Irish-American Artist-Designer-Writer-Hyphenater
Cover artist of the @cannonfilmguide
Co-creator of @zemwerk theater co.
#1 Fan of @realbuttershow podcast
It's all about focusing on gesture. Biggest trap for young artists is trying to finish every piece they start. Once you figure out gesture by filling sketchbooks with quick drawings, you can turn them into fully finished pieces. See if you can fill 2 sketchbook pages a day with dozens of gesture drawings. Only take 1-5 minutes each. Don't overwork it or fall in love with one pose. Once a few minutes is up, move onto the next one. After a few days of this you'll notice your speed increasing exponentially.
The circle of mushrooms in your lawn is the visible edge of a single fungus that has been growing for years, possibly centuries.
"Fairy rings" start when a single fungal spore lands in a favorable spot and begins to grow outward in all directions through the soil.
The mycelium (the actual body of the fungus) is a network of microscopic threads called hyphae. It can spread underground at a rate of 1 to 2 feet per year, fanning out from the central point. The mushrooms you see above ground are just the fruiting bodies, like apples on a tree.
Eventually the center dies out as the fungus exhausts the nutrients there. The outer edges keep expanding. The result is a ring that gets larger every year, sometimes for decades. Some grow to 33 feet across.
One of the oldest known fairy rings is in France, estimated at 700 years old and 2,000 feet in diameter. A fairy-ring-type Armillaria fungus in northern Michigan covers 37 acres, weighs an estimated 21,000 pounds, and has been growing for around 1,500 years. It's one of the largest single living organisms on Earth.
The ring in your yard is almost certainly smaller and younger. But the principle is the same: you're not looking at scattered mushrooms. You're looking at the edge of an organism most of which lives below the grass, has been there for as long as the lawn has, and will keep expanding outward whether or not anyone is watching.
This guy's chickens kept getting targeted by hawks, so he started feeding local crows. Now he has an army of crows that patrols his property and chases the hawks away.
Some of my TERRIBLY DRAWN storyboards for I Love Boosters. Later- we did have an amazing artist re-do them, but planned through most of prep using these. It worked. You don't have to use AI to do this shit.
In Oppenheimer, Emily Blunt said Christopher Nolan gave her a very specific and odd bit of direction. He told her to act as if she had something in her mouth, almost like she was chewing. It gave the character a sense of contained aggression, tension, and inner life.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Whatever [the next outbreak] is, we ain’t ready for it. We still have anti-vaxxers running around.”
“I don’t trust scientists. I saw a YouTube video, so I’m not going to take it.” (mocking)
“I don’t want you to ever forget this story.”
“20,000 years ago, we’re in the cave. Do you know what the life expectancy was?”
Shannon Sharpe: “10 years? 15 years?”
Neil deGrasse Tyson: “30. Half of everyone born was dead before they were 30.”
Shannon Sharpe: “Wow!!!”
Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Fast forward to 1840… everyone born in the world was dead by the age of 35. We gained five years of life expectancy. And every one of them ate organic, breathed clean air… Science matters here.”
“We’ve doubled the life expectancy with antibiotics, vaccines, and sanitation. The three biggest forces operating on our longevity. So to come around and say I don’t need vaccines because I’m not getting sick, that’s like saying, why are you using dandruff shampoo? You don’t have dandruff.”
Shannon Sharpe: “Well, I don’t want to get it.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson: “That’s my point. If you’re successful, people think you don’t need it when that’s what’s creating the ongoing success in the first place.”
The crow watching you from the tree branch knows your face. Not just as a human, but you. And they will remember the things you did.
Researchers at the University of Washington spent nearly two decades studying this. They trapped a few crows once, harmlessly, while wearing a particular mask, banded them, and let them go. Then they walked around campus in that same mask for years afterward. The crows scolded and dive-bombed it every time.
Here's the part that should give you some pause if you're considering being mean to crows. Crows that were never trapped did it too.
Birds that had only watched the others react learned to treat the mask as dangerous. And crows born years later, who had never seen the original event at all, inherited the grudge from their parents and scolded a face they had never met.
A control mask, worn the same way, was ignored completely. It was never about masks or people in general. It was about one specific face, flagged as a threat and passed down through a population like a piece of news.
So the crow on the wire isn't just watching. It's profiling you, and it will tell its kids about you.
Tom Holland would call "Spider-Man" producers from "The Odyssey" set in order to "lay down the law" about filming blockbusters the Christopher Nolan way:
“I'd say, ‘We are not going to come to set and figure it out. We need to know why we are making this movie beyond the fact that it’s ‘Spider-Man 4’ and they make loads of money and we’re going to just have a big summer. Why are we making this movie?’ And Destin was super instrumental in that, but it was just really great to constantly be calling up the studio and [producers] Amy [Pascal] and Rachel [O’Connor], who I love, and be like, ‘Well, Chris is doing it this way. This is how I think we should be doing it.’ ” (via GQ)
https://t.co/Gf5DPJBs9r