december 20, 2001
4:11am
homemade ornaments by lola
thanks!
yes, it's that time of year. time to pack up the car and evacuate the unheated apartment with the ivy out front that smells of stale dog and the dinners that come in little frozen cancer boxes. been running around all week doing interviews, wrapping presents, helping prepare press releases, churning the holiday elf nog and watching two giant monoliths of overflowing DVD boxes rise threatening-like in the middle of the humble studio. tim took pictures, it's impressive. whole lot of everything to do. bringing a lot of animation work along to where i'm going and i'll probably get more work done there than i would here because there's many distractions
here and it's well, quite slow and boring there. also going to make a feeble attempt at updating my bits of the website from there but, well, no guarantees on whether i'll be able to figure that out. i'm a bit worried that all my plants are going to die. one of them is a giant smelling orchid thingy that 20th century fox gave me 2 years ago and has proven itself quite indestructable to my care so far. i watched pinocchio last night for the first time.
well contrary to the evidence i do actually have a lot to write about but it's all sort of secretive big news and i'm not really allowed yet. but i think i'll at least be ready to share a little bit more of the new film with you next month, and hopefully more on the other stuff depending on how current events go.
but speaking of projects, i'll take this opportunity to hereby resolve in 2002 to get off my ass and finally finish up the first steps required in my anesthetics giant book thing. that has been sitting here staring at me out of a big cardboard box for at least six months now and i really really REALLY no i mean it really need to wrap that up and get it moving. i've never made a resolution before so there it is. do you see that i am serious? i have trained on the mountain.
don
december 11, 2001
one of these things
is not like the other
@@@@*@@
2:14am
yikes, very close to total disaster today at the DVD duplication place, but after some sweating of bullets i think we are back on track. no kidding.. i won't go into details, just will be dancing a little jig when this bloody cursed thing is finally finished. i mean, this fine digital production. meanwhile largely in the animation saddle again for what is known as the new film, pushing 6:30am each night/morn, amped on caffeine and sugar and anything else i can shove into my mouth. the past couple of nights have been really flowing well, back in the familiar groove. lately i can smell the coffee brewing in the other apartments as i go to sleep which is somehow kind of nice tho i'm not sure why. at this point in the production i've solved most of the technical trickeries and now it's just a matter of getting thru the droning busywork of point A to point B. a very long drive. other than that the big challenge left is just a loooot of choreography; many characters to juggle and get in the right places on the right beats.. i guess it sounds like a big dance cartoon or something and that's not far off except for the dancing part. much balancing to perfect via directing the viewer's eye from spot to spot, that sorta thing. and hopefully without giving too many people motion sickness. did a long interview the other day and have more lined up this week. wish i had more to report but things are just kinda drudgy right now..
november 29, 2001
our little italian place is gone,
replaced by a dental clinic
4:34am
quiet now little ones, the DVD is 99 percent finished, i promise. true to form,
we couldn't possibly have a production finish on time and under budget, could we? that would be just silly. error testing takes place in the next couple of days, and then it's finally off to the races and these will be in your hot little hands very soon after. and then i will go collapse in a ditch. this on top of the new production has created strange new manifestations of being run down and exhausted and i think i've made myself all sick again because i've been coughing today and my left spleen is very sore. i don't have a clue of how to set the little digital clock in my car, which was just reset due to a new engine battery, so i've been driving around with just zero concept of time. shuttling back and forth to the DVD lab every night at 5am with a clock that's telling me it's 12 noon just really makes for confusing depressed brain. i think my eyes are getting worse too and i've been wearing my glasses a lot lately because i've been squinting a lot without them, which leads people to think i am glaring at them. well that's enough complaining. so the DVD is just about there i reckon and altho we can't officially guarantee it in the online shop, you should all be easily able to receive them in time for the holidays if you pre-order. such was the reason we ran ourselves into the ground getting it finished. do you see how much we love? DO YOU SEE? i played rob's audio commentary for my mother and her first question was, "...is rob drunk?" ...now, if that's not a telltale sign of a great DVD i just don't know what is.
it is pouring rain outside, very stormy. thanks to all the folks who have been sending in happy gifts lately,
sorry about the delay in getting back to you, just veddy busy here. thank you also to the two people who've recently sent me homemade cookies even tho they were all quite swiftly yanked away and swatted out of my clawing hands before i could stuff them all into my mouth because the people here think you could be trying to poison me. i was advised instead to feed the cookies to ducks first and test them to see if their eyes bled or their stomachs exploded and it was just quite a horrible tease because they all smelled really really good. there was much whining. so please don't send any more delicious looking but potentially death-ridden foodstuffs because it is purely cruel when they take them away from me..
november 19, 2001
245am brrr
stresS? yes please!
my heatless apartment is getting COLD again. tis the season to wear sweaters inside. must close windows. they have been loudly tarring the neighbor's roof for weeks now and i am just about ready to start knocking over their ladders.
well, animating again is pure bliss. i was down in the dumps for weeks when i was unable to pencil-test and do any work, but now that i'm back on track it's pouring out of me anew and i am humming along. meanwhile still working miserably around the clock polishing off the final touches on next month's DVD release and the shop will be ready for taking pre-orders really soon. this is probably a good idea if any of you want to be darn sure to get one in december, as we will honestly have a limited supply available at first for that entire month. the disc is finally just about finished now, i guess we just need to error test the whole thing. and make sure all of the hidden viruses are intact. zeb has been camping out overnight in the DVD place, desperately trying to author this thing in time for us and i hope it can get wrapped up soon so he can go take a shower. speaking of which, last night's meteor shower was one of the best i've seen. we had to drive north to get away from the fog, stopped to watch them for awhile until the fog caught up, drove further north, stopped, fog found us again, drove north, etc. very pretty whizzy meteors. some of them were blue and a few were green. a friend was actually hit in the head with one and had to get stitches but she is doing fine now. somehow have been watching a lot of things with muppets in them lately. i would direct a film with muppets in a second. we watched cannibal man tonight and it was kinda disappointing. also there were no muppets in it. my throat is very sore. well, heading to the bay area for weekend to visit with rob and mike and family and try not to claw my eyes out in the homeland. but if it comes to that i will be sure to claw rob's out first, anyway.
november 8, 2001
bell the rubby
the airport security looked under my hat
1 or 2am ish
haven't been able to stop eating fried sugar and salted fat lately, which apparently means i am developing my annual winter coat. i always seem to have a full poochy belly throughout the holidays and then i suddenly stop eating soon into the new year. none of this you need to know
austin was a great time and it was cool seeing bill again. also spent time with
mike judge, who shared stories all day and showed us around town and i only wish all people could be as friendly. or could do beavis and butthead voices as well. the screenings for the don/bill thing sold out in advance, the lines wrapped the block, and the fire marshall came to harass the people sitting in the aisles and everything. overwhelming but i did not crawl and hide under a table because the people were friendly. bill is better at this than me tho. he even has things to talk about when onstage, imagine that. i'd never been to austin before so i'm not sure how the films got so popular out there, but each night it seemed over 3/4 of the audience knew every line to each one and had no qualms at chanting them out. i've never heard a chorus of "i'm feeling fat and sassy" with rejected before or seen headbanging to the beethoven, fists pumping in air to the intertitles, or actually seen people jump out of their chairs on cue for "dance! everybody dance!". meanwhile lily and jim continues to age really well for me but i still can't bear to watch most of genre. bill and i did the meet n greet thing on friday, and saturday i did the show solo. you are all terribly nice people and everyone cheered in the right places and it all leads me to the inescapable conclusion that somehow every single person who visits this website must all live in austin by some strange twist of fate. hi again to all the folks in homemade shirts, the people
who were angry we hadn't e-mailed them back yet, and especially to tim league who runs such a friggin cool theater. i just wrote friggin and now i am embarrassed. pleased to report i left texas having shot firearms and straddled a live bull. not at the same time, but hey..
nothing but good news to report today. finally received a new video cam with which i can attempt to kickstart pencil tests again and i am happy to say that it does the job i needed it to do, or at least close enough. i am pleased enough with it to give it a plug: it's an RCA CC6151, a really dinky little 8mm thing barely larger than your fist really, but it has a decent enough adjustable intervelometer to make crude frame by frame action when you watch in fast forward (not unlike my old, old camera). always test on video when you can. it also has a nifty zoom for watching the neighbours with. this is the first new video cam i've had since 1993 tho, so i am probably painfully out of touch with these things.
meanwhile, work continues on the dvd and i am getting more and more excited for it with each round. we have put together some nice menus and surprises and i don't think anyone will be disappointed. except of course old man applecrotch but he hates everything. the audio commentary is all done, the deleted scene work is all done, all the menu content is there, so now it's just a matter of sprucing up the interface with magic little toys i guess. i usually dread working with the films on video/telecine/dealing with the compromises, but this is actually really fun stuff and the digital restoration job on the picture sure does impress. i'm still antsy about getting it all done to meet our self-imposed deadline but i think we'll just squeeze by.
what else is there to talk about... being dragged against my will to the annie awards this weekend but am still considering a last minute bailout. right now i would prefer root canal.
zzzz running out of time on this..
don
october 25, 2001
high tech low tech
5:20am
my stupid new camera hasn't arrived yet and these people are not returning my calls and acting all
shady... my sleuthing revealed this place i ordered it from
has the lowest rating possible given by the better business bureau. suuuuper. so assuming vinnie
from the back alley behind the water heater doesn't ship my frigging camera from their "other warehouse" i'm going
to have to cancel and keep looking. of course the point to all this is i'm still without a pencil
test cam and stuck animating around all the stuff i need to test, if that anymore. running out of
stuff to animate around and getting really
impatient, i don't want to spend too many days off of the project because it will get
more and more difficult to dive into again. my time isn't going to
total waste however, as we are in the thick of this DVD production now and it's keeping me awful
busy. menus to design, stuff to write, things to figure out all before the deadline that everyone
wants of having this thing available "for the holidays". the most interesting thing
is being able to go in and digitally enhance and clean up our telecine, which was never perfect.
going in and removing
scratches and gobs that were on our neg, removing some ugly shadows that i'd accidentally cast
on a few frames of the art, balancing out of some the lousy scene to scene color tones the telecine guys
did, slightly re-framing a few shots, etc. fancy stuff. with luck i will also be able to convince tim to mix a special surround
sound optional track of the film for those of you with cooler home systems than me. so the disc
is going to be super deluxe, it's just a matter of getting it all done in time. last weekend i
bought new shoes and thought i had arm cancer but it went away. most of this week has been
overreactive moody crisis week for everybody for some reason and everyone just needs to chill out damn it.
well i'm about to keel over from spending too much time in front of this stupid starchy woozing monitor today
so it's a bowl of cereal and then straight to bed with me... will try and write more sooner
october 14, 2001
finding the funny
12:0?am
spent a few hours today and much of last weekend with rob and tim working on these DVD audio commentaries, which
had evolved from laughably bad to humiliating back to laughably bad. we have learned a great many things going through
this process about what a crap concept audio commentaries are in the first place, and have all agreed
to approach what we have from a completely different angle. we've now come up with
what is easily the funniest commentary track i've ever heard in my life and it was something of a revelation and a joy to toss out all the predictable miserably dry informative stuff we'd been hashing out.
you didn't honestly expect us to do a typical audio commentary anyway, did you? good stuff. in other news,
altho we just discovered that our big deleted scene from the film has apparently inexplicably been misplaced and lost forever, i was able to find a copy of it
on an old rough cut on video, and long story short rebecca will be able to restore the
scene as an extra as planned on the disc thru the wizardry of her digital post production guys over there. it is
mind boggling stuff they can do and i don't understand how it all works
but the bottom line is we can include
the deleted scene without needing to actually have it.
try and figure that one out. (what is it with all of these
lost scenes truly becoming lost scenes, anyway? we need to come up with a better way to store
this stuff..)
last weekend at the beach we saw starfish and little shells in clusters that looked like venusian toenails
and colorful ameneonomes in tidepools and there were dolphins and we waded around and it was very difficult to believe that across the world
people were getting bombed on and exploded. there was also a big field of llamas and an airplane
circling around overhead flying in loops. then we went to go eat. amy is taking care of someone's newborn kitten and
it is about the size of a video cassette and yesterday it fell asleep wadded up in the warm nook of my arm pit. i started to
swell up and get runny because i am allergic but that was ok
my video pencil test cam, the poor miserable old thing, has finally squealed its last and shuddered and died.
this leaves me in a very bad place and i've had to find other things to work on with the animation
that don't require tests at the moment. figured it would cost me another 200 bones to attempt to have
old man rickety repaired again so instead i took the plunge with that money on another very rare vid camera
that i happened to find on the web that purports to be able to do the frame by frame i need. it's really a shot in the
dark but i'll play with it when it gets here and see what i can get it to do.
i still have to finish two interviews tonight and i really don't want to do either of them : (
i be back soon.,
don
september 30, 2001
phlegm ahoy!
9:21pm
well now i have a gurgly chest cold and damn it something's wrong here because it seems like i've
been sick for the entire past two months. also i burned the roof of my mouth on a really hot pizza
and my tongue can't stop playing with all the loose little flappy bits of skin playing dangle games in there now. clearly i am a train wreck.
took first stabs at recording audio commentaries for this DVD over the weekend and ha ha ha i can't think
of too many other ways to fully expose what uninteresting miserable bastards with
nothing to say we truly are. i think we will try and edit and patch these horrors up this week but holy lord.
perhaps the commentaries are not a good idea. mister mumbly pants here talk big heaps not pretty
animation has slowed in my gurgly state but i am still chugging away the best i can. nothing
interesting to report there. amy told me that salvador dali used to eat cheese before he went to
sleep because it gave him surreal dreams so i tried that twice in a row and sure enough both times
i had really horrible nightmares that seemed to last forever and woke me up exhausted.
i wrote some poems for amy but she was not impressed
her name is little amy
and if she was on fire
she would be rather flame-y.
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her name is little amy
and if we had to eat her
due to arctic, starving fea-r
she'd prolly be stringy and gamey.
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amy is not like most friends
for beside her right mole
there's a miniature hole
and that is where she hides your pens
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i think i botched up the proper amount of syllables in that second one.
my neighbor is laughing at something
really loud and i want to swat his little bald head with something rolled-up and snappy.
in memphis, rob tried to exit a four door car by crawling through the space behind the front passenger
seat, thinking it was a two door car. really funny, that. what was even funnier was that i tried
to help him by attempting to force the seat forward.
we gave the vodkas + redbull a try
which were not bad but i hear they're really not healthy
this is a bouncy little pig and he is just for you 
don
september 21, 2001
7:44pm
not going to write about new york because everyone is exhausted and desensitized.. this is a good site though.. revolutionary association of the
women of afghanistan
my lungs have been hurting all day for some reason. i feel like this has been a very productive
week, everything seems to be moving along and there are a few less things hovering spookylike over my little head.
been in the animation trenches as usual and have been pushing things later and
getting up earlier, getting through quite a bit of stuff. incidentally i'm not sure if i would have been able to
animate some of this just a year ago, i've been learning so much as i go here. my guitar
needs new strings. i have a little nub on the very top and center of my head. it is almost
exactly the size of a metal pellet. it has been there for as long as i can remember and i don't
have a clue what it is. it's very much like just a little leftover stem from when my head was plucked from the
branch of the don tree.
something interesting, the spanky the bear show has been found. some may
remember this is a very short odd cartoon
i shelved in early 1998 because it, well, sucked, and went on to do billy's balloon instead.
in the years since, i ended up losing track of the only print of it in existence as well as the original neg and soundtrack (which are still lost).
so i was digging through my closet looking for odds and ends to include with this rejected DVD
and lo and behold i spotted a little reel with a mysterious unlabeled film wrapped around it.
according to the writing on this plastic reel, it looks like it was owned by gregg araki at one point,
then swallowed up by UCSB, and then 'liberated' from campus to be tossed into my closet with spanky on it and forgotten. so anyways
tim and i lugged out the old 16mm projector and had a look at movie history (hah!). the 2 minute
piece, dusty as all hell, still doesn't work for me but i am more forgiving towards it now and there are a couple of nice bits
of animation in it i guess. so i can't think of any other fate for this little "gem"
than offering it up as an extra on one of our DVDs, but i am still thinking about it. but at least the little bugger has been located and he's safe.
(more about spanky in the faq and gallery)
i'll be back soon with a story for you
take care,
don
september 11, 2001
have been glued to the tv news all day watching horrible footage of planes exploding into buildings
and people falling out of them. i hope everyone
you know is okay and that the world will not have ended by tomorrow morning. need to take a walk
september 2 and 4, 2001
my nose still hurts
can't get these stains out
ever think about the amazing racket that the postal service has going? they must rake in millions
of dollars in extra revenue by selling those optional insurance, certification, delivery confirmation and tracking
services, all by simply ensuring that their delivery remains incredibly lousy and unreliable. if they
actually just performed their basic job properly, there wouldn't be any need for all of those optional extra charges. instead they get paid more by staying so crap and worthless.
marvelous! it's the american way
i am eating melon. stuck with a raging head cold and everything is sort of swimming in slow motion. do you ever
have old forgotten memories suddenly triggered by the smell and taste of a current virus, because you'd been sick with something similar way back then in the past?
anyway, left me with zero energy to animate at all last weekend or even ink,
so instead have been putting in writing time and buying too many dvds. broke a guitar string which means i can't play
which means i get awful pent up. i hear the laemmle shows are going really well and they are extending
our run there to a few more weekends. talked to bill today and he was as pleased as i am with the
turnout; plus, we are both accustomed to never receiving a penny for any theatrical shows so it's nice to
actually have our own platform and not support somebody else's program for a change.
provided my head doesn't burst open with phlegm first, i will probably visit the laemmle shows
after memphis..
bzaaa i am drawing a blank here, i continue later...
don
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