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Writing at Home can Make Jane a Dull Dull Girl.

Stuck in a rut?
Ideas lodged in the mud with the coffee maker you hurdled over the balcony last week because it wouldn’t work any longer?

Get your ass outside.

I’ve joined a production to help me in my quest to find inspiration.

It’s good to be a part of The Haircut, and you can be too. They’re still looking for contributions and you can be a part of history.

The Haircut is a short written by Julia Cox, a film and television writer and graduate of USC’s MFA Screenwriting program.

The Hair Cut is about the first women to dare enter a military school like West Point Academy and the production has already been awarded a IMPACT FIRST FILMS $5K GRANT .

It will be exciting to get to work with talented people again and spread my creative wings at the same time. Win win.

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The joys of just being a number.

This little entry will entail what it’s like to have your apartment building purchased.

So far, it’s been pretty humiliating.

A few months ago, our new “owners” came by with cheerful smiles and attitudes. It seemed to reflect what we thought (or I thought) was a future rainbow focused on new beginnings. They were pleasant and we were pleasant back, because all of us have been suffering under the equivalent of a gentle handed slum lord (not outright horrible, but not outright great either –aka Artiste Apartments).

Cut to yesterday evening when the new off site temporary managers went door to door during dinner time (good choice), to see if people were home and introduce themselves. Again, on outward appearances this is a great idea but let’s rewind a bit. It was over a MONTH ago the place was looked at by the new buyer. A good company would send out letters informing us who the new managers would be AND let us know when they’d come for a visit so we could all meet them and BE HOME for them because I for one wanted to say hello but couldn’t. But, instead, the random quick in/out drop by is what we got. Leave your money on the dresser, man.

Less than 24 hours later (this morning) they started demo-ing 4 of the empty apartments. And by demo I mean, ripping out floors, kitchens, etc.

I made a little call to the department in charge of building and safety and discovered  no permits were filed for this activity and to be honest, I’m not surprised. This is ‘tow the line’ average for Los Angeles. These investors rake through the city, assess properties that can put out like the little money whores they are, buy and then flip them without acknowledging that human beings live in these spaces and have to live and work around their short cuts.

Exactly how hard is it to drop a f***ing note in the mail to inform us of upcoming construction? Not hard. And if they’re too cheap for stamps, and if they don’t get permits, what does that say about them and their ’employees’.

The new company (Essential Management, Inc. of Los Angeles) appears on the surface to be no better than Artiste. Prove me wrong!

Sure, you’ll flip the ailing apartments that need work as discussed, and you’ll pretty up the yard, but you’ll do it with unlicensed labor (hello GAS LEAKS!!!!!!), no permits, using noisy crews that yell for no reason, and play loud music while the rest of us who LIVE here try to work and pay your income.

I could call the city and punish them, but that will just hurt me (because we know how slumlords like to treat tenants who whistle-blow), and it would just delay the work, so at this point, I’m stuck.

I like it here, but I prefer to have building owners that acknowledge humanity and actually communicate professionally.

And…they don’t.

When is a permit required? http://dpw.lacounty.gov/bsd/permitinfo/

 

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Update: 8/9/2014

Six months later and I’m in a beautiful new apartment with a management company that actually cares about their tenants.

The initial manager who spoke with me (Karen) when the apartments were taken over, lied TO MY FACE about the company having permits. That was swiftly and easily taken care of by calling the city and having them inspect the work, stop the work (a nice week of peace and quiet, thank you), and require permits for the rest of their construction.

Stories of nazi-like aggression from the owner (the old one) from when I left continued to leak my way. He likes to yell and point fingers in faces, which didn’t work well with me, other than I left to get away from his magnificent ego and uncaring touch.  He ripped out almost every single plant that was green on this property and replaced it with sand, concrete, and pointy plants.

It’s the grossest most disgusting over-priced re-design I have ever seen in my life. The place looks like a prison now. I’m glad I’m gone.

My favorite example I was witness to was when he knocked on a tenant’s door at 9 am on a Saturday (a no no) and then chided her for being sleepy when she’s a waitress that leaves work at 2 a.m.. He then continued to invite her to his skeevy superbowl party. Gross.

 

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Wanted: 2D Animator seeking story.

I’ve decided to go forth and produce/direct a short that was relinquished back to me from a busy production company that bought it but couldn’t schedule in a time to film my little baby. I now feel this short will benefit greatly as an animated piece rather than shot due to complications like finding a highly trained animal on a tiny budget.

It’s a romance comedy, so I envision a soft pencil sketch (in color) animation, similar to Bill Plympton but maybe even “sketchier” or “softer” if that’s a more appropriate.

I’m currently seeking stills from other films to illustrate what’s in my head in terms of style.

So if you’re a 2D animation artist interested in joining forces with me, we can discuss how we’ll get paid.

We can either work our asses off for free and split any income/awards derived from it’s sale or perhaps create a kickstarter. Note: after much thought, I don’t have the heart to ask anyone to work for free, so I’m already planning a kickstarter campaign with a low but comparable budget in mind.

I’m willing to put in 110% of my passion and time, so if you are too, hit me up with a demo reel or resume.

This film has promise and it’s family friendly, so it knows no bounds.

Title: Middle Ground

Length: 6 pages.

Tagline:  When Robert and Brenda met, they thought they had nothing in common…  They were wrong.

Synopsis: A stray dog interrupts the comings and goings of  a chubby man out for a burger and a health conscious woman attending a yoga class. When the animal is injured, they find a middle ground between their differences and come together to save him from certain death.

Notes: The film relies heavily on visual communication, and limited dialog.  Approximately six minutes long.

Previous Reader comments :

“I think this is really cute…” Adryenn, 21st Century Pictures Group

“That was really nice. A great read.”  Richard, Actor

“(This) had the sensibility of and read very much like Pixar’s shorts.” Brian Alexander – Artfire Films

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All the Pretty People

No.

This post goes out to all employers, both in showbiz and outside of it.

You come off as a holy-rolling twat cake when you ask nay, require an applicant to submit a photograph for a job that doesn’t need a special ‘look’ or ‘appearance’ to get the job. I’m not talking about jobs like actor, model, etc, where the look of a person is a visually integral part of the product, even though I still have concerns over that ball of razor blades.

I place anyone (or any company) that requires a photograph with an application somewhere between ax murder and pedophile.  Actually,  as far as that scale is concerned, I’d rather converse with a pedophile for the research perks that would provide me as a writer. You on the other hand, I’d rather work in a factory chopping up baby animals than waste my time applying to your company for a job that requires I look a certain way rather than perform my job with the skill set I have so painstakingly cultivated.

When you ask for a photograph with an application you are:

  • NOT Professional – A dead giveaway to REAL professionals interested in becoming a part of your company or team). No one wants to work for someone who has NO CLUE what they’re doing.
  • Breaking Laws – The EEOC says it is ILLEGAL to ask a prospective employee for a picture or anything before the job is formally offered.
  • It appears as discriminatory. Why do you want to look like an uneducated bigot when trying to build a team that will raise your product from an idea to fruition?

So employers, producers, directors of Craigslist and the Los Angeles Table (names politely but not deservedly withheld): STOP.

Stop asking for photographs when asking for applications.  I will fight for the rest of my life while this law is in place to bury your stupidity with requests like this because there’s no room in this world for shallowness. I don’t care if this is Los Angeles where ugly people are arrested for fashion mishaps, or plain Jane, Arkansas. There’s just no room for you here.

The EEOC guidelines:

Taken from the EEOC (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) 

Pre-Employment Inquiries (General)

As a general rule, the information obtained and requested through the pre-employment process should be limited to those essential for determining if a person is qualified for the job; whereas, information regarding race, sex, national origin, age, and religion are irrelevant in such determinations.

Employers are explicitly prohibited from making pre-employment inquiries about disability.

Although state and federal equal opportunity laws do not clearly forbid employers from making pre-employment inquiries that relate to, or disproportionately screen out members based on race, color, sex, national origin, religion, or age, such inquiries may be used as evidence of an employer’s intent to discriminate unless the questions asked can be justified by some business purpose.

Therefore, inquiries about organizations, clubs, societies, and lodges of which an applicant may be a member or any other questions, which may indicate the applicant’s race, sex, national origin, disability status, age, religion, color or ancestry if answered, should generally be avoided.

Similarly, employers should not ask for a photograph of an applicant. If needed for identification purposes, a photograph may be obtained after an offer of employment is made and accepted.

I recently wrote a member of a networking group why they required a photograph with the application for a job as a Script Supervisor.

Their twat cake vacant reply was:  “Because I asked for one.”

Don’t be this person.

Get off your arse and interview people like adults instead of petulant junior-high cheerleaders chittering behind the Gator-ade dispenser.

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4.10.13 In a lovely turn of events, the moderator of  The Table has now banned submissions requiring photographs because it promotes a discriminatory atmosphere. I bow to you, sir and thank you.

4.10.13 Mike Bonomo, a fellow filmmaker/friend I’ve had the pleasure of  discussing this topic with, had this to say about the subject.

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The Demise of WriteSafe.Com?

write safe logo

WriteSafe.Com is was a repository for writers to upload their scripts, stories and other writing related materials with a goal to time stamp them for intellectual property protection.  It’s not legally very powerful from the standpoint of a copyright or even a Writer’s Guild registration, but it did serve as a way to protect one’s work if one was budgetary conscious.

You may recognize the domain/service  if you’ve ever submitted the short to Inktip.com‘s short’s division. I have several shorts online with Inktip.com in which Writesafe.com is used to validate ownership because it’s a pain in the wallet to register shorts with the WGA or copyright office.

This week I noticed the domain had expired in February which leads me to believe:

  • a) someone isn’t at the wheel and forgot to renew the domain (tsk tsk tsk)
  • b) the site is closed down for good

I’m leaning towards answer “a” because even if you were closing down a business, you’d create a press release, inform users of it’s impending closure, and renew the domain with a simple holder page for a year so that everyone knows what is going on with respect to shutting down the service.  Right?

There’s nothing on the internet I can find about the demise of this service, so it leads me to believe that the domain is simply expired.  Simple is really the wrong word to use, if you weren’t already familiar with how domain registration works, let me give you a quick lesson in how important it is to renew them in a timely manner.

When you register a domain, most if not all registrars will remind you 6 months, 1 month, and then weekly that your domain is about to expire. Many people use their ISP email addresses when they buy the domain, this is a HUGE mistake. Why? Because a year from now your ISP could either change names or you could change services. Once that happens, all reminders are useless because they bounce back to the registrar. You lolligag about your life not realizing that a shit-storm is about to befall you.

Most registrars give you a day or two to catch your mistake and renew a domain, and lucky you if that happens. After that point, you might as well say goodbye to your domain, your domain email, your hard earned google placements, everything… ESPECIALLY if your site garners any significant traffic.  After your domain is expired it enters “Domain Jail” where You the Owner and Joe Schmo Internet Squatter cannot touch the domain.  Well, that isn’t true. The owner of the domain can retrieve and renew the domain name but for an exorbitant hostage like fee around $80.00 – $150.00.

If you refuse to pay the Registrar (it’s actually ICANN holding them hostage) the high price, you have to wait 90 days before you can attempt to purchase your domain again at normal rates.

If you have a site with no traffic, this is always the best course of action because it’s rare a squatter will snap up a domain (I’ve had several clients use this method successfully). But if you have a decent domain name or good traffic, you pretty much have to mark 90 days from your expiration date down to the month, day, hour, and second to make sure you purchase it before a squatter does, and even then if they used a back order service, I’m not sure you’d get your domain back. A back order service may trump any tries at re-purchasing your domain.

The TL;DR message to all of this is: ALWAYS KNOW WHEN YOUR DOMAIN EXPIRES AND RENEW IT IN A TIMELY MANNER.

(If anyone knows what happened to the site, chime in, I’d like to know. I really enjoyed the service.)

 

 

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Taking the Mystery Away from Flash Animation Projects

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing with a fresh-faced company aiming to deliver a high quality product without the mystery of pricing.

What a mouthful, but wait, there’s more.

The outcome of the interview is still up in the air and before someone screams brown-noser, I debated for a bit on whether to publish this blog entry before the final result or after. I decided it didn’t really matter, I like the company and I think everyone should know about them.

The company is:

Fire Starter Videos

Fire Starter Videos creates “explainer” (how-to) videos, demonstration videos, whiteboard animations and cartoon animations for any business or person who needs one to sell their product.

What’s the big deal? There are a ton of companies doing this.

Yes, it’s a valid question, but where on the internet can you find a company that lays down the exact price of an animation with premium options? Almost no where. Even I can’t do that as a web designer until I’ve received a bucket-load of information from my client ahead of time. Most companies want to keep you on the line to add in bells and whistles while your bill secretly skyrockets but Fire Starter Videos shows you the price for everything, even before you contact them.

Fire StarterVideos ends any confusion you’ve faced before by letting you know EXACTLY what you’re getting for your money and even if your project doesn’t fit into their structure, they have an easy pricing system for non-standard projects. Their normal packages are priced for 90 second videos, however, if you expect your’s to be longer, they charge a flat rate of 20$/second.* It’s easy math for companies on a short budget.

My favorite video on their website is the Pinterest project (can only be viewed on Fire Starter’s home page – 2nd row, 2nd from the left). It would be regarded as an ‘explainer’ video which tells us what Pintrest is and an overview on how to use it.  I’m sure we were all wondering what the heck Pinterest was before it blew up into this major website that everyone uses to collect and share images like a scrapbook.

Here’s an example of their whiteboard animations:

Pretty cool, eh? It totally raises the professional level of any website when you offer something like this for your visitors, and it should be required for concepts and products that are too intricate to condense into a short one sentence pitch.

So, anyway, regardless of outcome, I’ll still be pitching this company to my clients that need a visual interface with their customers like this, because I’ve met the CEO, they have their heads on straight and their team is fantastic.

 

 

*Current pricing as of 3/31/2013.

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The Polishing of a Turd

Turdly.

Over a year ago I helped make a short film that I wrote as a favor to a film student.  My involvement was more than I had planned but ironically left me with little input.  And as it should be, right? The writer should stand back and watch the magic, not make it.  HAH!

Days before the shoot I found myself hastily casting, catering, propping,  and costuming the film because no one else was going to do it and my words were on the line. I knew I was saving a sinking boat and I resented it because I only wanted to be the writer.

Within an hour of arriving at our first/only shooting day, I discovered the photographer wasn’t going to use a clapper to match sound (a nightmare later in the editing room, hell they rarely even said “rolling”). With many issues to follow, it was at that moment I knew my boat and my dream of seeing my first bit of writing on “celluloid” crack. I kept my sadness firmly in check and plodded through the rest of the day trying to make it work, because that’s what a professional does.

This past year, with the help of my editor Devin Watson, I’ve been working slowly and in tandem to polish the biggest turd ever made. And it’s not even my turd, well the ‘funny when I wrote it’ script is still mine, but it’s not even “my project”. It’s this amalgamous stink pile now and I include my script in that globby mess because it’s not the story that was in my head anymore.

I loathe it now, every incarnation of it that digitally mushes its way through the editing process. Every lousy fucking second is torture and I’m reminded of feeling used. –With no bearing on my editor, mind you, his amazing work has taken this turd and made it into a shiny but brown marble.

But a turd is still a turd.

Toss it out, stop working on it, give it up because it won’t go anywhere and serves no purpose.  Hell No.

And you know why I say no?  A film is a story and a story must be told or it dies.

So this fecal three minute monstrosity, as shiny and as good as it can be will finally be done in the next couple of weeks and maybe,  just maybe, I’ll place it here for an arm punch and a laugh.

Because: I finish things….and the first thing you make is always crap anyway, right?

That’s all I wanted to say.

I finish shit.

 

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Nan with the Sense of Humor

Hullaballoo! My first Writer’s Mug Submission!

Brought to you by @mjvalquist, a screenwriter out of Los Angeles.
Jane Valquist enjoys long walks by the beach, a lovely picnic in the park…oh wait, I’m wrong… she’s a “Screenwriter~Red Wine & Beer Connoisseur~Big Ass German Dog Rescuer~Cartoon Watcher~Soccer Lover~Unashamed 80s Music Fan~Wii Bowling Master”.

She sounds like me minus the German and plus Papillion in the dog department. Oh, and replace soccer with vodka.

Nan gifted her this mug as a joke because Jane is the vertically challenged one in the family. This is also a great mug for swilling copious amounts of caffeine molecules. I like it.

mjvalquist

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The Power of Caffeine on the Written Word.

Whether you ingest it via coffee, tea or swill those heart attacks in a bottle (uber caffeinated sodas), there’s one thing you can say for a lot of writers: The words don’t flow until the machine percolates.

I have several favorite mugs, and each one serves a special purpose when I’m writing and this section will be devoted to other writers and their nursing cup of choice.

I’ll start with my,  “I have to do a lot of work, so “leave me be” mug”.

The delicate phrasing applies to me (don’t get distracted, Lane), and to everyone else (too bad my dog can’t read).

This writer has to write. Stand back.

Note: This mug usually works best without wearing pants.

STFU

 

The acquisition of mug is actually recent to my collection. It was given to me for Christmas (2012) by a photographer friend who is also my neighbor. She knows me well, I think.

 

What mug get’s your writer words typing?

Share stories about your inspiratorial ceramics and drink concoctions with me.

I’ll link your bio and cup to any blog, twitter or facebook page you want.

Email me (s.lane@snapthought.com) a:

  • a photo of the mug
  • how you came across the mug
  • a short paragraph bio about yourself
  • your favorite drink in said mug
  • your favorite writing genre
  • your favorite writer(s)
  • url link you want me to use in the post

I’ll post it here and maybe throw you a couple extra questions in the process.

 

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Business

Don’t do any business via texting on your cellphone.

Just don’t, trust me.

The opportunity for typos and errors is almost a given in any contract related negotiation via cellphone.

You have been warned.