly found popularity, hoping “to give our generation a blackletter from the here and now.” Fakir is not a revival, but “an all-new 21st-century blackletter uncorked in 2006, after 5 years of aging.”
