Band-Aid recursion

I have a 10-page short story to write tonight. Due by 1pm tomorrow. I haven't been putting it off or procrastinating or anything like that. I simply have not had enough time to work on it because it hasn't been as urgent a priority as work of my others classes simply because of due dates.

And now I'm going to be reaping the consequences of my decision to take 17 credits this quarter. And let me note that 5 of those credits are for a Computer Animation class that is really 10-12 credits worth of work. If I was taking only that class, I would still feel like I was taking a comfortable, not difficult though, full-time load.

That said, I made a conscious decision to take 17 credits, including this prose class, knowing that animation would be as much if not more of a bitch than last quarter--at this point, I'd say it's more of a bitch. But what's undeniable is the sheer amount of shit I'm learning in it. That is mos def true.

Of course, because of my ridiculous schedule, I've hardly had much time to spend wiht Marie, especially this last week or so. Naturally, it's been pretty rough for her. And when things is rough for her...they're rough for me. At the moment, I'm locked in a bit of an argument with her about whether or not I should come home tonight--

I'm at the undergrad library at uw, which is where I do my emergency writing, and I'm leery of going home because of the enormous amount of writing I have to do. If I went home now, I'd be surprised if I started writing before 2am. And I need to try to be half-finished by two, not getting started.

To be sure, I have a "plan" and two.five pages already written and I am something of a fast writer--but I have really bitten off quite a bit for myself this time.

To wit:
The story is a metaphor for the unending cycle of war, using the model of the myth of Sisyphus, transplanted onto the life of an aid station combat medic in an unnamed combat zone. I've also thought of leaving his name un-named as well. I'm still debating that count.

The story moves in cycles of three: Three incidents of trauma, three incidents of mundanity, bookended (as of this moment) by a first a scene in a mess hall where we meet the medic and his ill-fated medic buddy, and a final scene where he essentially becomes aware that this cycle of his daily routine, is for all intents and purposes, unending. The final line, I'm not sure if this is spoken or not, is : "All bleeding end eventually. Be patient."

That's it in a nutshell.

Some thoughts I've had today on it:
- The story is already rightfully episodic, I should embrace that and really highlight that as an attribute by adding perhaps chapter-breaks dare I say it, episode breaks?
- To reenforce the cyclical nature, I could keep flashing back to the mess-hall scene throughout, breaking the linear monotony of the episodes by, Lost-style, having flashbacks that reveal a truth about the current story.
- I'm not sure if I want to have the entire scene during the first flash-back, and with each subsequent one, just pare it down more and more until it's a purely graphical image
- Or if I want to break it up into relevant parts. I kind of think it could work either way, though it really might be better the latter way. That way the story's always moving forward.
- I think to help differentiate the flashbacks from the real-time stories, I'd like to have each one told in a different voice. Same character, just first person in one, 3rd in another.
- Should one be told in past tense and another in present? The perspective may help determine this...Though, do I want to be contrarian, or linear?
- The end, regardless of which way the perspective changes go, needs to be a sublimation of the two. And I think it ought to be told in first person.
- So if the end is in first person, present tense too, then perhaps the hospital scenes should be in first-person past tense, and the mess-hall scenes in third-person present
- I still need to figure out what to do with the bloody hands. It's a nice image, but it ultimately may not work

This is easily going to be the most flat-out ambitious story I've ever written. In terms of story, I've had to do a fair amount of research (both on technical stuff and on similar prose-efforts at extreme irony). Technically, this is going to be massively ambitious as well. And my slowly growing desire to make the arrangement of words on the page have a purely visual graphic quality as much as it has a linguistic quality will also be taken many steps beyond my last attempt. And I don't think I've ever had a more perfect marriage of theme and content in any of my work. I'm not sure I've ever had any fore-thought marriage of theme and content though, now that I think of it.

Researching Band-Aids Vol. 1

The last post resulted in an idea for a short story that riffs on Camus' interpretation of the myth of Sisyphus by implanting his logic of the absurd and the notion of the infinitely looping, self-aware though it be, existence of man into a story about a medic who spends everyday tending to the mundane and the dramatic, and ends everyday trying to wash the blood from his hands but failing to do so.

The problems are as follows: 1) Balancing an appropriate level of detail with the overriding allegorical elements (hence "realistic allegory") which of course implies...
2) Research. I have to get my facts straight and my ideas concrete and my situations realistic (there's that word again), which in turn leads to...
3) Blood. The bookends of the piece are him trying to wash the blood from his hands but, failing to do so, giving up and finding a way to live with the blood on his hands. At the beginning, we don't know whose blood it is. At the end, he's washing the blood of his best friend off...The problem: blood doesn't stain...
5) But does iodine?
6) Place/time: How to root it in a particular level of detail sufficient to be richly evocative without embedding it in a specific conflict that has specific contexts...
7) Which brings us back to #1 (how appropo!): Balance the story's allegory with it's need for credible detail.

Anyway you swing this axe, it all comes down to research--which is exactly what I'm about to commence.

Writing is a Sisyphean Task

The problem with a Rashomon-riff is that Kurosawa's film said pretty much everything there is to say about truth being a many-sided object, including that there can be no ultimate truth if there is no one truth.
-----
What was I thinking earlier? Back to Iraq but...the VBIED I was nearest to during my deployment was actually kind of humorous. They hid the explosives in a potato truck, so when the thing detonated, it flew mashed potatoes all over the street. Luckily, it malfunctioned. It blew the driver in half, and I think some shrapnel killed an Iraqi guard or two. But the thing I remember most was the street just being literally covered in potatoes. It was completely surreal. I wish I'd gotten a photograph of it, I really do. But at that point, I was so exhausted and sick of photography, that I couldn't even think creatively anymore with the still image. That coupled with the fact that I spent at least part of my time at the scene fending off guys requests to be photographed with body parts from the suicide bomber left me kind of de-motivated.

But what was I thinking earlier?

I was remarking on how one can easily lose their compass when confronted with such a disparately absurd tableau as the one I've tried to construct above. How do you react to a suicide bomber whose bomb malfunctioned but still managed to kill himself and possibly two others and left the road covered in potatoes? How do you react to something so utterly ridiculous? The potatoes just completely removes any sense of drama. And yet it can't be completely superfluous and comical because--hey!--there's a piece of an ear and--hey!--there's a trail of blood and--oh yeah!--that's where his foot went...I guess the way I worded it makes it kind of morbidly humorous, but nevertheless it's certainly not comical. Gallows humor? A certain kind of savage humor, definitely.

I think Camus answered this proposition best by (very paraphrased) saying something to the effect that when man is confronted with the reality of the absurd, his lucidity is what makes him happy. That even at his moment of greatest defeat, he can have his greatest triumph. Though he knows that his life is meaningless and all his efforts fruitless and futile, this clarity of vision is a victory over the absurdity of life in and of itself. So in that little epiphany lies man's transcendence. In the Absurd World, man cannot triumph over his fate but by accepting it...That's a very Zen philosophy.

Now the questions: how can I construct a story to embody that insight, deeply felt though it is.

MAN CANNOT TRIUMPH OVER HIS FATE BUT BY ACCEPTING IT

So we start with a character. A man. What is a properly Sisyphean fate for him in the context of a realistic allegory? His fate must be one that embodies infinite repetition. Something can't motivate his appreciation of his fate. It must be a self-realization or its worthless. Infinite repetition, with a break in the repetitive act that allows a moment of reflection before willfully charging once more into the breach.

So, parameters so far:
- Man
- Infinitely repetitive action
- Break in action to allow for reflection
- Realizes his fate every night and rises every morning to accept it

What is the ultimate repetitive occupation?

A medic in the army -- no nation, no conflict, just a medic -- wakes up everyday to triage the wounded and save the dying and goes to bed every night knowing that when he wakes up in the morning he will be doing exactly the same thing tomorrow --

....

And we're golden. Huzzah!

Writing for Writing's Sake Vol. 2

So I've kind of ditched the "writer's block" headings for the above--mostly because I don't need the bad juju that comes with uttering those words. So I'll keep it at a more reflexive heading while I muse about what the fuck I'm going to write about...

I have to come up with a "Story Preview / Plan" for tomorrow (in addition to the parable I've already written), and the field is wide-open as far as ideas go. I think the one thing I'm going to try my best to avoid is Iraq-anything. The intent is for it to be a "realistic allegory"; so I could touch on philosophical issues raised by my experiences, but nothing directly Iraqi. Realistic allegory also means no talking pigs a la "Three Little Pigs" which, incidentally, we had to study this past week in the class.

I've internet-ed away the past hour ==> which means I'm leery of doing actual work. Probably because ideation is always the hardest fucking part. Starting with a blank slate and all...and I feel fresh out of good ideas. I had two good ones last night, between the revision of the story for my animation class and the parable that I wrote.

But tonight, tonight.

Writing for Writing's Sake

I only have a few minutes before I have to depart for CSE Movie Nite Round 1 (starring Troy: the Director's Cut!?--we'll see if it makes any difference at all), but I've got a whole lot of writing to do tonight. However, since I don't have the time to get into any sort of groove in 10 minutes, I thought I'd just muse over it a tad.

Well the first part of my writing assignment for 384 involves writing a parable--that's the great thing about this class, by the way: we're not just given readings in a vacuum, we're given very specific readings with very pointed things to be studying towards to end of creativity. It's kind of nice actually, to not be given some massive tome, be expected to read it in a manner so fast that you might remember a sentence every other chapter, and then asked, "Well, what did you think?"

At any rate, we have to write a parable, a simple, effective, utterly concise story that carries some sort of metaphorical meaning(s). One I'm toying with is tentatively titled "The River" about a journey downriver by two(?) people. One of whom, for some reason, desires to go back up the river, but is reminded he cannot by his companion(s). I still need to work out the motivations and the ending, but I want the story to be slightly humorous, and very, very short. I'm aiming for 250 words, give or take. Definitely no more than 500.

The metaphor I want to play with is the notion that time lost cannot be regained. So regardless of how you spend your time, that is the only time you will be spending that time. It's kind of cheeky, and I'm not going to externalize this in the story, but essentially: "Life is a river that flows one direction. It has eddys and rapids and waterfalls, but always it flows downstream."

Kind of sweet, huh?

An Observation

Now that I've gotten into to 384, and will likely (hopefully) get into 487 "Screenwriting" next quarter, I've seen a curious and welcome pattern emerge:

Fine Arts: DX200, 201, 202 (in progress)

Cinema: DX450, 451, 452, 453 (complete)

Animation: CSE458, 459, 460 (in progress)

Research: DX400 x 3 (in progress)

And finally:

Writing: ENGL284, 384, 487

With 384 bridging the gap between my completion of 284 and 487, I'll have a full-year's work in fiction writing that culminates with a study of screenwriting. Since I've done a full year's work in filmmaking (not counting 450 "intro to video"), am currently doing a full year's work in art-research and computer animation, and will complete a full year's work in broad-strokes digital arts and experimental media when I complete DXARTS 202 this Spring, it's fitting that I should add to that a full year's work of fiction writing. It feels good--it feels right.

And of course, all of that will culminate with a year of intense work on a single thesis project next year, likely to be a video of some epic ambition (though videos plural is a possibility).

Now it's just a matter of doing the work. Right, that thing.

A Quarterly Update

The new quarter's begun, and not a moment too soon: I think around 1030 this morning as I got my ass out of bed, I finally shook the last vestiges of my fall quarter hangover. Every quarter my ass gets handed to me, I always think that's going to be the worst of it, and man is it ever downhill from here! Well, of course, I've had about five or six such moments over the last two years, and last quarter was definitely the heaviest of them. So it's likely that this quarter will be worse, yeah? I'm okay with that though, if I know that going in. And honestly, all it's going to compel me to do is manage my time more effectively...(which I just had trouble doing)...but more on that later.

The hard work was worth it though. I earned the highest GPA I've gotten since high school. Maybe higher than high school. But I also got more out of last quarter than I've yet gotten out of any quarter at UW. To wit: I went from zero knowledge of Maya to being somewhat comfortable with it; I co-animated a short animated film; I wrote and designed 5+ stories-for-film/animation; I made two videos--one vignette and one short film; I finally created a website for myself; and I wrote 5 prose short stories in the span of about three days. Now that it's all listed out and I can take a look at it--it's really not bad. Really, really not bad, what I accomplished in the span of two-and-a-half months.

But lets not start sucking each other's dicks--er, rather, my own--just yet. As I said, a new quarter's just begun. And it's likely to get more difficult, not less. So no dick sucking for me.

Speaking of this quarter, I got back-doored into English 384 "The Craft of Prose" literally just before I started this post. It's the next step up from English 284, the short story class I enrolled in last summer, took an incomplete in so I could go get fired off of a film in New York (still worth it though), and then finished up in a mad dash of writing this last quarter so as not to get a 0.0--which an INC converts to if it's not completed by the end of the following quarter. I'm actually looking forward to 384 quite a bit. It should be quite challenging, but when it comes to writing I'm not one to shake in my boots at a challenge--it's my natural talent. Still, my main concern is that it's going to be difficult and coupled with my computer animation class, I could have very, very little free time (a.k.a. sleep time) this quarter.

-- Just cut-off my first real time management violation. Typed the URL chud.com and hit ENTER. But I managed to cut myself off just before the page finished loading. I dig the website, and find the writer's opinions entertaining and sometimes even enlightening, but the days where the words of critics were gospel to my sensibilities is over. And incessantly checking their site for updates over and over again does not get me any closer toward being a good filmmaker. If anything, it deters me by forcing my to give up sleep and TLC with my lady in favor of a website that I can handily check once a day for a few minutes and get all the info I need from it. Instead, my habits tend toward the "Let's see, I'm getting bored with my current activity, I'll take a quick break." Except that this habit is so ingrained, the afore-written thought-process is barely an after thought now.

This is surely the scatter-shot epicenter of my time mismanagement tumor, and one of my primary goals this quarter is to surgically remove it from my afflicted habits.

Speaking of goals, let's talk tangibles (in no particular order):
1. Continue my exercise/diet routine
2. Manage my time more effectively by cutting out needless internet surfing
3. Narrow-in on improving my fiction writing
4. Regularly take notes in my notebook
5. Maintain my website
6. Post regularly in this blog
7. Pace myself in terms of homework, doing more now so I can do less later
8. Take the initiative to pro-actively engage with the learning opportunities presented to me this quarter regardless of their apparent degree of relevance to my cinematic pursuits (e.g. Maya minutia, prosaic writing (as opposed to image writing), non-cinematic digital and experimental arts
9. Being when it's time to be, doing when it's time to do--and knowing which is appropriate for when
10. As always: BECOME A BETTER FILMMAKER

Musings on Writer's Block vol. 2

Here I am, come upon another freewrite. Struggling to write. It’s 8:58am, been up all night. I’ve written two short stories in the last 16 hours, that total about 9 pages between the two of them. I like the both of them. They both say very specific things about my experiences in Iraq. Unfortunately, that’s the problem. They’re both about Iraq. Neither is really fictional. Something more akin to embellished, refined, narrative-ized non-fiction…The problem is that this is a fiction class. I’m already worried about having to do some major rewriting to fictionalize them for my prof. But I’ve also written five Iraq stories total for this class. Only one is truly fictional. I used my emotions and put myself into a Dear John type situation and it turned out really well. Very cinematic. It’ll make a good short film whenever I’m able to cull enough resources for it…But that’s not helping me now.

I have one…last…story to write…before I can move on to working on a story for a different class!

I started writing a variation on the Thorn story that was beaten into a pulp in my Story & Animation class by two months of reiterations. This time I removed all of the magical elements and stripped it down to just the abstract visuals, replacing the magical thorn with shards of a broken mirror…and I couldn’t stomach it. Not the violence itself, but rather that there was no discovery in it. It felt like I was going through the motions. I knew exactly where the violence was going to end up, and what made me sick of it was that it was so senseless. I suppose that was part of the original point, but after having my nose rubbed in the filth of my own design for two months straight, I just didn’t have the heart to follow it through. That’s the thing. If I’d had the heart, if I’d felt like what I was writing was saying something worthwhile, or allowing a new discovery, rather than just depravity, I could have followed it through to its very bitter end. But not this time. I’m finished with that story. I’m ready to move on to illustrations and evocations of greater emotional complexity than a visceral, gut-wrenching reaction. I kept thinking about early Cronenberg and Lynch, and their films work on levels beyond the purely visceral. The visceral is reserved for shock horror, and that’s about it.

So. Do I continue to strip-mine my Iraq experiences? Or do I progress onto something more complex? More original?

On second thought, I may have found a way to get the fragmented story to work. If I make it a piece about heroism as deformative performance art. I think I can see it now. That was the problem. I couldn’t see it. Or what I saw wasn’t clicking. Now I see it. And it could be beautiful.

Ever see Perfume? Beautiful movie. My kind of movie.

Musings on Writer's Block

I’m afraid it’s a little self-indulgent, writing about not being able to write. But I suppose it’s a clever enough way of writing something. Someone, was it you?, once said that if you’re writing is blocked, then write about that write, just write. That is the key.

I feel like every idea I come up with is either ham-handedly personal—i.e. has to do yet again with Iraq—or it’s ham-handedly impersonal. Narratives that go nowhere. Conversations that exist simply to exist or to highlight some pompous philosophical issue.

For example:
3 priests. They all three have discovered their Bibles are literally empty. This prompts a crisis of faith in each. And each reacts differently. The first thinks that it doesn’t matter whether its phony or not, the fact is his congregation believes it and, moreover, they believe because they believe he believes. And he doesn’t feel he has any right to take that away, even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t of course. The second believes that even if the “Word of God” is nothing but empty phrases, they still matter as long as we choose to live by them. In his case, he feels he cannot lie about their being phony, but questions what phony really means. His quest is to make the “Laws of God” into the Laws of Man, by reconciling the phoniness of their supernatural nature with our need to continue to abide by them. He also seeks to reconcile the difference between the spiritual and the supernatural, that we no longer to justify the spiritual by falling back on the supernatural. The third priest agrees with both, but seeks something beyond the physical constraints of our imagination, something that needs no supernatural nor humanly explanation or justification. He seeks nirvana for himself, so that he may bring it to others.

Now, the ideas that I wish to address couldn’t be more topical or relevant, but it is the story that I’m attempting to hang them on that continues to crumble under the weight of a heavy hand. I mean really, three priests having a spiritual crisis? No shit. Why not make a story about three clowns having a humor crisis while we’re at it. I suppose I could transplant the thematic ideas onto three ordinary peoples’ lives, but then there is no story, only a dialectic.

Example 2:
Three guys are arguing about the importance of having a MacGuffin that determines the political future of their country. In this case, the MacGuffin really is nothing, and they discuss the relative importance of the non-object now that they know the truth. The conversation covers the same broad-strokes existentialism as the three priests’ conversation, just in dealing with politics instead of religion.

Example 3:
A character is told he is a character in a movie and where he can find the camera. The story ends with the character acknowledging that everything he says or does is merely a facsimile of some almighty author. His dramatic realization is that when the movie ends, so does he. This is really an expansion of a story I wrote for a short film I made recently. The object would be the camera, which the two characters’ conversation kind of beats around the bush about, without ever really specifying what exactly they’re discussing. The shortcomings of the film is that it never directly addresses the issue of being a character in a film. And the fact that the camera he finds is a security camera, only confuses things. It turns the story of the film into one about discovering a security camera, and not one about discovering you’re a character in a movie.

The real problem I have with all of these stories is that they exist to serve only two functions: I’m looking to create a conversation between characters; and I want a soapbox to preach from. Iraq is always a goldmine of vignettes, but I don’t think that’s the only thing I can do. The problem is that everything else I write is pretty worthless.

I feel like I need to be more creative and stop writing about shit that’s so personal. But everybody writes shit that’s personal, right? Isn’t that why shit’s good? I mean Cormac McCarthy saw a massive fire on a hillside above a motel he and his son were staying at in New Mexico and so he wrote a novel about a father trying to protect his son in a world on nuclear fire from the worst kind of predator, cannibals. That’s a really pretty simple, brilliant interpretation/extension of that inspirational event. I wish I could do the same.

I haven’t been experiencing anything lately, is part of the problem. I’ve been stuck in a ridiculous, extended grind of school and we all know that school isn’t really something dramatically captivating.

Maybe I’ll write about Iraq once more with feeling.

Sketch 1: a vignette

In lieu of "100% concrete, artistic production", today I filmed a vignette--I think "short film" would do both my video and the phrase a disservice--so it's "a vignette" by yours truly. I think what I like most about it is its simplicity. I wasn't reaching after some grand--grandly pretentious--ambition. I just wanted to play with the moving image, and allow myself to improvise a little with it both photographically and editorially.

The only guiding principle for this filmic vignette was that a journey would be shown only through the beautiful convex mirrors that decorate many of the garage stairwells on the UW campus. And by "journey" I don't mean anything unnecessarily complex, only that the character is going from one place...to another.

This was born out of a desire to further explore an image that cropped up in a short film I made about a year-and-a-half ago in those same stairwells. I had captured only one image (which you can see above) using one of the mirrors and today it is far and away my favorite part of the film. If you watch it, (called, painfully, "Shadow Way"), you'll notice that I looped that and two other shots three times at varying lengths. I did this in part because the character's journey down the stairwell was too short as it was with only those shots, but also because I just fucking loved how it looked.

So in a sense, I guess you could say that I'm simply indulging myself. So be it. In plain terms, my goal/ambition/hope for all of my DXARTS work isn't first to make something "good", but to "make". The "good" can follow. For the time being, I'm primarily concerned with forming productive habits. Though don't think that I simply don't care about something of mine being good. Au contraire, I perhaps sometimes care too much. To the point that I end up overthinking the project. That's happened plenty in my short artistic career, and it usually ends with me either dropping the idea entirely out of intimidation, or it ends with me pushing ahead with a bunch of half-baked ideas. I'm trying to un-learn that, and to re-learn how to appreciate the moving image. How to see my creations for what they truly are and not for what I wish them to be.

I am positive that without being self-aware, without being emotionally authentic and intellectually concise, I cannot create a work that compels others to be aware of it: it will lack authenticity and concision.

That's not to say that this vignette is concretely either of those ambitions or is even intended to be. They are the end goal, and this vignette is but a pebble on the path. It is on the path, to be sure, but a pebble it nevertheless is.

This has been a killer week for me. I've been increasingly tired to the point that today, for the first time all quarter, I started nodding off in class. Though that's got to be some kind of a record for me, it's not because I haven't been getting enough sleep.

I think I'm just getting burned-out. Not because I'm doing too much per se, I love (most) of what I'm doing, more because I feel like the ratio between how much time and effort I'm dedicating to my schoolwork this quarter and what I'm getting back from it (i.e. grades) is pretty disproportionate.

I know I'm learning. At the moment I'm confident of this. And I'm also self-aware enough to know that that is the important part for me. Unfortunately, it's hard to see the forest when you're burrowing your head in a tree. I have so little time now to work on anything outside of animation, that my personal life is pretty much non-existent and even my DXARTS research studio is suffering a bit. Which is pretty shitty when you consider how hard I've worked to get into DXARTS: now that I'm here, I'm pouring all my effort into something else. To be fair, the Animation Capstone does count as a DXARTS sequence. Still, it's the principle of the situation that bothers me.

I'm not sure that by purging my thoughts on this situation I'll actually solve any of these issues, but some clarity if nothing else would be nice.

...more to come later...

sketch_Space vol. 5: Sketched Dimensions

dimensions

learning to see. again.

free of authorial intent

focuses on image composition, construction, capturing

a series of haikus, vignettes, exercises as preproduction

inspirations: d lynch ==> inland empire, d cronenberg ==> storyboard-free, blocking-dictated

culminates with a conversational sequence between actors/actresses (never filmed one)

blocking will dictate composition per cronenberg

modus operandi: make language and action meaningfully photographic

primary impetus: re-learn how to see what is in front of me; distinguish this from what i "place" there

secondary impetus: conversation construction, actor rehearsals, blocking

undercurrent(s): blur the line between ideation and creation; make the process the product and vice-versa

threads: haikus (complete cinematic agency) and taped rehearsals (photographically agentless) will be woven into a vignette in which both captor and captured will have mutual cinematic agency

to be transplanted to: students.washington.edu/eledrew asap

sketch_Space Vol. 4: Spaces for Sketching

Quick update: I've been working on an as-yet-bare bones sketchspace at my students.washington.edu/eledrew webspace and intended to have it online by tonight, but it seems I'm having some technical difficulties and I am afraid I'm in need of some sleep. So unfortunately, that's going to have to wait for tomorrow.

As far as my cultural webs go, I'm still working on breaking them down into categories, but it goes something like this:

-Arts
-Economics
-Ethics
-History
-Politics
-Society

And each of these may eventually have subdivisions within them. I think I may ultimately not have such broad categories, but this will be a project specific thing. I sort of see my cultural webs section as a place where I can link to and comment on anything apart from my own experiences that has nevertheless influenced them, my thinking, or my current project. I think I'll just use these broad categories as jumping-off points, general areas that ought to be considered when researching for a project. The 'referents' section will be a place that categorizes those personal experiences not directly related to easily identifiable external sources. It will serve as a more intimate place for thoughts, notes, and general, unifying principles.

sketch_Space vol. 3: on Word and Image

I wanted to share a few more thoughts about the sketch-space concept as I envisioned it in my last few postings. I still think the idea I illustrated would make a great, meta-medium for artists (and anyone else who develops multi-media "projects") to use as a site for their own art-research. But that said, I think it being built by myself may be somewhat out of the question.

I say that primarily because I think that the research, training, and man-hours that would be involved in creating a modifiable, web-hosted, 3-D environment would take me completely away from the art-research I ought to be doing. I have no doubt that the experience would be a fantastic learning experience for me, but I know myself all too well to think that my interests wouldn't circle back around to the image faster than I could type http://eledrew.blogspot.com. That fact remains that no matter how many different media I dabble in, it always, always comes back to film. Cinema or, in more artworld-friendly words, the "moving image", is where my heart is. Always has been, always will be. I didn't write short stories at age nine because I wanted to be a writer, I wrote short stories because I wanted to make movies only I didn't have the means. Even all those teenage years I spent wanting to be a novelist--it was because I thought that's how I'd get into movies. Same goes for film criticism. I didn't want to be a film critic indefinitely, I just thought it was a means to an end--like Godard or Truffaut.

Essentially, I'm saying that while I still very much like the idea, I don't think I'm the one to build it. And I say that not because I wouldn't enjoy it, but because it would take me away from working on art and push me towards creating a product.

Bottom line: I'm not a web-guru, I'm a filmmaker.

Which brings me back to the blog: although it's easy to see the blog as a cop-out, since it lacks so many bells and whistles and it's presentation is really quite uncreative, it is also so effective for that very reason. As you've read, my relationship with the word has always paralleled my relationship with the image, and so it shouldn't come as any surprise that I would be drawn to both of those as my primary means of expression. The word is fast, cheap, and out of control, so it beats the image for pure, stream-of-consciousness thought-processing (hence the preceeding and following). And since I'm interested in "storytelling through the moving image"--a really, really, really ashamedly pretentious way of saying "movies"--it makes sense that the de facto form of communication would figure predominantly in my ideation-creation, art-research process.

sketch_Space vol. 2: Titles

A few titles before I forget:

worXpace
worXhop
funXion space

sketch_Space vol. 1

I think my "sketchspace"--or whatever we end up calling the damn thing--will be built at my UW web site: students.washington.edu/eledrew, but seeing how confused I am on how we're to proceed with it at the moment, I'm going to settle for some bloggin'.

The specific assignment this week is several-fold:

1) REFLECT ON THE CONCEPT OF THE "SKETCHSPACE": My understanding of the sketchspace is that it is to be a web-hosted "environment" essentially, that serves as both workshop for the artist and document for the public. Process and product are to be one in it, hence art-research (a phrase which I'm actually really starting to like, if for no other reason than a purely aesthetic one: I like how it sounds, all badass and such). While we are expected to conduct our art-research through the medium/ia that the artifact is engaged in, the space itself must be a meta-medium (isn't that what the internet is, a medium that encompasses all media? Other than a series of tubes, of course...). It must be versatile: able to host the development of a project of any one or number of media, but once hosted, able to accommodate only those media engaged. A meta-media space that can transmute into a media-singularity, any media-singularity, and host such media exquisitely, as if the space was designed for only that media. To my mind, what this means is that the space has to encompass the different media I use in my ideation and creation processes. To wit: notebook/sketchbook, blog, video, stills, prose, a Google/wiki bar for quick searches, and audio-notes log. Not everyone uses all of these, some don't use any, so the space would have to be mod-able to fit the artist's own personal tastes. I think the most important thing though, is that it really needs to be convenient. The best thing about a notebook is it's backpocket convenience. The nice thing about a blog is that I can ramble on and on and work-out all of my thoughts. The nice thing about peers is being able to bounce ideas off of them. The nice thing about video is that it's the thing itself. And so on. If one has to manage this many different media, or more, I can imagine the temptation to get lazy and cease collating all of the data is quite apparent. So convenience, accessibility, clarity, are my primary concerns when it comes to how I would organize such a space. The first image that comes to mind is of a 3D octopus, similar to how we were taught to draw character traits in junior high lit classes. Character in the middle, with all of their traits springing off in various directions around. I'd imagine the hub of the site being the artist's name with their past, current and future projects springing off in 3D space around them. The user would click on whichever project he desired, and the octopus would morph from the artist to the project, with all the various media involved in the creation of it now replacing the projects in the tendrils.

This still leaves several problems: how to incorporate the tangibiles: notes, sketches, etc. short of manually scanning them in one by laborious one. Also, how to make the media itself, say video, dominate the art-research process.

This last question is the one that gnaws at me. Am I overthinking the sketchspace? Is it as simple as "doing" instead of "thinking about doing"? Probably somewhere in-between.

2) to establish an appropriate webspace where I will both document my art-research process, as well as build the space. Check, on that one.

3) EXTRACT FROM YOUR PROJECT/CRITIQUE SEEDS FOR NEW WORK AND DOCUMENT THEM IN THE CONTEXT OF STARTING POINTS IN YOUR SKETCHSPACE: It's really difficult to proceed on this step without answering some of those questions I posed in the first part of the assignment. But I suppose if there were a place to start, it would be in the critique of my project (uh, maybe like it says to do?). The critique was of "a product of my environment" and it was a pretty interesting one (read: harsh). The kind of critique that reminds me why I wanted to do DXARTS in the first place. It was essentially a critique of the incongruity between my Big Ideas for the piece and the piece itself. Noel railed on my artist's statement for being a series of post-rationalizations, which isn't entirely valid, but the reason he perceived them as post-rationalizations is 100% valid: they aren't there. The artist's statement isn't so much a post-rationalization, as it is a post-vocalization of pre-production intent. Of course, the fact that I'm the filmmaker has blinded me quite a bit (moreso than I'm comfortable with, really) to the flaws in the piece. I think what was most interesting about the critique is that it's completely different from the critiques I got in 452 when I first presented the thing. Rachel gave me a "whoa", Jim who I respect a lot (even though the bastard doesn't return my emails now) thought it was "the best video" I'd done in the class, and Noel's initial critique amounted to: "good cinematography, good editing, sound not so good, needed to be more drawn-out at beginning". We exchanged a few emails on this after class last week, but I think its interesting that he gave me one kind of crit, mostly positive, but constructive when negative, on his first viewing, and on the second totally ripped the film. As he said, he felt that ripping me the second time around would be good for me, whereas he may not have felt that way the first time around. If nothing else, I think it illustrates one of two things: the versatility of image-meaning (not necessarily my film's though), or the versatility of critical-perception. Probably somewhere between the two.

Either way, Noel was right. Bottom line: it was good for my soul. Unexpected, a little shocking, and stung the mane a tad, but it raised the bar for the class and for my motivation to improve. It's one less video I have to weave in my laurels, and now I don't think they can support my weight were I to rest on them. Thank Buddha!

New (School) Year, New Classes, Same Goal: see above

I've long since returned from New York/New Jersey and the short of it is this: you can't fit a square peg into a round hole, especially when the square knows it's a square and tries to anyways. Trans: I'm not an assistant, knew I wasn't, but tried to hack it anyways. Whoops.

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Onto the business of the moment. I'm more or less a DXARTS major now, which is great. This year, my time is going to be dominated by the Computer Science dept.'s Animation Capstone series. The class is more story-centric than the DXARTS equivalent, and is designed to provide us with an immersive, industry-like experience during the production of a short animated film.

In tandem with the capstone class, I'm taking a Technology & Story class that is responsible for developing stories for the class-wide animated short we're to begin work on winter quarter. It's entirely story-focused, which will be great for me since I feel like last year's video sequence made me comfortable enough with the moving image as an artifact itself, for me to be able to focus more on just the act of storytelling itself. It's a process of give-and-take, I think.

On the DXARTS side of things, I'll be taking DXARTS 400 all year as well, which is a two-credit undergraduate research seminar. From what I've heard, it's a pretty open-ended experience, that is just supposed to allow us students to dream-up a project and follow-through with it. Needless to say, it should be pretty fun.

So, all that said, the subsequent posts in this here blog are going to involve either story ideation for animation, or for project ideation for DXARTS. And maybe a little cross-pollination of the two.

Mas photographicas

Taken at a bar in Jersey called the Big Apple. I think it's supposed to be ironic or something.

Brooklyn, NYC from Midtown Manhattan.
Tribeca, Manhattan, NYC, NY, USA, Earth from Hoboken, NJ:My room:
My new room.

Crises of Conscience

Last week was really rough, not so much because of the job, but because of the job. What I mean to say is that, there was nothing directly related to the job that was frazzling me, but in an indirect way, it was getting to me quite a bit last week. I just had, time and again, slip-up after slip-up. None except one were particularly major, but minor lapses in memory happening several times a day can add up pretty goddamn quick.

I finally found a place over the weekend, so I'm no longer crashing on Andy Meissner's couch. And I can already feel the difference my own space is having on my motivation. The place is quite close to work and the roommates are pretty cool (both are in the film industry as well, one an NYU alumnus)--BUT IT'S STILL IN JERSEY. Man, Jersey. Oh man. The stories are true. Rather, that there aren't many, is the real story. One of the film's casting associates had to hand-deliver to me a DVD of an audition for Brett to look at and she road the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) into Jersey from Tribeca--for the first time. I have no idea how long she's lived in NYC, but if I had to guess, at least two or three years. And she'd never been over to Jersey.

My advice: don't vacation here.

All that said, today, Monday, has gone better than all the wellness in last week combined. Not that today has gone spectacularly well or something, just that it hasn't gone spectacularly wrong. Or something.

On the bright side, Marie's going to be coming out to stay with me for three weeks in less than three weeks (still with me?). I love Seattle, but it's really the people, not the place that I miss. The girl, the fam, the friends. And the Catz.

On another bright side, I've seen the new Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, etc) movie "Sunshine" twice now, and I'm almost convinced that it's my favorite movie so far this year, just edging out Hot Fuzz. I think Hot Fuzz might ultimately be the *better* movie, but Sunshine so spectacularly caters to my baser tastes in cinema (without making me feel the least bit guilty about it), that there's no way I could not love it. And I love the shit out it.

While we're comparing movies, why not go the full half-mile (seeing that the year's more than half-over):
1. Sunshine
2. Hot Fuzz
3. ...

Was anything else released this year? I also saw the Steve Buscemi movie Interview that is quite good, if not good enough to "list". I really liked Knocked Up also, but again, can there really be only these few films? Ouch...

I suppose the best movie I've seen this year period is Lawrence of Arabia. And the best movie I've seen this year that I hadn't seen before would probably be Ivan the Terrible I&II.

At any rate, I'm hoping to punch-out any minute now. I'll be in touch.

Hoes, Hobos, and Hoboken

My phone died just in the nick of time yesterday--good excuse for me to buy an iPhone. And while I'm at it, why not the most expensive one too? Guess what, it's fucking awesome. Oh and there goes a week's pay that I haven't gotten yet. Oops!

Since all my love's been NYC-directed, and for good reason, I thought I'd share some Hoboken, NJ love too:

1. Hoboken is the birthplace of baseball, a sport that is much more fun to play than it is to watch
2. Hoboken is the birth place of Frank Sinatra. I think there's a reason he ended up in Vegas.
3. Hoboken is the setting of Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront. I think there's a reason that movie is so depressing. At least Brando coulda been a conteda: Hoboken neva wuhs.