The director of Cowboy Bebop has a new animated series in the works: what looks like a pop samurai series called Samurai Champloo. There is some word that Champloo is going to be hip hop based whereas Cowboy Bebop had a definite jazz groove going (among others). If you haven't yet checked out Bebop, then do yourself a favour and catch it. Very well-written and realized.. See the official site here >>

Last night I spent some time with a group of digital filmmakers who call themselves Cinema Fabulon. Like me, they shoot using an XL1S. They have a very large group of people who do everything from set dressing, gore effects to building the sets they need for their short splatter flix. Take a look at their site and be sure to view their first movie >>

I found a jpg to ASCII converter and converted the Halloween picture of me you see in the top left hand portrait into an ASCII picture. See it here >>

Sounds strange but is actually quite nice. The Hungarian artist Parangako paints with sand on glass and changes one picture into another like a real-time animation. It was part of the opening ceremony at the Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival. See it here (Windows Media required) >>

I picked up the Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze DVDs from the Director's Label series (the other one is for Michel Gondry). It's so nice to have all these awesome videos in DVD form now. Immediately, the Chris Cunningham DVD is a standout because of his superb visuals. Windowlicker, Come to Daddy, Afrika Shox, Frozen, Come On My Selector, and All is Full of Love are on here as well as random commercials and a weird installation piece he did with the Aphex Twin called Monkey Drummer. There extras are a bit sparse but it does have a short behind-the-scenes blab for All Is Full of Love with Bjork. In Cunningham's bit he explains that he didn't have great faith in computer graphics until he had seen the finished work from the 3D studio Glassworks. You will probably get more information about the making of All Is Full of Love online. The best inclusion in the extras is the excerpt from the installation Flex, which features nude performers in some sort of paradise lost myth. Overall, something very nice for your collection.

The Spike Jonez DVD is a bit more of a mixed bag. If you don't like Jonez brand of humour and his stunts you're not going to want to pick this up. Jonez' videos don't have an consistent visual style (like Cunningham's) and many are cheaply shot (but not cheaply imagined!). You get the sense that Jonez tries new things with every project and that the artists he works with are indulging his freakish imagination. A telling part inclusion in the DVD was a rejected video concept he had for an Oasis song where he went around London asking people what they thought the Oasis video should be after they listened to it on a cassette. A band with egos as large as Oasis couldn't bear it, apparently. As I mentioned before, the Jonez videos are quite varied, all of them are quite sweet in a way. The cover song video Wax with the slow motion shot of the man on fire trying to catch a bus I quite like. Weapon of Choice with the dancing Christopher Walken in the empty hotel is an all-time classic as is the It's Oh So Quiet Bjork musical and Weezer's Buddy Holly. There were spme I didn't realize were Spike Jonez' videos including What's Up Fatlip and Weezer's Undone. The extras are quite a bit more special in the Spike Jonez DVD. Of interest is a 29 minute documentary he made of a group of rodeo wannabes in Houston called Amarillo By Morning. It's a slice of life of these young cowboys as they talk about Jesus, their wrangler jeans and their dreams of riding bulls on the professional circuit even as they pound their groins on top of barrels strung between trees.

I didn't go out for Halloween but I did got to a post-Halloween party at my brother's. Here's how I looked.

For the past three weeks I've been writing a feature-length screenplay, my second one after "Tigers" (which I'm leaving until later to edit). My goal this year was to write three marketable screenplays. Both "Tigers" and this recent one - about peacekeepers who get in over their heads - are aimed at a domestic Canadian market. My next one might be another as well.

Camera crews covering the trial of actor Robert Blake were conveniently placed to see a man in court involved in a trust fund dispute empty his pistol at a lawyer at point blank range. Amazingly, the lawyer dodges most of the bullets while hiding behind a tiny tree. It was all captured on video. . Read about it and watch it here>>