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My friend Justin Thompson sent me to this cabaret-themed drawing salon put on by the Gallery Girls. First time I’d been. I’d been working really hard all week, finishing up the first draft of Fathom, and it was a fun change of pace to decompress by spending an evening drawing people in crazy costumes with live music and a bar.

A lot of the artists there were pros and some had pretty mad skills. The guy sitting next to me, Joey Mason, amazed me with his dead-on caricatures that in a few lines somehow managed to look “more like” the model than the classic/academic, accurately shaded drawings other artists were doing (which amazed me too).

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I bought a Moleskine watercolor sketchbook and a travel-size watercolor set and took them to my neighborhood life drawing workshop. I still have no idea what I’m doing and no control over how it comes out, but I’m starting to realize that’s actually part of why watercolor is fun.
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Okay, this speech has been heard by probably a billion people worldwide; he doesn’t need me to plug it… but I’m just so happy to have a President who says things like this:

All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings.

It is easier to start wars than to end them. It is easier to blame others than to look inward; to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path. 

Can we?

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Had fun checking out some of this year’s E3 titles (without actually going to E3) at House of Game, a “vernissage” organized by the Hollywood gamers who started Nerd Poker.

Among the cool-looking upcoming titles: Tim Schafer’s Brutal Legend, Pandemic’s The Saboteur, Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain, and, of course, Uncharted 2.

I especially enjoyed seeing some of the indie games: A USC student project called The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. And Shadow Physics, a very cool mechanic in search of a game. Maybe because they’re works in progress, or just because they’re underdogs; but three hours later, I find myself thinking about them more than about the big studio fare.

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The first five years of Old Journals have now been posted, covering the development and first release of Prince of Persia. As of June 1990 — nineteen years ago — POP is struggling for life on two formats, Apple II and IBM.

I really appreciate the interest readers are showing in these journals, both on this site and on Twitter. I’ll continue posting one new old journal entry a day. Thanks for following!

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I found this Gamasutra editorial by Chris Remo interesting (and not just because he mentions POP).  He dares to ask: Why do today’s video games (and the movies based on them) tend so relentlessly toward the epic, at the expense of other kinds of stories?

Is it because games are often played as power fantasies? Is it because, when the default progression mechanic in most games is combat, grand conflict and badassery just make the most sense?

It’s a good question.  I saw Star Trek last week at the Arclight Hollywood with friends whose movie tastes run more towards art-house fare.  (I loved it, they didn’t.) After the first three trailers (Transformers, Terminator, and GI Joe), my friend leaned over to me in some perplexity and said: “I feel like I’ve just seen the same trailer three times in a row.”

Coincidentally, Terry Gilliam made much the same remark in today’s LA Times:

Terry Gilliam went to the movies the other night, and this is what he saw. “Trailers from ‘Transformers,’ ‘ G.I. Joe,’ ‘ Harry Potter’; they all had the same explosions, the same sound mix, the same rhythms, it was all the same film,” the director says, still not quite believing it. ” Hollywood’s been doing this for 20 years. When’s it going to end?”

[Small world: Gilliam's new film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, was edited by Mick Audsley, who is also one of the editors of the POP movie.]

Kurosawa once said that he made movies for people in their twenties. For me, that’s the key.  Epics are the kind of movies I loved most when I was in my teens and early twenties.  I liked other kinds of movies too, but I lived for epics.  Movies (and video games) mattered more to me at that time in my life than they ever have since. This being a business, it’s fair to note that I spent a far greater proportion of my time and disposable income consuming them than I do now. So in a way, I’m still making movies and games for my 20-year-old self.

These days, when I go to the movies (or the Xbox), be it Star Trek, Bioshock or whatever, what holds my interest most are the small, quirky, human moments that somehow transcend the familiar epic framework, make it come alive one more time. They’re getting harder to find.

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Did these on set in Ouarzazate, added the sepia ink wash later when I got back to the hotel. 

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Went down to the Aspen MLT offices to catch up on all things Fathom and see the work the artists are doing for the upcoming season.

Frank Mastromauro and Peter Steigerwald showed me a stack of Mike Turner’s original Fathom pencil art, including the very first appearance of Aspen Matthews.

There’s something uncanny about a physical drawing, pencil on paper. It’s as close as we can come to touching one of those fleeting moments when you imagine something new for the first time. Something that might change your life, and other people’s.

It was sobering to realize that the stack is finite.

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Of all the things there are to draw in the world, for me the most fascinating, compelling, and damnably difficult is sketching people I know.

It’s way more pressure than clandestinely sketching complete strangers in a café or an airport.  When you draw someone you know, you’ve got nowhere to hide.

This little scribble (lower left) of 2nd AD Rich Goodwin standing between takes on the POP set in Ouarzazate was one of the few times I felt I got a recognizable likeness, even though you can’t see his face.  (Whereas the one of John Seale looks nothing like him.)

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This NPR interview with Mo Willems really struck a chord with me. He points out that while all kids draw, almost no adults do, and questions why:

“People stop when they decide they’re not good at it. Nobody stops playing basketball when they realize they’re not going to become a professional. The same thing should apply to cartooning.”

About a year and a half ago I started carrying around a notebook and sketching what I saw. Aside from the pure fun of it, my new hobby has enriched my life in more ways than I ever expected. Willems has some great things to say in favor of picking up the pen, and I can’t endorse his message enough.

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