Categories
Journals

Hello from 20 to 26 December 2015, the last update for 2015.

This was my second Christmas break week from “A moment in the sun”. I did a little bit of light concepting and storyboarding but generally I took it easy and stayed off the computer. The shoulder has good days and bad days but it’s slowly getting better as long as I sit up straight. It’s probably about as painful as it was during Blender Conference.

And in the process of taking time off from the movie, I’ve managed to rack up hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube with parodies of an anti-marijuana campaign targeted at teenagers. That was unexpected.

The campaign ads feature a “Stoner Sloth” failing to cope with a typical teenage situation – passing the salt, carrying on a conversation at a party, and sitting an exam. The sloth is standing in for a teenager who is paralytically stoned. The Stoner Sloth fails, is accused of being a stoner sloth by peers/family, and then the stoner sloth looks sad. The end.

Suffice it to say, social media had a field day with this shit. It was still bumping along strong on Saturday night so I joined in with altered versions of the ads – some edits, some subtitles and intertitles, but mostly official-sounding overdubs turning the ads into warnings about sodium intake, deliberately embarrassing someone to mess up their chances to score with a girl, and the scourge of mental illness.

The sodium one is about to cross the 300k hit mark after spending just under a week online. It was included in the #stonersloth socmed response coverage from The Guardian, News.com.au, RT and CBC.ca to name a few.

I spent all week being amazed at how many hits I was getting and carefully curating the YouTube comments to make sure there was no obvious trolling – “How stupid are these people”, etc. I had to nuke about ten comments. None of the trolls came back. I suspect they just dart between popular videos saying mean stuff to start a fight, so they won’t particularly notice if one or two of their comments go missing. They’re busy people after all.

Tomorrow it’s back to “A moment in the sun” with the rest of the Christmas long weekend to ramp back up into it. One or two tweaks to make to Pointy’s rig – the hand-mittens are going – and then it’s time to hurl the little blue guy around a bit. Should be fun! 🙂