Book Reviewk

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
I had heard of this author years ago but not read anything by her. I recently saw a trailer for a movie called "The Namesake" based on her novel of the same name. So I started reading this book of short stories before said novel. It's excellent, beautifully written. Why are most short stories so freakin sad and depressing?

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Again, beautifully written. I liked the story as well but thought it really glossed over certain obvious areas like sexual identity/insecurity in a predominantly white town. Or maybe that was just me.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Oof. Great book. A page-turner. Sad. Romantic. Satisfying. Didn't end poorly which lots of books with great premises often do. Highly recommend.

Model sheet

For my thesis, I'm developing 5 stories. All five will be storyboarded and one or more will be created into an animatic. I have 3 stories that are close to finished and 2 others yet to be conceived.

One of the stories is called "Heart" and it's about a robot that wants to be a part of something. The original version of this story can be found as an animatic at this link.

Some feedback I got from this version was that they didn't understand why the robot fell in love with the car and why he'd go through such drastic depths to 'save' it. So I went on a long twisting, winding, convoluted plot redesign that ended up with a practically brand new storyline. The above image is a model sheet for the characters in the new Heart story.

Movie Reviewee

I've seen 3 movies in the theatres that are probably going to be nominated for an Oscar or two if not Best Picture.

Little Miss Sunshine
Very funny, very good. I'm a big fan of the ensemble cast. I listened to the Creative Screenwriters Magazine podcast of Michael Arndt who wrote the film and currently works fulltime at Pixar. Excellent interview. My favorite bit, "And where is your grandad now?" "In the trunk of our van."

The Queen
Good film, well made but I wasn't completely blown away by it. Helen Mirren was, as usual, perfection. An interesting film but a little dry and not very dramatic. But I still give it the thumbs up.

Babel
Harrowing. A very very good film. I felt the panic of all the situations (and there were many) and I wasn't taken out of the story at any point. I highly recommend this flick but not if you don't like tense films that leave you feeling more than a little drained.

Farmer Jim

This is Farmer Jim. I drew the sketch of him above then modeled him in Maya then made his tractor and created the animation found at this link

The animation came out slow for some reason but you get the general idea.

A post a day makes the guilt go away

My main New Year's Resolution is to post a drawing each day. What I really want to do is draw every day, practice drawing everything so I have more vocabulary of physical objects in my fingertips to use in my stories. The above is from my sketchbook, made up monster type.