Sarah Silverman

I had heard about her before, and I had seen a few clips of her in the past, but recently I started watching her show* and I'm impressed. The Sarah Silverman Program is probably the smartest and the most creative TV show I've seen since Arrested Development. Actually I didn't watch any TV shows since then. :) At least not in their entirety, just a few episodes of certain shows to get an idea. But I keep an eye on new stuff, so I guess I would've caught if there were any other excellent things out there.

Silverman has a very active, productive mind, for all kinds of ridiculously silly stuff. But she'll never ever be taken seriously about serious things after all this again, not in the near future. :) I used to be a more silly person myself. It's a lot of fun, but has its difficulties sometimes...

*: What triggered my interest in the show was this: SS at AME

Soulseeking

I might comment on this article some time in the future:
Losing track...

I had similar experiences and thoughts at times... Nick Southall has written a series of "Soulseeking" articles apparently, the others may be interesting too.

P.S. Oh, wow: Baby born with foot in brain (actually more like another fetus)

Processing

I could use a book like this:
Learning Processing

I wonder if I'll ever be able to dive back into that kind of art stuff as deep as before...

Animal Collective > New Sigur Rós, New Múm

I hereby claim that both the last Múm and the last Sigur Rós albums were inspired strongly by Animal Collective's "spirit". And I like both of those albums better than I would've otherwise probably. So... well inspired... it is a more exciting, dynamic, healthier "spirit".

P.S. I also like things like these:

"Monkey Jazz" BEARDYMAN & mr_hopkinson™ from David Hopkinson on Vimeo.



Maybe I should use this blog mainly like this instead of just talking about my own stuff, since I don't really produce that much regularly... Alright, makes sense, I continue: Although I don't watch as many movies or listen to as much music nowadays there are certain pieces I can't dare miss, i.e. I loved "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and I'm looking forward to "Synecdoche, New_York".

The Iron Giant

The Iron Giant by Brad Bird. Cool movie. Better than I anticipated. In fact it was one of the best feature animations I've seen, should have seen it years ago. It can easily compete with modern Pixar material.

And here's The Making Of The Iron Giant - Part 1 of 8

(The same Youtube channel has also many other animation making ofs, check them out if you're interested. I love the internet.)

And here's what's still left from it's website:
http://movies.warnerbros.com/irongiant/

It's not bad really, there are some interviews and drawings and so on...

Living Without Heads, Feeding Without Mouths: Chickens and Babies

I recently heard about Mike the Headless Chicken. You can also find videos about him on Youtube.

Basically it's a rooster that lived for 18 months without a head, more or less... Most of his brain stem and the sufficient veins were still there aparently. It's sort of exciting to imagine what this would be like with humans, and what it would mean about the human nature. I offered my dad to try something like this on him, but he didn't trust me, rightfully. He said that I might end up killing him and that I should first do the necessary research to operate properly.

Anyway, one inevitable consequence of missing a head is also missing a mouth. In Mike's case he was fed with an eyedropper, right into his open gullet. This reminded me of something. I actually had the idea of making a short film about someone who has to feed through his umbilical cord for his entire life. The storyline was something like this:

A pregnant woman is kidnapped by a mad evil scientist. After the baby is born the scientist puts the baby in another room, binds both of them to different beds  but there's a hole on the wall inbetween and the umbilical cord is somehow still intact. And the guy somehow also seals off the child's mouth. So he keeps feeding the mother regularly and the baby continues to live normally, starts to grow up. After a while the mother dies for some reason and the mad guy kidnapps a new woman. The umbilical cord is now artificially connected to this new "mother". While many "mothers" come and go, he develops a gadget for the child, something like an artificial mother: It can digest whatever food you throw into it and it has an output mimicking the women's. As the story continues the child is no longer bound to the bed-thing, he learns to live with the gadget. And one day he manages to run away, into the wild. He swears that he'll come back and take revenge...

And in the end he probably takes his revenge, or forgives the scientist, or something else, I don't know... I hadn't determined all the details. This was sort of the introduction into a bigger story. (I actually thought about combining this one with another idea I had about a tree by the river that envies the birds and wants to fly. It ends with the tree "flying" down a waterfall.) I came pretty close to start drawing a storyboard back then, but the timing wasn't right. It was too big for one unexperienced animator. So I laid it aside. Somewhere, I do have a few drawings of the grown up version of the character though, but I wasn't so pleased with the design, needs more work. (The gadget I'm talking about was attached to him like a backpack, with a funnel-like-opening on top for food entrance to throw in fruits and pieces of animals or whatever. He was sort of like a wilder version of He-man with a sealed mouth and a jet pack.)

Nowadays I'm pretty sure that I'll never keep working on this project, I just don't care so much about it, or I should rather say that I care much more about other stuff. If there's someone out there who has enough time and interest in these ideas, feel free to be inspired and use them. Even though I'm not enough motivated to work on this project, I would still be interested in watching/reading stuff like this.

Autodesk Signs Agreement to Acquire Softimage

http://area.autodesk.com/softimage_announce

This was unexpected, might have pretty interesting results. Maybe Autodesk should be internationalized or something like that...