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Updates, The Great College Conspiracy and Misc.

First of all, the lack of updates. Well, I’ve been extremely busy, what with school, Gaelic football and so forth, it’s been hard to get the time to sit down and bang out a blog post. You see, I’m one of those people that just writes one all in one go; none of this “write a bit now and finish it later”. Now way, I’d forget about it and this blog would be nothing but a pile of drafts waiting to be published. Need proof, I have three right now that may never see the light of day; one is a review of the ASIFA-East Festival from earlier this year, one is about the differences in music in cartoons (orchestral or otherwise) and one barely has a topic, let alone any text. So there you go, I’m not lazy, I just need time and a topic to write about.

Graduate school, what’s the conspiracy and why should I care? Well, I just started my MBA, a long and tortuous process that will take up the bulk of my time for the next three years. It’s not going to be fun, but it’s something I feel I have to do.

An education is the easiest thing you’ll ever carry

Or so says my Dad. He’s right too, which is why I’m doing it. Anyway, onto the conspiracy, which is, textbooks!

Yup, textbooks. I think I bought about three books for the entire duration of my bachelors degree. My ethos was “skim the required reading, skip everything else” (thank you Matt Groening). It worked well enough, but then nothing was really all that hard, and this time around, I’m coughing up for the piece of parchment, so I might as well make an effort.

So these textbooks, the one I needed for my class has an MSRP of $150. A hundred and fifty dollars! Outrageous says I. I would never pay that for a book back in Ireland. Surely there must be a cheaper option. Sure enough, there is.

My theory is that Europeans know right well that books, at least those in print, don’t cost that much to produce, and therefore shouldn’t cost that much to buy. Well, American apparently aren’t near as discerning.

As if I didn’t need more proof, I went on the publisher’s British website, and , lo and behold, there was the same book (albeit the “International Edition”), for almost half the price, with VAT included! Needless to say, I hit up eBay and bought that for $50, less than half the price!

Am I suffering in school? No. Did I cheat the publisher out of their money? Again, no. They still made a profit on the sale, otherwise it wouldn’t have been that price in the first place (it just happened to be an economics book too).

College in the US is a ripoff. Tuition fees give graduates a mortgage they can’t get rid of, and from what I can see, grades are a bit of a joke too. You gotta pay the cost to be the boss unfortunately.

OpenOffice.org, the free productivity suite. How good is it? I’ve ben using it at work for 6 months and no-one’s noticed yet. not only are all the parts better integrated than in MS Office, they’re actually superior in many ways. In my opinion, writing a large document in Writer allows far more control than in Word.

Give it a go, you can always go back if you don’t like it, but do make an effort to learn and appreciate the differences. I think in the long-term, we’re going to see a shift away from proprietary software towards free and open source products which often deliver greater efficiencies besides cost.

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Listening to:  Blues, Blues, Blues – Willis Jackson
via FoxyTunes

The 2010 Ford Taurus and the Mercury Brand: What’s Going Wrong?

The 2010 Ford Taurus. Kinda nice looking isn’t it? I drive a 2005 one myself, although it’s a million miles away from this. No heated seats for me, or even real leather for that matter. It gets me from A to B and will mean the wait for a real car (350Z, M3 or Mini Cooper) will be worth it.

This car is blog worthy today for a simple reason. It is a sign that Ford is trying. They’re still a wee bit off, but the 2010 Taurus is proof that Ford is trying to make decent cars again, which has been so long in coming, we’re still not sure if the gamble will pay off; the Japanese have deservedly  owned the US car market for over a decade now.

Ford has proven itself to be the most stable US car maker, although it has had it’s own financial troubles in the past when the other two were doing OK. Nonetheless, it would appear that someone inside the company is aware that US customers actually don’t put up with crap cars, they might put up with crap trucks, but that’s a different story. Nope, somebody figured out that good products are what you need and I think the 2010 Taurus is proof of that.

However, that’s not the topic of this blog post. What I’m writing about today is the one failing that Ford made with the Taurus, and its not really their fault, well it sort of is, but more on that later. The one failing they made is that they pushed the Taurus upmarket. Now that’s not to say that they should not have done that, by all means the Taurus should be competing strongly with the Accord, something my 2005 model hadn’t a hope of doing.

The problem is the brand. The Ford brand itself has always represented quality and value (the Model-T and so on), much like Chevrolet is GM’s value brand. The idea is that you start with a Ford, then move up the brand ladder before ending at a Lincoln. On you’re way up, you’ll have to pass the brand in the middle, Mercury.

Mercury was originally a near-luxury brand, one that offered some of the comforts of a luxury brand but without the price. Way back in the day, this meant a unique body style and even unique models. Unfortunately, much like GM, these brand values eroded over time, only to be replaced with “badge engineering” [snort].

Badge engineering absolutely destroys a brand, it turns it into a ghostly figure of itself. Brand loyalty goes out the window because it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Granted maintaining a completely separate brand is expensive in an industry with notoriously low profit margins, Volkswagen barely manages it and only Toyota, Nissan and Honda seem to have pulled it off successfully, although they focused on the purely luxury market.

Back to Mercury. Today, the most popular car with the Mercury nameplate is the Grand Marquis, a relic of another era in American car-making but a car unlike any other that will sadly be missed when it eventually dies. What’s sad about such a thing is that the Grand Marquis inhabits a very small, niche market with a definite age bias. Unfortunately, this age bias has come from loyal owners aging, not a general shift in car buying trends.

What I’m getting at here is that Mercury has suffered the same fate as Buick. Do you know anyone under 50 that drives a Buick? I didn’t think so. That brand is also seen as old and stodgy and it’s unlikely to get any better by using rebadged Opel products.

The point of this post is that I think Ford should have pushed the new Taurus as a Mercury first. The idea of a near-luxury brand needs a real near-luxury car in order to grow. It’s also far easier to breathe new life into a brand than to drag one up from the quality segments. By marketing the new Taurus as a Ford, the Ford brand will be stretched from the Focus all the way up. Ford cars should represent value, that’s what they’ve been known for 100 years. The launch of a new car aimed upmarket will hardly change that.

Another problem is the difference between the Ford and Mercury variants will now be even less. Why pay the extra for the Mercury if I can get real leather and heated seats in the Ford version. Sadly, the Mercury nameplate can no monger command the permium it once did.

If this car was launched as a Mercury (and it’s a rather big ‘if’ at this point), the advertising people would have to work a lot harder, but we’re in the middle of  recession and I’m sure they would  gladly do so. It would be a perfect opportunity to rebuild the Mercury brand as something that can compete effectively with the likes of Acura, Infiniti and Lexus. These brands do, in fact, offer near luxury cars at the lower end of their product offerings. Why not try and steal a few of those customers looking at an IS350 or G35?

At the end of the day, the car probably will be launched as a “badge-engineered” Mercury, be badly/poorly advertised, not targeted at the right customer and be lucky to sell a tenth of the Ford variant. Ford has come a long way with they’re products, now they just need to get the marketing right and they can once again be the leading American car maker.

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

A quick recap of my thoughts on Ponyo while they’re still fresh in the head.

I was quite surprised by the film in that although I knew it would be of the “quiet” type of Miyazaki film, it was even more so than I imagined. The story is extremely simple and uncomplicated, perfect for children but perhaps lacking for adults of more discerning tastes. Personally, I thought the story was rather cute, if a bit offbeat by western standards. Having said that, the simplicity of the story greatly enhanced the visual stimulation that the film has to offer.

Ponyo is a beautiful film, there is little doubt about that. Not only was I very impressed with the beautiful watercolour backgrounds, the overall look of the film was fantastic too. Buildings and landscapes compliment each other and the rich and varied colours compliment each other too. Such things I have come to expect from Miyazaki, someone with a particular attention to detail. Anyone in doubt should go an watch Spirited Away (my favourite) the details in the bath house are astonishing to say the least.

Ponyo running on the waves

The animation itself was flawless. As usual, Miyazaki seems to push the boundaries of what traditional, hand-drawn animation is capable of, no mean feat considering how much water plays a part in the film. Although it’s been claimed that no CGI has been used in Ponyo, there was at least one place where they must have used it, if only to enhance the scene in the subtlest of ways (see the picture above and look at Ponyo’s shadow). I’m not complaining, Miyazaki has been a champion and pioneer in using computers to enhance rather than replace traditional animation. Something people in the west seem to have forgotten in the stampede to computer generated 3-D images and environments.

Character-wise, I particularly enjoyed Liam Neeson as Ponyo’s father. Who would have thought that an Irishman could fill the role of a crank old master 0f the sea so well?

Overall, I have very few gripes with Ponyo bar the plot. The kids that were in the cinema with us seemed to enjoy it and the adults with them were chuckling in all the right places. suffice to say, Ponyo may finally be the movie that opens up theatrical Japanese animation in the US. It certainly seems to be doing well enough in the cinemas that it has opened in.

John Lassater and co. should be given a pat on the back for their tireless efforts to bring captivating animation to western audiences.

For some far more comprehensive thoughts by people far more versed in film reviews, check out both Michael Sporn’s excellent review and David Levy’s thoughts on the nuances of the animation itself.

A Rant On The Topic Of Fullscreen DVDs

First off, two things:

1. Who in their right mind buys these things?
2. The sonofabitch who came up with the idea was either really smart or really stupid.

Allow me to explain.

I might be a wee bit biased here, but they made the leap t0 widescreen in Europe way before the US; case in point, widescreen TV have been on sale for at least a decade, and those are in standard definition. HDTV is catching on, but apparently those of you on the West side of the Atlantic have needed that as an excuse to go widescreen too.

So, when DVD was unleashed upon the world, with mindblowing (compared to VHS) quality and surround sound, surely, the advantages it offered in terms of picture quality would be taken advantage of too, right?

Well, I’m afraid not. For you see, some person, somewhere (in Hollywood, probably) decreed that consumers should have a choice: widescreen and fullscreen. I’m sure the reasoning behind it went something along the lines of: “Oh, people won’t like having black bars at the top and bottom of their TV screens, so we’ll fix that by chopping off the sides.”

Fantastic, sell someone half the movie for the same price just because they can’t deal with some black bars. As for the eejits that buy them, what’s the story now? You’ve just got your brand new HDTV and it’s widescreen. Guess what, now you’ve got black bars on the sides and all the smart people who put up with the black bars in the first place are having the last laugh, watching their widescreen DVD on their widescreen TV.

Now, I’m not saying that we should take stuff shot in 4:3 and convert that to 16:9, oh no. That would be even worse. Me, I can live with a stretched picture, you get used to it surprisingly quickly, but the vertical black bars? They’re a million times worse than the horizontal ones.

OK, enough of a rant. Don’t buy fullscreen DVDs, they’re a waste of your time and money and those of us with widescreen DVD will laugh at you behind your back. Ha ha ha.

The Secret of Kells – Review

You can read all of my gushing enthusiasm over on ASIFA-East’s Exposure Sheet blog!

Motivation

This is just a quick note about motivation. To be honest, I’m not sure why some people have it and others don’t. It’s also surprising how much it varies from person to person.

My observations since I came to the US have indicated to me that the people who are most motivated, almost always get where they want to in the end. Some people start out strong, but give up after a while. It’s most obvious in college graduates. They come into the workforce full of wonder, excitement and optimism. Only to be crushed by the monotony of work and the crushing, failurist* attitude of superiors.

(*a word I just invented, but you get the gist of it)

Need proof, look at any young person who started their own company straight out of school, doing what they wanted. Let’s see: Bill Gates (didn’t even make it through college, so bonus points for him), Steve Jobs, those guys from Google, David Karp (a really smart guy), practically half the people in the Rich List and so on)

I know what it’s like; I’ve been there myself, and to a certain extent, probably still am. I thought work would be a great, uplifting experience, and to a certain extent it really is. Especially when you see the road you designed actually being built.

But I have been rather taken aback by how much workers in general in the US don’t seem to be motivated in their jobs; in other words, to attain a long and rewarding career by working hard, climbing the ladder and striving to achieve their best.

I recently read an excellent article called ‘Are You an American Zombie?‘. I found it fascinating because it basically describes a huge swathe of the middle classes. Becoming and American Zombie is something I’m deathly afraid of. To be absorbed into the bland landscape of the American workforce, to become a face in the crowd and to end your career in near the same place you began.

I don’t think I’d want to work in a place for 10 years only to be forgotten within 6 months of leaving (or getting fired). My Irishness helps in this regard (the whole office knows when St. Patrick’s Day is getting close), but it isn’t enough, at least not in the long run.

Now that’s not to say that everyone should be out there trying to get their names known far and wide. You can go into many places and people are perfectly happy to work at a bank or post office or hairdressers or office or factory for 40 years, there’s nothing wrong with it, but you can see the difference between someone who enjoys their job, and someone who’s just there for the paycheck. Millions have done it before us, although in the past, many would argue that food on the table was more important than brown-nosing the boss.

So, what’s motivating me?

I wish I knew, I really do. If I did, I’d have the answers to the hurdles I face every day. I’d know exactly what I need to do to get the career I want. Sadly I don’t; I have to take it one day at a time.

What I do know though, is that you will never, ever get anywhere just waiting on life to give you the opportunity. When I was back home finishing up at college, there was zero chance a US company would come knocking on my door offering me a job. I was extremely lucky that my uncle knew the right people, who, after two interviews (and $1,000 of my own money for airplane flights), were gladly offering me a job.

So I don’t know what’s motivating me, but I do know where I want to end up. It’s a feckin’ long shot if ever there was one, although others have gone further, a lot further, so there’s hope for me yet.

What is my goal? Ha ha; I’ve told precisely 3 people; all in different parts of the world, none of them know each other, and they’re not my parents or family.

I know exactly what I’m aiming for and I’ll get there in the end, because I’m motivated to.

The Secret of Kells US Premiere

At long last!

Just there the other day, I caught wind of a date for the premiere showing of The Secret of Kells, possibly the movie I have been anticipating seeing most this year.

Not to babble on too much with excitment, but it will be shown at the IFC Centre in New York as part of the New York International Children’s Film Festival. The dates are the 18th and 19th of July at 11am both days. Tickets are about $12 so tey won’t break the bank too badly.

The film itself is a fantastically animated feature set in Ireland around the time the vikings began invading and centres around a young boy named Brendan, who sets out to complete the illuminated manuscript known as the Book of Kells, which is porobably the most famous literary work to come out of Ireland in the last 1000 years.

The film is traditionally animated with some flash used here and there, but that’s not why I’m so excited. The fact that it is an Irish production with an Irish story is something that makes the old patriotic pride rise up inside me. The absolutely stunning quality of the film is secondary.

Other US showings are possible, but none have been confirmed yet, if you live anywhere near NY, come on down to see it, you will absolutely not be disappointed.

A praise post.

Today, I think I’m going to give some very well deserved praise to the good people over at Frederator.

If it wasn’t for them, I probably wouldn’t have had the inspiration to move to the States and engage in all the fun events in New York that I’ve done to date (for which I have become famous (infamous?) within ASIFA-East for more than one reason).

Of course, they have an exemplary role model in founder Fred Seibert, a man who has been on the leading edge for the most exciting 30 years the media has ever seen. The term ‘visionary’ simply does not do him justice.

Check out the blogs, it’s almost impossible to remember a time when outsiders didn’t have an open portal into how cartoons are made.

Every company needs to be more like this.

Crowdsourcing Animation

Everyone loves a contest, right? I know I do, they’re a great way to arouse interest in a particular cause and people normally make a decent effort because they want to win the prize. Some contests are boring though; like the one to choose the very lucky contractor that will someday have the distinct pleasure to build, yes, that’s right actually construct, the intersection in south-east DC I’m currently designing.

With all that in mind, let’s turn our attention to the FOX-Aniboom contest, where the submissions are 2-4 minute cartoons and the prizes total $35,000! (caution: exclamation point contains sarcasm). The overall winner also gets a development deal with FOX.

If one is to take it at face value, then it would appear that FOX is looking for animators to contribute content that could give FOX a new animated hit. In theory, this should work (although as Homer Simpson notes: “In theory, communism works”). However, it’s just not that simple, and as you already know; if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

The first big pitfall is for the entrants. They absolutely have to create the content in their free time. The official rules state that the content may not have been previously published, broadcast or marketed in any way. In which case a product like Geoweasel (hi Niko!) would be ineligible because it’s already been successfully established. You’d also be signing away your rights to the content. Matt Groening saw this one coming 20 years ago, which is why he created a family named after his own so that he wouldn’t lose the rights to the bunnies in his comic, Life in Hell.

The prize money, while it sounds nice, consists of $15,000 for the grand prize winner, along with a $25,000 development deal. That sounds great, until you realize that Seth McFarlane (oh, you should know who he is by now) got $50,000 to develop Family Guy, and he ended up doing the entire pilot episode (that’s kitchen sink and all) by himself.

So there’s not much, if anything in the contest for animators, but what about the network? I believe they’re highly unlikely to get a full series out of it, despite the development deal. While many series’ being life as a pitch, they are developed over a period of months (sometimes years) before getting the go-ahead. Pitching a series is also a bit of an art in that you have to get in there and sell yourself, getting a series based on a short clip is very, very rare (South Park and The Powerpuff Girls are the only two I know of).

For a very thorough guide to pitching, you can pre-order Animation Development: From Pitch to Production by the exceptionally knowledgeable David B. Levy.

All in all, I think this competition is just a chance for FOX and Aniboom to engage in a bit of self-promotion. It’s also highly unliekly that we’ll see any serious animtors having a go either; they’ve got access to the people they need to talk to and can therfore skip this contest. There doesn’t seem to be any long-term benefit for either party, so I don’t expect to see a series coming off the back of something like this any time soon.