Mike King

Serendipity

My wife and I went out on Friday night to take advantage of her parents’ visit and the built-in babysitting factor.

It was a totally unplanned night. We decided to go to Pasadena and take a random walk to see what might catch our eye. While walking around, we decided upon a Nepali/Himalayan restaurant for dinner. And on the way there, we saw there was supposed to be a Who cover band playing at a pub.

Perfect! we thought. Dinner and then some cool music.

Dinner went great. We finished up a few minutes before 9pm and then headed for the pub. Hmm, not much of a line. But then, we were a little late getting there and they’d probably already let everybody in. Ok. Get carded, pay our cover charge. Go upstairs. Uh, where’s the band?

Not to mention me and my wife do not fit in with the locals at all. We: nerdy, middle aged parents. They: twenty-something trendy hipsters.

Do we stay or do we go? Hope the band shows up? Maybe we’re in the wrong part of the pub?

Oh, look. The band cancelled. Next show: 11pm tribute to Kiss. No, thanks. Goodbye cover charge.

Feeling like total idiots, we head east towards our nerdy failsafe: Barnes and Noble. On the way there, I catch sight of a sign we hadn’t noticed before. Here was 1 Colorado and a movie theater. Maybe we could still catch something. We check out the box office, nothing started for another hour. And then we notice a handwritten sign. Serenity charity screening tickets on sale inside the lobby. Show starts at 10pm. We look around and finally notice the Blue Sun t-shirts and the pom-pom hats. Folks dressed for a real shindig. Ah, our kind of people.

We go inside and buy the last two tickets for the show. Shiny.

Learning to fly

It all started with this puppy. (Actually, this a photo I grabbed from the Internet, our plane is blue.) An Air Hog Aero Ace I grabbed for $40 while on a shopping trip for a birthday present for one of my daughter’s classmates. It flies really well when there’s no wind. Unfortunately, we get a lot of radio interference or something, especially on sunny days. So it’s not that controllable when we’d most like to use it. But we did fly it enough to get both me and my daughter hooked.

Then last weekend we went to see some RC jets flying around. And a friend of ours showed us his RC helicopters. I’ve always wanted a helicopter. My daughter wanted to show off her flying too, but the Aero Ace wouldn’t respond at all to the controller. We had to give up and she was very disappointed. Which brings us to this weekend…

A trip to Hobby People over in Pasadena yielded this the Rookie ($30) and the Sabre ($99 on sale!). The Rookie flew great, but it needed more space than we had in front of our house. The Aero Ace could do okay in the limited space, the Rookie needed a field. We went to the park last night and this afternoon and got some good flying in.
The helicopter is one of the easier to fly ones. But I’m still having a tough time learning! I managed to get off the ground last night for a few seconds. And today I tried again. I lost control and crashed and broke the main rotor and popped the rotor head off its bearings. We had to go back to the hobby store for replacement parts. Boy was I upset with myself. Should have given myself more room to fly. Fixing the helicopter was frustrating because I couldn’t get the blades balanced. Only one original blade broke, so I just replaced that. The other must have been damaged too, because until I replaced it as well, the helicopter was unflyable.
A simulator would help avoid loss of control and crashes. But it’s $200! I found a shareware sim for my Mac here and while I can’t actually hook up my transmitter for practice, I’m finding it useful just using the keyboard controls and getting used to controlling the helicopter from different orientations. It’s going to be a while before I get really good at flying. It’s very fun.

Online hit ‘Broken Saints’ joins DVD canon

cnet.com has a story here about Broken Saints getting a DVD distribution deal with Twentieth Century Fox. Broken Saints is an online graphic novel that caused some serious waves on the Internet during its 3 year run.

I’ve watched some of the trailers, and the story/art isn’t my cup of tea. But I am impressed that they managed to create and execute an idea that so many viewers found compelling.

Now if I could just get off my butt and work on my own project some more. This kind of news always inspires me and depresses me. It inspires me to see that someone pulled off something cool. And depresses me because I can’t seem to bring any of my own projects to completion.

Anyway, here is a link to the Broken Saints official site.

Ashes and Snow

www.ashesandsnow.org

Took a field trip last Friday with a bunch of folks from work to see an art exhibit over at the Santa Monica pier. The piece was called “Ashes and Snow” and I thought it proved that you could have too much of a good thing.

The photos and films are really cool. But a whole exhibit of this stuff, plus 3 films (one of which runs for about an hour) was just too much. With every photo and film sharing similar themes and style, there was no contrast. So despite the beautiful images and stylish presentation, I found myself becoming bored about halfway through.

Innovation quote of the day

“The most common mistake companies make with innovation is thinking that they can control it and define it. By definition, innovation is the unexpected – it is what changes the nature of your business as opposed to just extends it in a linear way. Companies think they know what innovation is, when they should be open to something they did not expect.”

Kevin Werbach, professor of legal studies and business ethics, the Wharton School
from this post.

bye bye, blogger.com

Yahoo webhosting just activated blog support as part of their standard features. So I moved my blog over from blogger.com to this new WordPress blog. So far, so good. I like the features and plugins. It seems much easier to maintain and extend than the blogger stuff.

I feel a little guilty for leaving blogger. They were good to me, and it was my first blogging system. But they haven’t seemed to add any new things in a while. Plus it was always a little weird trying to publish from their site to my site.

WordPress installed right onto my site without a hitch. I know enough PHP and html to be dangerous. So I’ve been customizing things a bit here and there. I should probably be spending my time elsewhere, but strangely enough I find this to be relaxing and a stress reducer. And things have been plenty stressful lately.

Halloween!

Had a nice Halloween today. I dressed up as Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly/Serenity. Thanks be to my wife the seamstress for making suspenders and boot covers for me. I was one of the very few folks who wore my costume to work. But I thought it was pretty cool.

Took the fairy princess for trick-or-treating. She lasted about an hour before melting down because her friend wouldn’t take turns ringing doorbells. Ah, well.

I love making movies

I really feel lucky that I get to help make movies for a living. Today I got to attend a screening for one of our upcoming features. Just storyboards, temp music & dialog. I love getting these peeks behind the scenes of the creative process. It still gets me excited to see how these things evolve and inspires me to want to work more on my own projects.

Speaking of the creative process, I spent a couple of evenings this week giving feedback to my brother about the screenplay for his latest short film. I enjoyed that a lot. Though I always feel like I go too far with advice and steer things toward my aesthetic, which really isn’t fair to what he’s trying to accomplish as a writer and director.

Still wrapping up a few things for The Zit (animated short film). Rendered out some high resolution stills for publicity purposes and did some Photoshop work on them. We’ll probably visit Technicolor again next week for color timing the video version of the film. A few weeks back we went there to color time the release print. That was a lot of fun! I learned a lot and the guys there were really nice about mentoring us through the process.

Not much progress on my own projects, but I am a little stretched thin. Someday.

On a totally different note, my Tuesday night gaming group has ended its campaign in the Exalted universe. I haven’t gamed in like 5 years, so it was fun to get back into it. The rules were a little daunting at first. And I had an annoying tendency to freeze up when I got tense. I think I got too caught up in trying not to mess up. I was starting to loosen up a little, but now that game has finished.

So I’m really looking forward to our next campaign. Though nobody has suggested anything yet, and I’m not familiar enough with the various RPG systems out there to even know where to start. All I know is I can’t wait to play again, whatever world we decide upon.

Ouch

Cut my hand over the weekend and needed stitches. A totally preventable accident too, if I’d just been thinking instead of half asleepd and careless. I’m not supposed to let the wound get wet. So now I have the joy of taking showers with a plastic bag strapped over my left hand. Fun.

I also got to see Shaun of the Dead. Thank you, Netflix! One of the coolest movies I’ve seen in a while. If you like your zombies dished up with some great humor, this movie is for you.

Busy new year

Working on last minute tweaks to my friend’s short film, The Zit.
And also starting to do color correction/styling for my brother’s latest music video.
Not any time left for my own projects. But hopefully these efforts will be finished soon and I can get back to my own stuff.