Jason F Maurer

It was off to the great white north for the xmas holiday to see family, it all seemed like a good idea. I knew it was snowy and cold – but I had no idea that it was THIS cold. I arrived to my dad’s house having no power, in cased in ice, and surrounded by snow and wind. Luckily he ran had gotten a generator early that day just in case and had at least the furnace running. He was like 53 thousand other people in the Ft. Wayne area – out of power and fighting off the cold. 

Indiana Michigan Power company brought in an extra 1200 power workers to help out in the crisis from other states. They are still working in 16 hour shifts through the holidays to get everyone’s power up. As of now there are still 13,000 people without power up here and there is another storm coming. 

Well Morgan (my little bro) and I braved the cold sunday to go out and shoot some pics of the park near my dads house. Thought I’d share a few for you all who are in the warm south… I miss my flipflops.

J

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It isn’t often that one gets to take a stab at a life goal, let alone achieve it. Delgo was that for alot of us at Fathom for Marc and I especially. Marc held onto his belief that such a thing could be done outside of Hollywood and made here in Georgia. If it wasn’t for his tireless efforts and unshakeable belief – it probably never would have been made. So thanks Marc for giving us all an opportunity to tackle a dream -I’ll never forget it.

I wanted to extend a personal thank you to everyone who has gone to see Delgo and support our film. While it has received pretty negative reviews overall, and I have personally received some pretty nasty hate mail via this blog- yeah can you believe it- I’m still proud of what we accomplished considering all of the hurdles and challenges we faced. 

I’m not going to waste time attempting to defend it or offer up excuses – rather I’ll simply say that we made a film outside of hollywood for good or bad – we made it. It happened, got screen time and people saw it – that in of itself is a feat. 

Our cast and crew were top notch and worked countless hours to put it all together and they deserve a huge thank you for all their work and taking a chance on a bunch of first timers. It could not have been made without them. 

So thank you all for your support and those of you who have sent me messages and emails of the positive/constructive nature – thank you for your kind words. 

Jason

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Well I promised I’d update you on what happened the last 3 days in Tokyo so here we go… hold onto your hats cuz it was a crazy ride!!!

Day 9 – Disney Sea

Now I know what you are thinking – why are you taking your students to a Disney theme park? What possible educational purpose could it serve? Well let me just tell you that this particular park is absolutely stunning in its attention to detail – everything is designed to enhance the complete feeling of immersion into the theme you are in – down to the doorknobs! You walk through the venice section and my god it is venice! or the early American area and I’m in san fransisco in the early 1900’s. Everything is themed to the max. Granted this is disney so it is a bit skewed towards the cutesy and overly PC feeling and then you put that on top of the Japanese’s interpretation of us and it gets a little funny. We spent all day there and had a real blast. I will say that their version of an American hot dog is a bit odd – they slice the bun from the top and its made of pork… 

Day 10 – Ueno Park zoo

We did the zoo again this year – was a bit cloudy and started to rain at the end, which really kind of stunk. I got some really cool sequences shot of elephants… one of them looked like he was dancing, swinging his head back and forth. I managed to get some decent animals drawings done, but not as many as I had hoped. The students really rocked it up and turned out some rather impressive drawings.

Day 11 – TCA Tokyo Communication Arts

We were very lucky this year to be able to sit in on classes and have a private lecture by esteemed Manga Artist and professor Hiroki Mafuyu. Hiroki was kind enough to have our classes sit in with his classes and allow Ray, Dove and I to participate/help in his basic inking class. It was really amazing. Our students got to learn from a master inker and film tone artist and we got to observe how they teach their classes and participate in helping his students. Let me tell you trying to teaching someone inking when you don’t speak their language actually isn’t as hard as it sounds. There is ALOT you can do simply by demonstrating and gestures. 

TCA is like Japan SCAD - literally. Their set up is very similar in facilities and they offer a diverse selection of majors. I was very impressed by there industrial design and comic work and their staff and faculty were just top notch and so friendly. It was a very good day.

Day 12 – Kamakura

A hard trip to do on the last day – but soooooo worth it. If you remember last year’s trip to kamakura – this year was ten times better. We didn’t see as many temples, but we saw the right ones this year in the right order. We started with the Great Bronze Buddha, then gave everyone time for lunch and met up at one of the big red Tojo’s that stand in Kamakura for Tsurugaoka Hachimangu temple. We roamed around, saw the 1000 year old ginko tree, drew, took pictures – I managed to try a candied grape on a stick. Despite its glassy, slimy looks it was actually quite good!

After spending a hour here, we gave everyone the option of either leaving early or continuing with me to Kenjo-ji – my favorite site in Kamakura. Most of the group opt’d to leave, but a few hard core peeps stayed and were rewarded with an amazing sunset atop the mountain we climbed! Kenjo-ji has probably 2500 stairs that you climb to reach a look out that views the temple complex and all of Kamakura. It is one heck of a climb, but it was soooo worth it for the view. Everyone who went was spell bound and swore that this was why they came to Japan. So for those cats who opt’d out – your loss. : )

Day 13 – traveling home

Well the trip home was insanely long, tiring, confusing and as always hectic. I think I watched the remaining movies I didn’t watch on the trip over, slept a little, and prayed constantly for the pain of boredom to go away. We made it safe and sound – all of us – despite some delays, hang ups and general travel issues with connecting flights and such. So I think I’ll call that a success.

Photos from days 9 through 12 will be in the next post for your viewing pleasure, cuz I’m still processing all of them. : )

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Hey all – packing up now – its day 12 and we leave first thing in the morning. I’ll update you on the remaining three days of the trip when I get back to the states. For now be satisfied that our Kamakura trip was amazing!!!

J

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Jizo statues

Day 8 began with me feeling crappy – stupid cold. But I pumped myself full of Airborne, and Dayquil and headed out into the adventure. Ray and Dove took the students to see the temple of 47 ronin while I dropped off Matt, Sandford and Dexter at the train station to the airport. They managed to find their ways home safely with little problems.

Once I was done with that I headed over to a temple we haven’t been to yet in Tokyo – Zojo-ji. It is right next to Tokyo tower and really, really amazing. They have, what looks to be a 100 ft tall Himilanian cedar tree which was planted by President Grant in 1864, still alive and well… it was cool!

By far the creepiest part of the temple are the Jizo statues – these are small statues used to pray for children who have died… and there were hundreds of them. They all had little bonnets on and windmills in front of them. When you’d walk by the little windmills would move, even when there was no wind. Kinda freaky… but cool just the same. A very somber, quiet place in the middle of the hustle and bustle of Tokyo.

After that I came home and crashed hard. Here are some pics for you… enjoy!!

J

temple and tower

wall texture

Grant's tree

He must be cold

Tower and tombs

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Well peeps after lots of wrestling with compression types here is the film for the first week. This is done entirely with my Nikon D70s and of course my mac. I decided this year I wanted to experiment with real time pixelation type of effect, rather than videos each day. It was way more work than I could handle last year and even this has been a feat. I’d like to thank Dove for knocking out the amazing music on this film.

Hope you like it.

J

Shintai 43.1 mb

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Ornament

Well day 7 came and went and we spent it at the Imperial Palace, mostly site seeing and drawing in the park. It has been a really great trip so far – I’m for sure coming down with a cold, which is pretty normal I think considering we are going out of hot stores into cold weather. For some reason the Japanese keep their stores smoking toasty – which is nice for the first 5 minutes then you sweat and just when you are about to shed a layer you are back out into the cold again. So it is alot of back and forth. Luckily today we were outside for most of it and being the cloud watcher that I am I spent a small portion of it laying in the sun at the park changing clouds into dragons, spaceships and imaginary animals.

Here are some photos from the day – hope you enjoy! Movie coming up next post!!!

Our hearty adventurers

Plant under glass

Just got termination notice

Swan

gardenia - I think

Chillin'

Mark and Denise - two amazing people!

Sandford and the man

Storm Rider

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The surrender document

So today we ventured out to the Edo Tokyo Museum - where they have some pretty amazing stuff. It was school field trip day at the museum so we had a ton of japanese children all running around. They would all run up to us and say Hello, what’s your name in english and ask all sorts of interesting and bizarre questions. Especially the 8 to 10 year old boys – lets just say they were VERY blunt and VERY personal. It was all fun and interesting, letting them practice their english while we practiced our Japanese – or at least I did. 

I took mostly sequential stuff in the museum and got a few decent shots of some of the kids. When we exited the museum it was raining and blowing like one of our good storms from the mid-west. I had Tyson ask a guard and he said the museum was closing due to a typhoon  (their version of a tornado)… needless to say – no tornado, just a little wind. 

After that we had the artists pick their favorite drawing for the day two sequential and one animation (1 for every 12 students) the winners got to go to dinner with us and the artists. Lilly, Mark, and Dixie got chosen for their amazing drawings. We managed to eat at an italian place (a very popular one at that) which wasn’t too bad. The rest of the students were on their own for dinner and traveling – some went to Roppongi, some Shibu-ya, others back to Nakano and Akiharbara for shopping goodness.

After dinner I joined a few of the artists and students for sketching at McDonalds of all places – it was cool. We just hung out and sketched people. Here are some of the photos from that day… 

4 yellow hats

The helper

Waiting for a date

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Lonely Gaijin

We got up at the serious crack of dawn – 445 am – to go to the fish market. This year we had an interesting thing happen. All was fine and dandy we came, took our pictures, were respectful of their space, etc.  and left. Well later that morning apparently some Australians got all worked up in the fish market and disrupted the flow of the place, got hit by the little trucks, didn’t move out of the way etc – so the Japanese government has banned all foreigners from the fish market starting on the 15th of this month. One report I read said for 1 month others said indefinitely so I don’t know for sure. I was very concerned that we might have caused a problem – but based off of the reports I saw and what my students whom speak japanese have told me – it wasn’t us. So Whew… but burn. You would think that people would be respectful of these guys. I mean they are at work, hauling fresh fish, trying to make sales, close deals that’s their livelihood and here are all these big bumbling gaijin walking through their office. I’d be a bit un-nerved myself.

Anyway after the fish market we had a break for breakfast, and then trucked it over to Asakusa temple – my favorite temple in Tokyo. Where I took some cool sequences and did some pretty decent quick people sketching. Near the end of the day a small group of us clustered together on the front steps of the main temple and were drawing – we drew a HUGE crowd – so big in fact that the guard had to politely break it up, he looked like he didn’t want too but had no choice. So we split up and headed off into our own different groups.

On my way back I managed to run into Dove, Asia, Ray, Matt, and Grace – all of whom were heading to Tokyo Disney. Now I’m not a big disney park person – but Dove knows EVERYTHING there is to know about theme parks so even though I was beat tired, I tagged along. It was worth it – fun actually. Space mountain still is a wussy roller coaster – I don’t care what anyone says. But the star tours ride was cool and so was the Pirates of Caribbean ride. We managed to get home before the train stopped so that was good.

All in all a very packed day. Here are a few photos from the day – not much actually – most of my time was spent sketching and doing frame sequences – which I”m in the process of adapting into a film, which will be put out at the end of the trip.

Love me some squid

Three dead fish

tuna steak... yum

Texture

very random

The subway

Poor Sanford

M.Shumway and Kyle

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Today we continued our workshops with the artists, I snapped a few pictures of them in the act. I have to say these guys have just been fantastic -they are engaging with the students outside the workshops, Sanford started an evening sketch club at the starbucks. They are just an amazing group of people and we are so fortunate to have them with us this week. They will be missed next week for sure!

After the workshops we headed out to the Ghibli museum which is one heck of a train ride. Took almost 45 minutes to get there -but as always it was worth it. We all had a seriously good time there, and just like last year they had changed the art on the studio walls so it was new and fresh stuff. But my favorite part of it is still the zoetrope. I wish I could show you it -but alas – no pictures inside the museum. You’ll have to settle for this one of Sanford…

Group wave...

After Ghibli we went to Nakano broadway, where I bought my mom a tea pot – yes mom I didn’t forget and its iron so it won’t break on the way home. I also got a really killer cel from Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro. We had conveyer belt sushi for dinner and jetted then back to the hotel. I managed to snap a few cool photos yesterday – here are some of them…

crazy homeless guy...

Sticker...

bikes

trees

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So today’s hearty workshop for our budding animators involved showing off their walks that they observed yesterday. It was an exciting, funny, and freeing experience I think for them all. Mr. Shumway did a killer job switching them up, giving them a sense of what it is like in production when you do a shot and then the director doesn’t like it and changes animators out. It was really nice. Mr. Schultz should talked about how the Japanese art prints – Ukiyo-e - influenced america’s great master illustrators guys like- Howard Pyle, Winslow Homer, N.C. Wyeth. He gave a really good lecture on the connections and how showed some really stunning examples.

After the workshops it was the mad scramble for lunch then off to Ueno Park for the museum. We split up into 2 big groups on the subway and made our way just fine to the museum. After negotiating with the ticket lady (Thank you Tyson for speaking Japanese!!!) we made our way into one of the coolest special exhibits I’ve seen at a museum yet… Fungus and Bacteria!!!

The entire exhibit was made out of cardboard… it was amazing!!! 

One of the other wicked things that they did was used these really cute characters to represent various deadly germs/bacteria and had this exhibit where it showed you in your home where they lived. The worst of course was E-coli – represented here by the happy red octopus thingy… 

After the special exhibit it was onto the main exhibit where we spent most of our time drawing dinosaur bones (or at least I did.) and taking reference photos of all the other amazing things there. I’ve been here like 3 times so this time I drew more – spent my time studying people and practicing my drawing.

Once we finished up with the museum we took everyone to Akihabara for dinner and exposure to the insane amount of electronic/toy/amazingly cool stuff stores. While in the book store I happened upon this very interesting object – I guess it is necessary when you pack this many people into such a small place…

Tomorrow is Ghibli museum and Nakano broadway. I will also be posting up some time-lapse experiments, which have turned out interesting…

J

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Well peeps – we managed to get settled in yesterday and today we got up, had breakfast, and made our way to the conference center nearby to partake in the words of wisdom of…

Mark Schultz

Sandord Greene

and Matt Shumway. 

Three really amazing artists – and just down right fun and goofy guys. Check out their work and you will be impressed. 

After the workshop we headed out for our first adventure a day at Meiji Shrine a real magical place. This year the Ravens were really noisy and did a great number of fly bys, but we managed to survive. I spent my day sketching, and shooting photos of people this year. Here are some samples of what I shot today for your viewing pleasure…

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