Welcome to Room 116

Washington

the best cigarette

http://www.bcactionpoet.org/the%20best%20cigarette.html

Dramatic Chipmunk on Facebook

I thought it was a praire dog. Hamster?

Our Mecca

Before this year's class at VCU graduated, I had a chance to visit the school and students.

Walking through the halls again brought back a lot of memories.  There's a sense of innocence and rawness in air that I feel as I see the school life on the walls and the pictures of students holding, what I imagine, is their first ever  Fenske assignment.  I don't think you notice the innocence and rawness until you've graduated and worked a few years.  Innocence in that here within these walls holds all these hopes and dreams of change.  (I really hope one of the students here will take a gigantic chainsaw and make their way through the nimcompoop forest.)  Rawness in that there are no rules, no budgets, no scared clients, and nothing to hold us back.  It's like we're all parachuters inside this plane about to jump out with the destination unknown. It's here that, at least for me, I see and feel the reason we all wanted to be in advertising.

Another thing I saw that I took with me was seeing Cabell's office which is now in the room across from Tim's.  I was sad he wasn't there that day but I did see something that I'll never forget.  Remember how Cabell made us get these big ass black notebooks to put our inspiration and scribbles in?  Well, he brought all his notebooks into his office and they are all resting on this metal book shelf now.   I wish I had a picture to show you.  It was pretty amazing to see about 30-40? of these big black notebooks. Some looked new, some looked beat up, some had labels on the spine, some had pictures on the cover, and some were undecorated.  But it was then that I realized why he made us start the journals. It really is about living the creative life.   You really need to constantly have this dialogue with your inner creative and feed and nourish it.

Later that night, I joined a student party and had a blast playing beer pong into the wee hours of the night.  I look forward to visiting the new Adcenter building in January but I know deep down I'll always miss a lot of things from the old 1313 East Main St. building.  Well, everything except that nasty looking carpet that's starting to look like a lost Pollock painting.

Kwik-E-Mart

http://flickr.com/photos/unsureshot/688029743/

One of the many shots from the flickr set:

Review of Paris, Je T'aime

 

View the trailer here.  (FYI, the song in the trailer is sung by my fav, Feist.)

Went to see this film last night with pretty high expectations after seeing the trailer.  I consider myself a hopeless  romantic so I was looking forward to this.  The girl next to me actually said before the film started, "I hope I don't cry."  I laughed while thinking to myself I would cry before she did.

Anyways, I was really excited about going.  First film to see since I got back from my vacation so make that about 3 weeks!  I was afraid I wouldn't know which films were by which directors so I actually went on to imdb.com to write down the shorts I was looking forward to and their directors on a little sheet of paper.  (stop laughing!) I had down mainly the ones I knew: Alfonso Cuaron, Christopher Doyle, Wes Craven, Coen Bros., Alexander Payne, Gus Van Sant, and Tom Tykwer.

So here's my review.  I only liked about  5 or 6 out of the 18.  First it's hard to really absorb them because it's like watching 18 films in one sitting.  By the time the next one starts, you're stilling thinking what the hell happened in the last one.  The annoying thing is there's really no visual cue that the story is over until the titles of the next film start.  On top of the that, the next film's titles appear about 30 seconds in so for 30 seconds between films you're seeing a scene that you don't know if it's the last or first scene.  Maybe it's just me.

I could sense there was some order to the way the films were viewed but I didn't like the first one.  And with all short film viewings, it's a mixed bag.  A few really sucked.  I was disappointed with the ones from Cuaron and Doyle.  Has anyone else seen them? I didn't get them because I got tired and just couldn't really focus.  My favorites were the ones by Tykwer (Run Lola Run director), Gus Van Sant, Coen Bros., the mimes one, the cowboy one, and Alexander Payne (Sideways).  The one by Alexander Payne was hands down the best.  You knew it once you started watching it and it just got better and better.  My heart ached yet smiled the whole time which was really weird.  An LA Times critic said on RT that Payne's film was worth the price of admission alone. (See reviews about the movie here.)  This whole film felt like sitting in a Mark Fenske class and I wonder which one he would like.  Probably none of them.  :)

Flight of the Conchords

Remember in middle school where there were a few class clowns who made stupid jokes and annoyed the hell out of everyone but were funny? Well, they grew up. :)

Original Footage

http://www.dramaticprairiedog.com/

greetings from cannes

Serra @ Moma

From Delta

http://flickr.com/photos/oshani/511562477/in/photostream/

London 2012 logo

Love it or hate it?

http://www.london2012.com/

AICPshow.com

AICP launched their new site today that has all the commercials from all their past shows.  It's a great resource for everyone, especially students.  It's also the only site where SAG let the spots be shown without registration, passwords, and having to pay.  Check out the MTV Fetish spot and see if you can figure out all the references.  (It's the link with the sheep.)

http://www.aicpshow.com

For fun. rm116 as a graph

Via Websites as Graphs

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Hello Chris Berry!

 

Chumley: Chris is awaiting his huge check.  Hot tubs don't buy themselves.