BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS
Friday, January 30, 2004
The nifty things you learn in PE:
1. The only advantage of a one-handed backhand is reach. But with how fast players are nowadays that's negligible. With a two-handed backhand you have better control, aim and more power. There really is no reason to learn how to do a one-handed backhand anymore.
2. Recent studies show that stretching before a workout doesn't really decrease your chance of injury. In fact it doesn't help your workout at all although it doesn't have any negative effects on it either. It does help your flexibility and it is a good thing to do in itself, but it is now recommended as a cool down after a workout rather than as a warm-up pre-workout routine.
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Two classes into tennis and I've had two, well, interesting tennis partners. One asian girl kept shouting 'OOPSIE!' and 'MY BAD!' on every error. At first it was funny, eventually it was irritating. I wonder where 'my bad' comes from. It seems like a very trendy thing to say these days, although Marc says it's an expression that's been around for a long time. It really annoys me actually because it sounds so wrong! This girl has the right take on it:
Ok, I've had it. Listen up kiddies. The only appropriate use of the word "bad" as a noun is in the case of "You have to take the bad with the good." You cannot use a possessive when using the word "bad" as a noun. You CANNOT say "my bad" as in "Sorry, that's my bad!"--this is not a grammatically correct statement.
You cannot own a bad, it's not a dog, it's not a thing to possess. You cannot wash and style your bad. You cannot pack your bad to take on a trip. You cannot take your bad to the park for a walk.
I kept imaging Venus or worse Agassi shouting 'my bad!' during a game, puede pa siguro si Kournikova. The next girl I was playing with was demanding. 'Oh can you hit another one of those high ones.' 'Oh can you feed me down the line' 'Oh hit me one for my backhand.' Daming request. Ano ako instructor? Tsaka, buti nga nababalik ko, iisipin ko pa ngayon yung request niya kung papaano ibalik.
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You know what's bad these days though? My hair. I've been having really bad hair days. It's probably too long already. Marc even thought I changed my hairstyle. Time to go to Supercuts and go from bad to worse.
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I had to take an oral English test today to be a full-fledged TA. Apparently, last sem I was officially an RA (research assistant not a teaching assistant). So binigyan ako ng graph - 1999 Loan Amounts for Students - tapos yung graph shows different ethnic types and their average loan amounts. So you have to figure out what the graph was saying and then you have to 'teach' it to these to testmasters and answer these questions. Parang, hello, animation po ang field ko. Parang ang layo, puede ikuwento ko na lang sa inyo ang origin ng Powerpuff Girls? Sobra akong walang interest, at medyo inis na nga ako na kailangan ko pa prove ang english skills ko, so medyo lackluster ang aking 'teaching' at when asked to 'analyze' the data I couldn't help myself and said 'well, I suppose blah blah... but actually this is not my field and I am in no position to make such an analysis.' Medyo na sense ata nung head test girl at tinanong ako 'In the Philippines, how would these loan values be distributed among ethnic types.' Diyan siya nagkamali. Well, for starters, I said there are no clear 'ethnic types' which surprised them . Pero I explained the very distinct class structures and how that would affect chances of higher education. AND napaka-alien ng notion ng student loan sa atin 'no. Minimum wage ka na nga pag-naka hanap ka ng trabaho kakaltasan ka pa ng student loan for life? Funny, they're testing international students with what seems to be such an American 'test premise' buti na lang the testers were smart enough to massage the situation. Well, they gave me a high score daw. Tang ina dapat lang 'no, sayang naman ang aking Jeshweet edyukayshen.
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This week in seminar we had this guy who directed Action League Now. Probably the silliest and most poorly animated series that was on tv in recent years. But I watched it (it was an ongoing Ka-Blam series) and actually found some of it funny just for sheer crudeness. Now he heads Warner Bros. Interactive. Funny what some careers are built on.
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I'm whiling away my TA hours blogging. I can't wait to get out of here and eat something. I haven't eaten a meal all day (I did weights pa) and it's going to be 5 pm already. Must control urge to not pig out.
Thursday, January 29, 2004
The presidential elections in the Philippines are in May 2004. What do you think of actor Fernando Poe Jr.'s currently leading in the polls?
He is my godson. I always tell my friends [that] in a dark, dark night, we need a star. We need a star.
Haha. Imelda in Newsweek.
Sunday, January 25, 2004
This doesn't not seem like a Kevin Smith movie at all. And the funniest thing is that the trailer almost completely leaves out J-Lo and plays up Liv Tyler even if J-Lo is headlining it with Ben Affleck. Aside from the shadow of Gigli rearing it's ugly head this trailer is so blah. Well, except for the use of that Cure riff in the middle.
Jersey Girl
I don't remember Starsky and Hutch on tv aside from the image of the car and the fact that it was shown on Channel 13 if I'm not mistaken. But this movie looks like a lot of fun.
Starsky and Hutch
Can't say the same for this. Damn Garfield looked much better in the dailies we saw. This trailer sucks, the stupid studio exec who asked for this doesn't know shit about Garfield. What's with all the bouncy music and animals dancing around? They should have cut a one gag, slow trailer with the fat cat lazing and just saying wise cracks. I can't remember one strip where Garfield actually dances around. Inis.
Garfield
And speaking of fat cats... didn't know there was a docu on Imelda at Sundance this year
Imelda
by this girl
a review from ainitcool
imelda is about the woman with lots of shoes who used to be one of the uncontested dictators of the phillippines. it is a portrait of the lure of power and the cult of celebrity. imelda marcos is a profoundly deluded woman, but everyone, including the documentarian seems charmed by her. watching her natter on about her principles of life and watching everyone around her show her unadulterated adulation was crazy. i was reminded of some of the worst excesses of courtney love while watching her pronouncements. scary. not sure if the documentarian was in on all this. she gave away a pair of valentino shoes at the screening. beware, very little of the brutality of the marcos regime is given equal time. enter at your own risk...
Saturday, January 24, 2004
http://www.inq7.net/lif/2004/jan/17/lif_1-1.htm
Friday, January 23, 2004
US city passes emergency ban on karaoke booths
Karaoke singers in the California city of San Mateo can still sound as bad as they want but now they will have to do it in public.
The San Mateo city council has voted unanimously in favour of a 45-day emergency ban on karaoke booths, calling the sound-proofed rooms found in clubs a potential haven for prostitution, underage drinking, fights and robberies.
San Mateo council member John Lee said: "Our police department decided there have been significant problems in the greater Bay area with private karaoke rooms.
"It is hard to enforce the law in private rooms."
San Mateo is just south of San Francisco.
Karaoke, hugely popular in Asia where customers pack clubs offering private singing rooms, is gaining a big following in the United States.
The San Mateo ban does not affect the one public karaoke room operating in the city.
Police will now decide how they want the city to address the private rooms, where customers can sing without having to perform for strangers.
A restaurant owner in San Mateo has applied for a permit to operate four private karaoke booths.
Some opponents of the ban who testified before the vote argued that the private rooms offered poor singers a chance to sing a love song without fear of embarrassment.
"My voice is terrible," Walter Lei, a San Francisco bus driver, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "If I was singing here, everybody would run off."
--Reuters
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Reminds me of Daddy's kuwento about karaoke rooms and GROs and lady's drinks and Tito Boylas asking a GRO 'kumain ka na?' and when the girl says hindi pa he tells the waiter 'pare, paki palitan ng kumain na.'
Documentaries Draw on Animation By Jason Silverman
PARK CITY, Utah -- Had he been born a a few years later, Henry Darger might have been an animator. Instead, the now-famous outsider artist, who died penniless in 1973, left behind an illustrated novel with thousands of watercolor paintings plus music and lyrics. Many of Darger's works were painted in sequence, almost as if he were drawing storyboards for a movie.
When Oscar-winning filmmaker Jessica Yu began a documentary about Darger, she decided to take what seemed like a logical next step for this work -- she animated it. Yu's film In the Realms of the Unreal, which premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival, includes both standard documentary footage -- talking heads and archival photos -- and animated sequences that add movement and sound to Darger's paintings.
Even 10 years ago, mixing animation and documentary would have been both impractical and taboo -- animation emerges from the brain of an artist, while documentary is supposed to be grounded in objective truth.
But the plummeting costs of animation and dissolving rules of nonfiction have brought this cinematic odd couple together. Michael Moore's Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine featured an animated sequence created by Howard Moss. Recent PBS documentaries Hybrid and Repetition Compulsion were largely or entirely animated.
Animation, according to Cara Mertes, executive director of the PBS nonfiction series P.O.V., is one sign of a brave new era of documentary.
"Documentary has never been more exciting, and that's because of the expansion of the form," said Mertes. "Filmmakers are incorporating fictional elements, experimental elements and animation, and the animation that documentary filmmakers are using has been wonderfully imaginative and extremely effective."
Filmmakers are bringing a number of different styles and methods of animation to their documentaries. In the Realms of the Unreal used After Effects to create a staccato, childlike motion -- like Colorforms come to life -- perfectly appropriate to the subject matter. David Lebrun, in his documentary Proteus, used quick cutting of photographic images to create an animation-like effect.
Proteus explores the life of the 19th- and 20th-century scientist Ernst Haeckel, who discovered, among other things, the radiolarian -- a single-celled organism that comes in a startling diversity of geometric forms. Haeckel sketched more than 4,000 of these, and Lebrun, through a complicated and painstaking photographic process, transferred 1,000 to film.
Lebrun then combined these still images in a process similar to traditional cel animation. Because of that, Proteus is as much a visual experience as a narrative one.
"The animation throws Proteus into something that is beyond documentary into a sensory experience -- hopefully an ecstatic, visionary one," Lebrun said. "If I just presented the animation by itself, outside of the context of the documentary, it would probably seem experimental or radical. But by creating a documentary, I can hopefully propel the audience into a very intense, stroboscopic, hallucinatory animated experience."
Perhaps the best-known practitioner of the fully animated documentary is Bob Sabiston, the animation director of Richard Linklater's cult favorite Waking Life. Sabiston has created a series of animated interviews, including Grasshopper, also premiering this week at Sundance, along with Lars von Trier's The Five Obstructions, for which Sabiston animated a sequence.
To create Grasshopper, Sabiston took a video interview with a man on the street and overlaid it with animation. As the man talks, the background shifts, his eyes bulge, and colors flash and pulse. It's beautiful to see -- far more visually striking than the average nonfiction film -- and elevates what would have been an interesting monologue into a deeper meditation on truth and perception.
"I'm not sure if I consider it a documentary -- I guess it is because it is real," Sabiston said of Grasshopper. "People who have seen my films have told me that the people somehow seem more real than they would if it was just video. And they pay more attention to what is said. The animation is useful because you can heighten what is interesting and drop out what is not."
And animation, Yu added, actually can help remind viewers that even documentary is a product of a filmmaker's own agenda and attitudes.
"In any documentary you take liberties, but with animation those liberties are more obvious and transparent," Yu said.
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Greg who just came from Sundance because his short film got into the online competition was talking about the highly annoying schmooze factor of the whole affair. He said he would come in to a party with his Sundance id card saying he's a 'director' then people would chat with him, people who want to work/act in people's films, and stuff, and slowly extricate themselves from talking to him after learning that what he directed was a short animation, not a live action feature. He said animation festival people are so much nicer.
Samwise Gamgee to Direct Fantastic Four Feature?
Monday January 19, 2004
Brazilian magazine, SET, has posted an interview with THE LORD OF RINGS actor Sean Astin, where he mentions being in the running to direct the FANTASTIC FOUR feature. Upon the success of his short film, THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT, which he filmed while making LORD OF THE RINGS, he has had interviews to direct 20th Century Fox's feature adaptation of the Marvel comic classic. The article quotes the budget between $100 to $130 million. Steven Soderbergh (OCEAN'S ELEVEN) is also rumored to be in the running and a favorite of the studio because he would bring producing partner George Clooney onto the project to star as Reed Richards. Astin said, "Yeah, but I'm a friend of George Clooney too (laughs). I think he would make a perfect Reed Richards." When asked who Astin would get to play the Human Torch, he said his RINGS co-star Orlando Bloom. DOWN WITH LOVE director Peyton Reed had long been attached to direct, but he dropped out in the fall of 2003. The SET article states that Fox hopes to get the picture out by the end of the year, but previous more realistic studio estimates have the film pegged for a July 1, 2005 release.
- VFXworld
Idol talaga si Samwise, tunay na kaibigan na, tunay pang direktor! Pero parang gusto kong si Soderbergh na lang.
So ano nga ba ang gagawin ko pagkatapos ko mag-graduate? Well, nakatali naman talaga ako sa aking scholarship. Uuwi at uuwi ako pagdating ng araw. Sa totoo lang ang visa ko hanggang end of May na lang. Pero mapapakiusapan naman yan ng mga isang taon pa kung kailangan. Isang taon, tapos, uuwi din, kailangan ko din mamalagi sa Pinas ng at least 2 years. So ba't hindi na lang umpisahan na yang 2-years na yan kaagad pagkatapos ng graduation? Yan ang nasa isip ko. Sa totoo lang kasi ano nga ba ang puedeng mangyari sa isang extra na taon? Kalahati ng taon na yun naghahanap ka ng trabaho tapos ang natira na lang sa 'yo kalahating taon para magtrabaho, o di kaya mag-intern ng kalahating taon o buong taon. Eh sa mga nakikita ko ngang entry level dito sa animation industry, o kahit sa entertainment in general, puede mo ngang iyabang na nagtrabaho ka sa Dreamworks ng isa o kalahating taon, pero anong tipong trabaho naman kaya yun, malamang nag-eerase ng cable sa likod ni Vin Diesel o di kaya nagbabantay ng render sa Shrek 2. Hindi masaya ang magbantay ng render, nakakabobo yun, literally watching paint dry digitally. Wala naman kasi akong ilusyon na makakuha ng animation job ng ganun ganun na lang, yung tipong animator ka kaagad, sa Pixar o sa ILM, siguro kung mag-ayos ako ng demo reel ng ilang buwan pa, tapos mag-aaply ka pa, wala na goodbye one year visa extension. Eh hindi ko naman maasikaso ngayon ang maayos na demo reel kasi kailangan ko mag-graduate. At parang mas magastos pa, isang taong renta na naman buwan buwan na six hundred dollars. I-gigimick ko na lang sa pilipinas yun. Ewan ko ba. Ngayon parang tempted ako i-explore na lang yung offer ni Robert sa MTV sa atin, o kung anong nangyayari dun sa cg company nina Dennis, tignan kung puedeng rumaket ng pagtuturo on the side sa UP, Ateneo o La Salle, at magsetup ulit sa bahay ng computer para sa sarili kong mga project. At least sa atin puede hindi lang ako nagbabantay ng render o nagpipinta ng mata ni Yoda, direktor at producer ka. At sa totoo lang diyan naman ako masaya, yung maliliit at mabibilis na project na hawak ko creatively. At parang gusto kong gumawa ng komiks din, at gumawa ng sarili kong animated shorts. Dito siguradong di ko magagawa yun. Sa totoo lang iniisip ko puede ko talagang i-hone ang character animation skills ko sa atin on personal exercises eh kasi pirated na ang Maya, tapos, pagkatapos nung mandatory 2 years may matino akong demo para sa mga studio dito sakaling gusto kong umalis ng Pinas. At by that time siguradong marami sa mga kakalase ko nasa malalaking studio na at puedeng magpa-refer. Eh putang ina gusto ko ba talaga umalis ng Pinas? Di rin natin alam baka magkaroon ng 3d explosion sa atin kung sina Dennis makabenta nung sine nila. Magtatatlong taon na ako dito sa LA feeling ko turista pa din ako. Hindi naman ako sold sa buhay dito eh. Kung hindi lang kasi matino ang suweldo at standard of living. Ewan ko ba magagalit sa aking ang kaluluwa ni Senator Fulbright kung mabasa niya 'to. Kaakibat na rin sa issue na ito yung tanong kung may ambisyon pa rin ba talaga akong mag-direct o makokontento ba ako sa pagiging cg artist? Magconcentrate sa animation lang o sa halong live action? Magconcentrate sa motion graphics/ commercials o sa special effects/ features o sa character animation? At balang araw itaga ninyo sa bato gagawa ako ng feature putang ina, kahit matanda na ako, feature galing sa sarili kong material; at makakatapos ako ng kahit isang magandang graphic novel bago ako mamatay. Dami kong ambisyon no? Parang alam ko naman ang sagot sa mga tanong ko. Parang alam ko naman ang gusto kong gawin sa buhay, marami lang reservations sa utak ko.
Nung Wednesday nag-attend kami nung Visual Effects Bake Off sa Academy of Motion Pictures. Lahat ng semi-finalists ng Oscar nominations for Viz Effects andun para i-present ang special effects highlights sa sine nila para maka-vote yung Academy kung sino ang ino-nominate para sa Best Visual Effects. Ang mga semi-finalists ay Pirates of the Caribbean, Master and Commander, Peter Pan, LOTR: ROTK, X2, T-3, at Hulk. Nandun lahat nung Effects supervisors kinukuwento nila dun sa mga Academy members kung ano ang 'special' sa kanilang special effects ngayong taon. Siyempre ang paborito ng marami Lord of the Rings. Ang ganda panoorin nung highlights sa screen ng Academy, ang klaro, kung ikukumpara dun sa screen ng SM Megamall kung saan namin napanood ni Donna ang sine. Ang layo ng kulay at quality ng image. Tinitignan ko si Jim Rygel ang supervisor ng effects, at naisip ko gusto ko bang maging si Jim Rygel o si Peter Jackson?
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Bagong taon, bagong blog.
