Still not quite enough.

I will add a journal entry here though.

My younger sister was home this week on break and so I'm allowing myself some "time off" of my thesis. She wanted to rent movies, at the beginning of the week, which is always great for me to do personally and professionally. We rented "The Grudge", "She Hate Me", "Saw" and "Girl With a Pearl Earing."

"The Grudge" was decent, by the end, but a lot like "The Ring"; I only saw the Japanese version.

"She Hate Me" was the best shot Spike Lee film I've ever seen, but conversely almost the worse story only second to "Girl 6."
The thing that sucked the worse about the film is that it starts off making you believe that it is brilliantly structured satire that comments on the current state of human greed, averice, and malice in government and corporate subculture only to belittle itself as a bizarre circus sideshow where the embattled star of the film becomes the soulmate of two lesbian women and their two collective children. WTF!?!

"Saw" was decent, but too predictable, Definitely nowhere near 7even. I didnt even hear about the movie until it was almost out of the theatres, but all that I'd read at that point said that it was overrated when compared to Seven, so I assumed that was wht all the early reviews compared it to.

"Girl with a Pearl Earing" was by far the best movie of the group and even that film had gaps that weren't filled either by poor direction, poor screenplay condensing of the novel, or just bad choices made by the original novelist. A lot of those things showed themselves when watching the "Behind The Scenes Featurette" on the DVD. The interviews layed some things out that should have been told visually that never were. Overall though it was better than average and Scarlett Johanson was gorgeous.

I am also going to check out the new "Dali" exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Museum with my sisters, if we can get tickets and we'll also be checking out the Egypt Gallery at the University of Penn. Museum, which is permanent. Visiting museums is something that I always secretly wanted to do, but was always "Too Cool", or too busy "Dealing with Real Life" to be frivolously visiting museums. However, now, that I almost consider myself an artist I feel justified in going. (Note: Children this is not a justifiable way of doing things, if you genuinely want to do something that there's nothing wrong with doing that don't let superficial obstacles get in the way.) Interestingly enough it took a rather unsettling experience at an artists' gallery for me to actually begin to view myself as an artist. I'll put that in the next Blog entry though.

Gotta move the images down and out of the way of the sidebar.

Technology is never perfect.

My first 3 modelled characters, almost COMPLETE

I'm finally getting the hang of Flikr, an image posting service that allows me to sore my images online, but also forward them to this blog to be viewed online.

Sexism and Racism in Contemporary Fantasy Art.

As I'm looking through reference material and rediscovering some art that I've seen in the past and admired, but didn't know the names of the artists of I am beginning to see certain elements of the artist's body of work and Fantasy art as a genre that concerns me. Namely, work that falls into the same category as Frank Frazetta, and Simon Bisely's work. While I would not would not be foolish enough, as a man, to say something as stupid as " I abhor the sight of voluptuous nude women." I do have two sisters and feel like a lot of the work within the fantasy genre is offensive to them. I intend on having more than one female character and am wrestling on how to depict them. FEEDBACK WOULD BE GREAT HERE. The female characters won't all be weak and in need of saving so then there is the idea of how to physically depict them. I would like to have an erotic elemen, if only for appeal, but I want to find some middle ground between an asexual "Butch" female and a gyrating "Music video girl."

A good sampling of Fantasy art:

Frazetta Gallery

Fantasy Gallery dot net

Still organizing

I'm still organizing and keep finding new images that are relevent to the work. I will take some time to post images some of my stuff up to this point. I probably, will have to use a variety web image posting services since Blogger doesn't support image posting directly, so once some images start going up some may/ or may not erretically be available and unavailable, but I'll have to see how it works out.

Travis Charest

Travis Charest's artistic style and depiction of character in a particular context is THE major influence on the aesthetic of my sci-fi/fantasy work right now. Travis Charest is one of the few comic book illustrators that has re-established the look of traditonal art styles prior to the "Comic Book" art style era in popular books published now. Charest's work seems influenced mostly by Greek/Italian/renaissance period art.

Joe Mad!

Joe Madureira's art is one the many artistic influences on my work. I'm still organizing my refernce art and am really trying to whittle down my selection to something manageable and also create an aesthic paradigm for my project which combines sci-fi/ high technology and ancient myth-based fantasy. Joe Mad and Travis Charest, both illustrators primarily for comic books and graphic novels, are my main influences for tastefully blending lots of elements. So, primarily that's what I'm doing today while sorting through all these reference images.

Organizing

Current Favorites:
two songs: "Ghetto Rock" - Mos Def, "Big Weenie" - Eminem
two movies: "House of Flying Daggers", "Kinsey"

While I have some characters and a basic animatic already built I need to take time to organize my reference materials to streamline my modeling and texturing workflow. Unfortunately, all of my material is scattered all over my computers. I hate to do product plugs, but I just got and started using Extensis Portfolio 7 and it really is awesome at helping to organize lots of images quickly.

NOMMO the movie

This is my first entry for my thesis journal. I am testing the blog thing to see if it will allow me to journal my progress in a convenient, effective and finished way. It will be ideal to be able to edit and publish this from anywhere since I move around so much, primarirly between Philadelphia and New York daily. If you didn't know already I'm Butch Arrington, currently a grad. student at NYU. I am a Master's candidate in NYU's Center for Advanced Digital Applications otherwise known as CADA. "Nommo" is the tentative title for my thesis project and the film teaser trailer of a movie I would like to produce VERY SOON! "Nommo" is a West African term that roughly means "Word Magic" and it is very often used in reference to idea of weaving, or crafting stories orally by a person like a griot. A very important element of my film concept is the idea that the story itself is a story that is like mythology being passed down from generation to generation. The opening of the story includes a father telling one of the many "modern" stories of RA to his son.