I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

For your next non-union contruction site protest, up the ante—Creatable Inflatables

2 colors; for a t-shirt. draft 1

Time to move on.

I’ve knocked out another set of logos.

Bryk said I made him elephantinely obese, so I powerpuffed him—

And lastly, a header for a blog. (This was a quickie using old art.)

I can do headers for your blog… send me an email for prices.

A new efficient term was coined on the local news last night in a report on an auto accident:

crashingers

I’ve had a slight up-swing in the number of commissions I’ve been getting. It’s still only a tiny percentage of what I was doing this time last year.

I did a logo for a production company (I’m not sure if that’s the right word) that puts up plays and live events a while ago. They were honest up front—it’s going to be design by committee, you’re going to do a million versions, the final version is going to be something extremely compromised, but we’ll pay you more. It’s a devil’s bargain but I took it. I’m doing another logo on the same tip for a play about an animal shelter called “Tails” and my direction was to make the word in the form of a dog.

(a rejected draft—too hard to read)

I’ve just started doing some character sketches for bryk.com… the guy vanished for a little while and then he emailed me to tell me his hard drive crashed. We’re going for something sad and slightly Sanrio-influenced. I was trying to bring in some Junko Mizuno drippiness as well.

This is a rough sketch done with a thick sharpie that I colored in photoshop to get a sense of what the colors will look like. I may brighten the palate considerably looking at it. The finished version will be made entirely in Illustrator and probably won’t have outlines like this. (The top one came out too much like Strong Sad in the face.)

I’m waiting for feedback on both of these from the client.

I have… fashionably late… joined MySpace. Nobody’s Sweetheart actually joined MySpace for the purposes of networking and getting new commissions.

I dabbled in customizing the template, but I haven’t really gotten too far into it. I need to figure out how to overrule the colors on the text boxes.

I have an interview at MTV next Tuesday.

We’re taping our second day (and first exterior) of Cakey! episode #2 tomorrow morning at 8 AM with our special guest star of the episode, Mark Sam Rosenthal. We taped all of Huskey’s business before he had to fly out to LA for pilot season and Gavin has already shot five hours last weekend in our apartment. Lou Fernandez ended up saving us at the last minute by loaning us an essential, hard-to-find prop (I dashed to Brooklyn to pick it up right before the actors arrived).

Bill, Kirk and I talked this weekend and at that time (after a long and technically difficult shoot) it seemed like we all wanted to kill the show. The biggest problem is working with—and around—the puppet. Cakey the puppet is just a head, basically, with an opening in the bottom for a hand to go in. If it had a body (like a Muppet), it would obscure the hand and maybe even head of the guy operating it. Cakey is also very stiff and can’t open its mouth without a lot of effort. He also smells terrible and under hot lights, reeks more the hotter it gets.

Later in the day, Kirk and I came up with a pretty good idea for #3 that would fix a lot of our “hiding the puppeteer” on set and in post issues as well as be quick and easy to shoot. So, I’m a little more optimistic about continuing if the audience wills it. As the screening is on a Tuesday (killing the UCB element by being scheduled opposite Harold Night), I can’t be all that confident we will be even though this episode is a lot more coherent (at this stage) than episode #1 (which was a collection of weird in-jokes and justifications for them).

We still have to pick up the tail end of the episode… also outdoors… with Gavin’s sister this weekend. Keep your finger’s crossed we don’t get snowed out. Or we’ll have to pull a Block.
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A couple of Cakey! mentions in strangers’ blogs:

PuppetVision
A Canadian puppet blog mentioned Cakey right after the screening and then included us in a weekly round up of puppets on the web (along side 102’sPuppet Rapist). Also has a lot of great puppet-related links for resources that I wish I saw when we were building Baku.

Yodelling Llama
Interesting writer does a round-up of 101 and 102’s prime time. Calls Cakey “funny” and “quotable”

Nothing—short of a Port Authority prostitute vomitting on you—makes you feel like a more miserable piece of shit than looking for work.

I’ve been doing it for the last two weeks and it reminds me why I’ve spent pretty much my entire life underemployed.

Seriously, would you hire this?

(I removed my personal info from the upper left)

The retooling of the Channel102.net went up tonight thanks to Will Hines coming over and hammering out the particulars we’ve been IMing back and forth about since last weekend.

Some tweaking is needed, but 90% of it is in place.

Channel 102

Download a very sweet Katamari desktop for your computer.

I spent this weekend looking for jobs on Monster, MediaBistro, and the “positions available” subsections of the Viacom and Columbia U sites while Kirk was working the graveyard shift at his work for the Oscars*... together we represented the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” yin-yang of employment.

A new week dawns and I haven’t sent out any resumes. I was too sucked into discussing what to do with the 102 website with Will Hines and testing out different ideas. The site has gotten much more complex in the last month since adding in a private IMDB for all shows and now dynamically generated png titles in any font as well as larger show thumbnails are on the horizon.

I decided to revise the logo first. I had to recreate the logo before when I was doing the UCBT calendars and 102 was on the back… there weren’t any 300 dpi images of it handy, so I just copied it in illustrator. Rounded square, bold sans text and go.

It’s pretty obviously a TV GUIDE parody as well, which I wasn’t that into, but the main issue I had with it were the rounded corners on a flat sided box. It’s supposed to resemble a TV, but TV screens stop being rounded in the 60s, and even then they had bowed sides (as did the original TV Guide logo).

I bowed the sides of the rounded-corner box to be more aesthetic and replaced the “channel” text with Microgramma—a typeface that it both very retro (‘51) and futuristic (used on all versions of Star Trek, Space 1999, and the Sub Pop logo), but most importantly WIDE. Getting a symmetrical balance in an aggressively unsymmetrical combination like “102” is retarded difficult. In Tanek, I added space between the 1 and the 0 to balance out the wide “2” (I also could have used a font with wide serifs).

In future revisions, I’d want to do something with no relation at all to the TV Guide logo. One text experiment, which might be adapted somewhere else, is using overlapping versions of characters made of horizonal lines (I did this in Illustrator) to simulate the look of video de-interlacing and the crunky stuff you get in overcompressed DV on pause.

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*Hooray for John Canemaker, my former professor at NYU for his Animated Short win. He was a very nice and interesting teacher; I wish I wasn’t such a shitty, lazy student in college.

I haven’t visited this site since my brief employment at a now-defunct advertising agency. Their ‘Plastock’ book was so fun to look at, even if I didn’t have several hundred dollars to licence any of the images.

Even if you’re not a designer, you can get your daily serving of kitsch imagery and juxtoposition on these CSA dinner plates, at $10 a pop.

Are you a teenage girl who loves quizzes and excessive graphics in your blog and/or message board signature? Would you like to pretend to be?

Feel free to download, link to channel102.net and plaster the web at large—

(While you’re at it, why not add Cakey as your friend on MySpace!)
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I made, but am far less enthusiastic about this one——since the MrGhost site is half-done and pretty cruddy looking. I also get regular emails announcing I’m at 95% usage of my bandwidth or some such crap. Feh.

Ambigrams are AWESOME!

We have a script for Cakey and our first day of shooting is tomorrow. Kirk and I wrote it during the commercial breaks of “Project Runway.”

Brian Huskey is leaving for LA on Saturday, so we have to shoot his whole bit in 2 hours or something.

On Saturday Kirk and I went to the New York Times Travel Show, which is like an industry show for travel agents (do they exist anymore in the era of Travelocity?) that’s open to the easily-entertained public. Silvija’s Latvian Dance group was performing a 20-minute set, but since we paid the full cover we got their early to check out the scene.

There are booths of the different tourism bureaus, tour groups, airlines, resorts, etc.—it’s kinda like the science fair. The only booths people really care about are the ones that give something away or have moving parts…live lemurs, dudes on stilts, live Carnaval band, 100 gallon scuba tank. At the end of the day we ended up with a stressball, 3 clown noses, a Turkish “eagle eye,” 3 cups of sake, a dixie cup of Hawaiian Kaui’a coffee, a fistful of mints, a mini-beach ball, and a poster of a Panda sleeping.

Greece and Ireland seemed to have expended the most on archetecture… giant booth full of computers and squishy carpet. There are booths for international and US destination and they were roughly arraged by geographical area, but there was some unfortunate intersections—New Jersey looked pretty embarrassed surrounded on all sides by India, Mongolia and Japan.

The stage had different native entertainments in 20 minute increments. We saw the tail end of Taiwanese drumming, a Greek bar band, a seemingly endless Capoiara/Samba nightmare of audience participation, and a Sea World animal show. The stage was very close to the booth worker break area, so a guy in a suffocating-looking Spongebob costume kept coming in and out… the costume had no arm or eyeholes and seemed to be constructed of a single block of high-density foam.

Then it was time for the Latvian dancing, with a live band and singers. All of the ladies were in Ren Faire barmaid type dresses—vest, blouse, and big skirt—and all the gents were dressed as Robert E. Lee. Kirk saw one dancer man walking around and thought he was a Civil War re-enactor… maybe rallying for tourist dollars to burn through Atlanta to the sea. No one really matched, and Silvija said later that her outfit was an actual antique she got from a little old Latvian lady. It was mostly green and red and had a Karate-Kid style headband.

I thought maybe the hats of the ladies indicated their seniority in the dance group, but she said that they were from different towns in Latvia. However, they were keeping the tradition of a “closed hat” indicating married ladies—much to the displeasure of the dancer wearing a lacy peaked “smurf hat”—and any available chick having an open-topped circlet or headband. I bet, though, if lacy smurf hat lady went to bar in 19th century Latvia, all the dudes would see that smurf hat and rally to get a taste of forbidden rūgušpiens.