Our Time is Running Out

It was such a busy weekend I thought I was entitled to an extra day before Monday. But alas I had to work with what was given to me. The Ozark Celebration Festival was this weekend and my club had a booth (we had been invited by the school). We had a bake sale. So I went to Janis's apt. on Friday night and baked a cake and some cookies for the sale. Janis made, among other things, a wonderful dish that I hadn't heard of until I came to MO called Puppy Chow. It's Chex cereal mixed around in melted chocolate and peanut butter then sprinkled with powdered sugar. Delicious and sold out fast!
Janis showed me an amazing movie that had me rolling around laughing called "Drop Dead Fred." I don't think it's a well known one, even for a cult classic but I remember someone mentioning it in High School. Have any of you seen it? If not, next post I will give the synopsis. 
I'd like to note that Janis's oven is a capricious little demon! She warned me that her oven doesn't like oatmeal, referring to the oatmeal butterscotch cookies I was making. I thought she just meant that oatmeal is harder to bake. She actually meant her oven. This oven worked fine all night, from about 7pm to 10pm. Then when I put in my oatmeal cookies it started to freak out and within two minutes the temperature inside went from 375 to nearly 500 degrees (Janis has a thermometer in her oven). It burned the first batch. So in order to cook the second batch I had to put the dial to 100 degrees and also keep the door of the oven open...

Saturday and Sunday consisted of waking up early to set up the booth. But I did have fun at the festival, they had old-time crafts like the lacemakers, the spinning wheel, a blacksmith, soap makers, honey, quilting, other types of needlework, wood whittlers, stained glass, basket weaving etc. There was banjo and fiddle music and Irish and Square Dancing. Next to our booth was the Association of Cowboy Poetry. They also had handmade whips and reins. It really was nice and I took MIso, the Korean girl, around becaue I figured she hadn't seen a lot of that stuff before.

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to at least 10 people and include me. You can't use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It's a lot harder than you think! Repost as "my life according to (band name)."

Are you a male or female?
"Lady Stardust"

Describe yourself:
"God Knows I'm Good"

How do you feel:
"Unwashed and Slightly Dazed"

Describe where you currently live:
"Suffragette City"

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?
"Across The Universe"

Your favorite form of transportation:
"I Took A Trip on a Gemini Spacecraft"

Your best friend(s) is/are:
"Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)"

What's the weather like:
"Wild is the Wind"

Favorite time of day:
"When I Live My Dream"

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
"Golden Years"

What is life to you:
"Magic Dance"

Your fear:
"I'm Afraid of Americans"

What is the best advice you have to give:
"Hang On To Yourself"

Thought for the Day:
"Where Have All The Good Times Gone"

Your ambition:
"Fame"

My soul's present condition:
"Somebody Up There Likes Me"

My motto:
"Let's Dance"

Adam surfs the net to find ways to make money, I surf the net to find things to buy. See? It's a perfect match!

Woooaah.. I can feel the summer. Schools almost over. For each class I have I think I only have about 3 class meetings left for each of them. I know I'm itching for summer because I started sketching during class today. First I sketch the students and their backpacks, then the teacher. Somehow I still manage to hear everything he says.

That said only two major projects, three papers and two presentations until all my stress is gone. Although right now I feel like a bird released from the cage... I have to try and focus and get all this finished. I also found a song I love. Seether's cover of the George Michael song Careless Whisper (Never Gonna Dance Again).

I watched a movie called "Princes et Princesses" that was notable. It was in French and is animated using paper cutouts I believe. All the characters are in silhouette and they act out fairy stories. Not Grimm Fairy stories, I think these were made up for the movie .. I could be wrong though. They did one from Egypt,. on from Japan and some others. There was even one that took place in the year 3000 and had space ships. Anyway, it was nice and relaxing.

I thought I should post some more pictures from the movie since we have done a lot more:

  The Robot and the Robot's creator. This location is in the Art building where the metals class works.

Our hero, Kendra comes upon this creature in the backroom of Norb's repairshop.

 
In a classic case of "who-don-it," the creator gets shot with a laser gun~!!!
  


Norb the repairman is friends with this Robot-making man. "Here!? Here!? You brought stolen goods to my shop?"

Welcome to the front room Norb's Repair shop~!
Hey! That's an expensive prop! XD

A classic portrait... FYI, this bunny is an Easter egg. He's somewhere in every scene.


Who has the bigger gun?
These are the gaurds and in the middle is the main antagonist's henchman.
You can't see it here, but the guards' badges are metal fleur de leis.

Kelly the costume maker/ bounty hunter

Robot says "Thanks everybody for looking!"

Yesterday: Got all my paperbackswap packages mailed. Cleaned my room because I have a friend, Heather, coming over tonight to watch movies. As a reward for cleaning my room I watched MIAMI INK~! XD I love that show and I don't know why. Oh yea, I also saw "Oedipus Rex" at the theatre. It was pretty awesome~! All the characters were wearing masks and the set was like a red and orange (deserty) Stonehenge, except one of the rocks was a hige door to the palace. If anyone knows about this story, in the end Oedipus gouges out his eyes with pointed objects. In the traditional Greek way this was done offstage, but many modern portrayals like to impress the audience by having the violence visible. I'm so happy this one decided to have it offstage. It's sickening enough to see the guy stumbling onstage with blood running down his face...

anyway ..

I better get to work doing something useful. I have too much homework to be lazying around as usual.

So the shoot ended at around 11pm on Sunday night, I relaxed watching Caroline in the City until 3am and then settled into bed. I slept for 14 hours! My phone has been acting weird so i didn't hear any of the calls that had been made to me. I woke up on my own at 5pm on Monday (which was a school holiday). I didn't want to end up nocturnal so I decided to stay up all night and today so I would go to bed early. I stayed up watching movies -- I watched Bram Stoker's Dracula on Netflix -- and making a sketchbook for an ArtHouse project that needed to be mailed today. I got it done and then I went over some homework to make sure I was up to date. I have a paper due next week and a model of a stage due this Thursday. This week is going to move reallly fast since I missed Monday. It's a little sad because I feel like I need to catch up on homework but I also have to touch up props that broke this weekend and make more.
Now I am in a kind of writing mood. I am having trouble working out a plot for a play I am writing.. I don't want to force it.

I just got back from late night, where I stacked an ice cream cone with three scoops. 2 parts Dulce de Lech and 1 part Strawberry Cheesecake. I might be replacing friends with food -- that's what Adam thinks anyway XD I think I am replacing friends with work and stress ^^;;

On another note, I have pictures of the shoot!
Check it out!
There's more here!

For those of you too lazy to look aty a full album, here's some favorites--

My director Jonathan -- "Hey! Hey Heidi! We're making a moooovvvviiieeee!!!"
My producer Andrew -- 
Costume Designer Kelly -- She's a big "Malice Mizer" and Visual kei fan. She went to A-kon last year and will be there this year!

1st day of shooting -- All the equipment we had to haul everywhere! We rented a UHaul

The props storage table in which we take the props needed for that day -- the foreground is all a side view of the portegraphs I spent a lot of time making!

This is the space we shot in on Friday before everything was set up. It is an unused art classroom. 

This is a picture of the dolly track and that's the set on the left. The costume designer is doing some last minute adjustments between shots. 

That's me getting his kneepads to stay with Velcro. He is an actor in da movie~!

That's Isaac our Sound Designer and Robot Electrician reaching up the robot's tutu to hook the cables that will make the face work. He would of course apologize later for the embarassment. The robot is afterall, a boy.

This is us fitting Nathan in his Robo costume a couple nights before the shoot



Our robot boy - Nathan - is boldly walking to the gas station to buy a snack. We discovered he can't walk down stairs. When people asked "Why are you dressed like a robot" he said "A robot can't choose not to be a robot on a certain day. This is how he is." Some people he told them he was the new campus security-bot. I would love to explain the tutu, but I'd like you to see the movie. It has to do with the story.

Our cinamatographer Chris leads Robot to his place -- the actor can't see at all except out the side, which is not reliable. It looks like they are dancing.

Robot gets adjusted and ready for the shooting. Here you can see what his face looks like. It is a wireless reciever of another actor's face who is sitting off-camera with a tiny camera infront of his face.


Here is the robot's face actor at his spot --

This is actually all the compenants for the second scene we shot that day. It is a singing part so we played the music and the actor lip-synched what he had previously recorded.

The same scene from off-camera


This is the main character Kendra all decked out in her gear. Take note of the portegraph on her belt that I slaved over. (j/k =P) Behind her is the Kitchen set from Saturday's shoot.


This is the character Cassidy. She's a bitchy secondary character, but her costume is really hip.

And that's all for now.  There are plenty more on the albums I gave the link for. They are all really cool, but I didn't want to bore you too bad. The pictures from Sunday aren't up yet, but as soon as they are I will post them. There is a character that is dressed like Gackt and I want to show him off.

Yum! The dining center was closed when I was hungry so I ordered a pizza from the internet ^__^ Oh it was fun. The delivery guy had a ponytail like a renaissance page-boy and he wouldn't stop looking me in the eyes. Since this embarassed me, when I reached out to get the pizza I dropped my phone and it broke into three pieces. He swooped down gracefully and swiped them up saying, "It's ok, phones are easy to drop."
And the result of this embarkment is that I enjoyed yummy hawaiian pizza.

Today is my off day --- and yet I have little motivation to do my homework. I just love sitting around doing nothing too much. My goals:

Homework - Practice Kanji and Katakana
                       Write two monologues
                       Finish pencil drawing
Laundry
Finish wrapping Paperbackswap Packages

That's the majority.. it's not bad. But now that I finished my pizza and the TV has been switched to CSI by my roommate, I can manage to occupy myself with other things.

Yesterday I spent most of my time relaxing. I played the DS and watched the commentary for Kiss of the Dragon, and then also Romeo Must Die. Jonathan drove me to Wal-mart so I could get some supplies... can you believe Wal-mart doesn't sell Tracing paper? And we went to an extra huge one too. It was a Wal-mart that had moved into an abandoned mall. So I had to borrow tracing paper from a neighbor.

2 weeks until filming.

I decided to try out paperbackswap.com, as soon as I posted my books all of them are being asked to be sent. XD It's kind of overwhelming.

I went to my Tuesday/Thursday classes today for the first time, since I was sick on Tuesday. I can already tell that Critical Approach to Literature is going to be a tough class that will eventually be annoying. But I need the credit.. and my friend is in the class unexpectedly. For that reason I would feel bad to drop it. I also have Theatre Aesthetics (which will be easy.. I am heads and shoulders above everyone else in the class. The teacher even asked me if I would help him explain some of the concepts), and Playwrighting, which will take work but I know will help my writing in the long run. I was caught off-gaurd today though since he broke out with a characterization excersize and we only had a second to think of a character to write as -- so I just chose Wendy from Peter Pan XD He asked us to write what our bedroom looked like, a memory from childhood, a secret, what we want in the next five minutes/five hours/five years, how we would change the world, what our greatest dream is and what our greatest nightmare is. It was fun, but I was taken off-gaurd.

My Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes are: Science Fiction and Fantasy (conscentrating on "Utopia and Dystopia"). A class I look forward to every time because the teacher is funny and insightful. I am suprisingly learning a lot oabout philosophy in that class because the Scifi/Fantasy genre is usually commenting on social philosophy of the day.  Then I have Theatre History -- a lecture class that is bound to get boring if the teacher isn't careful. I'm suprised the teacher is actually going over things I don't already know XD At night I have Japanese II -- we are starting Kanji. Enough said.

My goal is to get an A in at least three classes, last semester I only got an A in Japanese, the rest were Bs and a D. I am going to prophesize now that I will get:

A in Japanese
A in Theatre Aesthetic
B in Theatre History
B in Crit. App. to Lit.
A in Scifi Fant.
B in Playwriting

Crit. App. will be hard, so that grade is if I can keep up with the reading.. and we are reading 1930s Great Depression stuff so I will probably get bored of it.


Tonight is a Production Meeting for the student film. It is all cast now and the crew and cast are all meeting in the same room for the first time. Exciting!

I bought a Nintendo DS game called "My Sims." It's just a cute relaxing thing I guess..

Last Book Purchased:
Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris a Paperback Version for people to borrow


Last Movie Purchased:
Tinkerbell the Movie


Last Game Purchased:
The World Ends With You


Last Thing I Netflixed:
It was Hamlet 2 I believe.


And the 2008 Best/Worst Ofs:

BESTS/// WORSTS

New (to me) Movie: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Death Note /// Death at a Funeral
Gift recieved: Nintendo DS and games
Purchase for myself: Rayearth box set, Death Note movies /// Gameboy Advance
Purchase for another: Adam's xmas gifts-- clothes from Macy's and a red dragon pocketwatch from the flea market
Book Read: Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen, The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman
TV Show Discovery: Trueblood, Korean Drama Who Are You, Princess Tutu /// Charmed
Theatrical Experience: Dracula the Ballet at Bass Hall, The Matchmaker at UTA
Relationship: Adam /// Stephen P.
In Art: Trying out junk art, making it to Student Exhibition /// Cutting up Teddy Bears
Event: A-kon, my birthday party at the lake
New Friend: Heather, Jonathan /// Tink
Old Friend: Megan /// Laura S.
New place: Noodles Boba Tea House
Old Place: Mr Max
New obsessions: Korean Dramas, DS games, teddy bears, earrings, Trueblood
Old Obsessions: Charlaine Harris series, the color Fuchsia, Peter Pan
Class: Japanese /// Color Theory
Accident: roommate from Texas /// Grinding my thumb in art class
Trip: St. Louis with Kelli my dormmate