Extract

I started a new job a couple weeks ago. I am post production assistant on Mike Judge's new movie called "Extract". It is in the same vein as Office Space, a movie that I love. I am very excited to be working on it.

Max Payne ended and all the guys moved onto work on Season of the Witch, the new Nick Cage movie filming in Hungary right now. Although Hungary sounds delightfully decrepit, I am happy to be still here in L.A. and gainfully employed. Max Payne was met in the box office by what I would likely describe as mild success. They can't all be Dark Knight. I have high hopes for Extract. I think it will do well considering the adoring cult fan base that Mike seems to have accumulated since Office Space.

Our office will be a stones throw from Mike's new animated series "The Goode Family". I am hoping this will give me a glimpse of life on animation production, which is very much where I would love to end up. So cross your fingers I can learn a thing or two.

J&Tiff In LA

Jamie and Tiff came to L.A. Fun ensued once more.

You may wonder why this gate is so fascinating.

It just so happens this is the gate to the one and only Scranton Business Park where you may find the Dunder Mifflin paper company.

And the Shrute Farm. I always keep my farms disassembled in parking lots.
Jamie as per usual.
Jamie has a crush. She was going on and on about Jimmy Dean sausages and I tried to explain this was not the same guy.....

Jamie discovered a new crush and they watched the sunset in a smoke filled sky. Los Angles burning to the ground always make the sunsets so romantic....

Mom comes to LA

This all happened in September..... I am sorry for the delay :)

Mom came it L.A. Fun ensued.
Happy day.

We went to the Santa Monica Pier.
Mom salutes the ocean for doing such a splendid job.
Patrick thinks plants are silly.
He is still willing to give the silly plants a hand.

Calliope & Ichabod

My next animation is in the works. I am currently suck because I cannot find a suitable narrator. Any suggestions will be gladly taken.

Storyboards are coming along as well as a few set pieces already. I will post a few storyboards when they are finished, which I hope will be soon since they are the most frustrating part of the process for me.

Just to get you excited for the animation the first part of the poem is posted below. There is much more to come in the story of Calliope and Ichabod though so stay tuned.


Calliope and Ichabod
Climbed high atop a lightning rod
To find if they could speak to God
and ask his middle name.

He answered with a lightning bolt
that gave them a terrific jolt
of several hundred thousand volts
and set them both aflame.

No one would recognize the two
with hair of black and skin of blue
when they awoke in morning dew
and wondered just the same.

Who was this pious paradigm?
Though neither volunteered to climb
and ask the man a second time
to speak his name in pain.

Penske Truck Ad

I helped out on an ad for Penske. It is a contest to win Packer tickets and have your commercial shown at the stadium. We made the final 7. Voting goes until December 9th. Please go and vote. You may vote as many times as you like... though sadly only ONCE a day.

CLICK HERE



If there is any confusion, VOTE #5.. i mean vote for the best one.

Help a girl have a Merry Packer/Penske Christmas and vote often.

:)

Hollywood - isn't she lovely

Pictures I took on the way to the New Beverly Theater.

Matador 4

Did I ever show you the apartment?

I don't think I did. These pictures are from when we first moved in so the poster arrangement has since changed (several times) to include mostly a lot of Dark Knight, but all in all this is where we live.

oh and the curtains there on the far wall are our screen. We have a projector. It's our home theater... with actually red velvet curtains. I made them myself :) with window curtains to match.






And when I say we I mean myself and this guy.


Don't worry. He's not as deep as he accidentally looks here. Not even close.

Recent Food Adventures

1. I invented a soup.... or well made up an awesome recipe. It's something to the effect of roasted eggplant curry soup. It's delicious. If you wanna know how you will have to ask me.



2. I made green salsa (salsa verde for those of you keeping track). Strangely one of the tomatillos had a penis. I used it anyway.



3. I made a banana cream pie for the first time. It didn't really turn out. Fist and for most I did not have a mixer so I had to whip the meringue by hand. It was nearly impossible so that part didn't work quite right. Second the pudding (cream part) never got thick and solid. It stayed pudding so it was an all around failure. I will do better next time. The guys in the office will make sure I at least try again.

The Buddy System

I have been talking with a new stop motion studio called Buddy System Studio. They are eager to have my help on their current projects and I am eager to oblige. They used to work with the Robot Chicken/ Moral Oral crowd at Shadow Machine, but have decided to move on and create their own studio.

I worked with them briefly before on a project for ESPN that was never aired. I enjoyed working with them quite a bit and was very excited when they called. Currently they are putting together a commercial for Penski trucking that will be entered in a competition to be played at Lambeau Field. Good ol' Wisconsin :) so you know they are good guys. Check out their reel HERE

Injured Owl for Main Titles

i made an owl. it might be on The Sarah Silverman Program. :) cross your fingers.

Photo Op

Patrick and I needed to come up with a present for his mom's birthday. I thought we should give her a photo. This is what I came up with.



I think you will agree it was one of the best gifts of all time.

Dark Knight

Dark Knight was a roaring success, as expected, and I am really REALLY proud to have been part of such a great movie. I may not have made it into the credits, but working on the Dark Knight was one of the best things I have ever done.

I hope it continues to break records and entertain audiences everywhere. Go Dark Knight!! Go and be free.

Reversal

I helped my friends out to make this short called Reversal. It was written and directed by my friend Cullen Wright. All of his friends put many, many hours of volunteer labor to bring this piece to life.




They are currently putting together a feature called Veronica, which is also written and directed by Cullen. Hopefully it gets off the ground. I am looking forward to working with them again (hopefully this time for money).

YEA for Employment

Sadly, Dark Knight ended. I suppose it had to be released sometime. Now you may all go out and enjoy it. Just so that you don't have to bother with the extraordinarily long credits and perhaps feel as though you missed my name.... it's not in there. The credits ran long and being the bottom of a very large totem pole... I was cut. Anywho ENJOY it anyway. The movie is freakin awesome.

I spent week or so in Milwaukee visiting and whatnot, extremely scared I would not be able to get a job when I got back. I did in fact have to turn down a show on the CW in order to take my trip as planned. And boy am I glad I did that. A few days before returning I got a phone call.... or rather I got 3 phone calls all wanting interviews the Monday I got back. It helps to have Andrea on you side (if any one was doubting that). I dear friend Andrea recommended me for two of the jobs that had called.

I got back, went to my first interview of the day (which happened to be the one I wanted most) left and ten minutes later I get a call and a job offer. I started the next day at 9am. :)

Now I work for Max Payne. Post PA extraordinaire once again. It's based on the video game and staring everyone's hero, Marky Mark.

Hollywood Forever

A whole bunch of us went to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery tonight to watch "The Man Who Knew Too Much". Nothing beats watching a movie like watching a movie with hundreds of other living people on top of hundreds of dead people. It is pretty awesome. People flocked to the cemetery to watch the classic Hitchcock movie projected on the wall of a large building. So many people were going it took us a good 30 min to go just a few blocks down Santa Monica Blvd. two hours before the film even began.

Sadly, I will be out of town for next weekends screenings of Easy Rider and Blue Velvet, of which I have seen neither. If you get the chance to go, you should do it at least once. See a movie under the stars and over the stars...

obligatory link

best line from "The Man Who Knew Too Much": Sorry we took so long, we had to go pick up Hank".

It is really funny if you've seen the movie. I swear.

Naked Parade

In the far far away land of hippies (Seattle), there is a day when the hippies get naked. Many hide from this phenomenon, but others decided it would be better to just throw them a parade. On the first day of summer every year, brave but not necessarily attractive souls take off all their clothing, paint their bodies, and ride down the streets of Fremont on their bikes. The other people who decided this was a good idea follow them with floats. The floats seemed to be either bizarrely random, or uncomfortably political - hippies go figure.

At then end of the parade the hippies gather on the hill for naked togetherness. With their bottoms missing a sweaty triangle of paint where they sat on their bikes, they party into the night with overpriced food, restricted drinking areas and bad music. Boy those hippies know how to throw a party. All in all i give it two hand slightly covering my eyes :)







Some of the people were kinda awesome though.... these two guys for example.





photos by: Jessica Eskelsen

Spore

There is a really amazing game that will be coming out called Spore. I am really REALLY excited for it. Until then I will have to use the trail version creature maker. I highly recommend this download to tide you over. Make fun things with it :)

MKE article

While I am trying to catch up on my blogs and all, it would be nice if I did things in order. Sorry...I don't know that I can really promise anything is accurately chronological. Especially since this atricle post happened just recently and I have nowhere near filled in the gaps yet.

A couple months ago I received a call from a guy who wanted to do a profile on me for MKE magazine. He did a phone interview and I didn't hear another thing about it for months. He calls me very recently to ask some follow up questions, which was good since I had done quite a few more interesting things (that I will blog about soon).

Then I find out they need a picture of me in the next... three days. Guess they were a lil pressed for time since they wanted the article out in the next issue. They sent out a photographer, I pulled out my muppet (all my Furry Revolt characters were in storage far far away) and took some fun pictures.

Then presto. There is an MKE article on me. There are a few inaccuracies though that I would like to point out. Primarily that I would never name a character BRANDON. His name is Wendell. Which is a German name derived from the word 'wonderer'. A far more appropriate name if you ask me, since the boy in my story is both GERMAN and WONDERS around looking for hiding spots.

Of all the things that could have been mis-quoted this is not so bad. Though I'm not sure how great it is that I said the word bitch, but it is completely something I would have said and probably did say.... so yeah I'm ok with that one.

Oh and that is the puppet I made in the picture in the article. Isn't he cute?


- i'm not so sure how long they keep these online pages available so if it is not there and you want to see it, here is a screen shot I took. Minus the ads :) Make sure you zoom in on it, otherwise it is completely unreadable.

screen shot

Why are there so many songs about rainbows?

Ok. Let's go back a bit here. I have not made a decent post in quite a while, but I won't bore you with EVERYTHING that has happened. Perhaps just the fun highlights and the occasional quirky detail.

Christmas 2007:

I was still living in Tarzana in the house with my crazy landlady. She happened to "do foot sessions" in the back house for foot fetish men. She also would take fetish photography of herself and sell them after (not so talentedly) photoshopping them. Here is the best way to understand her.... her myspace

I was feeling a bit depressed and all. My job sucked and I was feeling kinda lonely. I missed my family terribly. It was Christmas and I wasn't able to get any time off. Then I received a package in the mail that was absolutely wonderful. My awesome mother sent me my Christmas presents along with a whole slew of our old Christmas decorations AND... a pre-packed stocking with every individual item wrapped so I couldn't peek. This was the one and only time I cried about being in LA.

One of those wonderful presents I had in fact requested and was terribly excited to receive. I was given a class. A MUPPET STYLE PUPPETRY CLASS taught by Micheal Earl (better known as Snuffy amoung his many puppet incarnations). his website
i made it onto the U.S. workshops page :)



The class was fun. I was not bad. Could use A LOT of practice, but I loved it. I learned how to preform with muppets. I even went home and made myself a cute lil guy of my own. More to come in the future. I want to make a small army of muppets.

Maybe I Might Make More Muppets in My Myriad of un - Mployment.

Let's just pretend that this gets to completely caught up to umm.... let's say beginning of March.
That is when I got my new apartment. When I get home from from my current trip to Seattle (which is becoming a pattern of what I do during my unemployment) I will post something about how kick ass my new place is.

Bad Blogger...baaaaad blogger

It has been brought to my attention that I have been a neglectful blogger. This is true.... I have failed what appears to be my fans. I must apologize for failing to update these things as well as apologize for not knowing any one actually looked at this thing. I appreciate that people read my blog and I feel terrible for the lack of new posts. I promise to bring it around here. I am unemployed at the moment and have a fair amount of time on my hands. This won't last I'm sure, but none the less I will attempt to continue to make up for my failures here.

Upcoming Blogs to look out for:

1. the awesome several month re-cap

2. cool stuff i have done lately

3. the hunt for a new job

4. new videos

birdhouse in your soul

i made a little bird today.

Edgar Wright and me :)



Patrick with Edgar



John Landis



Quentin Tarantino



Edgar and Paul Williams



Me Paul and Patrick



Me with Ron Underwood and Brent Maddock
(the director and writter of Tremors and many other great movies)



Patrick with John Landis