This is my set.

This is my set.

It looks like a garage...because it is.  I recently shot (most of) my next short film.  It's mostly an exercise in camera tricks and sound editing, but it's been quite a learning experience so far.  I definitely bit off more than I could chew with this project, but that's the best way to work up my chewing skills, I guess...so we'll see how it turns out.

Okay people, I must take a break from this post to mention that Watermelon Dream by Guy Clark just came on my Pandora station, and I was subsequently reminded of the time my dad devoured an entire watermelon in approximately 90 seconds to win a contest at one of the many food-centric summer events held in the parking lot of the baptist church in which I grew up.  It made me laugh out loud because the mental picture is something you just can't not laugh at.

Aaaand we're back.  So, in case you haven't heard, I've officially changed my major to Film and Video.  Now, that doesn't mean I got all starry-eyed in my Intro to Film class and bought a one-way ticket to L.A. to spend the next 30 years gunning for the director's seat at some major production studio.  It means I realized that I'll have a better chance of becoming an animator if I jump into the film industry, rather than wander aimlessly through the world of drawing/fine arts.  As much as I love painting, studio art is becoming less my cup of tea and more my cup of espresso.

Plus, all of my Drawing Fundamentals friends say I'm a better fit for the film industry anyway.  I chose to take it as a compliment, even though I'm quickly learning that it could simply mean I would fit in well with a room full of pale, overworked starving artists who are strung out on crack and all seem to have Tourette's.

All this to say...I actually have no idea what I was going to say.  I'm still listening to online radio, and somehow something I listened to made me think of people Googling their names.  So of course, I did mine because it's 4:30 on a Friday and I've been typing it up all day.  But I already know what websites will pop up, so I made things interesting by searching images and videos.  Here are the top three entries for each.

Videos

All you really need to see here are the thumbnails.  The first is my first short film, the second is a home video I made for a friend when putting together a dance/painting performance thing we did, and the third is what the freaking crap is that video doing on my results page.

Images

Left: my Myspace profile pic, which I totally forgot about because who cares about Myspace anymore?  Center: coincidentally, this is the person for whom I made that painting video.  Right: my wife and I during our first year of marriage.  Neither of us looks like that anymore...it's kinda crazy.

So, I'm going to need to come back to this post at a later date, because while posting those pics, I started listening to a man and a woman conversing in the lobby of our building.  Against his better judgment, he thinks that she is helplessly fascinated by his extensive knowledge of exotic cars, and she seems to think her son is a crash test dummy.

Anyway, to wrap things up, I'm officially pursuing a career in film making now, and from the way this post went, I guess the job suits me well, because while running a crew on set, you must be able to pay attention to multiple things at once, much like writing a blog post while reminiscing about your distant past, Googling your name and eavesdropping on old people.  It's one of the only lines of work where being constantly distracted can actually be a good thing, so we'll see how it goes.

This is all for now.
-R.

This is my cat.

This is my cat.

His name is Maximus Leopoleon.  He is a mystery of sorts, deathly afraid of everything but that which he feels the dire need to overpower and destroy.  A cross between the Cowardly Lion and King Leonidas, he encompasses all the qualities of a stereotypical house cat.  Also, he drools like a freaking pit bull.

But when I think about him and how he conducts his business, he really has boiled down the essence of catdom to a simple, concise message, and surprisingly, it's not "feed me."  He's like the haiku of the cat world: it is what it is, and there's really nothing more to him than what needs to be.  It really made me start to think about how much "boiling down" I could stand to do in my own life.  If I wrote a one-page summary of my entire life as it stands right now, what would be excluded?  More importantly, what would be included?

There's an exercise in which many a seasoned thespian takes part, in which a pair of players generates a two-minute dialogue between themselves, following it up with a compressed rendition thereof, lasting only one minute.  This process continues through thirty seconds, to fifteen seconds, and finally to a ten-second dialogue that is still meant to capture the essence of what was truly being communicated in the original two-minute scene.

The idea here is brilliant.  If time were money, narrowing a two minute discussion down to ten seconds would be a 92% savings.  The idea of minimalism has always been extremely appealing to me, but this concept isn't minimalism.  It's reductionism.  It's the simple act of viewing the complex system that is life in terms of the interactions of its individual moving parts.  It's weeding out the things that don't need to be there.

I'm not about to go on another one of my purging sprees - I did that in college and wound up sleeping on a mattress on the floor with a thin blanket and no pillow.  This is just another one of those introspective moments that happens to me every once in a while to make sure I'm still growing - still reaching for that next part of me that's just out of reach.

These blog posts will probably start getting shorter.

At least for a while.

But not less meaningful.

I hope.

We'll see.

This is all for now.

-R.

Related articles

• Interview With the Cowardly Lion From The Witches of Oz 3D (wired.com)
• The Great Oracle - Delphi, Greece (travelpod.com)