Last month, for the first time in over 5 years, I was officially back in the movie business, if only for few days. My friend Joeprops was in Atlanta, having taken over as propmaster of The Vampire Diaries. After completing a few small graphics jobs Joe pitched me on cool new project: illustrating a prop journal that one of the characters was slated to find in an upcoming episode (now known as “The Turning Point“, which aired on November 19, 2009). After thinking about the job for a day I agreed to have a whack at the drawings and spent the following weekend studying old Continue Reading
I understand that my pals The Cardboard Troopers had a wild time this past weekend. They arrived in Atlanta for the 2009 edition of Dragon*Con, but they couldn’t actually seem to find a trace of the convention and the hotel people kept looking at them funny. I sure hope that they come back for the 10:00am parade on Saturday, they always seem to enjoy that.
Which reminds me that last month the Fall issue of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine hit the stands and I was simultaneously delighted (97%) and mortified (3%) to read the article about me that staff writer Van Jensen composed after we met prior to my surgery this summer. Entitled “How Did That NERD on the Left Become That PIRATE on the Right?“, the article does a really nice job of catching people up with the kid who won the Batman contest back in the 80s… and the second page features a certain cardboard trooper standing in front of a line of “real” troopers at Dragon*Con.
Here’s some video of the crowning achievement of my wooden box building phase in the early 90s: my Tolkien-inspired RingBox. Built entirely by hand without working drawings, the spring mechanism was perfected straight out of my toolbox…. tinkering and tinkering until it worked. The wood I used was from one of those bags of scrap wood you can find at hobby stores, and I’m not sure what Continue Reading
I love boxes of all sorts, particularly wooden ones. Back in the 1980s I made my first “themed” wooden box. It was peculiarly awful, yet lovable in its own weird way…. especially if you like Disney’s EPCOT Center in Orlando, Florida. I was a huge EPCOT fan in my youth, to which this hysterical artifact will readily stand testament. I’ll be uploading more photos of some of my other nifty boxes in the next week or so, so stay tuned!
As part of the work I’m doing to update this website I’ve decided to move my photo galleries offsite to Flickr.com to make it easier for people to navigate the photos. So far I’ve uploaded photos from three films: ‘Run Ronnie Run‘, ‘Sweet Home Alabama‘ and ‘Dumb & Dumberer‘ (the latter set has over 430 photos in it!!). Give ‘em a spin!!
Dumb & Dumberer - 433 photos
The Playboy Grotto from ‘Dumb & Dumberer’: Continue Reading
Just a few minutes ago I sat down to do a Google search in the Firefox web browser, which has a search form in the top right corner of the default installation (at least on a Mac). It was dark in the room and I didn’t realize that my fingers were not on the right keys as I began hammering our the search terms. I was eight or nine letters into the search terms when I glanced over at the form and realized my mistake. What’s interesting is that my quick mis-typed entry had brought up a real topic in an accidental fit of Continue Reading
This evening I’m celebrating the conclusion of six months’ hard labor with the launch of a new website called BridgingMethod.com. Developed by well-known Atlanta architect and businessman George Heery, the Bridging Method is a building construction project delivery method enjoying increased popularity in the United States, particularly (at this time) in California. Deceptively simple in layout, the website is crammed full of legal text, diagrams, downloadable PDF documents and a 45-minute, 5-chapter, step-by-step tutorial on how the Bridging Method works. Continue Reading
Note to Charles Brewer: I visited Serenbe today, had my cake (actually a chocolate chip cookie) and ate it too. Dude, I told you it could be done. Continue Reading
