Johnny Boy Screening

I have to say, the Johnny Boy showing was pretty incredible. Seth, Mike, Ian and I showed up to the festival when it opened, I set up the press table, and then we checked out some of the short films. Attendance was pretty low in the morning; there were maybe five people in the audience aside from us, which I guess is what you get when you schedule films on a weekday morning. By the time 1:30 rolled around though it was a different story. The place was packed (well, comparatively) and I started to wonder if we had taken the festival staff by surprise having such a large group of people show up out of nowhere for one film in particular.

From the moment the movie started a strange feeling washed over me that was extreme excitement mixed with dread. The excitement part is obvious, the dread came from being in a theater full of people judging this movie that we have put an incredible amount of time and effort into. Will they hate it? Did we waste our time, as well as the the time of everyone else who helped us? What will the actors think? Of course I've never viewed even a second of our work on the movie as a waste of time, but it's hard to keep those thoughts out of your head when your work is on a screen a mile wide for all to judge.

Of course there was no need to worry, it couldn't have gone better. There were laughs and gasps in all the right places (we made people gasp!) and it was just an incredible feeling. I'm really not sure I've ever felt anything like it. When the crew stood up at the end and everyone applauded and whooped and cheered...it sounds cheesy, but I really just felt on top of the world. I'm not sure how much the experience affected the other members of the crew who were much more vital to the whole project than I was, but the experience left a huge impression on me.

Like I have explained to some of my colleagues, my favorite part about the whole thing is that we DID something. We MADE something. Everyone at some point says "If I made a movie it would be like this..." but we actually did it. We started something, saw it through to the end, cared enough to get frustrated with each other from time to time, and never settled for a low quality product when we saw an area that was in our power to improve. Especially Mike, who probably spent about 200 more hours staring at this thing on a computer screen than he wishes. We didn't do it for a class or a prize or because someone bet us to, and actually sacrificed many aspects and hours of our personal lives to get it done.

I am very proud to have been a part of it, and of everyone I worked with. And if things go the way they're looking, it's only going to get more attention from here.

In Working Order

Kyle brought it to my attention that some of the pages on my site were simply showing up black with no content, particularly those in the Voices section. I checked it out and it seemed fine, so I figured it must have been a problem with the computer he was using. By chance a day or so later I was checking out the site in Internet Explorer and I saw what he was talking about. Apparently whatever the problem was it was only affecting IE.

I use Firefox as my browser because it’s much better than IE on all fronts, especially in terms of security (protection from spyware and all that) which is very important. But I always make sure to check out if my site is working on as many browsers and platforms as I can, because different set-ups always read sites differently. I had made one minor change to my site recently, so I knew that must be the culprit that was making pages show up blank. See the image at the bottom of every page that shows a character sitting in a chair? I added code to set those images on a randomizer, meaning that every time a page loads you'll see a different image of someone sitting in that chair. It seemed to work fine, so I didn't think to check it in all browsers, and I certainly didn't think it would render pages unviewable.

At any rate, it's fixed now, but if anyone notices something displaying a little screwy please let me know. It's impossible for me to check how these pages will display on every combination of setups.

Also, if you're not already, start using Firefox. 90% of the time when somebody asks me to look at their computer because it's on the fritz, it's a spyware problem. Once the spyware is gone I download Firefiox, tell them to always use it for browsing, and none of them ever have a problem with it again. Of course Microsoft has been making more of an effort against Spyware lately, (Windows Defender is the best anti-spyware software you'll find for PC's) and it's been so long since I've used IE this may not be an issue anymore. But you know that awesome tabbed browsing that all new versions of IE have? Yeah, that was Firefox's idea.

On the update front, I added some Hellboy cursors I made to the voices section. I've wanted to put those up for a while now, so anybody who wants them can use them.

Toy Weekend

Today was supposed to be a downer because I had to head back to the homeland of Charleston to visit the ol' doctor. (lame-O's.) But after that was taken care of I visited the Charleston Town Center Mall for the first time in forever where I ran into the entire set of Gorillaz figures for next to nothing. I bought all four for slightly more than one cost at original price. I don't know what the deal is with the winter sales this year but stores seem to be getting pretty desperate.

Then as I arrived home I was greeted by a small package containing series 2 of the Back to the Future Minimates. So today turned out to be great! For a big toy-collecting geek like me, anyway.

Not to mention that I finally found a pea coat after probably a month of searching. Now my friend's plans to be the "pea coat gang" when we head to NY in a few weeks will finally come to fruition.

Gremlin! Bloopers

I finally got around to adding the old blooper reel from the Gremlin movie, which you can find here. The main reason I never added it before is because it's no picnic adding videos to your site and making sure they're compatible, reliable, etc. Just slapping a video on a page is no problem, but there's a reason YouTube coverts and posts your video for you: it's a big enough hassle that most people wouldn't bother. Especially little Mandy and Chad Q. Teenybopper, who make up probably 80% of YouTube's posts and have no web savvy skills beyond uploading of pictures of passed out friends on Myspace.

And speaking of YouTube, the web standard is now of course to use FLV, or Flash's video format. So it was quite an undertaking to make sure I knew how to properly use/convert/embed FLV, but it was made much much easier by this guy here. This programmer offers a free Flash-built web player for users to control your videos with, as well as a wizard to generate the code for embedding the video with tons of options I didn't even touch. Needless to say, I wouldn't have been able to make the jump to FLV without this site.

I have been changing tons of stuff around the site lately, all fairly minor, but each change presents it's own challenge. I've actually enjoyed all the problems I've run into so far, mainly because I have yet to find one I couldn't solve. This has just further made me hope I get that job doing the WV Encyclopedia website since I'm one of those weirdos who enjoys this light web stuff.

A change of note is the new interface I created for viewing my comic. The old one just didn't fit in with the rest of the site, and seemed too clunky.

I'm Watching the Watchmen

The Watchmen Movie Blog isn't updated too often but when they do update they don't jerk you around. They just recently posted some storyboard images to show off how faithful to the comic panels they're trying to be. I still have hope for this movie, partly because I want to have hope for it and partly because I haven't heard anything yet that would make me think they're doing a bad job. Though I guess they did abandon the "comic within a comic" for the main film and are just going to put it on the DVD. Maybe that's for the better? I don't know. But it does seem they're heading in the right direction. I mean one of the previously attached screenwriters wanted to update it to modern times. I can only imagine how awful that would have been. I think that just would have been a gateway to the mindset of "Well, we changed the time, so we can change ____ detail too."

So I'm eagerly awaiting this movie, but ultimately I do agree with Alan Moore that it didn't need to be taken from its native medium of comics. I think for me and lots of other fans of the book, this is going to be a "Okay, lets how close you got it" experience.

The movie blog is here.

MacHeads

Macheads - the movie (trailer)
Uploaded by brunogarattoni

This looks really interesting, a movie about Mac users. And what's even better is that it doesn't seem to be shying away from pointing out how absolutely insane and pretentious Mac users can be.

Once again, for the record, I don't really hate Macs and I don't really hate the people who use them. That would be silly, just like the people in this video. What rubs me the wrong way about Macs is how people perceive them, and tend to act when they have them. Macs can do the same things as all other computers, no better, no worse. But They've gotten this reputation of being better equipped for art and design purposes just because they're trendy. A $1 watch tells time just as well as $500 watch, so there's only one reason why you buy the $500 one: to say "look what I have."

Sorry, I know this seems goofy, but when silly trends like this actually interfere with your ability to proceed normally in your chosen field it tends to aggravate you. I'm just glad I'm proficient in both Macs and PCs.

New Intro

After years of having the green door at the front of the site I finally added a new intro. It struck me today how easy it would be to do a parody of this particular beloved network intro in Flash.

And if you don't know what the intro is from, I weep for your childhood. :)