Bite-Size Arts Ensemble on NBC 5

- I wrote a little guide on how to create a badge for your blog, which you can find over at the Entrepreneur the Arts Blog.  You don’t need to know how to design or code or anything like that.  Real, real simple.  Check it out.

Because of that job, I got passes to screenings, and there was a time during my junior and senior years when I was at a screening almost every night of the week.  (I won’t even mention the wonderful street cred of getting a pass to leave school and go see the Lord of the Rings a month before it was released.) (Ed. Note: I decided to mention it.)

Then I went to college, and started seeing fewer films.  Don’t get me wrong, I was still seeing a ton by any normal human standards, but I noticed the number dwindling year by year…and since moving to Chicago, that number has reached some dramatic new lows.  I’m also a list freak, and so one of my year-end projects tends to be reviewing the list of releases every year and excitedly counting exactly how many of them that I saw.  I know.  I’m cool.  Send me an e-mail about how cool I am and I’ll send you something back that says “re: I know.”

Because my intake in 2008 and 2009 were dramatically lower than the years before, I’ve taken it upon myself to see if I can make up for some lost time.  And thus, OPERATION: SEE ALL MOVIES is born.  Mission objectives are below.

Operation: See All Movies

Background: There were 136 major releases in 2009, not to mention the multitudes of limited releases that are only released in certain cities.
Mission Objective: I will undertake the mission of seeing at least 125 of the 146 major releases from the 2009 calendar year, as well as my choice of 25 of the limited release films.  That’s a total of 150 films.  Why only 125 of the major releases?  Because, as heroic as I am, there are going to be movies that it would take a village to get me to sit down and watch, even for the sake of a pointless personal blog project.  Yes, EVEN FOR THAT.
Mission Completion: /150

BEST OF ALL…

You can play along too!  Just print out my handy dandy Operation: See All Movies checklist and mark off the movies as you see them.  If anyone  else completes the Operation, e-mail me a copy of your checklist and I’ll mail you a special prize.  No kidding.  It might even be a MOVIE.

Here’s the list.  Thanks to Dark Horizons for the release list resource.

(in no particular order)

1.    Bride Wars
2.    The Unborn
3.    Hotel For Dogs
4.    My Bloody Valentine 3D
5.    Notorious
6.    Paul Blart: Mall Cop
7.    Inkheart
8.    Orphan
9.    The Ugly Truth
10.    Aliens In the Attic
11.    Funny People
12.    Janky Promoters
13.    Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
14.    New In Town
15.    Taken
16.    The Uninvited
17.    GI Joe: Rise of Cobra
18.    Julie and Julia
19.    A Perfect Getaway
20.    Coraline
21.    He’s Just Not That Into You
22.    The Pink Panther 2
23.    Push
24.    Bandslam
25.    District 9
26.    The Time Traveler’s Wife
27.    The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard
28.    Confessions of a Shopaholic
29.    Friday the 13th
30.    The International
31.    Inglourious Basterds
32.    Post Grad
33.    Shorts
34.    Fired Up
35.    Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail
36.    Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience
37.    Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li
38.    The Final Destination
39.    Halloween 2
40.    Taking Woodstock
41.    Watchmen
42.    All About Steve
43.    Extract
44.    Gamer
45.    9
46.    The Last House on the Left
47.    Miss March
48.    Race to Witch Mountain
49.    Sorority Row
50.    Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself
51.    Whiteout
52.    Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
53.    The Informant!
54.    Jennifer’s Body
55.    Love Happens
56.    Duplicity
57.    I Love You, Man
58.    Knowing
59.    12 Rounds
60.    The Haunting In Conneticut
61.    Monsters Vs. Aliens
62.    Fame
63.    Pandorum
64.    Surrogates
65.    Adventureland
66.    Fast and Furious
67.    Paranormal Activity
68.    The Invention of Lying
69.    Whip It
70.    Zombieland
71.    Toy Story and Toy Story 2 in 3D
72.    Couples Retreat
73.    Dragonball Evolution
74.    Hannah Montana: The Movie
75.    Observe and Report
76.    17 Again
77.    Crank: High Voltage
78.    State of Play
79.    Law Abiding Citizen
80.    The Stepfather
81.    Where The Wild Things Are
82.    Fighting
83.    Obsessed
84.    The Soloist
85.    Astro Boy
86.    Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant
87.    Saw VI
88.    Battle For Terra
89.    Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
90.    X-Men Origins: Wolverine
91.    Michael Jackson’s This Is It
92.    Next Day Air
93.    Star Trek
94.    Angels and Demons
95.    The Box
96.    A Christmas Carol
97.    The Fourth Kind
98.    The Men Who Stare at Goats
99.    Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” By Sapphire
100.    Terminator: Savlation
101.    Dance Flick
102.    Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
103.    2012
104.    Pirate Radio
105.    Fantastic Mr. Fox
106.    Drag Me to Hell
107.    Up
108.    The Blind Side
109.    Planet 51
110.    The Twilight Saga: New Moon
111.    The Hangover
112.    Land of the Lost
113.    My Life in Ruins
114.    Ninja Assassin
115.    Old Dogs
116.    The Road
117.    Imagine That
118.    The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
119.    The Princess and the Frog
120.    The Proposal
121.    Year One
122.    Armored
123.    Brothers
124.    Everybody’s Fine
125.    Up in the Air
126.    Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
127.    A Single Man
128.    A Simple Man
129.    Invictus
130.    The Lovely Bones
131.    The Hurt Locker
132.    My Sister’s Keeper
133.    Crazy Heart
134.    Avatar
135.    Did you Hear About the Morgans?
136.    Nine
137.    Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
138.    Public Enemies
139.    Bruno
140.    I Love You Beth Cooper
141.    Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
142.    It’s Complicated
143.    Sherlock Holmes
144.    Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
145.    500 Days of Summer
146. G-Force

Limited Releases:

1. The September Issue
2. The Marc Pease Experience
3. Every Little Step
4. I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell
5. The Girlfriend Experience
6. Gentlemen Broncos
7. Moon
8.
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10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.

If you don’t like your idea, that’s not an excuse to dismiss it.  An idea you don’t like is a challenge.  Because here’s the reality of what happened:

1. Your brain felt that the idea warranted some form of generation to begin with.
2. For whatever reason, you wrote it down into your big notebook of scrap ideas or in the heat of a fast-paced brainstorm.

An innocent tree died so that you could have the pencil wood to write that stupid thing down!  You deserve to honor it!  This is where the whole “love” thing comes in.  Writing isn’t dating.  When you’re dating someone, and you aren’t really enjoying it, it’s probably a good idea to get the hell out of there.  You can’t change your lover, and it’ll only hurt to try.  Ladies, you’re with me on this one.

You can change your idea.  Writing isn’t a “love at first sight” process.  You don’t have to start off in love with your shitty idea.  In time, you can learn to love it.  All you have to do is push past that initial rejection and start to question what it is about it that you don’t like.  Is it not grounded enough?  Is it about something that doesn’t interest you, or that you don’t know much about?  These are fixable problems.  You know the old “it’s not you, it’s me” excuse?  Take it to heart.  It’s not your ideas fault, it’s your own.  You came up with it, you can make it work.

Creativity is as much about the experience of creation as it is the experiences that come from the final product.  Whatever it is that you don’t like about an idea, use it as a catalyst to learn something new or have a new experience.  And if you absolutely can’t get something down on paper, even after giving it the fairest shot in the world, then so be it.  But before you push all your “little ideas” aside, remember that you already wrote something and that’s a hell of a lot further than we get on most of our ideas.  It would be a shame for it to go to waste.

Please enjoy:

You Got Me Again With This Fake Unicorn! [via McSweeney's]

The point of this story isn’t the building, it’s the woman.  Her attention provoked me to give my attention, and that got me to thinking about what actually causes fame.  By the time you reach the early middle stages of your creative development, I think we all come to the realization that most of the people who are famous aren’t necessarily any better at the craft than anyone else, nor are they somehow more deserving.  They’ve simply figured out (or, maybe more accurately, their team has figured out) how to turn one person giving a shit into millions of people giving a shit.

When you think about it in this sense, that fame is a consequence of attention and not vice versa, it seems like a much more attainable goal.  We lose sight of the fact that our goal, especially in the early stages of our creative careers, isn’t to be loved by everybody, it’s to be loved by one person at a time.  If you’re doing your job right, those people will attract others by virtue of the fact that you’ve warranted their attention.  Like the building.

But here’s the thing about that stupid building: when I looked at it, I didn’t understand why I should care.  This woman cared, but the building wasn’t coming through.  There was a thing they did on The Today Show a few months ago where they took one of the NBC Pages, gave her a professional stylist and then sent her out on the streets with a fake entourage including a fake papparazzi, a fake manager, stuff like that.  And even though people didn’t know who she was, they assumed she was someone famous and wanted her autograph or her picture and then asked people around them who exactly she was.  What that can tell us, and what my fascination with this building might tell us, is that we’re willing to give the initial benefit of the doubt to something that other people are noticing, but that window is very limited, and you have to be prepared to take the focus and run with it once it is gifted to you.  It’s not the job of the person standing across the street taking your picture to continually play advocate for you or your work.

That doesn’t mean it’s your job to wave your arms around and attract attention.  Desperation will close that window before you even get the chance to prove yourself, because we perceive desperation as an indicator of lack of quality (i.e. “why do they need to do all this?”).  And yet, you still have to be a shrewd self promoter to get initially noticed.  So what’s the middle ground?  Or is there one?  Do you either have to do good work quietly and wait for it to be noticed, or do you yell and scream and risk alienating people to come look at your good work and hope that they can push past the tactics?

One of my challenges for the work I produce this year is to build in ways that encourage people to stare.  That’s why I keep pushing this alternative venue thing…if people are looking in and see something going on, that’s going to make others look in, and so on and so forth.  It could mean outdoor theatre, spontaneous plays that pop up in the park and draw a crowd.  A walking production that pulls people in slowly, Pied Piper style.  And at the end of the production, how do you get people to continue looking at others looking, even after they’ve gone home?  Maybe that’s merchandise…maybe it’s a shirt with some art from your show, maybe it’s a punch card that you give them to give to a friend to encourage them to come back.  I don’t know, I’m brainstorming here.

All I’ll say is that…as you’re building your next creative venture, take time to build in ways to let people stare…and even more than that, find some way to involve the people who are staring at the other people.  Don’t let those folks pass by, because each one of them represents ten more who will follow close behind.

On that note, I still don’t know what was so special about that damned building.

We’re in the midst of our Level 5 Conservatory shows at Second City.  For those that don’t know, we do an 8 week run of a sketch show as the final piece of our study at Second City.  Last week was the first week of the run, and we were told not to get our hopes up because first weeks have about a 70% cancellation rate.  Now why would they cancel a class show for a class that we’re paying for?  Because they haven’t sold 25 tickets for the night.  Kind of a ridiculous system, in my opinion, but I don’t make the rules (I’ll just change them when I open a theatre of my own someday).

But last week we were fine, had a good show with maybe 30-35 people in the crowd.  Not huge, but we’re just testing material right now, so who cares.  Tonight, though, we got canceled.  This wouldn’t have been such a bad thing had my girlfriend Amanda’s parents not been in town to see the show (she’s also in my class, just to clarify).  They weren’t here JUST for this show, but still…they were excited to see it, she was excited to show them, we all wanted to do a show, stuff like that.  So when pulled the plug on us at about a quarter till the first group was supposed to go up, it was a pretty severe disappointment.

Except that wasn’t the end of it.  There were maybe 6 or 7 of us milling about, having just heard the news, and it dawned on us that just because we were canceled didn’t mean we couldn’t still do a show.  Except, of course, all of the rooms in the Training Center were booked with classes or rehearsals, and attempts to gain access to the empty theatre for a private showcase were not met with much approval.  So we found a reception area, with a stairwell.  We sat down Amanda’s parents (and her aunt, who was also in town) on the stairs.  We quickly ran over the running order, cutting the few pieces we couldn’t do with our smaller numbers and swapping in people to play parts as needed.  And then we did a fucking show.

Was it our tightest show?  Who gives a shit.  Our blackouts were coming in the form of yelling “blackout,” our sound cues were coming out of my tiny iPhone speakers.  We played the cards we were dealt.  And yet I still came out of that mini-not-a-real-show feeling better than I have about a lot of recent performances because it just felt fun. It was as much just for us as it was for them, and it reminded me of why I’m doing anything creative to begin with…to do what I like to do and hope that others find something fun in it.

I think we all reach a certain point in our development as creators where it kind of stops being fun…you hit a plateau for awhile, where you’ve been drowning in classes and mediocre performances and being in your head and fighting to find an audience for so long that it’s all you can focus on, and you lose sight of enjoying the thing that you set out to do to begin with.

I want the opportunity to do more shows like tonight.  I want to be able to do a show without the pressure of needing it to change the world.  I want to be able to do a show where I’m not on the line to pay back the theatre for an hour of space, or where I need more than three people to see my work to feel validated about it.  I want to remove the limitations of accessibility that I’ve put onto my stuff and just do what feels right, and if other people don’t dig it, maybe I don’t need them to as much as I did before.

My next show’s about a space station.  Genre stuff.  Not a ton of commercial appeal, I’d imagine.  But I’m going to do it however the hell I want to, in a space that’s not meant for theatre, and I’m going to blow the roof off of it.  I encourage you to do the same, because as backwards as it sounds, I think I’m more inclined to come see your show if I know you don’t need me there to make it the best thing you’ve ever done.  And while I don’t need you to, I do hope you stop by.

We’ll find a comfortable stairwell for you.

For an overview, the gist of Produce Yourself is simply that I want to help you along every step of self-producing.  I believe in the idea that it’s pointless to wait for opportunities to fall into your lap…if you want something, create it for yourself.  Of course, that’s easier said than done, which is why I’m going to talk about everything from venue booking to marketing to just creating a viable concept for a show.  The whole spectrum of creation from beginning to end is our fodder, and I WILL be jumping all over the place.

For the time being, I recommend catching yourself up on the first two installments, linked below.  They were originally written to go in a much more linear fashion, and I’m ditching that aspect of it, but I’m really big into the idea of narrative evolution, best-worst ideas and sabotaging your work, so these are good primers to some concepts I’m going to explore further down the road.

Produce Yourself – 30 Ideas, 30 Minutes

Produce Yourself- How To Sabotage Your Best Worst Idea

With that thought, I began developing the concept for a series called NASCAR Samurai Priest Mystery Hour. The show would have been in the tradition of the Father Dowling Mysteries in that it was about a priest who solved mysteries, but it was SO MUCH MORE AS WELL.

Here’s the pitch: Trevor McRoy was a famous NASCAR driver…until he got into a big ole crash that managed to kill an innocent bystander with the debris.  Disgraced, he left NASCAR and became a samurai to try and find some balance and discipline….until he got into a really bad samurai fight and accidentally killed a fellow samurai with a sword.  Disgraced, he left the way of the samurai and became a priest, embracing his faith in a higher power.

But when the police discover the grisly murder of McRoy’s brother with a crime scene that prominently features evidence that could point to either the competitive racing world or the modern samurai world, they turn to the one man who might be able to help.  For Father McRoy, it’s not just a standard murder…it’s his sordid past taking its toll on those he holds most dear.

That was episode one, anyway.  Obviously (not obviously) it’s a comedy.  I got so far as to write down some loose outlines, but it never moved beyond the concept phase, and I apparently never went so far as to type up any of the stuff I jotted down.  I’m sure I’ll stumble across it one of these days.  I did find this character design for Father McRoy, though…

As you can see, this was before I was better at digital artworking.  I also found this still from the project, which I believe was intended to be at Father McRoy’s extremely modern church service.  Naturally, they had a DJ.  And that DJ was a robot.  And that robot’s name was Funkytron.  DUH.

And that’s how great ideas are born: combine a bunch of niche career fields into a crime story.

For more Stuff I Never Finished, click here.

And so, like with anything that I discover I like, I’ve become obsessive about finding new games to play.  This is to your benefit, though, as it means I’ve sifted through tons and tons of crap to find some of the gems in the mix to recommend.  MAYBE WE CAN EVEN PLAY TOGETHER (if you have an iPhone or an iPod or an iPad (if you can get ahold of one when they come out (good luck))).

First off, a website recommendation.  Most all of the games on this list were downloaded for free at the time (even if they aren’t free anymore) using a site called AppShopper.com.  Don’t get the wrong idea…they’re not pirated and the site is totally innocuous.  It’s just an App Store tracker that shows when games are having price drops or free days.  I keep AppShopper.com/Prices bookmarked on my phone so I can check it every couple of days and stock up on a batch of new free games to try.  Even if there’s a game you want to actually PAY for, it’s worth it to keep a lookout on this site to see if you can’t save yourself a couple of bucks before you buy.

NOW THE GAMES, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

Words With Friends

This one is probably the most common of these games, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth mentioning.  I haven’t spent a ton of time with the official Scrabble app, but it seems to me like they’re doing Scrabble better than Scrabble is.  The fact that you can download the full version of the game, albeit with ads that don’t really get in the way of the experience at all, is also a real selling point over the $4.99 that EA is asking for real Scrabble.  If you want to upgrade to the full version, it’s only $3 and they deserve your money for building a clean, effective word game knock-off.  It’s easy to connect with random opponents and you can have up to 20 games going at a time, so you almost always have a board to play on when you’re bored.

Download Words With Friends now!

Stackus

There are quite a few physics-based games for the iPhone, and some of them are quite good (Finger Physics comes to mind), but this one takes the cake in terms of stacking games.  The concept is simple: you take all the blocks on one side of the screen and restack them in whatever configuration you can on the other side to make a stable structure.  It actually sounds impossibly easy, until you realize that if any piece falls off of the increasingly small platforms you have to work with as bases, you’ll have to start all over.  I keep using the word “clean,” but it’s another example of a game with a very simple art and sound design that really make for a rewarding experience.  The sing-songy countdown clock when you complete your structure and the marimba celebration song upon your success will be stuck in your head for weeks.  And it’s free, though you can download a “Season Two” of 50+ new stages for $1.99 once you work your way through the first 50.

Download Stackus now!

Amateur Surgeon

This is an older title, but worth the mention.  Amateur Surgeon is from Adult Swim Games, and I believe there’s a full free version of it as a Flash game on their website, but it’s perfect for a touch-based game.  Imagine the game Operation, except with better graphics and instead of working in a hospital, you’re doing back alley surgery with chainsaws and staplers.  There’s a simple little story mode that goes along with it, but the game is long for what it is, and the surgeries gradually ramp up difficulty as you’re faced with case after case of bizarre medical emergency.  You’ll detoxify a body of poison, you’ll remove pieces of glass from someones liver, you’ll replace a rapper’s ribs with gold-plated bones and electroshock weird bugs crawling around inside a guy’s heart…and while the game gets a little bloody, it’s all done in an extremely cartoony style that makes even the grossest stuff look cool.

Download Amateur Surgeon now!

Bonus!  The Amateur Surgeon Christmas Edition is a free download that also acts as a semi-sequel to the original game.  If story means nothing to you, try out the gameplay with this short, holiday-themed version!

Alphabetic

Talk about another deceptively simple game…here’s the one-line description: you have to touch the alphabet in alphabetical order.  Except that the alphabet is bouncing and moving and changing color and filling your screen with random letters that you have to scavenge through to find the next item on your list.  The basic game doesn’t have a ton of replay (unless you get into a high score challenge with your girlfriend, which I may or may not have), but there is a Challenge mode as well that offers you specific goals, such as endurance or hitting a certain score or finding double letters.  The game is equipped with OpenFeint achievements as well, for those working on their iPhone gamerscore.

Download Alphabetic now!

Angry Birds

Another game with a great graphic style, Angry Birds is a tower-destroying catapult game packaged as a war between the titular angry birds and a group of evil pigs who have stolen their eggs.  Because that’s a thing.  This is another game that relies heavily on a realistic physics engine for much of its gameplay, but the feeling of knocking down these fortresses by launching specially-powered birds with a slingshot is immensely satisfying.  Best of all, it’s long…which is more rare than I would like for many puzzle games on the iPhone.  There are 105 levels of bird-shooting action for $.99, which is pretty damned good.  There’s a Lite version you can test, but it’s hard to find a better game deal for a dollar.

Download Angry Birds now!

——————–

So there’s a few of my recommendations.  Do you know an awesome game that I should try?  Leave me a comment and I’ll give it a shot!  It’s like they say in the Bible: “You can always find time for more games.”  No?  Maybe not the Bible?  Oh well.

The end of the circus day was the only time she had to herself anymore.  Between the families and children who bothered her during the day and the unruly circus roadies who threw rocks at her trailer at night, there was no rest anymore, just solitude.  But judging by the heavy footsteps she could hear approaching outside, even that was a lost cause tonight.

The rusty tin door crashed open, letting in a burst of stinky elephant poop wind from the big top.  Alexandra’s father, Sergei, stood in the door licking a knife and pointing at her a lot, in the way that infers that you, the person being pointed at, are next.  She was the only person in her trailer, so the pointing was basically unnecessary, but he seemed to enjoy the theatrics.

“How many people did you make laugh today, Alexandra?” her father asked between licks.

She told him fourteen.  The licking stopped abruptly.

“Fourteen.  Pitiful.  That is but five percent of our daily ticket sales, Alexandra.  What kind of shitty clown can only muster five percent of laughter?”

She assumed it was a rhetorical question and continued smearing the last splotches of white from her neck.  Sergei hiked his sagging pants and lumbered over to her, pointer finger fixed like a laser.  He slid the dull edge of the knife’s back down her cheek, leaving a trail of slobber as it moved.  She refused to give him the satisfaction of looking at him, even though he was now trying to do that obnoxious double point from his eyes to hers in the mirror.

“We know what happens when we don’t reach our daily laugh quota, don’t we Alexandra?”

She totally knew, but obstained from nodding.  He flipped the knife in his hand and nicked her cheek in one fell swoop.  A slight string of blood trickled down her cheek, diluting in the saliva tracks her father’s knife had left behind.  It didn’t hurt, really.  Not anymore than the others.  She calmly lifted one of her gloved hands and used the thick foam lycra to wipe her cheek.

Sergei licked the blade clean of his daughter’s blood and awkwardly slid it back into his fanny pack, even though the knife was slightly too long and had to go in at a diagonal.  He zipped it as far as he could and then turned his attention back to his daughter.

“There is nothing funny about what I do to you, Alexandra.  You know this.  Tomorrow, be better.  It is the only way.”

The trailer buoyed slightly as he stepped back out into the night, leaving Alexandra with her quiet.  The cut on her face started bleeding again, and she held the sponge to her face to soak up the last few drops.  The banging of rocks landed on the roof of the trailer, and she could hear some derogatory yelling and a pick-up squeal off in the distance.

Alexandra flipped the switch on the side of the mirror and the make-up bulbs blinked off.  She looked pretty good in the darkness, the same way she looked pretty good with all that clown make-up on.  She smiled at the shadowy reflection in the mirror, stood up from her stool and went to lay down on the burlap cot that she called a bed.  As she lay there staring at the dented tin ceiling of her ramshackle home, the dull pain in her cheek throbbed just enough to provide a little internal rhythm to lull her to sleep.

That night, she dreamed of what her life would have been if she’d just finished that last semester of med school.