I did this a year and a half ago for Scott Nygren's Hypervideo class, and I still haven't disowned it yet.
It was supposed to be a critique of those overwroght, anti-captialist, "cut-and-paste animation" propoghanda movies, but everyone just assumed it was one of them. The whole class thought it was exactly what I was trying to satire.
Hey Internet, this site used to host my thoughts on some of the personal projects I worked on in high school and college. Since college is merely a distant memory to me now, it’s no longer updated. Since I’m usually doing professional work, not personal stuff, there wouldn’t be much to update it with anyway.
Nevertheless, all of the content here is quaint, so it’s worth keeping online. It’s now here as an archive of a time long gone when things like Youtube and Spotify didn’t exist and everyone was excited about the idea of 24p standard definition video cameras and iTunes playlists.
Pretty much to summarize, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is a new Broadway show by Julie Taymor based on Marvel’s Spider-Man character and loosely based on the continuity of the recent Spider-Man films. Its full of highwire fighting, flashy costumes, and technological sparkle. It’s also light on plot, somehow even the weak story is relatively hard to follow. This is pretty much exactly what to expect from Julie Taymor.
The problem isn’t the article, it’s the comments at the end:
I’m not one to wish anyone ill-will. That being said, however, I am hoping for the failure of this monstrosity. It embodies all that is wrong with Broadway. There are so many good writers and good pieces of work out there, but “Broadway” is only interested in what will sell to the masses. It’s kind of nice to see those big names and their mountains of money get some comeuppance. Besides, if I want to see this kind of nonsense, I’ll go to Vegas and see Cirque.
Certain types of small-minded people tend to adopt this attitude whenever a popular, highly-anticpated movie, album, or TV shows gets previewed.
How does it help anyone for a 65 million dollar show to be bad? Personally, I hope its great (that doesn’t mean it will be), but why hope someone fails? Let’s look at all the great things that would happen if the show were good:
1. The people who put their money into making art (commercial art is still art) can at least break even and continue being creative in the future.
2. The actors and crew can have a long, successful run working on a good show that makes people happy.
3. The show can introduce an audience (young people, male nerds, movie-goers) to the theatre who may have never seen a live theatre production.
4. The show can be another thing people can enjoy in a world already filled with mostly unenjoyable things.
Until very recently, theatre has been a populist medium. Many stuffy, “classics” of the stage used to be populist, technology-filed spectacles: Shakespere, yes; Greek tragedies, yes.
It’s also not difficult to find examples of works in all sorts of media that find a way to “appeal to the masses” while still being critically successful.
Maybe it would be okay to wish Julie Taymor failure if she for example, committed a war crime during production, or abused her cast and crew. But she hasn’t displayed one ounce of insincerity (at least publicly). She’s just a controversial director who has a very clear vision of the plotless spectacles she wants to create, and that rubs certain people the wrong way.
Wishing that someone’s work is bad, just so they get “comeuppance” for being successful is pretty tacky.
After over three years of acting as my stalwart, 100% uptime, ever-vigilant online presence, Is it Obvious?, is being taken down.
Take heart though. From this site’s charred remains, something better, will rise up — Phoenix-like — from the ashes. Stay turned the grand opening of a new website in place of this one within about 3-4 months.
Like a struggling network television show, the site will be retooled, new characters will be written in, and the final product will be unrecognizable to anyone who enjoyed it in the past.
For now, take a look around at some of the old posts while you still can. Some of the best, least incriminating entries may make the transition to the new site. So while a small selection of the non-embarrassing content will be available after the purge, most of it will go gently into the night without having fought the dying of the light.
If you you keep waiting for things to be as good as you want you want them to be, you’ll probably be waiting forever. This iteration of Is It Obvious? had always been planned a temporary stop-gap maneuver, in place until I could move on to bigger, better things.
I finally realized that I’m never going to have enough time make a real portfolio, so I should jump on the bandwagon of a slick, Web 2.0, out-of-the-box solution. I found Carbonmade.
So you can find my new design-only portfolio at itISobvious.com which (if you’re paying attention) is a play off of this site’s name (isITobvious.com). I thought it was cute.
There isn’t all that much there. A portfolio is only as good as the worst piece, so I decided to only include the better ones or ones that I’m not bound by an NDA not to release.
Until I did my bi-yearly hard drive purge, I’d forgotten that in 2006, I was obsessed with learning 3D animation. “Learning” is the wrong word. I didn’t intend to “learn” 3D animation in any systematic way, I just happened to download a bunch of 30 day trials and decided that this would be what I was into for the next 30 days.
As you might assume, looking at how things have turned out by the beginning of of 2010, I never quite got beyond the “30 day trial” skill level using any of these programs. There was too much patience involved.
In addition to over a month of wasted time, I also got a hard drive full of animation tests (render tests, camera movement tests, lighting tests, texture tests) that I can show for myself. All-in-all, they’re mostly inept, glitchy and artless, but there are a few that more interesting than others. These are those:
Created in Vue 5
Created in Mojo World
Created in Mojo World
Created in Vue 5
Tried to do something realistic. It took a whole lot of work for what it ended up looking like.
Upon reflecting, I guess the big question is, what’s the point of all of this? I think the answer is that there is no point.
If you find a better way to spend 30 days in 2010, let me know and I’ll do that instead.
Dave Eggers (author and editor of McSweeney’s) dictated this brilliant essay in response to the question: “Are you concerned that you’re not publishing as many unknowns as you had been? And killed pieces? Are you taking any steps-are there any steps to be taken-to keep shit real?”
You actually asked me the question: “Are you taking any steps to keep shit real?” I want you always to look back on this time as being a time when those words came out of your mouth…
I’m pleased to announce that Adam Bowers‘ movie New Low, starring Adam, Toby Turner, and Valerie Jones is going to be in the Sundance Film Festival! That’s right, I didn’t write Slamdance, I wrote Sundance.
As if it can’t get any better, guess who was the DP? My boy Ryan Moulton.
Out popped a dozen people in dark windbreakers identifying them as feds -- agents from Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some raced to the loading docks. Others hurried through the front door. All were armed.
"I just sell honey -- what the hell is this all about?" he remembered asking, as he was hustled into a tiny room with his office manager and truck driver.
Three days before the April 25 raid, customs had persuaded a federal judge in Seattle to issue the search warrant shoved in Ingalls' hands. But it wasn't until Ingalls read "Attachment D" that he understood why investigators were seizing his business records, passport, phone logs, photographs, Rolodexes, mail and computer files -- almost anything that could be copied or hauled away.
Out popped a dozen people in dark windbreakers identifying them as feds -- agents from Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some raced to the loading docks. Others hurried through the front door. All were armed.
