Writing Samples
Product Review: What is Skymall?
Skymall is a mail-order catalog that allows you to buy ceramic deer, UV toothbrushes and 100% Turkish Cotton Slippers at 40,000 feet. In other words, it's a catalog of bizarre luxury items I've only ever seen offered on airplanes.
As someone who started flying at very young age, Skymall was just an entity that existed, and every flight caused fresh bewilderment as I leafed through the glossy pages of the catalog to stave off boredom. Every page just inspired the same questions, over and over:
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Why were these things made?
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Who buys them?
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How on earth was this company surviving?
There are legitimate artists out there who can't scrape together a living, and yet Skymall has been around since the early 90s, and somehow is able to justify the costs of mass-producing giant terrifying tree statues and creepy plaster cherubs...and be successful enough to distribute full-color glossy catalogs on every major airline I've ever flown on.
How many people are buying hideous tree statues and UV-ear-hair-trimmers that it justifies mass-producing them? It boggles the mind. Anyway, without further ado, I give you Skymall Magic.
Today's adventure will be a voyage into the world of garden statuary. Our topic? Resin giraffes. Yes, Skymall has enough unique resin giraffe products available that I feel justified in calling this a "voyage".
Skymall clearly understands the fact that consumers today may not have the endless funds of the early 90s, and so they make sure there is a giant resin garden giraffe available for all budgets. We start with the economy option...
Research Paper:
The Influence of Japanese Animation on Avatar: The Last Airbender
Published in UCLA's Animatrix, Issue #18 2011
Animated TV shows normally have a composer record a number of themes (action, comedy, drama, and individual character themes), and then a music editor cuts or loops the tracks to suit each episode as they are made. In Avatar, Konietzko and DiMartino wanted every episode to have a unique musical score, tailored to fit the action and to create the greatest impact on the viewer because they understood that music can make or break an animated production.
Viewers respond to music’s stresses, dissonances and harmonies intuitively, at any age. Music can help express storyline, character, color, emotion and other cinematic elements; make them seem more alive, give them greater impact. Richard Williams said: “I think of animation as drawn music. It’s very similar; the timing is similar – the passion, the contrast, how you join things together interestingly.”
According to Jeremy Zuckerman, one of the composers of Avatar, an executive in charge of production on Avatar told him: “'make the sad scenes heartbreaking, make the scary scenes terrifying, make the funny scenes hilarious...'. Basically, don't hold back - make Avatar as emotionally dynamic as possible.”
Research Paper:
Fritz Lang, The Most Animated Live Action Director
Animation was traditionally done on paper and transparent acetate sheets known as “cels”. In modern times this has changed to a digital process, but the concepts are still the same and the techniques are identical, just digitized. Typically drawings were done on paper by an animator, cleaned up by an assistant, checked for accuracy by a checker, and then traced onto a cel and painted. These transparent cels (with the characters colored in with opaque acrylic paints) were then photographed on top of backgrounds.
Cel levels refer to when multiple layers of clear cels are placed on top of each other. Each character in a shot is usually broken up into different cel layers, and sometimes when only a small part of a character is moving a part of the cel will be held under the camera while another cel layer is moved on top of it. An extremely common use of this technique is when a character is holding still on screen and only their mouth or eyes are moving. The moving elements are inked and painted on a separate cel layer and swapped out on top of the single“background” cel of the static face.
ScreenpLAY: Jack and the Sea Monster
A Samurai Jack Spec Script
EXT. OCEAN - DAY
CLOSE-UP ON SCOTSMAN, his face is enraged.
SCOTSMAN
(cont)
--He didn't even get to die wearing his favorite hat!
Historical Fiction Summary
The Show Must Go On
Kazimir is a refugee from a small, struggling nation who's lost everything because of war: family, language, even his name. He lives in glamorous Paris now, surrounded by strangers and alone, hiding his past behind a French name and never speaking his mother tongue.
Like every thirty-something without a formal education, he has to do a little of everything just to survive. He always has an eye out for odd jobs and opportunities, but most days he ends up conning people on the street with cards. When the crowds get too sour about his winning streaks, he turns to magic tricks to lighten the mood and make his escape.
He's also involved in the black market smuggling of food and ration tickets, and on occasion, he steals priceless works of art from the Nazis.
It's 1942, and Kazimir is a survivor of the Nazi annexation of Poland.
He lives day by day, one crime at a time until he meets Eric, a spy with an unusual agenda: recruit Kazimir to use his criminal talents to protect Poland's cultural heritage from the Nazis. Because the Germans are fighting a new type of war with a new, terrifying goal: Not just killing the enemy, but the complete eradication of all societies and peoples other than their own, using the destruction of books, art, and the mass murder of civilians. Nowhere has this destruction been more systematic and brutal than Poland and Kazimir knows this first-hand.
But is there any point in saving art for a people who might not live to see it? What value does art, love, and human dignity have in a world that treats people like animals? Can Kazimir find the strength to join Eric on his mission to save the heart and soul of their homeland?
And if they can pull it off, how the hell is Kazimir ever going to top this magic act?