Witches of Willow Wood

This week I finished the mock book cover for my friend's story called The Witches of Willow Wood. It's about 3 young girls who discover a magical land. It's just the cover though so now I have to go back and do the back cover which I'll post when it's complete.



I went to see the movie Becoming Jane at the Arclight yesterday which is the story of Jane Austen's life, but it made me kind of depressed. She never married but it's the story of her love affair and the reasons they couldn't be together. I prefer when romantic movies have happy endings. Also went to dinner at the Formosa Cafe on Santa Monica Blvd which is a restaurant inside a train car. I liked it a lot there. It felt very cozy and had pretty good food.

Pride and Prejudice trailer

Here's the latest copy of the trailer I made for my editing class. I cut about 12 seconds off it because it was feeling a little long. i might want to go back and play with the audio a bit and try to make it better, but for now I'm pretty happy with the way it's come out. I got to use some of the stuff I learned in my motion graphics class to make the title cards. The next trailer I'm going to start on is The Last King of Scotland so that I have a variety of genres.

my pride and prejudice trailer

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Because it's compressed to an mpeg-4 it looks like of pixelated. Oh well.

The end of summer

School's gonna be starting again at USC soon and it's the weirdest feeling not to be going back there with everyone. It's going to be especially strange not to be doing sorority rush school, which was such a consuming process but ended up being pretty fun. Instead, I'll be finishing up this editing class next Thursday and then will have no excuse to not apply for jobs.

Also, i took the plunge and bought a Macbook Pro!! It looks a lot like my other powerbook, but my old computer's over 4 years old and is starting to have problems. The hinge broke off so I couldn't close the screen and it was kind of slow-moving. I tested out my new computer's speed by ripping the DVD for last kind of scotland. On my old computer, it took over 10 hours!! New computer only took a half hour. yaaaay!!! And they had a deal where we could get $200 off a video ipod so I bought one for only $50. It was my lucky day. My old ipod was the very first generation that came out so I'm looking forward to all the cool new video ipod features. I am officially a technology whore now.

Inconceivable

I'm very glad that I'm starting a new editing class on monday because I am going stir crazy! This weekend should be fun though since I've basically sat on my butt all week. I even got so bored that I got in my car, drove to Hollywood for no good reason and then drove back. I was originally planning to go see Harry Potter the night it opened but it snuck up on me and I missed it so instead I'm going to see it with my mom on Friday night. I don't know if this is gonna be one of the better Harry Potter movies because the 5th book is kind of a transitional book that sets up for Book 6. Then on Saturday I'm taking a one-day class called Photographing the Urban Landscape. We're going to take the metro from North Hollywood to photograph the LA Cathedral, the Disney concert hall, Olvera Street, Union Station and Chinatown. It's going to be all day in the sun so I'll probably get sunburnt, but will hopefully get some awesome pictures which I will post here later.

Sunday morning I'm going to brunch in Los Feliz. I really like the area and it's one of the places I'm seriously considering moving to when I'm ready to get my own apartment. The other day my parents and I took a drive down to Silverlake and Los Feliz to check out the neighborhood and to write down names of apartments that we thought looked nice. I researched online and it seems like the general price for a 2 bedroom, 2 bath is between $1700 and 2000 a month. So with a roommate splitting the cost that would be something like $900/1000 a month. Which sounded like a lot to me but I know people who are living around SC paying $850 a month and that area's not as nice. I guess it's just the price of living in Los Angeles but I think I'm going to try to find a place for even less expensive.

I'm in the 4th week of my motion graphics class and even though the class is 8 hours long and I usually feel like gouging my eyes out by the end of the day I'm actually enjoying the class and learning a lot. I don't think I would've learned it on my own, so it's nice to have something forcing me to do the work. This week we had to take a quote and animate it.

I was trying to figure out how to post the quicktime movies here, but apparently you can't unless it's already online. Oh well.


Next Friday the Harry Potter book comes out!!

The sun in retreat made the skyline look like crooked teeth

Tomorrow is the last day of my 2-week adobe illustrator class. I'm really glad that I took the class because I was always afraid to open the program and use it before so I just avoided it and stuck to photoshop and indesign. But this class forced me to figure it out and I think I learned a lot. A frustrating part of this week was when I had to make my first assignment which was to create this landscape picture of suburban houses based off a picture he gave us. I spent forever working on it because I was working on the old PC in the other room. It took maybe 5 hours. I was happy with it and saved it to the desktop, but the next day it was nowhere to be found on the computer! Totally gone! So I had done all this work and I couldn't turn it in and I looked like a slacker.

Today's assignment was to take a family photograph and draw it in illustrator. The boundaries were pretty loose so instead of a family picture, I wanted to make the project applicable so I chose one of Ewan McGregor smoking a cigarette and drew that. I made it into a movie poster that I imagined would be called The Wanderer and would star Ewan and also Natalie Portman and Jason Isaacs. Hopefully this one will make up for the lack of first project.




Also, last night, matt and I went to see The Wind Fisherman at AFI. It was a year ago that we worked on it. I remember how hot it was during filming. People were running around in 100 degree heat all day but when you saw the film nobody looked sweaty or red which was surprising but good. It looked really great with the original score added and the CGI work. It was also nice to see all the people who had worked on it. I like to be on the AFI campus because it's up on a hill and has the most amazing views of the LA skyline.

If you want to be someone else, change your life

I've been thinking about what I would be doing as a career if I wasn't going to be a designer. Here's a list of what I came up with.

1) A wedding gown designer. When I was 13, becoming a dress designer was one of my dreams. I used to scribble pictures of dresses on napkins when my family went out to eat. Unfortunately, my insight into the gown industry was limited and all my drawing came out looking like the exact same piece o'crap gown: thin spagetti strap, umpire waist and then simple flowy bottom, which is probably the last thing I'd pick as my actual wedding dress. Alas, I didn't become Vera Wang, but I do enjoy flipping through the bridal magazines at the drugstore and checking out all the new designs.



2) A mythbuster. I am totally hooked on that show and I think it'd be really fun to figure out the different experiments and test them out. Of course, I am clueless when it comes to science so I would probably never make the cut.

3) A Greenpeace (or PETA) activist. Yep, that would be me cleaning oil off all the baby seals and ducks. I don't think it pays well and I'd probably be arrested for disorderly conduct, but it would be exceptionally cool.



4) A foodie. I'd work for a local paper in some very chic town that has wonderful restaurants and I would go to them all and sample the food for free. Then I'd write about it. I'd probably be really fat, but at least I'd be fat and happy. In this vein, I also dreamed about being a pastry chef (and open my own bakery in Hell's Kitchen like Kyotofu) or a wedding cake decorator. Everyone loves desserts so I think it'd be fun to create the desserts that people love. I would be a lot like Sookie from Gilmore Girls.

If you're looking for a good Los Angeles food blog, my favorite is http://www.potatomato.com/mt/index.html


Sookie

5) An adventurer/riverboat captain. I had a dream last night where I was riverboating in a creepy bayou but it was more like roaring rapids and the boat capsized and I had to save my family from almost certain death. But in real life, I don't think anyone judges riverboat captains. You're not held up to very high expectations, as long as you don't steer the boat into a sandbank or something like that.



Although I could still ditch my plan to be a designer and go to culinary school, I'm re-energized now that my summer classes have started and I feel like I'm actually being productive again. My motion graphics class starts on Friday, I can't wait! My dad got to fly out to Pittsburgh for my cousin's Bat Mitzvah, but we couldn't go so I felt really left out. It was apparently a big family reunion and we missed it! Extended family has started being more important to me than it was when I was younger. My dad filmed my grandpa and his brother talk about our family history and I learned a lot of things I didn't know. For instance, I am a little Romanian. It really throws off your sense of identity when you throw a new heritage into the mix.

I went to see Jon Brion last week at Largo on Fairfax, my most favorite singer/songwriter/composer. He shaved off his lumberjack/Gandolf beard which was unfortunate because I've grown fond of it. He was amazing as usual and there seemed to be lots of famous musicians in the crowd who got up to play with him. There were the Watkin siblings from the group Nickel Creek, the drummer from Rilo Kiley, and some others whose names I have forgotten. I've also been at the Hollywood Cemetary for screenings of old movies. I saw Gilda not long ago and tomorrow is Rebel Without a Cause. We bring a picnic and I really enjoy going there, despite being surrounded by graves. It's not as creepy as it sounds.

I love california

I went on a drive on Sunday through the hills past Frazier Park, through the mountain, down through Ojai and ending up around Carpinteria. It was about a 6 hour drive and was really relaxing. It's nice to get out of town and see the different landscapes of california. I also got to visit this creek that runs through the hills and take a picture for a poster project I've been wanting to do for a long time but couldn't find any stock photo that was what I wanted. The creek was down from the road about 10 feet so I had to climb down a rocky hill to get to it. Luckily I didn't slip and roll down the hill and I was able to get the perfect shot!










Coming up this Thursday is the Student Key Art Reception for the movie poster/trailer contest that some friends and I entered. They're not going to announce the winners until the reception. I don't expect to win at all because I did a trailer and it was my first time making one so there was a lot of experimentation, but I'm excited about being at the reception and seeing everyone else's entries. I'll take lots of pictures and post them at the end of the week.

Here is the finished poster I made for "Summer of Fireflies" that I mentioned in my last post. It's a film that I made up so that I could make a poster for it. I've been trying to make a shift from using stock photos to taking my own photos. So I had this jar and I took the photo of it on the grass in the front yard and then made a poster with that. I figured this film would be a coming of age story kind of like Bridge to Terabithia or Charlotte's Web. When I was a little kid living in New Jersey I used to run around catching fireflies in a jar, so that's the memory I was trying to capture with the feel of this poster.