» Fringe Blog – Writing on Film, Culture, and Things on the Fringe

Grounds Zero Titles

jelewis8 — Thu, 18 May 2006 01:31:09 +0000

As promised, though a day late, is the title sequence I’ve been working on for the past month. The short film is about three coworkers at a coffee shop called Grounds Zero. The sequence runs just over a minute and includes a hybrid of hand drawn artwork, computer vector art created from scratch, and animated in After Effects.

UPDATE: The video may take a bit of time to load up. Sorry for the delay.
UPDATE 2: YouTube’s upload service was slower than molasses in Fargo in January. Uphill. So I’ve embedded the file myself. Enjoy.
UPDATE 3: I didn’t like the embedded look, so it’s now linked to open in a separate window.

Hard Drive Fund

jelewis8 — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 18:53:11 +0000

The faithful laptop gave a croak and took its final breath sometime this morning. Like an old man dying, I knew it was on its last legs. I was sure it would die sometime over vacation, but again, like an old man dying, it surprised me, lasting through the flights back home and a day back in the old manse before giving out.
I lost a bit of stuff, most notably my music collection–thankfully, most of it was ripped from my own cd’s, but there were a number of albums I purchased online. I’m pretty bummed about that. I had my writing backed up, so I can continue to pick and scratch at that tiny trade.
The nice thing is, I should be able to purchase a new hard drive and resurrect it like a monkey paw version of its former self. Without all the painful clanking and scary tension of the story. And since I have always suspected that I inherited huckster genes from some long ago snake oil salesman or televangelist, I am going to try and raise some of the cost of the hard drive right here at Fringe Central. Naturally, there’s no need to feel obligated to donate, but should you still feel a bit of leftover Christmas spirit, click the button below and savour the feeling you get when you buy a seat at the local theatre, or purchase a brick in the pavement of a city restoration project.
Hey, if NPR can do it every year, why not me?

Laptop Hard Drive Fund

A Spot of This

jelewis8 — Thu, 12 May 2005 18:26:25 +0000

900 degrees in my room as I woke up, and yet I still shivered slightly as I stepped out of the shower into the cool air. The perfect temperature is a constant battle for us, one we have fought and clawed our way upward for superiority and success, and the best we’ve come up with is air control at the push of a veloured button, the kind that gives a satisfyingly small click when it is pressed.
Here’s a creepy exercise. See if it resonates.
About 75 yards away a young, full-figured woman wanders out from an opening in the fence and onto a running/walking path of sorts that runs next to my apartment. She is dressed in blue coveralls and a dark green shirt, and her hair is in a ponytail. She bends down to scratch her leg, and whilst in that position, rolls the bottom of her pants legs up. I can see now she’s got sandals on.
A dog wanders through the fence and it appears she’s supervising his daily bathroom exercise. She walks to the edge of the woods and picks at a large shrub (or shrubbery) whilst her dog does his thing. She bends again to scratch her left leg.
Now she’s straightened back and turns and does a lazy walk back toward the fence opening. Her dog catches up to her and she bends and scratches it, playfully wagging its rump back and forth as its tail slaps back and forth in a pleased manner. He runs ahead and she follows, still bent in that pose, like a mother might do when playing with a child.
I indulge in a tiny grin, and watch as they pass the brown bomber on the next road up and disappear from my view.
That just goes to show you that even if there are stories everywhere you look, not all of them are worth telling. That’s a good lesson for me, though I doubt there’s any real danger I’ll do anything more than wistfully dream. Some things are worth writing about. I’ll try to stay in that category.
I meant to write about hospitals, as I spent a little time the other day visiting my roommate’s girlfriend, who suffered a badly broken leg–as if some breaks aren’t bad at all, merely annoyances–and was laid up in Montgomery County General. Am I the only one who walks away from a hospital feeling dirty? Not like pornographically dirty, but physically, petrie dish dirty, the kind of dirty that you physically go home from and scrub until you’re reaching that third but all critical subdermal layer of tissues that keeps your muscles from spilling out onto the ground from lack of restraint.
Here comes another pretty girl down that walking path. I love spring!
At any rate, hospitals, and the general feeling of constantly collecting the spores of sickness and surgery and death and leaving as a walking biohazard…the other thing about hospitals that I find unsettling is how quiet things are. I recall, or at least read about, the heady days of Civil War hospitals, which found influxes of men from both sides of the conflict, missing limbs, frantic in their pain, and the sounds which always accompanied them into the halls of healing.
We don’t have that so much anymore, and the quiet of a hospital is like the quiet of a cemetery. Still, over the ages, one thing about hospitals has remained constant, and that’s the bad food. Bad hospital food is almost a tautology, its so universally known. Show me a hospital with good food, and I’ll show you an cell phone that actually works in my apartment.
If I sound a little bitter, it’s because I don’t live the high-octane life of a former Capitol Hill intern who dodges air attacks on the White House by squadrons (or in this case, one) Cessna(s). Now that’s exciting!

More Humour from the Left

jelewis8 — Fri, 18 Apr 2003 16:04:14 +0000

From my dear sister Stephanie, who lives out in Seattle:

Does anyone else besides me think this is kind of funny?
Today I was waiting at another interminable traffic light in Seattle, when I glanced to my left (ironic) and saw a car with the following bumber stickers, one on each side of the bumber. They read as follows:
Free Tibet
End Chinese Occupation
and
No Iraq War
Okay, that makes a ton of sense to me. Let’s raise awareness of the poor people of Tibet and have concerts with folks like the Beastie Boys ranting about the horrors of the Chinese occupation there, but who are we to go over to Iraq and meddle in the affairs of the Iraqi’s, toppling their dictator, and setting up democracy for them. Let them fend for themselves. I don’t know, I’m sure it’s just that I’m too thick to figure this one out, but I did scratch my head a bit and almost missed the light that said “go”.