2004 YEAR END REVIEW 02
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The decision I made in March, to do this children's video was mainly financielly motivated. Rather try and sustain myself through a long feature process, I thought it better to do something short. A children's show can be 30 mintues on a DVD and still sell well. I figured getting some project out quickly and maybe starting a series would make other plans possible. I am not sure I really wanted to do this show. That is probably why only one sequence, of about two mintues, got done.

In April, I wrote this:

New things pop up on occasion and sometimes things change considerably. I have been doing a wide variety of side gigs for some time. I did J4A, which turned out to be a fiasco where it may never find its way to air. I did an anime style pilot, for which I was paid, but have yet to hear from those for whom I did it. I have done some sound FX editing work and a few other things.

With my plans for much larger scale publishing on future projects, comes the need for much larger scale gigs. Those gigs are becoming increasingly easy to find, probably because of the DVD released through TOKYOPOP. More people are calling, not that I'm complaining. The time is here to build up the means and methods to do the future release right!

The month of April took me to ZOIC Studios, best known for their work on the Joss Whedon television properties such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly. I actually saw Joss Whdeon there! I wasn't on one of his shows though.

I worked on John Woo's remake of lost in Space. You can see some of the work I did on it in my 2004 reel by clicking here. Of course, that took up all my time and little else got done. On the plus side, I got a lot of money. I also learned Combustion 3, which is a top notch compositor.

Working on the last leg of s huge studio project pretty much takes up all hours of the day. Needless to say, very little got done on my own projects. By then end of the month, TOKYOPOP told me they were holding actual copies of World of Hartz in hand, and TechTV Japan called to get script information to translate Understanding Chaos for showing in Japan. Not a bad month if I do say so myself.

In May I was in a bit of a slump. This means I probably spent most of my time watching anime. I also decided to restructure how I work based on the new things I learned at the studio. World of Hartz hit the shelves, and I wrote a new schedule to better manage my time and get more work done. J4A won a videographers award, but there was still no word on if it would ver hit TV.

I started doing models for Daniel, tested new software and worked a bit on a freelance video game gig. I realized that it had been two months since the mind animation tests and yet I hadn't taken it anywhere. I had a lot of money from the studio gig though, so I was probably buying lots of DVD's. That same month, SOny announce the release of a 3 CCD HDV camera to counter JVC's earlier release of a single chip model. The HDV wars had begun and I raved about this on the net in many places. On the whole it seemed to be a month of passive observation.

In June J4A won a Telly award and I finally put mind animation to the test on the opening sequence of Daniel: Visions and Dreams. This was my first foray into full high definition work, outside of a major studio anyway. I used much of what I learned on my last studio gig to make the transition.

I didn't post for the first two weeks of that month. Near the end of the month, my computer died and I did a full system restore:

I began to revisit the issue of cloth simulation. As I have written many times, my goal has never been to do a full 3D CGI movie. I want to do anime as it has always been. I see no reason to think I can or should improve upon it. Anime cloth and hair don't move like realistic cloth and hair and so I decided the days of full cloth simulation in anime were over. By the end of the month, I installed my music software to prepare to score the trailer. This was clearly a slow time.

More to come...

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