Back Home and Distracted May 20, 2009

While trying to get some catch-up sleep from the very last semester of the College of Santa Fe (R.I.P.), I’ve been trying my best to keep busy. However, I’m trying to find a job, trying to add sound to my animation (the hardest thing I’ve ever done), trying to finish the screenplay I’ve been working on for school, trying to figure out financial aid stuff with my new school, yet I find myself completely wasting my time.

The number one distraction: Facebook.

I never really checked this site during school, but because I miss my college friends, and because I’m an incredibly lonely individual, I’ve spent hours meandering through the god damn facebook. I found myself figuring answers for Pick Five:

The only problem is that there aren’t a lot of Pick Five lists that warrant a nonsense response and the ones that do don’t have great responses. Ah well.

Also there’s this game Scramble, where you are given a board of tiles and you have to link letters, horizontally, vertically, and diagonally to make words. I can’t get past 67 points. By the summer, I intend to beat Robin’s 118 points, just so I can feel pretty good about myself. Sadly, I am learning more words by stumbling onto them in the game instead of, you know, knowing words before I go into it. I need to read more.

The second thing has been following artist blogs and videos. Looking through the Drawn archives, I stumbled across some truly inspired and/or bizarre projects, namely Justine Lai’s mission to paint herself having sex with each U.S. president in chronological order:

You should see the one with Abraham Lincoln

Thinking that looking at other people’s art and animation would inspire finishing my own was completely misguided. After watching Koda by Reza Dolatabadi, I wonder why I even bother:

This is probably one of the more singularly beautiful things I’ve seen in a long time. It took Dolatabadi two and a half years to make it. The animation is composed from over 6000 paintings(!). It’s incredible and the hard work really paid off. Check out his website.

I will get my animation up sometime this month. That’s sort of my big project before I go onto designing a little animated introduction for my next video projects and resume working on my writing (I’m twenty, dammit! No more totally unproductive summers!). I hoped to have the audio-less version up today, but I wanted to set it up so it would be embedded directly from my computer. I’m a little hesitant to put it through a video sharing site in its current state.