Busy weekend! We had the in-laws come up to visit us on Saturday and Sunday, which was fun; I can always count on eating at a variety of restaurants when they visit, and I'm always stuffed to capacity by the time they leave. Unfortunately, I was sick yesterday (I could go into details but suffice to say that I couldn't afford to be away from a toilet for more than fifteen minutes at a time), and so I had to miss work and my first class today. Fortunately, I felt fine by the afternoon, so I was able to make it to my Comics 2 class. In today's class, I learned that A) Vince mocks people's excuses in funny voices, and B) at least half of the comics artists recognized as 'the Greats' are complete lunatics. The key to maintaining one's grip on reality, said Vince, is balance. Maintain a life outside of your comics work, interact with other human beings from time to time. Not relying on coffee and blow to keep up your page rate probably helps, as well. Patrick assured me that, just as in any vocation, there are people who become workaholics and forget all other things in life, and there are people who allow themselves to grow bitter and twisted by their experiences.

Let me finish my class schedule from last week:

Fri. 9:30am-12:00pm - Writer's Workshop: Character. This class is technically divided into three classes, which are held in succession throughout the semester. I'm not entirely sure why this is done; I must assume that there are people out there who only feel they need to take a class on Plot or Theme (which are the other two segments), and have the whole Character thing down. I was excited to take this class - any opportunity to write creatively - and I was not let down. One of the assigned readings was by Anne Lamott, an author that Marilyn introduced me to, and whose writings I enjoy. For our in-class exercise, we tried three different methods of getting the creative juices flowing. The first was Free Writing. This is little more than sitting down and writing about whatever comes to your mind about a given topic for a period of time, without pausing to think about it. That makes my hand cramp. The second was what she called "Clustering" (when I was first introduced to it years ago, my teacher had called it "Brainstorming"). This is when you write down a number of words that come to mind in connection with a given topic. The word she chose was "hurricane", which, given recent events, inspired a flurry of words. Then you circle words, connecting each one to another word that you find relates to the first in some way. While a couple of the pairings are fairly obvious, some of the other connections suggest an interesting exploration of how they're connected, leading into symbolism. It also helps you to pull out more thoughts and memories about a topic than you might otherwise had come up with if you were simply writing prose (the other word we tried it with was "5th grade", which, while actually being two words, drew more words and images from my mind than I thought I remembered about 5th grade). Finally, she mentioned journal keeping, which is simply writing daily. She emphasized that this is different from keeping a blog, but I think she said that only because she feels that different connections are made in the brain when you put pen to paper than when you're banging on the keyboard.

The last thing we did in class was to draw a mask. It could be of anything we wanted, she told us, so I drew a wolf. Don't know why that came to mind; it just did. Then we switched masks with the person next to us. I got a girl's mask, and it looked as if she had simply drawn a version of herself. No problem. We were to give the character a name and describe them in a few sentences. Then, she went to each student in the room and had them ask a single question that we had to answer about the character. What was interesting to me was not so much how quickly and easily the character seemed to take shape (as I do this with roleplaying game characters all the time), but that when the girl got the mask back, she said it was eerie how well I had described her. Neat.

By the way, my wolf's name turned out to be Les Hairyson, a wolf-man with a surprisingly gentle side who loves disco and entertains himself by chasing villagers.

Wed. 1:00pm-6:00pm - Introduction to Animation. My teacher for this class, Tom Schroder, looks like a Slater - he looks to me as if he could be related to Kham and Chris. His mannerisms kind of reflect that, too. He told us about animation, giving us a lot of detail on what sorts of things to expect and so on; his last comment was, "Oh, and the other thing about doing animation? It sucks." Essentially, he was trying to warn us that while seeing the finished product is enormously gratifying, the tedious, lengthy bit that takes up the overwhelming majority of creating animation - the repetitive drawings of the same thing in slightly different positions - is really not so much fun. I like him; he seems like a very down-to-earth guy, and the three pieces of his animation that I've seen (a commercial for Tylenol or some sleepy-time cold medicine, I don't remember which; a black-and-white film festival animation drawn to an interview with a guy who rode his bicycle for five hours to visit his girlfriend; and a computer-animation short about a kid who goes out on a motorboat with his parents), he seems like the non-dangerous-wackamole variety of independent animator. We read a handout from a book on Disney which spoke about the techincal terms that arose for different animation cornerstone techniques, terms which these studio animators came up with in the '30s and have since become the industry standard. Then we watched a couple of animation clips that illustrated each of these terms (including six seconds of the Ostrich ballet scene in "Fantasia" over and over and over and over...never have I been so anxious to see what happens after the lead ostrich begins to dance). Our homework was to draw a short flip-book style animated sequence on index cards: 50-150 pages. I've only worked on mine one night at work, and I got up to 36 cards, so I feel pretty good about it so far. It's a cartoony Viking pulling an axe out of his pocket and going into a berserker frenzy with it. Fun stuff.

One of the things we did over the weekend was go to see "The Brothers Grimm," Terry Gilliam's latest movie. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," with its themes of reason vs. fantasy (Jacob Grimm is the "Fantasist" in this one) and soldiers in Napoleonic garb (Jonathon Pryce especially reminds me of his "Munchausen" character, but that's probably because of his antagonistic role and thick accent). Now, let me preface this by saying that a lot of people at my school really didn't like it (in their words, "it sucked"), and so I was a little worried that it might not be as good as his other films...yet, at the same time, I don't put a lot of stock in the tastes of my fellow students, and I know that Terry Gilliam is not usually very conventional, which is one of the reasons I like his work so much.

Well, I liked it. I'm not sure how to compare it to the quality of his other movies, as I don't think I've seen it enough times yet. But I will eventually, which I guess is enough of a testament to how much I liked it. While it plays very loosely with the actual history of the Brothers Grimm (one minor detail is that Jacob is portrayed as the younger Grimm, when in real life he was the elder), it does take place right before their fairy tales were originally published (a year before, if my math is correct), in French-occupied Germany during the Napoleonic wars. It's filmed in the Czech Republic, so it has this wonderfully dark and medieval feel to it (for those who know what I'm talking about, even though it was set about 300 years after the appropriate period, it had a very Warhammery look and feel, which I liked). It draws on at least seven or eight different fairy tales that I can recall, and there are probably more that I may have missed; bits of each are used, but they play out slightly (or very) differently than the fairy tale version. Yet it's all dark and a bit frightening, as it should be.

For those who are sensitive about such things, there is a poor little kitten who meets a brutal end. You've been warned.