So Many Animal Calls

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Days Like Television: I draw kittens making giant robots play instruments for Feiyue!

I'll write about it in depth in my post on last weekend, but just quickly thought I'd post this video of what I got up to last Friday. Footware fanatics Fieyue invited me to illustrate a canvas as part of their Shapes campaign. I had 4 hours to do it, standing in the window of Rosebank awesomeness store Mooks. Here's the little video of those 4 hours condensed into two and a half minutes:

Between 10and5 are providing coverage of the whole Shapes campaign. As a part of it they did a wee interview with me here and you can click here to see some more photos of me making kittencore!

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Good Weekend: New Home and The Robo-go-gos!

This was a pretty crazy weekend. Starting on Thursday night, a bunch of us showed up at Cam's place to build decor and outfits for Robo A-Go-Go. Needless to say super pleasant times followed and much cool stuff was built. On Friday morning I woke up and raced through to BT Games to pick up their deal of the week, Bioware's Dragon Age 2! I;m a massive fan I am of Bioware and their unique, narative-heavy take on RPGs. I loved the first Dragon Age, and ever since playing through the first few hours of the sequel with Jun I've been dying to get hold of it. And on Friday that finally happened.

What should have followed was a whole day of gaming, but instead I had to pack up my life; the next day I'd be moving into my new home on the roof of the Lister building in the CBD. Luckily, with the amount of drawn out dialogue sequences, Dragon Age 2 proved to be the best game to pack to; between hacking apart darkspawn, the dialogue sequences let me occasionally chose what to say and just listen to the characters talking in the background as I packed.

In the evening I hit it through to patrick's place, for a belated party to celebrate the awesome fact that he got born and is still alive. Cue awesome times. Then cue me saying goodbye, racing through to Town Hall, spinning a DJ set to support the Dirty Skirts launching their new album. Have fun playing fun vibes, watch the Skirts unveiling their new material, then race back to patrick's for birthday party part two. Woke up early on Saturday morning, dismantled my TV and sealed my last boxes. While waiting for the movers, Jared calls to say he's through from Pretoria to help us build robots for Dynamo. With the big robot party happening that night it was probably the worst day to move, but things worked out okay. Jarred and I hung out in my now-empty, soon-to-be-former flat, then hit Cams for a bit of Dynamo action. Then I went back to my old place, met the movers, loaded up and moved to my crazy new home, 19 stories up in the center of the city I love to call my home.

Didn't have much time to appreciate my new home, busted a quick shower and raced through to Kitchener's to help with the set up for High Five. Was delighted to discover Cam, Jared and Richard had whipped up some awesome decor since I'd seen them, and coupled with the outfits we'd made on Thursday night we found the party pretty wonderfully transformed into a robo-disco where a night of mad fun was about to go down.

Waking up in my new home on Sunday morning was a bit of a shock. The sunday morning town noisiness was pretty intense, and with all of my kitchen supplies still in storage I realised I couldn't even have a glass of water. Cue more Dragon Age and unpacking all my boxes, being pretty proud of how my new room was coming together.

In the evening Cam swung by to help me break the flat in. Saving me from my lack of kitchen supplies he brought along a pair of mugs and some sugar. Pity we didn't think about not having a teaspoon, so we landed up making tea with a knife.

And then in keeping with the fantasy awesomeness of my Dragon Age Sunday, Cam and I rocked Your Highness.

Seeing the film as a kind of fantasy, stoner, spiritual-succesor to both "Pineapple Express" and "Eastbound and Down", I've really been looking forward to Your Highness, and as much as I was expecting to enjoy it, those expectations were well surpassed. It's surely not a film for everyone. If you weren't a kid in the 80ies, the fantastic throw-back special effects could be totally misread as crappy and cheap. As always there's a lot more low-brow humor than anything I'd usually watch and it's probably a given that as a stoner film is not something my Gran would enjoy. But for me, it was was fantastic. The over-the-top 80ies action cheese that just seemed acward and out of place in Pineapple express seemed perfectly at home in Your Highness' fantasy setting. There were mountains of subtle visual references to films I grew up with and Cam and I just LOLsed and LOLsed. Eventually though it was time for him to go. We said our farewells and I clumb into my old bed in a room, excited and giddy about starting this next chapter in my life, my new rooftop home and the fact that the next day a pet cat would be moving into it!