journal page 22

august 23, 2002
Self as would adjust yourself!
now have you spoilt mine days!
4:46am
have gotten rather good at killing the gnats in here by merely snatching them out of the air like some kind of kung fu gnat man. soon i will be able to kill with my very thoughts. the seas will run red with the tiny bloods of my gnatty vengeance. all of the plants have been freaking out all lusty in this apartment's humidity and are suddenly growing these gigantic yellow mushrooms and the orchid now looks like it has some sort of obscene jolly vegetable scrotum. the gnats love it. see picture. meanwhile the kangaroo fern's tentacles are maniacally crawling all over the walls and are now long enough for the plant to pull open the cupboard and make itself a sandwich.

somebody sent over a very, very low tech computer translation of a swedish message board currently discussing this website and it's sadly quite a bit funnier than anything you will find here:

This page had vart with formerly! But the is right schysst so =). devil?? Did not get economize film 'rejected' un self log, so self crying. Find the nån as vet if vart husband sheep pull on biterfilms as wmv? Day be able devil nots initialised better!!: Ooh , this page am arriving self ihåg. Had for me that it was self as hint if Ah L'amour once in terms. Fraught down the kick tail. If the is any as vet if the am going that fraught down Lily duck Jim anywhere? Equal good self am correcting myself entrance any other is doing well is the any as should conviction had began with. : Self as would adjust yourself! Now have you spoilt mine days. : Cheers Nirre Neilfisk un dazed. Badly that find , I have inga money and Dons Herzfeldt is one genius. : For very text for that husband bark stool read. : Now is the Christmas again show in Rejected. Few biscuit.

august 9, 2002
6:42am
the week kinda took a turn for the strange and godawful and i'm sort of just blocking it all out right now.. more importantly i'm so very close to wrapping up this giant chunk of animating that's taken up the past 2 years i can almost smell it. and it smells curd-y. i've probably written about this a thousand times by now but is true, i'm quite well, close. maybe a month to go now and then on to the rest which should at least be more fun to work on while doing that very short film on the side before year's end. and meanwhile it never fails, at exactly this 'almost there' point in a show i always get suddenly flooded with very immediate, visceral plans for another film.. started toying with something out of nowhere a few days ago, talked to some friends, it changed a bit, and lo and behold now it's already blossomed all smelly in my head and will probably demand a place next in line. it will be bouncing around in there for maybe a year but at the moment it seems like it will be a very very long piece but a lot of fun to make. i'm sure writing will begin uncontrollably in about a month. sigh. hmmr i scribbled notes on my desktop a couple of hours ago so that i would remember what to write about here but they got all smudgy from working and the bottom note now reads something like 'twine lepue' and i have no clue of what that.. mwait... oh yeah, 'time lapse'.. for a few nights i've been shooting a bit of time lapse footage around the desk while animating and it's been coming out pretty interesting looking. maybe will be dvd material. it is scary, watching me work. i just wrote a guy trying to get the music rights for something that i only need a 10 second clip of and he just wrote back saying it was 2500 dollars and well that's the end of that little plan. my back hurts. time for bed. i'm a year older now by the way. i am all musky and wrinkled.

another genius open writing assignment

GIRL MOST LIKELY TO (MGM / Marc Platt producing / Robert Luketic directing)
An ugly girl undergoes plastic surgery and becomes beautiful. She then takes revenge on all the people who mistreated her when she was ugly.

july 22, 2002
6:34am
shooting wrist pain. kinda dizzy., oooh to never have to ink this film again. the fat woman at the video lab with the gold chains whom i'd never met before said i should go see a doctor about the circles under my eyes. that was kind of depressing. at least i've lost some weight thru all this. the weather's finally cooled off some so it's a bit easier to work but should try and scale back my hours again.. lately it's working til 7:30am and waking up at around 3... if i keep pushing it i guess pretty soon i'll just have completely wrapped around the clock and will be back on regular human hours again, ha ha.. i think i've made that joke about 30000 times in this journal. just a little further to go now.. studied a lot of classic old title sequences this weekend.. not because we're planning fancy titles but because up until the early 90s titles were shot on animation stands virtually identical to ours and they used to pull off some amazingly inventive and tricky stuff with next to nothing (also identical). i guess these days almost all titles are shot digitally and not many people care or know too much about optical mattes, double exposures, trick photography, etc.. have also been studying old harryhausen films again in spots. dying to try some new tricks on this film. meanwhile had probably what ties as my worst ever pitch meeting with a studio guy the other day for something i was potentially going to write for them. my previous worst ever pitch was many years ago for a certain guy at dreamworks who literally just stepped off a plane from france, limped into his office jetlagged to just get his mail and go home but realized he was stuck with a meeting to listen to me talk. so this was just as unpleasant but at least it was over the phone. so very tired.

speaking of studio movies these are actual open writing assignments from my agency's mailing list. brilliant!

MARIA POPPINS (Warners / Robert Lawrence producing):
Present day Latino MARY POPPINS about a Mexican housekeeper and her relationship with the American family she comes to work for. Looking for HARRY POTTER in tone

SHORTY (Universal / Marc Platt & Master P producing / Jesse Dylan directing / Lil Romeo starring)
A midget alien is stranded in a Los Angeles 'hood. He becomes a rapping, hip-hopping partner with a 12 year old who wants to win an MTV talent contest.

these are not the writing projects i was pursuing. altho perhaps that's where i've gone wrong.

i think my birthday's coming up... send all presents and homemade pornography to the studio address. i might actually go see the new submarine movie this week. as long as harrison ford punches somebody and runs around yelling i'll be happy

july 10, 2002
5:26am
we went to a hidden lake this weekend and fed ducks and saw some wild bunnies. the dolphins have also been back along the coast flopping out of the water, it's like sea world out there. still very steady progress animating, trying not to slack off, still well on track to start photography in the fall which amazingly will probably only amount to about three or so minutes of finished footage thus far. but the rest of the film ought to be downhill from there. i'd thought these animation papers would have gotten absolutely thrashed by now considering how much manhandling + work that has been crammed into each page, but they've been holding up remarkably well. this apartment has been hotter than a screaming antelope and the news says another heat wave is on the way. there's no ventilation in here so it's all mildew and humidity and sweating walls. i think i've been grinding my teeth at night because my tongue is all chewed up. i'm sitting here in nothing but army shorts at 5 in the morning with fans going and i still want to crawl into the refrigerator's vegetable bin. there is something scratching on the other side of my wall. ward kimball died which is sad. i was lucky to see him present a retrospective of his work in 1996 and from what i gather he was the most inventive fellow on the disney lot

it looks like i'll probably start animating yet another film, albeit a very short one, around the same time i'll start photography on this one, but which will actually get released first. was that a proper use of commas? it's just a little piece that will need to be finished and in theaters around next january or february already. rob and i will probably do the voices and whip a quickie job on it thru the holidays. a silly little thing really. work, work. so a new film from us already in february. well not really a full film. but sort of. maybe

still not much progress with the cartoon network unfortunately... we were thinking 'rejected' would air in july but reached yet another snag in their legal dept and now we're looking at october. the big irony is three weeks ago a fellow over at the cartoon network in spain (same turner company) e-mailed us out of the blue with an offer to license three films for the summer. the deal was worked out and agreed upon in two days, the paperwork is now being completed and the spaniards will enjoy the films already this month, couldn't have been easier. and meanwhile here we are, one year and a half into a gory ordeal still struggling to get just one film on air in the states on the same network. viva america. i just read back the beginning of this paragraph and to be honest i guess that's not really irony, is it? altho maybe that sentence there was ironic in itself. let's just quit while we're ahead

the ad on tv trumpeted that their product provided a "lifetime of temporary relief" brilliant!

june 11, 2002
5:18am
"the deeper that sorrow carves into
your being, the more joy you can contain"
my cereal box came with a free cd of xmas music. is it not... june? part of one of my plants began to fall apart and i found that it was all black underneath and crawling with little white bugs. i guess the plant can contain more joy now. the other plants are multiplying so i've had to start making clippings and giving them away to friends. a couple weekends ago we went to the beach and came upon a dead seal all washed up surrounded by bird skeletons. a couple weeks before that we had found a big dead manta ray and then seconds later another one washed up right beside it.

general attitude is good towards the animation, really starting to feel the beginnings of the 'home stretch' at least with this hellish chunk of the film. it's a bit deceiving as even though it may amount to just a minute or two's worth of time on screen, the animation is so dense that it will still take months to finish. but then i get to start shooting and sweet doggy what a great day that will be. i have at least three other little films in mind that i'd love to start work on but can't so the sooner this thing starts getting wrapped up the better.

i saw the tyson/lewis fight and it was really kind of sad. my pillow smells vaguely of maple syrup.

don

may 18, 2002
4:56am
spent the week in LA doing this and that, while animating at a surrogate art desk. yes, the film follows everywhere i go like a little lamb. only the lamb is made of thousands of animation pages stacked in plastic bags, cotton gloves, sharpies, and a plastic pegboard. it shambles after me and goes baaaah as pink pearl eraser shavings and pencil stubs spill from its butt. i caught the new star wars which was quite good if you can get past the clunky bits. unfortunately though, thru 75 percent of it i found i had to pee in the most raging of ways and there was an air conditioning vent aimed directly at my lap which made my sad shifting pee pee waiting game even worse. alas nothing wrecks a movie more than trying to time your miserable flight to the restroom just right so you don't miss anything, let alone keep thinking, 'i'd probably really be enjoying this right now if it weren't for the fact that i'm nauseous from having to pee like a four year old girl but i'll be good-goddamned if i'm going to leave right now because it looks like some more whipping out of lightsabers and explodey things might happen and holy god i'm in pain.' i think there's some freudian stuff in that sentence that you can disregard. so anyway i have to see the thing again to make up for my frisky bladder. i said both pee pee and butt in this paragraph

the daily animation grind has gotten so routine that there is just nothing new to report.. my life in this production is a broken record.. you can probably expect more updates around here in the experimental places and other spots instead of production-doldrums reportage, pretty much anything that amuses or distracts from these lower trenches of the film-make is growing in importance. maybe we'll do a couple charity auctions over the summer to liven things up around here. or boil some rocks. and hopefully someday soon we will be able to announce some of the nifty things we've got cooking on the side that have been keeping me exercised and off the streets and out of gangs.

the other night i dreamt that we had a cat who was going after this mouse, only the mouse wasn't really a mouse as much as just an oversized mouse head that slowly bounced around the furniture like a rubber ball going, squeak squeak. the cat finally caught the mouse/head but it was so large it could barely fit it into its mouth, like a giant gumball, just big enough that it could not chew it. the head kept squeaking miserably inside of the cat's mouth as the cat desperately tried to chew and then i had to leave the room. i want to go on a cruise

this is a very impressive free little program that seeks out and removes all corporate spyware and hidden tracking devices from your computer that you never knew you had running: ad-aware

april 30, 2002
you smell like all sorts of stuff
and your pants are wet
6:05am
today was a good manic day, steadily powering thru a big pile of stuff that needs to be inked. arm numb, blood sugared, shooting pains in wrist. inking is still the worst. meanwhile, seems like if progress continues at the current pace it looks like i may be shooting the first roll of film around autumn, maybe. it would make me feel a lot better to get a solid chunk of this stuff safely photographed so that i can stop worrying about it all catching fire, at least. and then the final scenes might possibly be shot around the holidays. the past two years have gone by incredibly fast because of all this yet i seem to have aged 15 years. would be nice to have some manner of deadline/goal/release for next year but every time i set a date for these things i end up missing it by several months and get lousy depressed. i think i already wrote about all this before. we went to the happy county fair this weekend and took pictures of the families devouring corn dogs and the fat woman in the trenchcoat who was missing a foot. a commercial on tv yesterday was selling beds but referred to them as 'sleep systems'. another one was for a kids cereal and showed all the cereal bits whizzing around in space; a disclaimer underneath read, "not a flying cereal." my computer is suddenly making a whole bunch of chuggy noises.

april 13 or 14
4something

thanks to loren for the bendy banana sculpture!

i can tell the weather is changing because my apt has gone from unbearably cold to unbearably hot. i live in a giant thermos. had another meeting in la earlier that went really well concerning things i cannot say... so many secret projects, so little time. meanwhile fighting off this head cold and spending too much money on ebay. speaking of which, this guy is auctioning off little individually preserved squirrel penises in specimen jars. i think i just found amy her xmas present. then i saw another guy on there selling racoon genitals. i wonder if they are like rivals or something. when i shake my keyboard upside down all sorts of horrible things fall out.

back in inking gear, and i'm getting better at it even tho each frame still takes nearly 5 minutes to ink and touch up. soon will come the day when one of the more busier frames may take closer to 15 minutes to fully ink. we're not going to think about that right now. also still trying to solve that special fx shot so that it doesn't take months to produce... decided will definitely not be using models tho

there's an amber colored sort of sap dribbling down my walls; turns out that heat causes this cheap sort of paint that they used on these walls to spontaneously secrete weird brown syrups. "that's normal, that's just the walls sweating. don't let that bother you. oh and dear god, don't touch it" also i seem to have blown a color tube or something in my monitor today, the entire computer screen has turned a sickly yellow and it seems that i am typing on pee. otherwise this has been a really good week. the song of the day is 'distortions' by clinic

april 3, 2002
when he approaches the counter
they all go on break
6:12am

thanks to haley for the candleholder!

so amy was watching cnn and they reported that since the terrorist attacks, americans have been feeling "increased anxiety" and that they worry more often than they used to, distracting them. so they recommended that people "set aside an hour of every day for worrying." i guess because how can we possibly enjoy a pleasant lunch if we're being bothered by unscheduled grief, loss and horror?

music of the day is "iguazu" by gustavo santaolalla, go find if you can. rather than blearily scrub out the endless layers of mildew in the bathroom every two weeks, i think i've taken to just photographing it. in closeup it all sort of looks like a beautiful rugged alien landscape. "found art." must run along now, it's almost time to worry

march 23, 2002
4:04am
came up with one of most important shots in the film a couple days ago in the shower and it's all plotted out in my head now and storyboarded. it's a big outer space shot and i'm not sure yet how exactly i'll pull it off special-effects wise but it's either going to be half-animated half-models, or some very gutsy experimental animation. can't wait to just finish up this lousy long sequence and move on to something new at least. have decided that once the film is all finished and out of my hands i'm going to drive to the grand canyon. i'm not sure why but it's definitely going to happen. i've never been there before and it seems like a place to go. bought a new lamp yesterday and it made me happy. currently wearing a cowboy hat.

all wrapped up with the big book proposal.. discovered the hard way the other night that the 24 hour supermarket closes early on wednesdays which is really inconvenient when you've run out of glue stick at 2am. also learned that 7-11 does not carry any glue. at all. none. so yesterday i finally got all the assorted sample pages together and had them bound into a little book for the publishers and the guy at kinkos who bound it sort of flipped through it and frowned and asked if it was a children's book.

i think i'm coming down with something

march 16, 2002
neck rash
i am superman
4:36am
the big downstairs neighbor excitedly alerted me yesterday that he thinks he saw mexicans trying to break into my apartment when i was away. however, after some further quizzing i learned that his idea of "i saw mexicans trying to break into your place" is equivalent to "i saw one mexican guy politely knocking on your door" .. the better news is that those are apparently bona fide termites getting all jiggy in my kitchen walls. i don't really want to have to deal with the whole circus tent/poison/evacuation scenario so i think i'll just snuggle up with them and pray i don't plummet through the wooden floor before i eventually move the hell out of here. we have also been playing a game for a little while now in which i put scotch tape over their little holes and then they move around it to drill new ones and i think they're really beginning to enjoy it. i just spilled peanut butter on my pants.

the daily animating dregs have been highlighted lately with more exciting news that i'm not really allowed to talk about yet, but there are big neato things in the air. hopefully announcements soon. but i am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel with the animation... not a big light mind you but a tiny little firefly blinky thing that reminds me that this year and a half of drawing so far for the film has been a lot like writing a novel by etching it letter by letter into a rock with my fingernails. i can't get this peanut butter off my pants... hot water? cold?

finally wrapping up the early anesthetics book draft on the side this weekend and then it's off to the publishers for a spell, so that will be cleared away from my head for at least a little while. feeling good.. cleaned out the front room of a lot of junk for new incoming furniture and it's always funny how a suddenly more spacious room somehow gives the inside of your head some fresh clarity. have been sleeping less but feeling all awake

don