don's journal

january 22 hello from park city. weather report: heavy snow, 20 degrees, frozen hair, your windows will make long, low wooshing sounds all night. the first screening was good yesterday, saw a couple of other movies and later trudged through a blizzard to reach the taco bell at the summit of everest. sort of laying low today and also we discovered this hotel has a lord of the rings pinball game in the basement. second screening tomorrow at noon, so many things on my list to see and people to say hello to.

often during q+a's my left elbow will suddenly jettison my forearm over the audience's heads. please catch and return thank you


january 19 packing for almost 3 weeks on the road and just realized i don't think i own this many pairs of socks. see you soon in sundance/olympia/seattle/portland/eugene. possibly in a laundromat

january 8 2012 for the last few years i've had a dream sort of recur where i'm on a big airliner that for some reason has to make a routine emergency landing, onto a six lane freeway or in the middle of a village in africa, and we then have to drive the rest of the distance in the plane, looking out the window at cars and people go by, with a vague sense of relief. it's raining here and i've sort of been in slow motion for weeks. i should probably be writing but there are too many heavy things

my niece: bear! i get bear! it's in my woom! [runs to get bear] bear! now cuddle him! again! again!! now they're underwatah! and DANCING

i am no longer the cassette tape in your car
december 19 denver, san francisco, all four screenings wonderful, thank you,. ive been home again for a week, sort of not unpacking, sort of slugging around the house, watching a load of movies, sort of working on this new script again as well as somewhat thinking about the graphic novel that has been half buried in the yard for a very long time. i think i'm going to add a robot to it. most things seem to be improved with the addition of a robot. but i will probably paw at this script for a while first. 2012 is going to be busy with these things and we're also announcing a whole mess of tourdates. the ground is slimy with rain and leaves butthe sky just turned really pretty
sf, denver december 4 ""your xmas present will be the *thought* that i might remember your birthday"
reached the bay area, driving too fast in a weird rented cube with four more shows down: SB and LA, thank you, somehow we did it, three q+a's in one night, sold out screenings and a lot of complimentary mr pibb, a strange hotel room with a silver bean bag chair and view of palm trees and purple buildings. i actually forgot to pack my toothbrush. for the teeth in my mouth. the other teeth i have a separate brush for. san francisco you're next november 20 the first three shows are checked off the list and the movie is out of the oven and floating around the lower atmosphere in a fancy little suit. i added one last-minute short to the program lineup the night before the first screening and i think that was a good move. the two austin shows sold out in advance faster than anything i've been involved with and you will be pleased to learn that the majority of my q+a's no longer consist of glares, gardening tips, and long, slow groans. west coast you are next week, briefly, and then a whole bunch of stuff is being cobbled together for the first few months of the new year. i am going to paint some rooms around here. we resawed a hole in the house a few weeks ago to get the 2nd giant acme camera inside. the cameras look handsome standing together and i've given them horse's names. here is austin and houston:

november 10
it's still hard for me to believe fewer than ten people have seen "it's such a beautiful day" yet, i am clawing around the walls waiting to show this to you. a secret screening was held in montreal earlier this week for a few film festival staffers at the sommets du cinema d'animation de montreal (dec 3+4):
..............................................
"After the 23 minutes, when the lights turned on, I heard that the four of us were all crying quietly, and nobody said a single word. I don't know if you realize what you "did" - how big (?) is "this" - how far you make us go during these 23 minutes. My English being very poor, all this sounds quite stupid and empty for sure, but I just wanted to tell you that after the screening, I thought :
1. If there is one human being like this on Earth, it's ok. Then, it's ok.
2. I would like you not to burn or explode as they all do one day or another (the unique artists like you).
Thank you for everthing, merci pour tout."
..............................................
thank you marie-pierre and marco -- tomorrow night a screening at the bradford animation festival in the uk. next week usa premiere shows in austin and houston, and beyond. hello, hello hello i'll see you soon

november 7 getting tired of doing interviews and will now answer every question with, SNAKES.
"As an artist, what would you like your audiences to take away from your films?" SNAKES.

october 29 the new movie is finished: signed off on the first release print a couple of nights ago after a long week of color work while living in the most murdery motel in glendale. tonight is santa barbara, tomorrow moving the big camera out of the studio and trucking it to austin. i shot "rejected" on there in 1999 and everything else since, all the way through a good 90% of "it's such a beautiful day. the movie is finished + the end of an era...

october 24
subliminal arrows woven into the pattern of the airport carpet, to suggest movement. my flight smelled like ham

october 22
tonight i am declaring the soundtrack officially finished. almost four months to record, edit, and mix. off to the dolby lab tomorrow. collapse onto floor. i hear this soundtrack in my sleep and my soul is empty. the cat here likes to sit in boxes. also i have thought of some more album titles for you:
- let's go get haircuts!
- loud, gay chirping
- space groan
- i'm dancing in yellow
- everything is rubbable
- slithering to the lake
- i'm thinking tacos
- all animals can scream

this makes me happy. when i am 52 and sad in bed, please wheel a little tv into the room on a cart playing this, saying, "dooooon...."

october 7 the sky looks fake tonight and there are geckos all over the house and the wind keeps knocking over my plant. we have been beaten over the head with repeated little technical problems on "beautiful day" for the last three weeks.... time lost to lab errors, unexpected busywork, nonsense. the film is in no danger but i can't remember the last movie where in every department something seemed to be going wrong, all the time. most of it is out of my hands now except for the soundtrack which i am hoping not to go and ruin at the last minute. barreling very quickly towards the premiere date in mid-november. but i think we'll get there

october 4
this headline was on my news page today:

jaundice sounds like a girl's name
sept29 you know how in the dark crystal those machines suck the souls right out of the faces of the little pod people? that was actually protools. they were just working on their soundtrack for the third month. when i close my eyes all i see are wavelengths. it's finally raining tonight but i feel like angry chewed gum. but in happy news we should have a few opening tour dates to announce soon



sept 14
k needed help thinking of a slang compliment for "nice legs." i came up with:
meat columns
torso danglers
lower arms
i think i am fired from helping any more

sept 12 just locked picture on "it's such a beautiful day," i think. final running time about 23 minutes exactly, longest movie to date
sept 11 3:53am
i've just synched the last note of music to the last frame of the movie.... better late than never.... things are rattling in ways i wasn't expecting but i can make it work and i think we'll have a locked picture soon [famous last words]

this just in from the grocery store: a gentleman purchasing a six pack of clamato to the tune of "we built this city on rock and roll"
september 4 i think we might be ready to sneak the movie out to a few theaters somewhere in november. i am finally running out of stuff to fix in this sound mix. if the new footage comes out right, i think one more round of editing and we'll have a final cut. so i am painting the kitchen. i also bought a new thing to put some things in and now the living room looks better. today i met some dogs
hey look some pictures from "it's such a beautiful day" are over here look do you see?
august 28 2011
roll 16 is through the camera and in the fridge, i can't believe i've gotten up to 16 now, much of it being re-re-re-shoots, and i will dive deep back into work on the sound mix tomorrow, and i am adding this extra final thought so that i can find a way to fit yet another comma into this sentence, and, well, maybe three more. late at night the cats hop the fence to watch us swim and now it's become sort of a clockwork routine for them

august 24 film history: turns out that "leave the shutter open" option on the animation motor is a relic from the days of rotoscoping.... you'd flip that switch if you wanted to use the camera as a projector and load it with live action footage that you'd project down to the table for tracing one frame at a time. thus, you'd need to leave the shutter open after every advance. i noticed the other camera i have here has the same little archaic switch on it too, only this one's got a massive piece of very old red tape glued angrily across it, keeping it from ever being set to the "open" position. it seems this has beleaguered many a cameraman in the past. tonight the grocery store smelled like soapy pee and there are baby geckoes all over the house. wait that's not how you spell geckos
august 20 something of a disaster today.... it turns out the four rolls of footage i'd shot since may are all unuseable... the camera here in austin has been weirdly leaving the shutter wide open after every frame of animation was shot, thus capturing my hands moving the artwork in and out of position throughout every scene in a mess of overexposed blurs and blazing horror. i admit it looks experimental and very pretty, but it will give everyone seizures and the sudden appearance of giant hands will probably change the story in a negative way. so remember that simpsons halloween episode where homer keeps getting attacked by a cursed krusty doll? and finally they find a hidden "good/evil" switch on the back of the doll, and someone says, "well here's your problem, somebody had this doll set to evil." i've learned the camera has its own evil switch i wasn't aware of, an inexplicable stop-open switch that's been unknowingly set to leave the shutter hanging open through the last several hundred feet of animation. and i'm still trying to wrap my head around why on earth anyone would actually want to design such a thing for an animation motor that would, by design, ruin any frame-by-frame photography.... burbank, what have you done?
even though most of the ruined footage were reshoots that we could carry on without, it also contained the very last 30 seconds of the movie, which i didn't otherwise have coverage on. so the soundtrack's just about finished, all the other footage is there in the movie, we are just missing that last 3% of it... and though it is tempting to simply end the movie on "scene missing" cards, i will now shoot more camera tests, confirm that the evil switch is now properly set to good, and power through these reshoots. again. more. shooting. this will probably delay the movie being finished by a couple of weeks, but in turn that will probably delay the actual release of the movie by about a month

august 19 a week ago i dreamt i died in a plane crash. in spirit form, i could still contact people by sending thoughts directly into their heads... but they all assumed they were simply wishing i were still around, and dismissed my telegraphed messages as their own sad imaginations
august 16 i just accidentally texted someone, GET IP GAAG. i guess i'm just not going to explain it and see what happens
august 15 red ants have taken over a bedroom window and seem to be building something out of mud. tonight a car drove into a house and i stubbed my toe on the uneven sidewalk and we swam under a full moon
august 7
the cicadas in the trees rattle at all hours, the days are reaching 106 degrees, and the cat here can fluently pronounce the consonants "R" and "W."
i am getting mighty tired of listening to this soundtrack every day. there are few creative things left to do in there now and it's getting down to all the technical boredom, re-recording, polish, polish, polish, please don't put the headphones back on me. there are also reshoots and new takes left to edit in, about 800 feet of footage that i still haven't seen. all downhill to the finish line, but i've grown so mind-melded with the movie it's hard to believe there will one day be an end
there were a lot of cops out tonight and people yelling at children in the grocery store. the quote of the week was, "now your floors will never be moist." here is an unrelated picture that karinne took

" with little plumes of cigarette ash dancing off your black wings"
july 18 sometimes i mix up the word sparse with parsley and end up thinking things like, "income this month has been sort of sparsely."

july 17 i have about five minutes of film left to narrate and edit and will then have finished a rough draft of the soundtrack from beginning to end. it seems i am adding and discovering much more new music to include here and there + possibly skipping a lot of the music i had originally planned (as well as written), which gives me the strange dilemma of my long-ago-shot page of music credits being completely wrong and incomplete at the end of the movie. it is annoying and expensive to have to go in to reshoot a single page of credits, but if that's the most annoying problem i have right now i guess things must be going pretty ok

july 6
"you are the king of selective listening"
"i am the king!"

july 5 .......i'm about 1/4 of the way through carving out a skeleton sound mix and finding the right beats... meanwhile rearranging shots, yesterday finished one last roll of film, and am happy to report now that the movie is at least not going to suck... things are slowly sticking and tugging in the right directions, sometimes surprisingly so. animating, writing, and shooting for almost a couple years without arranging any of the scenes together is always a strange thing, seems like sculpting something in pitch blackness with maybe a tiny bit more light let into the room as you go, but it's only months later when these first edits and sound touches let in enough light to actually see the thing you've been chiseling for ages: "oh, i've got his head on backwards" - "oh, obviously this has to go here and i need one of these" - "wow, this is really just terrible"
i meant to type "exposed neg" on this can of film and accidentally put, EXPLOSED NEG
quote of the night, observing a clumsy fall: "if you had a sparkler in your ass that would have qualified as a firework."

june 23 2:35am i was a lot like cat today. i got up on the roof, i ate a lot, and now i'm sleepy. early sound work continues. i don't remember the narration being this hard before to actually get right. rewriting, changing music, etc. the air is warm and wet tonight from last night's storm and everywhere in the darkness all things are hissing and chirping and going rrrrrrr

june 22 the sky is thundery now and my bread tastes like pancakes

june 16-17 i realized i am missing one minor shot, which gave me the excuse to order yet more film and add a few other bits and pieces... one involving a strange little thing on a beach which i am going to draw tonight. the furnaces are burning hotter now and i feel i am slowly pounding this thing into some sort of shape, or at least something vaguely shaped like a movie. with everything finally flowing in order it's much more clear which sequences need a little more of this, and which need a little more of that. just saw "the tree of life" tonight and liked it very much, though after discussing it i realized that through the whole movie i'd thought sean penn was the other brother, which i guess sort of changed the whole thing for me. also took the wrong freeway to get to the movie theater, mere seconds after reminding myself to take the other freeway, so it seems like maybe there's a recurring something-wrong with me.
i fed the cat who thinks he lives here leftover beef chow mein and afterwards he looked up at me and said, "thank you very much, that was fantastic."
may 31
the first assembly of "chapter 3" has just been stitched together, it clocks in at just under 22 minutes though more footage is going in and more footage is going out. this is nerve-wracking to watch.... it is always easy to panic when you see about two years of work quietly whiz by like nothing... i'm probably shooting roll 13, all retakes, this weekend on the new film stock kodak's introduced to replace the stuff i usually use... their promotions make it sound like the stock's so versatile that its emulsion can capture the ghost images of your dead ancestors and then melt the screen with colors. which luckily is exactly what chapter 3 is all about.

may 12 well, it's getting exciting... the footage looks really great and some of it makes me want to run around... as i suspected though, the camera's shutter action began breaking down midway through the week, and by rolls 10 and 11 there are frequent bursts of overexposed frames interrupting every shot. suspecting this, i'd shot everything really fat and i'm pretty sure we can cut around all of it. meanwhile, i was forced to not use registration pegs for some of the really experimental stuff, and i think something also got misaligned when i printed many of these frames, resulting in many shots that are weirdly jittery, like a strange earthquaking hand-held look... so put together a lot of this material basically looks like i was desperately trying to finish the movie while under intense machine gun fire. but i think i will be able to use some of these weird flaws to the footage's advantage. maybe.

there's a handful of scenes in there that could be better though, particularly the last shots of the movie (rather important), and i'm therefore going to need to rethink and reshoot them here in austin with the screwy blind camera. could finishing this movie be any more dramatic? camera one has taken sniper fire! land the airplane, blind camera! land the airplane!

may 1 wasps have started living inside of one of my lawn chairs. it's like the worst chair you can select now.

april 30 austin. "it's a wrap." uh, until i see the footage and inevitably have to go back and reshoot and fix and a bunch of stuff. but we can pretend. 1600 feet of animation shot in 8.5 days, a new record. going to sleep now.
april 25 back in santa barbara, five days into shooting, 10-12 hrs a day at the camera, everything hurts. the giant stacks of animation left for "chapter 3" are formidable but i should be able to plow through by the end of the week. every late night i drive back and think i see blurry figures and faces in dark corners of streets. the magic camera stand blew out a light today and lately the shutter has been getting stuck on frames, but damn it, it still runs and we flow together like old times. when i re-opened the studio for the first time in seven months, the door wedged on a massive pile of junk mail that had amassed beneath the mail slot, damp and literally rotting from leaking rainwater
april 14, with nothing to do until i go shoot next week, i shaved my beard off and sat down and began writing this feature screenplay i've had hanging in a tree for years. in one twelve hour plus sitting i have poured out 33 finished pages and am feeling rathergreat.

april 9
i just accidentally sent an email signed as "dion" :(

april 8 i drove by the google street view car today. maybe i should have waved or done something fun but i sort of sadly drove past like i was in trouble. also i think the conflicting sudden impulses of all the different fun things i could do on the spot would've collided and i'd have just sort of thumped against the driver side window. the woman behind the counter at the post office looked like she'd been crying all morning. also last week we were almost run over by a high speed police chase. (not the woman in the post office)

"I do not like the picture at all, -- in fact I cannot find words to express how much I dislike it.
-- You were never physically attractive to me; you are neither graceful nor beautiful, and you evidently know nothing of the laws or properties of beauty.
Otherwise you could not have sent me such a picture, as it could only disgust me.
Whatever liking I have had for you, it has never been of such a character that I could be otherwise than disgusted by such a picture as that.
It is unutterably coarse and gross and beefy. It is simply unendurable."

march 27 2011, i think i finished animating today, i think. unsettling. i am restless. according to the journal i started drawing this way back in october 2009, easily another life ago. i can't remember when i started writing, i doubt those first drafts resemble this much anymore, it's grown and grown and grown into something sort of weirdly great. stacks and stacks of stuff waiting here to be shot, plenty of months of production work still ahead, but my nights of drawing little round headed things in successive motion seem to be over for now. everything will be ok turns five years old this year, what a long way to tell a story. the weather here is good. once the summer humidity hits, you don't want to go outside much other than to swim. cats melt and can be poured into convenient six packs

march21 a glimmer of good news....the austin camera passed its test with flying colors, looking clean and free of bad things. of course i am shooting almost blind on it (no working eyepiece, framing things by squinting straight into the little reflex mirror) but i should at least be able to get some easier shots tackled here in case i'm not able to get it all though the magic camera in santa barbara. i still can't believe i own two of these beasts, resurrected from life support, in different states. today a turtle scowled at me for an extended period of time and i put a plastic wolf tattoo on my arm. we were going to hike but sara brought the wrong shoes.
march16, 17 sxsw is happening and downtown is wall to wall shuffling tote baggin hipsters, rockstars, aggressive LA types, hula hoop girls and ukeleles, no parking, and warily passing drunk white guys post-beaten up and left bleeding on the sidewalk. so i haven't been going downtown very much. but i did see the new werner herzog cave documentary and it's pretty great. i also saw a michael stipe thing, followed by a band that screamed "geiissshaaaaa!" a lot while we ignored all the motion around us and talked about the end of the world while watching the terrifying radioactive news coming out of japan on a small blue screen. also last night i had to cut a wasp in half but in the morning it was a moth.
i've just booked a flight back to santa barbara in one month to shoot, so now i have to buckle down and actually finish the rest of this movie. really hoping to shoot some of the simpler stuff on the cri-ppled camera wondering what it's doing in my house, i shot a strip test on it today to make sure the gate is at least not full of bug hairs. incidentally kodak has forever discontinued my usual film stock for these cameras and i've just bought the last four rolls of it in existence... i guess there's a replacement stock but it's 200t instead of 100, and change scares me. we found ourselves drinking with davefoley the other night, who wound up curled up in the dirt in his suit. blame geoff. last i saw him he was doing that thing where you go down a staircase walking carefully backwards on all fours. i am still not altogetherhere but i just found a cookie to eat. quote of the day: "it would be funny at first but i am sandy and determined"
march 7 who wants to go to ikea thisweek? march 6 down to maybe three shots left to animate, the last three i've been stalling for weeks for not having figured out yet ....one in which a character is viewing "stunning works of art," the sort of scene you immediately hate yourself for writing when you sit down to actually try and deal with it. need to grimly stare these down as quickly as i can this week and then book a long trip to the santa barbara camera, i wonder if she misses me. every day i've painted a different wall in the house. quote of the week: "if i was run over by a bus would you go barf on a stripper?" i think i had something else to tell you but i can't remember
this is maybe the most interesting article you will read about "wisdom teeth."

february 22
grrrARRR
[climbs out of hole in the desert]
rarrara rrarrr arrrrrr
[lumbering around landscape with claws]

february 20
the austin flea market = machetes, cock fighting dvds, and last supper paintings
february 16 it's warm again, with fat grasshoppers in the dead lawn and happy rolling cats on doorsteps. i have about ten very difficult shots left to animate and then i'm done...
february 7 the ending is almost totally storyboarded now. i...i can't believe how many shots there are in this movie. every time i think i'm getting close it all just expands just a little bit more. but the light at the end of the tunnel is almost in sight. knocking them down one at a time. getting hard to leave the house. this movie is going to eat your face.
february 4 my friend molly sometimes teaches illustration at elementary schools: this is a kid's inexplicable drawing of two dragons dropping their plastic water bottles down a storm drain to engage in sudden battle. i want to frame it

february 3 highs in the 20s this week, possible snow tonight, animating in front of the space heater with a scarf, coat and hat
january 31 i bought a piano a few weeks ago and am happily getting back in the habit of playing every day. i have conquered two gnossiennes, one more to go. above certain phrases, most composers' notes to the musician will read something like "softly" or "brightly"... satie's fantastic notes read, "open your head," "arm yourself with perspicacity," "don't leave," and "how to achieve absolutely nothing."
there's a huge storm blowing through tonight, wind and rain throwing trees around and snow is on the forecast in two days. tonight i've been drawing an elegant creature though the animation hasnt reached elegance yet.
january 30 everybody had a bad week. crushed my finger, really smashed it, thankfully not the drawing hand but i'm not sure i've ever felt such physical pain before, like the same level of awfulness for ten minutes that leaves you writhing on the carpet exclaiming things. then it swelled up and the fingernail turned alarmingly blue with blood and long story short i learned this trick from a doctor on youtube where you muster the courage to light up the tail of a paperclip til it's red hot and drive a burning hole in the nail to drain it all out. too much information? nobody's reading this anyway. so stabbing burning metal repeatedly into my hand was how i spent the other morning. let's hope this week's a little better yeah? completed three beautiful shots so far in the ending to "chapter 3", it's really happening.
"Perhaps that is what has made us America's Pretzel."
january 24 wrapping up a few shots tonight of bill under a very familiar tree. the ending is finally up next, maybe starting the first shots in a day or two, and i'm getting really jumpy to launch into it now.
in this shot from last week i had to animate bill very, very small. this was actually spoken in conversation today: "i'm curious what dr. handy says on groundhog day."

january 15 i'm starting to stare into the future (it's eerie but i do this) + wondering exactly how long it'll take to finish "chapter 3" and whether it'll still be deliverable in time for another fall tour... and in turn how wise it will be to pull the trigger on starting tour preparations, say, over the summer, if the finish line for the movie is still in limbo. i seem to be a couple months behind where i thought i'd be. sort of began storyboarding the ending sequences which is really exciting and terrifying. they are huge.
this is a totally useless conversation i had on 8/30/09 while working on the sound for "wisdom teeth"
me: i cant think of what sound effects to put with these shots
sara: birds and puddles
me: i didnt think puddles made sounds
sara: they do whn my feet are in them
me: if puddles could sing their voices would be low and groany
me: this person in the scene is in intense pain and the screen sort of goes abstract. i dont want to use sound effects i would ordinarily put here because ive already kind of done them to death
sara: doens't pain sound like "wahwahwah"
me: well its not the person making the sounds.... its the sounds of the image
sara: i know that!
me: wah wah wah?
sara: i didn't mean a person saying that.
me: like a siren you mean?
sara: no, not like a siren like a pounding headache
me: like a low drone? waaaaaaaaaaaah waaaaaaaaaaaaah
sara: yeah that pulsates
me: "ow this really hurts! WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH"

january 11 2011 where i've been lately
january 6 2011 happy new year. is it too late to say happy new year? after weeks of compositing shots, it feels really great to actually be drawing again. hello paper. hello pencil. i've cleared a lot of shots out of the way now and almost ready to get started on the ending. maybe after one more week of all this. i don't know why but my hair seems to keep turning red
december 20 the pool is full of drowned caterpillars. heading to california tomorrow, my niece is toddling around now and the only word she knows how to say is "wow." everything is wow. which, when you think about it, is really the only word you need. at 2am tonight the moon is going to turn red and disappear.
"because you speak to me in words and i look at you with feelings."
december 11 at&t assigned the house a phone number that used to be a discount shoe store so a half dozen people a day call me for shoes. sometimes all they say after you pick up is, "where y'all at....exactly." the house still needs more attention and furniture but i haven't been doing much the last couple of weeks but gain weight and try to push these remaining scenes up the hill. my mouth felt weird today. tonight i'm working on a little shot of bill rising out of a chair, and a few little shots after that i'll have nothing left to animate but the very last scene of the movie, an amorphous chunk of story that's so free-sprawling and weird that i haven't got much of an idea even how long it will be, one minute or several. it's going to be large and difficult and an adventure to figure out, and then that will be it. i wonder how many times i've drawn that little hat.
your quote of the day: "often it's just sound effects or observations about sensations in my mouth."
your quote of the week: "ringo was scrunchy."
look, they are waving at you, from across time. they were just like you, once.
NOVEMBER 16 I DON'T KNOW WHY THIS IS IN CAPS
on paper i'm periously close to finishing animating "chapter 3," yet it's going to be a very slow crawl to that finish as it seems every single shot from this point on is gonna be difficult, time consuming, and tediously special effecty. but i'd guess i have only about five more minutes to get through. "wisdom teeth" has been sitting finished on a shelf for so long i've almost forgotten about it... showtime picked it up several months ago but hasn't decided yet when exactly they're going to show it, though it should turn up both online and on tv almost any day now. i think? here is your quote of the week: "only one apple pleases the japanese."
this is another still from "chapter 3," shot from so long ago it feels like another life

"i would have covered you in glitter glue and thrown a stuffed owl at your face"
nov 1 happy late halloween, a cat has decided he lives in my house and bangs his head nightly against the glass door. i'm sinking into a number of weird hybridy special effect shots in chapter 3 now, bouncing drawings and things back and forth from analog to digital, eventually printing entire scenes back out in the form of several hundreds of composite photo prints that'll be further messed with when i go to shoot them under the camera, one at a time. it's strange stuff and the few scenes ive tried this on look so good i sort of have to design others now in the same miserably time-consuming way. it seems like i'll probably need to return to the santa barbara camera somewhere in december to february to shoot the final rolls of the movie, which i guess isn't such a big surprise. here's a picture from chapter 3 that was shot back in june or july. will probably dribble out more pictures to the journal soon if i remember. chapter 3 will be in theaters next year. i think it's gonna rain soon

oct 9 i'm the last person on earth to have never carried a mobile phone before, i kind of hate them on principle but had to get a temporary one during the move. you may receive a text from me that is all confused symbols. sometimes it lights up and i throw it across the room

oct 7 pictured here is the "new" 35mm animation stand currently living in my house. we look at each other awkwardly like teenagers at a dance. i think it dates to the 1950s but i'm not sure. possibly in the early 1830s it was used in eastern europe to execute foreign prisoners of war. i hope to be able to shoot the last third of "chapter 3" on this so i don't have to run back and forth to california to finish the film on my main rig out there. i have quite a bit more drawing to do before i'll be ready to shoot anything again, but so far the eyepiece i have for this camera seems damaged and can't be used. i don't suppose anyone out there has a spare eyepiece for a 35mm acme? am i the only person in the world now who owns two of these monstrosities? oct 6 through all the unpacking and furnishing and planning ive left one room in the house completely empty, it only has a window and a floor and i like this very much

sept 19 animating again, on a broken chair, covered with anonymous bruises. in two weeks i have survived a tornado, a strange bald man appearing in the backyard, flooding water from the worst storm in years,
hydrochloric acid spilled on my hand, a camera abandoned for days in the rain. still no working phone until the end of the month. austin you are trying to stop me but i will never stop crawling forward.
on rainy nights the toads have orgies that carpet the lawn. sometimes their bodies get lodged in the pool filter, swelled up like little basketballs. but when there are stars, we swim.

sept 6 the house is beautiful but i still sort of vaguely feel like i'm only visiting. i think this feeling may pass once we saw a giant goddamn hole through the wall to get the animation camera inside.
sept 5 hello from the middle of nowhere a few days ago: arizona, new mexico, texas?
august 31 arizona. picked up the newly adopted 2nd giant camera rig on the way through LA and i hope it will be happy living with me. it seems a bit different than my other one, almost turned upside down.
moving injuries sustained so far: a cut up left hand, sore limbs, banged up leg, blisters, sunburn, as the plants sitting next to me flew forward in the car i instinctively threw out a protective arm that squarely impaled my right hand around my cactus,
a television set dropped down a flight of stairs. tomorrow to west texas and more bleeding

august 20 ive decided to give up on moving and just live sadly among my dusty box towers. ive painted faces on the boxes and given them ladies names
august 13
david mentioned someone was acting "pretty dickish." pretty dickish sounds like the name of an overweight british prostitute from the mid-1800s. she mostly serviced lonely sailors from her harborside bedroom and spent many quiet mornings staring longingly into the foggy sea. someone please write a novel about pretty dickish. someone else please make an oil painting.
"wisdom teeth" is due to be available all over the place in just a couple more months. finally, finally finished wrestling with the colors in that one and delivering it soon. some movies you think you finished long ago but realize you've been walking many miles with them still clinging to your leg
august 12 2010
my apartment and the studio are now filled with heavy horrible boxes stacked in horrible towers. i am filthy with boxes. boxes, boxes, boxes. there is still more packing to go, more throwing things in dumpsters, more surreptitiously throwing things in neighboring dumpsters in the middle of the night when this one has been filled, more covering oneself with dust bunnies and standing in corners that used to be occupied for years by furniture and now provide strange and shocking new vantage points to familiar rooms that have never been seen. i am not used to navigating my new box maze surroundings and sometimes they come crashing down around me. i have also dropped a very heavy sharp object as well as a large vacuum cleaner within inches of my bare foot (the same foot, though not at the same time), have twisted my back more than once struggling furniture down stairs (lift with your back, right? like in a sudden, jerking motion?), and found many depressing buried artifacts from ghosts of girlfriends past underneath large objects not moved in years. i think i am supposed to be excited about moving into a new house in a brand new city but mostly i just want to drink a lot.
meanwhile, each film - tens of thousands of pages of animation in ridiculous haphazard stacks dating to 1995 - is finally now being gathered and organized and placed into properly labeled storage boxes. it's probably something i should have done long ago and now have a good excuse. i have caved under the amount of work to do with this and recruited an intern to help and she encourages me to continue with the box plan every time i break down and want to burn the whole mess of them.
the garage sale we held on facebook was a roaring fun success, countless random items sent to people from the studio included wonky rare shirts, books, props from the films, sea monkeys, drawings, production odds and ends, dinosaur vhs tapes, a dvd of "lawrence of arabia" signed "i did not make this movie," photographs i took in elvis's living room, hundreds of other things i can't now remember but should probably apologize for

july 31 2:27am
finished roll 7 of chapter 3, which, depending on many factors, might well have been the last footage i ever shoot in the santa barbara studio. kind of strange and sad to think about that. the last 48 hrs have been the busiest in years. trying to work on two films while packing up all of your belongings under a deadline, i don't recommend it
july 27 today was tinted yellow. i just got through one more shot in the studio, trying to finish out this roll of film before heading out of town this weekend + leaving the state a few weeks after. i just went to the kitchen to get another trash bag and returned with only a soda
july 25 packing up, throwing out, everything must go. dust-clouded treasures unearthed from closets and boxes include a 1994 warranty from my first computer (800 mb + a fax-modem!), a horrifying rubber monkey frozen in the half-turned act of throwing an orange, a 7" copy of crush with eyeliner signed by dennis miller (what the hell?)
july 23 i think i might have gone and bought a house. it's a very sudden and terrifying grown-up feeling, and i take comfort in knowing that the house i've selected is completely irresponsible and ridiculous
july 13 dreamt last week: i was watching "chapter 3" dailies with, inexplicably, a professor from my old film school. there was very little drawn animation in it, it was mostly repurposed photographs from the 1970s: pictures of bowie, fashion, pretentious closeups of pornography, and i remembered shooting all of this but couldn't remember anymore how any of it fit into the movie and the professor grew impatient and said, "come on, what is all this shit?" as i slowly realized that i totally sucked
july 6 on my evening walk around the block yesterday: a large cooking pot in a bush, a pair of panties on the sidewalk, an old wooden chair on its side, a vhs copy of field of dreams against the curb. it's like a bad flea market lives inside of a raincloud above the neighborhood.
july 3 because you want the day to come sooner
powered through a second roll of film in exhausting record time, heading back to los angeles tuesday for another full day of lab chores, then returning to austin to look at more real estate and pretend i know what i'm doing. "is this real wood?"
last week i knocked together a beautiful frigging roger rabbit shot at the last minute on a weird lark... and on the previous roll i was even rotoscoping something... what the hell's going on here? i might be done animating in a couple more months.
tonight = doing a terrible job coloring a scene with pastels, spilled ten thousand cheerios on the carpet
june 27
don: that was close
don: their feet probably look like ground beef
j: yuck
don: in north korea they are actually going to make burgers from the shamed team's feet
don: i read that
j: YUCK
don: north korean shameful foot burgers
j: what is wrong with you?

the bottom of the door to the studio is warped outwards from water damage and has a deep splintering crack in it that a beautiful big black spider has moved into. every night when i go open the studio door she runs into it for cover
june 22 quote of the day: "at first i thought the elf was crying and i think i like it better that way"
june 21 been shooting in the dark every day for about 6-8 hours + ordered more film today to carry on this week. been going for days without speaking to or seeing another person and the scary part of that is i'm sort of ok with it. but i think my days of making movies like this are numbered. i might have half the movie in the can now, maybe more, so much work left to be done but some of it might be looking really good and if we cross our fingers we might see something beautiful
june 7

at about 10:24 you can see the light of the sunrise outside my window move across the page

june 6 this week: order film for next round of chapter 3 photography... consider september trip to europe for two screenings... consider plans for japanese tour after chapter 3 is finished... wrap up plans to release wisdom teeth everywhere this summer... look for a house to buy... don't panic... possible labwork in burbank for a day... think about going to the beach... cheer up a sad friend... draw draw draw
june 5 gabe took this great picture last week... it seems the closer you look at it the less you know

june 3 tonight i have to begin cutting out 216 little holes.
june 1 my ipod, which i've had for 5 years, is finally starting to die. the battery is shot and it won't turn on at all unless it's plugged into a wall at a very specific angle. it only can access songs intermittently, and when it does play, it will skip past several songs on its own, playing only music of its own choosing. i've already ordered a new one and its on the way. but i've been listening to the dying ipod while i work for the past few days, and i like to think it's been selecting these special songs to play in its last breath of time, as a way of saying good bye

may 30 spent the week in austin looking for a place to live... old friends, absinthe, ghosts in the fireplace
may 26 i may have written a new ending for chapter 3 on an airplane, scribbled in the open margins of a magazine. it was at first an idea for a completely unrelated new film and would be a gigantic leap to make, but i'm thinking it might work somewhat beautifully
may 23 searching for real estate is the worst thing ever. key quotes from my depressing weekend online include:
"The trampoline may convey."
"Beautiful wood & glass fron door welcome's you!!"
"it doesn't get any better than this."