grass is greener

Margaret taught William how to dig out dandylions today. The lawn is looking great. This morning while it is too cool to do much outside, we watched last week's episode of Dr. Who written by Neil Gaiman. Great story, very odd of course.Yesterday we also had an early celebration for my sister Sharon's birthday (below with William assisting on candle). We didn't see them again today, things just got a bit nutty and a second dinner party felt like too much.

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My fever broke around one in the morning. I'd gone to sleep reading/comparing Boewolf comics, one based on the Gaiman screenplay for the movie, the other based on the original text. There seem to be a lot of key differences, chiefly in the role of Grendel's mother who is slain in the original but lives and seduces both the old king and Boewolf in the other version. The old version seems to have him killing monsters that are unrelated to one another. I guess I would be better off reading the original, but who does that with movies and comics in such abundance? Anyways, as a result I was dreaming about fighting a dragon but things began changing, probably as the fever changed, and instead of a sword I had a needle and the dragon had become blurred into a mire of all living things so I knew I had to take care to poke the right spot. I awoke to find myself hot and needing to get rid of the hot water bottle and layers of blankets. An hour later, William woke up calling me and he wanted to snuggle so it was a strange night.
I created a playlist for the "She Said" videos so you can watch the who set in auto play, if that is of interest.

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Watched Boewulf this evening with Paul. I couldn't get into it, I found the animated style (I was expecting a live action movie with lots of CG effects, not an entirely animated film) to be distracting. No one seemed grounded, people moved like they were Spiderman, sliding and almost hovering even when they were just supposed to be drinking mead. Overall, the constant feeling that I'd rather be watching Shrek stopped me from connecting with any of the characters (even though it was written by the generally solid Neil Gaiman). A disappointment.

This afternoon I worked with Jade Duckett, helping him to edit his film I'm mentoring him with. Cutting on Imovie was ridiculous but we finally figured out one or two useful approaches that weren't completely time wasting. Unfortunately, Jades first roll of film didn't work out due to a loop being lost in the camera. This meant that the poetic footage of the rooms in his house and his shower curtain that lead up to the fight scene were all lost. Only the fight scene remained. As I may have mentioned previously, he lost his actors who were supposed to fight so he played both fighters. I helped him set it up, getting the camera locked down so that we could do a split screen effect. We had to put that together in Final Cut pro, then export it and bring it into Imovie. It is a bit ridiculous but also quite entertaining. My main contribution today was to boldly put a lot of short edits into the film. I hope Jade can learn to be brave with the footage, jump in and actively work it and manipulate it.

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Spent the entire day at the office today, mostly editing on the End of Life project. I need another half day to get the cut down to the right length, then some sound and graphics to make it presentable for our meeting in a couple of weeks. I've got an assistant who'll help with some of that work as well. I don't know where to buy sweetgrass anymore. You used to get it from Painted Buffalo on Dewdney but they closed a few years ago. There must be somewhere else but I can't guess where.
To break up the day, I worked a bit on the Flipbook computer, shooting a bit of animation with one of William's Bionicles. This is a software package that allows you to take single frames from a video camera into the computer and they'll be lined up as an animated film. I finally figured out how to shoot in colour (the trick being that the main layer that it defaults to will always be black and white and that you need to shoot onto the background channel, who knows why).
I also spent a while in my office finding missing elements for the website. I'll need to re-type a few things that I have lost the electronic copies of (I suspect a couple of them were typed elsewhere, perhaps the Filmpool).
William has been listening to a lot of books on tape before bed. Tonight I got him to record a Syd Hoff book (32 page Bernard On His Own) and have it on cd.
I am finally making use of my new 500gp drive. It has been sitting empty for a week. I have put all of my dvds into it (of my work, not my entire collection). I'll be able to burn copies of my work on the drop of a dime now (or about 30 cents actually).
I watched "Stardust" this evening. I've been really looking forward to it, it's based upon a Neil Gaiman novel that I listed to on tape last summer, amazing stuff. I was certainly not disappointed in the movie, but was disappointed that Margaret was feeling too sick and too tired to watch. We weren't sure if it was suitable for William (probably, but not on a school night, likely more for an early evening or a weekend afternoon due the occasional intense scene), so Margaret fell asleep and told me to watch without her. She'll love it, so I'll talk about it more after I see it again with her.

crucifixion

I stayed up late last night reading the seven issue comic book series The Eternals by Neil Gaiman (published between August 2006 and March 2007). I've not followed Gaiman's work for very long, I'd been buying comics in the 80s pretty much stopped in the early 90s when the collecting mentality brought cover prices up while my personal income was at an all time low. However, I was aware of his Sandman series and had glanced at an issue or two but had not been engaged enough to start buying them. However, a couple of years ago, Margaret borrowed the entire Sandman series in graphic novel form from the library and we both devoured them. Since then, we've looked at many of his stories and generally enjoyed them immensely. Earlier this year I listened to Stardust as a book on tape, read by Gaiman himself, again staying up half the night, unable to turn it off. Similar to Sandman, the Stardust story twisted and turned, it excited and amused, it drew from the long history of a particular genre (fairy tales) and took it somewhere fresh. Gaiman is a good writer and would have my vote for the best (English language) comic book writer, that is until last night. The Eternals was a comic book series written and drawn by Jack Kirby in the late 1970s, published by Marvel. It presented a new set of characters, new comic mythologies, and represented an important return of Kirby as a central creator for Marvel. I bought them all and still have them stashed in the attic somewhere. They weren't all that great, I think Kirby wanted to draw lots of "deviants", monstrous people each of whom had entirely different physical characteristics, fighting against the eternals who still dress like the Greek heroes they were many millenia before. In other words, it got stale very quick. Gaiman has proven himself very apt at reworking tired old ideas and bringing depth to minor or forgotten comic book characters. I had high expectations. They were not met. I'm not saying that these were bad comics, I was taken with them, they were page turners and I jumped from one to the next. However, I was never really carried somewhere new. They were a bit more sophisticated than the originals, and certainly more creative in the violence performed, but in the end we are left with the same problems and lack of conclusion Kirby left us with, the domination of the god-like celestials who stand in judgement over the world. Like so many traditional comics before it, character development ends when superherodome begins, the insomniac character struggles with overwork, loss of love, etc until he accepts his super powered existence, then he runs off like a testosterone filled teenager, racing around the world with his buddy. Gaiman does suggest a certain religious standpoint, but his characters spend too many pages discussing and concerning themselves with the trivial that they become trivial, human, and non-heroic themselves. When they transform back into eternals/heroes, I don't buy it.