Sketchcrawl Dec. / Lasseter / cell phone blurs

God-diggity-damn! It's been a long time since i last posted.

Sketchcrawl Dec. was awesome. Lots of great artists. Illustrators, graphic designers, animators. Good people. Good sketching. And of course it's really nice to have Enrico take us out to the Museum of Natural History.

At the end of the day we went to Rafaella's (restaurant,) in greenwich village. They promptly kicked us out after an hour or so of sketching. Bitches.

Here are my sketches( In no particular order):




And this last pic was the massive exodus from the Museum of all the sketchcrawlers, crawling to a restaurant for lunch!



Last friday I went to see John Lasseter vice pres. creative of Pixar and director of Toy Story and Cars talk at the Museum of Modern Art. John's awesome. Such a down to earth person even though he's basically the creative head of probably the most cutting edge animation studio today.

And he said something that inspired me and made me very happy:

"Art inspires technology, technology inspires art."

And to anytime i've ever been questioning myself on what's funny he said to:

"Remember the first joke you laughed at."

Great words of wisdom.

Something I'd like to say about Pixar's latest movie Cars. Almost everyone I've talked to about watching any clip or teaser trailer of Cars, has said that they aren't very interested. That it doesn't really pique they're animated hearts, that it just doesn't look that great. And honestly I had felt the same way.

That is until John talked about why he decided to make Cars.

He said he had taken a cross country trip in a motor home with his family, and he remembered what it was like going on a trip when he was a kid and watching everything from the side of a window: telephone poles going by, lights bluring in the distance, the sun going down over the horizon.

When he said this was his inspiration for Cars, my heart immediately informed my brain that we needed to see this film.

The reason is because I know this exact feeling. That kind of distant awe and observation when driving with your family as a kid in the backseat, watching the world pass by in front of your eyes. It humbles you when you drive more than 2-3 hours in this country- to know that it is so massive and that you are only one tiny person in it.

And so I think Cars might be Pixar's most unique and undeniably American film to date because it will so succinctly capture the heart and vastness of America in the mode of transportation every american is familiar with, driving in an automobile.

So here is two bad photos of John Lasseter. Notice that he's so damned fast with his hand movements that he blurs. He's like a living inbetween:


About blurring. On a totally different subject- I was toying with the idea of starting up a seperate blog of only pictures from blurred cellphone images. They look so vivid and weird. Here are some I took with a digital camera. You too can capture neon ghosts.






Tell me what you think of these and the idea!
-Nels