JoeyF (Level 13)

So I got a Wacom tablet!

I'm not a very good artist, I like to sketch often, but nothing refined. I've been aching to try some crude animated shorts with After Effects, so I figured I'd give my self little daily tasks to try out. Here is the 1st and crudest.

Just some layers of things I drew in photoshop, taken into After Effects and keyframed! Pretty simple. One step at a time! I have no idea what this short is going to be about yet.

I feel like this is a good time to go into this chapter of my life, being that a relative trailer just launched (see that guy at the very beginning with the flag? That's me with my iron man halloween costume in front of a green screen like 4 years ago!)

A great friend of mine, Jon Finger, is really good with 3D and compositing work; and he was also a huge fan of a game called Natural Selection. He also went to the same college as me and submitted videos to that college video contest that I entered into. Except his work always won, and my work always left people scratching their heads with, "what the f#%k was that??".

Afterwards we ran into each other on campus and got to talking about video stuff and hit it off and became good friends. I was a little burned out on finance classes and had a tough time spearheading my own stuff, so I dedicated my free time to hanging out with him and his crew, and helping them do whatever. It was a ton of fun, and I really encourage anyone who's into video stuff to find people with like interests in the craft, stick with them, help each other out, and you'll learn more than you would from any text book.

I digress. He was really into a game called Natural Selection, and actually started helping the company that is currently making the second game, make behind the scenes videos. He also had a chance to make a teaser trailer, and a fan film using the early assets from the game.

He cast us -- as bad as actors as we are -- to play the parts of the soldiers, and help with all around production (this was bare-boned, I think there was only like 4 of us working on this).

Anyway, I got to play the part as "tough guy soldier" Bazon, and as bad as I am at playing it, I have to admit I had a lot of fun gritting my teeth and grunting.

This was a lot of fun, and it's a gem in my memory signifying a more relaxed time of my life where my agenda wasn't career oriented, or paying the bills, or branding, or ego; it was just to have fun doing stuff that we all collectively love -- pure raw enthusiasm.

Here's the final fan film video below (interesting fact about this -- there was only one costume. We shot our scenes separate and were composited together. None of us are in the same scene together).

Well well well, looks like I'll be seeing one of my films in the Sidegrades video series. We'll see whose film is the most heaviness of human existence!

Film Noir's been one of those types of cinema where most of my knowledge of it stems from theory and textbook filmatic history, than the actual experience of watching the films of that era. I'm gong to try and change that!

I created a noir list of -- what I've been told -- were the definitive films of that era, along with a few other flicks I wanted to revisit like Chinatown, and Sunset Boulevard.

I'm going to try and power through these film within a month a do little write-ups on them. See if my perception of this genre (sub-genre?) rings true with the actual flicks. Should be fun. If I'm missing any movies you all consider to be great additions to the list, let me know!

Film Noir Marathon

	1. Double Indemnity
	2. The Killing
	3. Thieves' Highway
	4. Touch of Evil
	5. The Asphalt Jungle
	6. Chinatown
	7. In a Lonely Place
	8. The Maltese Falcon
	9. The Big Clock
	10. The Big Sleep
	11. The Long Goodbye
	12. The Big Heat
	13. Farewell, My Lovely
	14. M
	15. Odd Man Out
	16. Laura
	17. Detour
	18. Sweet Smell of Success
	19. Out of the Past
	20. Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

They only get weirder from here...

So, if you read my last post, you would know I just moved out of LA to finish college for Finance and while there, I signed up for local film festivities, kind of pretending I was a film student. Well, an entire year has passed, and I was so focused on school, I didn't really make many other videos. Instead I spent a lot of time maxing out my credits in finance and working on feature length screenplays in my free time.

WASTELAND

So, what you see below is an entire year later, same competition and I've been consuming way too much of the Mad Max trilogy. We actually had a full day to work with this one, some dirty clothes and toy guns lying around, and the pitch to my friends was, "Let's make a post-apocalyptic story of hygiene."

We kind of ran out of time near the end of this -- the ending's kind of thrown together. Also, I couldn't do much of the filming, because I had to be in front of the camera because no one else was willing to run around in a towel for the day.

Like I said, it only gets weirder from here...