LONELYPOND PRESENTS

I was writing behind the scene posts, linking to fun FT articles, getting rejected by the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, writing a kick ass Merchant of Venice blurb (yes, I, Michelle Denise Norton, have decided to take on yet another infamous Shakespearean speech. Stayed tuned for round by round updates), buying a shirt, listening to Radio FlashCatFlash, Radio blinkkittylove, searching the web, remembering the 80’s, Twittering, and doing and thinking about a galaxy of other things. Here’s the highlights:

Merchant of Venice blurb for the season brochure (then I stop thinking about it for several months):

Merchant of Venice follows Portia, another of Shakespeare’s inimitable heroines, as she makes her way through an obstacle course of money and marriage. One of Shakespeare’s most misunderstood comedies? Or the cruelest? See for yourself.

An excerpt from my Blink Kitty Love Animator’s Journal:

So many people cite Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, the team at Disney as early animation influences; not me. With Blink Kitty Love, you put Rocky and Bullwinkle, Scooby Doo and Josie and the Pussycats in a blender, press mince and here we are, having a blast + burning a hole in our Wacom tablet.

Read the rest at the Blink Kitty Love blog.

El Tigre won 4 Daytime Emmys…congratulations + to celebrate, here’s a fan made mashup trailer of High School Musical 3 + El Tigre.

FT’s Vanessa Friedman on the fashion industry making itself accessible to the film industry.

Peter Aspden on The Beatles, their digitally remastered back catalogue + a lack of originality in contemporary musical endeavors.

The Herge (creator of Tintin) museum. Read up now; Steven Spielberg + Peter Jackson Tintin movie coming to a theatre near you Christmas 2011.

And I think that’s enough for tonight *yawn*..wait, you must watch Warehouse 13. It’s smart, funny, well acted, sharply written, surprising and suspenseful…yes, many science fiction stories have the same seeds, but W-13 lets them grow in interesting + intricate ways. Last week’s Alice in Wonderland take was amazing — you can probably catch it next Tuesday at 7.

And yes, it would be nice if Claudia turned out to be gay…

And on that note, a shout out to the Outer Alliance (@nicolaz is a member + my source for this) and the GLBT Bookshelf (@yuricon the source for this one); people are banding together to get lgbt speculative fiction + writing out there. Click through if you’re interested in finding out how/why.

Good night; sleep well.

New behind the scenes, peek at the process page up at the Blink Kitty Love site.

Last.fming Depeche Mode’s Shake The Disease and I miss having a site to drop music lyrics and links into…I love the song, it perfectly expresses a very specific mood that strikes me(and I do mean strike with a tangible force)…I could keep dropping lyrics into the Blink Kitty Love site, but without video embedding support from myToons, there’s no visual content as both youTube and Aniboom still drop out frames.

Plus, I’m not sure the lyrics are appropriate for the site…the biggest Blink Kitty Love fan is my nephew Joe (13 years of age) and over pizza and burgers at the King Of Prussia mall the last time we got together he spent an hour grilling me about the band, who was crushing on who, why TK wasn’t crushing on anyone, wouldn’t it be funny if Tammy did this and what was the other girl’s name again (Tinker) and how did Ty’s head get turned upside down? Then, he started spewing forth a string of ideas (and yes, one of them I’m probably going to use later)…I tried to encourage him to create his own band, but he claims he can’t draw. I’m going to have to get him a video camera; he’s a natural director.

But if he’s Blink Kitty Love’s biggest fan, then what am I doing seeding their website with Adam Ant, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, Gomez, David Bowie, Liz Phair…none of those bands appear on iCarly, another one of his favorites and there’re some concepts he doesn’t understand yet…

So I’m steeping over the website redesign and trying to figure out RapidWeaver (thank you @autonomydesign*), Tammy’s taken over and at the moment it’s PINK…I’m not a fan of pink, the color; I’m a go on Pink the singer. I’m going to have to get Tinker or Ty to take over the process…

Anyway, any Blink Kitty Love fans with feedback, let me know. And you can view the episodes here at their new home, blip.tv, and download the full, high quality versions here…and once I get The Miser up and running, there will be new content and a new website (color/theme suggestions welcome). Share the Blink Kitty Love…

*Disclaimer: And yes, I think I have a crush (Blink Kitty Love crush contagious) on the oh so cool Autonomy Design website and one of my new goals is to get enough of an income stream to let them worry about the pink thing.

I’m keeping a what goes on behind the scenes journal through Pages at the Blink Kitty Love site. Five so far. See what inspires me, frustrates me and how the band and blog are developing.

I’m going to add a new feature to this and the Blink Kitty Love site, giving you a behind the scenes look at what happens when we do an episode of Gulible and Twitchy or I FlipBoom another bit of Blink Kitty Love fun. Which means I’m going to have to stop cheating and start learning how to use links in this blogging platform.

Today, we experimented with clay and stop motion as a start to our upcoming combining Shakespeare and animation project (two of the things I love most)…but for starters, we were going to do a sort of Gullible and Twitchy version of Frankenstein. We scheduled a Sunday session and shopping for clay made the to do list. I’ve always been a little afraid of clay; allergy to weird textures seems to be an issue sometime. Didn’t have much trouble with the textures, but the smell under the lights became almost obnoxious. And end of winter is a really good time to prop open a window.

During chi gung in the morning, I came up with the idea of the cats rolling together a head, which as we worked turned into a race to complete a monster head which turned into Twitchy cheating (a very typical Twitchy thing to do).

Ended up with black and two blue clays, manufactured by Van Aken, costing $3.79 a block. We have not cracked open the darker blue one yet. I didn’t buy the smaller more bright color Van Aken ClayToons options because unlike the other clays, they were not marked non toxic. I figure maybe there’s an issue with the dyes. But two colors worked out fine and they echo the colors of Gullible and Twitchy’s traditional nemesis, the Scarecrow. And Hermunn turned out to be pretty cool.

The images are in the computer to be edited together next session, with a special effect or two added. We used Composite Lab Pro to great effect in the last Gullible and Twitchy video, Skate Street, so I’m getting more comfortable with the thought of editing in tricks and tempos. It’s been too long since I’ve had the video camera out — the battery had totally drained and most of the files in storage had been corrupted, which bites. I’m pretty sure I was just keeping them there as backup data storage so nothing lost.

All Gullible and Twitchy videos so far can be found at MyToons. Just look for the orange cats. Now time for a shower and getting the smell of heated softening plastic out of my personal airspace. Good night all.