Day 2 was fantastic. After a grueling day of driving, I got some sleep in the little mountain town of Livingston, MT. I woke up with the sun and hopped on the bike. It was a chilly morning and it looked like rain so I bundled up a little. I ended up at the Chico Hot Springs resort. After maxing out with a coffee and a good book (Illusion of Life), I got a wild hare and decided to hike up the big hill that overlooks the town. I’m not sure how high I got, but it topped off my workout nicely. Mountains are going to get me in trouble. It was a really nice bike ride, about 30 miles in all.

I got back on the road around noon. I stopped in Missoula, had a coffee and looked at some Apartment listings. It seems like a really cool college town. I’m going to call it Montana’s Brookings. After a bit more driving, I decided to hit some Spokane hay.

Day 3, I jumped back on the road and made it to Seattle by 10am. Naturally, I was welcomed with heavy traffic and rain. I made it in to Freemont neighborhood in time for an apartment showing. Little did I know, the Solstice Festival was happening and traffic was terrible. It was taking me about 5 minutes per block. When I got to this apartment, there was no parking available within five blocks and I wasn’t going to get my car towed on my first hour in town, so I had to bail on the poor girl.

I’m still looking at apartments and exploring the city. It has a great feel. It really exhausts a guy after a couple laps around town on the bike going from hill to hill. It looks like two sunny days in a row now. Maybe this place wont be as gloomy as I feared. School starts up on the 27th, so I hope I can get something set up this weekend. A huge thanks goes out to Abby, Alex, Jasmine and Kyle for letting me crash at their place during the hunt!

Day 1 and 860 miles of the trip is down and I spent the night in beautiful Livingston, MT. Traveling west is great. The days are effectively an hour longer. Sunrise at 5:39C in Milbank and sunset at 9:15MT in Livingston. 16.5 hours–feels nice.

After driving no more than 2 miles over the limit the whole way, a MT speed trap in a 55MPH work zone zapped me at 66. It took a while to get over that. It’s been a few years since I felt that awful feeling. Bright side, it would have cost twice as much in Minnesota.

Today, I’m going to enjoy the mountains and do a bike ride through Paradise Valley. Have a great day friends!

And… breathe. Class 4 is complete and it was a roller coaster. Animation is, in a word, humbling. There were weeks when I felt like I could do anything and weeks when I felt worthless. This self-esteem punch is new thing for me. Animation is a beast that I’m only beginning to tame.

To be honest, this week finds me in an animation slump, mostly due to the fact that I lost about 20 hours of work today that I don’t have time to make up. Computers are jerks, but I’m to blame for not saving the files more often. At least I’ve got an excuse for why the dialog shot doesn’t look as refined as it should, but I’ll be (re)addressing that once I get settled into my new workstation.

That brings me to the most exciting news. I’m packing up my car today and heading west first thing in the morning! I’m planning to take my time, see some sights and arrive in Seattle sometime this weekend, probably Sunday. We’ll see how purdy that Yellowstone really is. I finally got myself a point&shoot camera, so I’ll take some photos of the adventure.

I buy these burgers at Rainbow quite often for use in dishes like chili or my sausage, egg & tater skillet. It’s usually just $2/lb at Rainbow for what seems like above par quality ground turkey.

I picked up a box of 12 quarter pound burgers last night. Today I hear on MPR that the same product is recalled because of 12 salmonella cases around the country. The recall only includes 12 packs of third pound burgers sold at Walmart.

What do you think. Do I open this box?

Class 3 is wrapped up. No week off this time, so we’re diving right back in on Monday. That’s cool. I’d probably get bored after being in the routine of sitting at the desk most of every day.

I spent the weekend rendering out my Class 3 lumberjack shots. I think I got them looking reasonably-pretty. I wanted to gussie them up for my internship applications. I applied for the summer programs at Pixar, Disney and Laika. Wish me luck, y’all!

Class 4 is going to be awesome! It’s all about working performance into animation. So far, the emphasis has been on the fundamentals and intricacies of body mechanics. Cool stuff for sure, but the really cool stuff comes after you add acting to the mix. In the next 3 months, I’ll be doing one pantomime shot and one dialogue shot. I’m excited to get access to the Bishop rig. Bishop is the main character associated with Animation Mentor.

It looks like I’m westward-bound in May. I’ve decided to move to Seattle. It’ll be great to be close to the animation community. There’s a handful of AMers in Minneapolis, but out west, I’ll be able to attend numerous school and industry events throughout the year. I’m a little afraid that town’ll be too gloomy for my taste. Me likes the sun. I’ve never been so I should give it a try, right?

12,870 Miles–That’s how far the Honda Civic took my in 2008. At the end of that year, I decided that was way too much, so I’ve done a few things to trim the fat on my transportation budget. The biggest thing was moving from Maple Grove to Minneapolis. That knocked off most of the monotonous freeway miles.

2009 brought me down to 9,780. That year, Casey and I really got serious about carpooling to work. Of course, I drove most of the time, so it doesn’t really help my number out so much. I also started doing a lot of biking in the temperate months.

In 2010, I only used my car for work when I really had to. Casey manned up most of the time moving gear from jobsite to jobsite allowing me to two-wheel it very often. For the month and a half I was at First Avenue, I biked there almost every day and had materials (you know, the 100+gallons of paint) couriered to the site. Living Uptown now, I started using the buses a whole lot, especially in the Winter months. These practices brought the Civic’s annual total to 6200 miles. Half of those miles were used up by the end of April due to working pizza delivery. Believe it or not, customers don’t really accept the “I missed the bus” excuse for cold food.

With a 24% decrease in ’09 and a 36.6% decrease in 2010, I’m on pace to cut my number in half this year… Realistically, I’m setting a goal of 5000.

YakBak: How many miles do you drive in a year?

I’m getting used to seeing my photo in the news. I’m a photolink to another year in music thing. Go here and click on the Vita.mn tab.

Here’s the last shot I did for class 2. I’ve got a full rig with arms here, but I decided to severely limit them with a straight jacket. I see nobody nibbled on my feedback request. Just know I’m going to blame you guys for my lame ideas in the upcoming term.

Video Daze

For the last month I’ve been working on digitizing fifty odd camcorder tapes from the last 10 years of my parents’ home videos. After the hullabaloo of getting hardware and software infrastructure in place, I’m on to the grunt work–ten tapes down. I’ve been trying to start capturing a tape and ignore it for a couple hours, but I’ve found myself just sitting and watching. There are hours of Casey and me goofing off making movie magic in 2001-2003. It’s looking like a can make a pretty comprehensive family holiday compilation. I think I should take a break after I get all these tapes captured. I’m not sure I like how the days have disappeared this week.

Here’s the second shot for the body mechanics class. It’s still a pretty boring action, but I’m trying to choose shots that will teach me a lot and not get distracting with all kinds of acting quirks and what not.

Feedback PLZ:
My next 3-month class will also be focusing on body mechanics. I’ll be doing 3 shots, each about 8 seconds long. One where my character lifts a heavy object, one acrobatic or dancing shot, and another with no guidelines. I want them to have a common theme. I’d love any suggestions for his setting, situation, or costume. Thanks friends!

The Star Tribune put another nice picture of my back on the front of today’s Variety section. You can see Barry in the background on my favorite 50 foot setup.