Where is your whimsy?!
wonder without spirits, I said that shit, and limited animation
¿What you heard?
I slowed my stroll in the Huntington Gardens as I exchanged the I-think-I-know-you look with a woman rounding the corner.
“The meditation in the park,” she reminded me.
“Oh yeah! Arlington Garden!” I finally put the pieces together.
My friend Ben took the chance encounter to solicit her impartial opinion about whether I really heard a spirit say President Trump at Whiskey Pete’s last week.
In the paranormal community, Ben is what we would call a skeptic.
In the skeptic community, I am what Ben would call a fool.
Ghost agnostic, the woman challenged Ben. “Where is your whimsy?!”
And with that question, she also called my attention to the magic of the very un-supernatural moment we were already living in — the impossibility of running into someone in LA (the second run-in in my last two visits to The Huntington I might add!) and the surreal beauty of a Japanese garden in San Marino.
What you doin’?!
For me to criticize the universally-adored Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and then tag the screenwriter is a crazy kind of thing.
Maybe, even a lil cocky… or a lot of cocky.
But I embrace it!
Some overconfidence is good as an artist and demonstrates significant growth from the writer I used to be, the writer who would cringe at hearing his own work read aloud and who was often deeply uncertain about his opinions on the work of others.
So even if someone thinks I’m wrong about Little Miss Sunshine, which I most definitely might be, the point is that I think I’m right, and thinking I’m right means thinking I’m worthy, worthy of being a writer.
What you seen??
ONE PIECE (1999-) has been building my confidence in animation as I slowly move from the writing phase of Aisha Been Leimert Park into the fuck around in Unreal Engine phase.
The first thing for me to set up is the environments, the locations where the film takes place, one of which — Leimert Park — is a real life neighborhood.
To make Leimert Park, I’m going to create something called a Gaussian splat, essentially a bunch of images that are transformed into 3D space.
The problem with a splat is that, because it’s photo-based, everything in the environment is frozen in time.
I was concerned about this — frozen trees, frozen fountain, frozen people — until I watched One Piece.