Already tired...

Nothing like starting out a new work week exhausted. I had to get into Indigo Films here very early this morning to get in before the editor arrived. With my commute, that means leaving my house by 5am.

My workload for the past few weeks has just been crushing, what with current projects, new projects, spare time projects, etc.

To help understand why things are so crazy, let me take this opportunity to explain what I do for a living. I am a broadcast designer, which means I create graphics for video and/or television. I am a freelancer, but my primary gig for the past four+ years has been Indigo Films in San Rafael, California. Indigo creates programs for cable networks like Discovery and A&E, so the work I do ends up in shows on The History Channel, Travel Channel, National Geographic, The Science Channel, etc. For the past year I have been working almost entirely on the History Channel shows. There is a fair amount of 3D work called for, but mostly it's maps. History Channel *loves* its maps.

Now it looks like I have a new gig making maps for JAK Films, which is the LucasFilm subsidiary that was put together to make the Star Wars prequels, but has since been retooled to produce documentaries. I had my first interview out at Skywalker Ranch a couple of weeks ago, so that project will be picking up next week.

I have another project doing graphics for a cooking show, but that's a pretty small slice of my time.

The big crush right now is Indigo Films. I am crurrently juggling three 2-hour, HD shows for the History Channel. There is one on the story of Boudica (warrior Queen in Roman-occupied Britain), one on the story of the U.S.S. Constellation and its role in the Slave Patrol, and a show on Vampires. The Boudica show is going into the online edit starting tomorrow, and I am having to render out all of my maps at full resolution. This has been a monster--I've been rendering for a month solid. I did all of these maps in 3D using Lightwave, and that is something I don't want to do again anytime soon. The way they evolved made them very cumbersome, so every map is made of from up to six layers, and there are 26 total maps. So it has been a logistics nightmare, and we have very few machines to render them on, and Lightwave has been buckling under the strain. For the Constellations show we are currently editing act 6 of 9, and I have been feeding maps in as we go along. (Those maps are easier, as they are flat and being done entirely in After Effects.) On the Vampires show, I am doing background illustrations for the interviews, which were shot in front of greenscreens. So there is a lot of color-matching and keying work for that project.

So for this Thanksgiving, I will be giving thanks when I can just get the Boudica maps out the door, assuming I survive until Thursday!

Caffeine? Decaf? Both bad?

I just heard a news report talking about the results of a study in which it was found that decaffeinated coffee caused a jump in the production of certain fats in the bloodstream (the bad kind of cholesterol). Great. I've been switching over to decaf coffee for a while now by order of my doctor, because it makes my heart beat like that of a hummingbird goofed up on asthma medication. Now the decaf is clogging my arteries.

I'm beginning to get the idea that the medical industry does not want me drinking coffee. (Probably has something to do with the fact that it is one drug that they don't directly make a profit from.)

I just wish they would stop picking on coffee. With every study, it seems that coffee goes from being good for you to bad for you. Caffeine good. No wait, that's bad. Wait--it's good, but the use of Arabica beans is wiping out the population of a certain type of beetle. Stop it! Just let me enjoy of steaming, carcinogenic, cup of liquid death in peace.

Why not instead turn our direction to studying the harmful effects of something (seemingly) much more dangerous and common--like air?

Just consider these statistics:

1. Of all the people of this Earth who were alive for a time, but who are now dead, there is one common thread. They all breathed air. All their lives.

2. The harmful effects appear to be cumulative. If you look at two study groups: ones who are in their twenties, and those who are over a hundred years old, most of the people in the latter group are deceased, whereas the people in their twenties are considerably stronger and quite full of vigor. They have all been breathing air, but the folks in their 20s for a much shorter time.

So the moral is: hold your breath, everyone!

And make mine a double espresso...

Welcome to my blog!

I never thought I would ever have one of these. Perhaps I still won't. I always thought that I would never have enough time to post anything (I am a certifiable workaholic), and that if I did manage to, that nobody would bother to read it. But lately I have been interested to read the blogs of others, and they seem to be having so much FUN at it!

So here goes...

Here is what I would like to do with this. I am an artist. I get paid to see the world, process what I see, and relay that information in different ways. Sometimes I see things that seem truly amazing, things that seem to fit into the bigger picture in ways I'd never noticed before. When that happens, I want to tell somebody. I want to record it forever, becuase it is fleeting. It's like what Jane Siberry sings of on her album The Speckless Sky: "...he wants to write something down, he wants to sing a song or paint something..." Well, here is where I will write it down, and if I happen to paint something--I'll post it too. (Trust me--you don't want to hear me sing...)

So herein you will find bits of philosophy, assorted imagery, the ocassional rant, and hopefully lots of humor. (Always remember this: I'm not being silly. It's the world that's silly. I'm just being observant.) I'll try to avoid the mundane stuff. I mean, I could fill volumes with entries like "Ugh. I just got home. I worked my *** off today. I'm beat. I think I'll ZZZzzzzz" Yuck.

So if you feel like reading along, welcome to my head! If it's not your cup of tea, then thanks for at least checking it out, and feel free to grab some Triscuits(R) on your way out. In the end it may just be me having the memoirs I thought I might someday write, so that I can look back over my life and see just what a silly person I was.

"hope you have your camera
hope you have some paper
because if no one gets this down
then it's gone forever"