Inspiration From Teddy

So I had a hard time being productive today. (It's been a rough week.) I finally decided to go lie down for a bit to clear my head. Ended up picking up my copy of Don Rosa's "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion" that my mom had gotten me for Christmas, which had been sitting next to the bed untouched ever since.

Excellent book; ended up spending the bulk of the afternoon consuming every page and panel. Towards the end of the tome, Unca Scrooge meets up with President Teddy Roosevelt and (as part of the tale) Scrooge recalls words that Roosevelt had told him years earlier (which, in reality, is a paraphrase of a real quote of Roosevelt's):

"Don't live by the doctrine of ignoble ease, but by toil and effort, labor, and strife! The highest forms of success comes to the man who shirks not from danger or work, and who therefore wins the ultimate triumph."

Those words seemed to be appropriate for my current situation, and I reproduce them here in hopes that they might touch other people as well. I have several friends who are very successful in their chosen fields, and they got there through dedication and hard work, pushing aside any obstacles in the pursuit of their dream, while always keeping their eyes focused on their goal. I envy these friends of mine. I know they are a different breed of person than I am, and I cannot duplicate their way of living and believing, but I can hope to emulate them in some small way, and sometimes it's through wise words like those in the excerpt above that help drive people like myself who don't have the natural attitudes and abilities of those rare people who truly know how to live life to the fullest. It's even more helpful (for me, anyway) when it comes via a comic book.

Oh, also, "Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye".

Green eyes and big admiration go to Matt, Larry, and Zach. Keep doing great things; in addition to your own success, you inevitably inspire others.

Recent Videos for DSI

Two new videos up now, one on YouTube and one on Facebook.

First is is the new intro for Season Two of our acclaimed DSI High show, a sort of improvised sitcom. I based it on last year's video (which, strangely enough, I don't seem to have blogged about or even posted!) I used Pulpmotion to do the yearbook bit at the beginning; I may recreate that whole thing on my own, so I have a little better control over it. I like the character introductions (it helps that the adult/student ratio was more even than last year); separating them into "teachers" and "students" makes the characters esier to identify. The "running through the halls" scene turned out quite nicely. I just shot that as a hand-held video on my still camera, and then used Quicktime Player to save selected frames into a folder, using Photoshop to format them for Final Cut. The group shot at the end was fun; I just had to pull Spencer's face in from a different shot, do a lot of lighting readjustment, and slap a brick wall behind them. There's a faded, peeling walrus mascot sort of hidden on the wall; you can see a better still of that shot here. Lastly, I re-edited the Bowling For Soup song so it ended with the end of the video, and by accident, the line "here we go again" lined up nicely with the introduction of the DSI High logo. Yippee!

Second is the first draft of the DSI Witness News intro. I meet with Zach tomorrow for revision notes, but was asked to upload the current version as a promo for the next show. You can find it here. I used a new program I bought recently, Kinemac, which is awesome. I tried to make the video as slick and as-like-a-real-newscast as possible. I plan on adding some animated tubes snaking around on the "News/Sports/Entertainment" page; we'll see what else ZW wants for the video. I particularly like the 3D animated logo, with the extruded words appearing as the cube rotates.

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I'm on Twitter now, much though I have resisted it. You know the name.