Whoever Thinks Making Films Is Easy Has Never Had To Deal With SAG

As some of you may know, I'm trying to make another film. This is particularly challenging for several reasons, the first and most foremost of which is; I no longer have a university providing me with assistance in making my crazy waste of money.

This film is part of a competition called interpretations, which I'm pretty sure I've mentioned here before... but if I didn't, its a competition being held by director Justin Lin.

The film I came up with for this competition is not only a Vietnam War period piece, which is difficult enough as it is, but also uses my good friend Zephyr Benson; Son of Robby Benson, 18 Year old about-to-be-NYU Tisch freshmen and most importantly, SAG actor.

The fact that he's a SAG actor complicates things incredibly because now I have to go through SAG to use him and that means filling out a bunch of paperwork and hoping that they don't care that I don't have insurance. All of this almost makes me wish I was back dealing with all the bureaucracy of film school because that at least I knew how to work and worm my way through, even if it did take a bit of effort. Now I'm just trying to pull my normal tricks and crossing my fingers while squeezing my eyes shut hoping it works or somehow slips past unnoticed.

The real world is a big and scary place and being slick and deceiving there is proving to be a bigger challenge than it was back in school.

Browsing other Blogs

So as I was browsing other people's blogs, more specifically Keith Lango's blog, a blog introduced to me by a friend of mine who was a senior at NYU when I was a freshmen; Stewart Shaw, I came upon some really good stuff, one of which is this below:

selected animated scenes from Beauty and the Beast in their early stages.


This video has reminded me just how much there is to learn from old-school Disney. It also makes me say wow a little bit because occasionally I get to hear Robby talk about what it was like to be the voice of the beast.

As someone that knows next to no computer animation, any sort of animation I do/have done (with the exception of the bit that I had done for assignments in intro to 3-D) is hand drawn, yet at the same time I have never really gotten past the rough stage of animating to the clean-up and coloring and I would really like to get to there at some point, so I guess it's time for me to start thinking up ideas that I can animate and following through on them. Seeing this video on the Beauty and the Beast is very intimidating yet I'm still motivated by another thing I found on his blog:

I found this post on Bill Plympton and was especially motivated by the note he made for himself:

"(note to self: never accept what somebody else defines as 'impossible'),".