Brave New Beginnings

Brave is coming out this Friday, and even though it's different from the movie that most people are expecting to go in and see, it is an amazing film that most people will be glad to have seen. We watched it for the first time two weekends ago at the Brave wrap party, which was up at a wine castle in Calistoga. Yes, somebody decided that they didn't just want a winery, they needed a castle...

(photo from the interwebs)

We watched the movie in a custom-built outdoor theater, which proved to be the perfect 4D experience, complete with wind in your face while Merida rides through the woods and a couple of shooting stars. I seriously recommend watching this movie outdoors if possible.

There were all sorts of themed activities (archery, wood carving, scottish dancing, scotch tasting), themed food (turkey leg, roasted whole pigs, meat dumplings), and a dungeon dance party. Seriously, you walked down a series of tunnels into the cellar, past the torture room, and voila... full-on rave going on. Oh, and most of my male friends and coworkers wore kilts. AWESOME. I would post more photos, but according to HR, apparently it's a deep dark Pixar secret that we have fun sometimes.

 

Nadim and Dave at the villa, in my obligatory "let's take awkward prom photos" pics.

 

The girls' outfits for the night were very varied. Some women were wearing tartan cocktail dresses and shawls, some were in LARPing costumes, some just wore something lovely. I was opting for modern with a touch of medieval.

We had rented a villa in Calistoga to spend the night, and I fell asleep under the stars because the night was so warm. Needless to say, it was amazing.

This has been my life for the last three and a half years. It's hard to believe that much time has passed. I look back and see how much I've learned, and yet I don't feel like I've accomplished nearly as much as I would have liked. In many ways, things are awesome beyond belief and I'd be a fool to question them, but sometimes I still feel like I'm floundering, trying to find a greater meaning.

Certain <ahem> events of the past year have set me on a trajectory that I had never anticipated. I still find myself with a big question mark above my head, kind of like that game where you stick a note card to your forehead and ask, "Who am I?" The things that I had thought for so long defined me, I'm no longer sure if they are features or bugs. Lazy weekends powering through an entire TV series make me anxious now, like I'm wasting my time on pursuits that lead to nowhere. And I spend too much brain power analyzing people, trying to understand how and why people act and interact the way they do. Life is confusing.

So, in the spirit of Brave, I'm embracing the theme of the movie, "Change your fate."

I've been spending a lot of my extracurricular time on assorted interests of mine: dancing, learning languages, playing instruments. I like them because I'm good at them, at least to the extent that they provide me with some level of instant gratification. There's certainly nothing wrong with this, and dancing will always be my first and foremost love. However, I'm starting to feel like I need something more.

I keep seeing these projects at work and feeling like I want to tell my own stories, but I don't have the skill sets of some of my coworkers to be able to pull it off. Well, why not? Because I'm scared. Because it's hard, and I don't know where to start. Because it takes work and discipline. Because I want someone to push me along and root me on and help me when I've fallen down. But in life, you can only ever truly count on yourself.

I've never really started a project where I was unsure as to my ability to finish it. Even now, it's rather nondescript, and I don't even know what the project will be. I don't know where all this energy will lead me. But I know that I've been comfortable for too long, and I'm starting to sink into the black hole, the inertia. I'm certainly hoping that I'll walk along this path and then one day turn around and realize that all the questions have finally disappeared, and everything seems makes sense again. But even if they don't, I guess part of me just needs to know that I can challenge myself and become more of the person that I would like to be.

Ling & Rowling

This past week has been strange for me because I am currently in between assignments. I just finished up on crowds on Cars 2, and I'm waiting deployment in the 3D stereo rendering department. You would think that being between assignments would be the best thing ever. I certainly thought so. I had been on project after project since I started at Pixar, and even though some times were slower than others, I never had a moment where I felt like I could really work on my own personal projects and career development. And now, glorious free time, I was even able to go outside after lunch one day and read a book in the delightful weather we've been having while lying in the grass under a tree.

As the week went on, though, I went from relaxation to listlessness. It's like when you've been waking up early all week, and you think that it'll be great to finally sleep in on Saturday, except instead, you binge a little too hard on the zzz's and wake up in the afternoon with that horrible feeling of shame for having slept until the afternoon mixed with an even deeper feeling of shame for still being tired after said sleep. That's how I felt. On Friday evening I was exhausted, and I had no idea why because I had done very little all week outside of messing around a bit in Corel Painter and reading some photography websites.

My theory is that I need to start organizing deadlines for myself. One side effect of being someone who has not really been formally trained in any aspect of the movie pipeline but has experience in almost all of them is that I feel generally empowered enough to want to try a bunch of different things but not empowered enough to be able to harness any of them to innovate and create, which is really the goal, after all. And being someone who is easily distracted by the interwebs and such nonsense, the only real way to ensure that I'm learning what I want to learn is if I make myself a schedule of tangible goals with tangible deadlines.

So where am I going with this? Today I was watching Julie & Julia, courtesy of the free DVD library we have at work, and in addition to inspiring me to buy Julia Child's cookbook in an attempt to elevate my cooking a little bit from "put some shit in a pot with oil," it inspired me to jump start my week of not-lazing-about by embarking on a quest that I've been meaning to attack for the last few months now. You may not think of it as much of a quest when you hear it, but I have been playing Shadow of the Colossus, so you can trust me when I say this - I know what a quest is, and THIS IS A QUEST. I am attacking the pages of J.K. Rowling's great masterpiece, Harry Potter. Oh yes, Harry Potter, which I have read many times, but never IN CHINESE.

I was drawn to the idea because I love Harry Potter, and I always wanted to collect all the books in every language, since I am a hoarder and like having things on my shelf that come in collections. I was hoping every translation would have a different cover, and one day I would have read the series in every language that I even vaguely know or want to learn. And my shelf would look something like this:

Sadly, the Chinese book looks just like the English version, except that it's 95% characters that I don't know, and the words are super tiny so that I have to hold them up to my face to be able to see the strokes. Trying to read a book in Chinese when you have the Chinese literacy of a four year old can only really be described as masochistic. I've basically gone through one sentence, and already I'm breaking a sweat. Sweat induced by all the labor of flipping through the pages of the Chinese dictionary after every other word, because anyone who has ever used a Chinese dictionary knows that it is not as simple as knowing the alphabet in order.

The goal is to finish the book by the end of the year. I'm hoping it'll get exponentially easier and I'll be down to at least one in twenty words by the end. And then I'll finally know how to talk to people about Harry Potter, even if I still won't be able to read the whole menu at Chinese restaurants. Since, of course, that's what's really important anyway, right? ;P

2 Years!

It's been exactly two years since I started at Pixar.

When I arrived at work this morning, I tried to recreate the feeling of the very first day. I remember that I was afraid of being late or getting confused during all of the bus transfers, so I left extra early and arrived at 8am. Barely any people were in the atrium, and I walked around the deserted campus taking pictures of Luxo and just breathing in the California air. I had no idea how a movie was made, I had no real skills other than some programming knowledge and maybe some ninja matrix magic, and I didn't know anybody except for the guy who let me into the building. I think his name was Kevin, but I haven't really seen him since, though his friend that he introduced me to is in my yoga class now.

Well, right off the bat today, I kind of killed the mood by getting in at 10:15 am, a good two hours later than I arrived two years ago. Then I spent a good portion of today glued to my desk, cursing at Massive, and not really getting much sun at all. There's also been some... er... "life complications" that have been taking up a lot of my mental capacity, but I won't really get into that.

So, I was thinking that it wasn't really a great day to celebrate an anniversary. But, not every day is perfect. On the other hand, if I packed all of the perfect moments I've had over the last two years, they would overflow a day. Maybe a week. Maybe a month. Even just in the first three days of this week, I've gone to a totally awesome ballet class right in our own breathing room, had a long tea break with Roxanne out on the balcony in the warm totally-not-winter weather, went to a craaazy yoga session that involved these bizarre headstands where our heads were held up between two chairs, spent all lunchtime looking for cabins with Nancy for our epic 20+ person annual ski trip at the end of this month, and rocked out at my daily office dance party that I put on for myself after my officemate leaves and I grab a beer from the beer cooler out in the hallway of the chars pod. And maybe it didn't happen today, but every once in a while I just walk up to the front gates on a fresh early morning, and I get that feeling of giddiness all over again and wonder how on earth I ended up here. Whatever innocence I gave up, I traded for experience and knowledge and, most importantly, so many amazing friendships and days filled with laughter.

To top it off, we're going to get the chance to sign our names in the new cement out by the new building on Friday. A chance to be a permanent part of Pixar! Not to mention my two credits in Cars 2 for chars and crowds, and this character that I shaded just got revealed today:


It's also Chinese New Year, and my dad sent me an email saying how funny it was that I got hired for the first time on Christmas Day 2008, became a full-time employee two days after my birthday 2010, and now am celebrating two years at the company on Chinese New Year 2011. Well, in celebration, I'm going to start reading my new chinese Harry Potter book. Then, I'll finally be able to read chinese. Or at least all about chinese muggles and spells, I guess. 哈利波特!!! Yeah, awesome.

So speaking of Harry Potter... I promise this blog is not going to be all about beautiful men all the time, but I just couldn't resist posting this video of Darren Criss. Just because you work at Pixar doesn't mean that you can't fangirl, right? (If you are saying, "No, but the fact that you are 25 years old does," well... WHATEVER.)


While I was drooling at the screen, I yelled out, "OMG I WILL MAKE FINDING NEMO 2 FOR YOU DARREN!!!" Then I realized that I'm not high enough up to make that happen, and I got kinda sad. But, I'm here, and I'm learning, and who knows?

A reboot!

I've decided, as part of my New Year's resolutions, to reboot my Pixar blog. Basically, I'm still going to do my anal-retentive-write-everything-about-every-day journaling thing, but that will be private somewhere on my computer. This blog will be safe from that. This blog is going to be an actual blog, and I'll just update it from time to time when I want to actually say something for other people to hear.

In honor of rebooting things:

A beautiful, beautiful man. I cannot WAIT to see this movie.