All the people in the studio, there is a big mushroom monster.
also dead ants and big asses, intelligent inputs, and local lore
¿What you heard?
I spent a fat chunk of Saturday at three different panels at the Pan African Film Festival, so I’ve heard an abundance of amazing things, but the best words I overheard all week came from a six-year-old doing a mic check in a classroom at USC.
“All the people in the studio, there is a big mushroom monster. He is very intelligent and a maniac. That maniac is horrible.”
Now, some out-of-context snippets spoken at the Pan-African Film Festival…
“You could hear an ant die a mile away.”
“Now, you’re down the rabbit hole of big asses.”
“You need three s’s to be successful in this industry: stakeholders, story, stamina.”
What you doin’?!
In the pitch deck for Gullah Binyah, the children’s semi-documentary educational animated travel show about Blackness I’m developing, I’ve included a section on workflow, which if you actually read it should dispel the ridiculous myth that the proof of concept I made for this show is somehow also proof that I am “good at Midjourney”.
Let me be clear. I am not good at Midjourney.
I don’t even know if that means anything, and if it does, it doesn’t mean anything about me because I haven’t had a Midjourney account since like September 2023.
It’s February 2025.
What I am good at is using Unreal Engine to create intelligent inputs (rather than asinine, lazy text prompts) to feed into Stable Diffusion, which I mostly use just to help take the edge off of the 3D and disguise the influence of the game engine behind the scenes of almost all of my animations.
What you seen??
TEEN TITANS GO! (2013-) Season 7 Episode 2: “Hafo Safo” is one of my favorite things I’ve seen because it does for Silver Lake exactly what I am trying to do for South Central. It establishes a wild local lore based on the quirks of the neighborhood.
The origin of the “Hafo Safo” story is the sign for the Sunset Foot Clinic as well as Elysian Valley’s nickname, Frogtown.
In my script Is There a South Central in Heaven? Is There Funk After Death? (currently pending a third draft), I develop South Los Angeles legends from The Great Wall of Crenshaw, the Crenshaw Cowboy, and the perpetually-shuttered Vision Theatre in Leimert Park.