Project Gadfly Press Conference

The press release regarding Gadfly's protest in Beijing has been posted on Exodus8one.org. You can watch it here, but I encourage you to visit persecutionandtheolympics.com to find out who and where you can send letters to asking for justice in China. Please be a voice for those who are silenced by torture and bars.

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation

Today on CartoonBrew.com Amid posted thoughts on how the future of TV animation is found on the internet.
"The paths that both of these properties have taken (Making Fiends and Daily Monster video podcast) offer a view into how new TV animation ideas will be discovered in the future. The dysfunctional system of pitching and development in TV animation still exists, but it is on the wane and being dismantled by the Internet."
-Amid
To read his posting click on the link below.
Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation

Posted using ShareThis

Protests in Beijing

There have been a few protests in Beijing, China over the past few days. I have to admit that I've been sleeping on what's been going on in China pretty much all of my life. Recently one of our church's leaders has awakened me to the deteriorating status of human rights in communist China. Among many other atrocities citizens of China don't have the freedom of speech or the freedom of religion. The result is many of my Christian brothers and sisters are either dead or in prison labor camps because of their faith.

The issues and the details go much deeper than I have time for in this blog, but I've noticed some interesting protests in Beijing now that the Olympic games are about to start. One of these peaceful protests hits really close to home for me.

The first protest involved a young British man named Iain Thom climbing a lightning rod near Tiananmen Square and hanging a large banner that read, "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet" and "Tibet will be free." Another activist named James Murray hung a similar banner over the River Thames in London that read "Beijing 2008: Make Olympic History: Free Tibet." Both of the campaigners and their other fellow activists were said to be from a group called Students for a Free Tibet. To my understanding they wanted to use the popularity of the Olympics in Beijing as leverage to bring China's occupation of Tibet to light.


Late last night some videos were posted on Youtube.com of another protest happening in Beijing. An activist named "Gadfly" turned two luxury hotel rooms into what looks like murder scenes complete with human sized dummies made out of pillows. On the walls he painted murals and Bible verses such as Proverbs 31:8-9 "Speak out for those who have no voice." The murals included the symbol for the 2008 Olympics and a hill side scene that reads, "Beijing 2008 Our world our nightmare." On the walls Gadfly also asked for the release of 5 prisoners in China. Each prisoner listed is a leader or prominent figure in either their respective religion or in the freedom movement in China.
1. RELEASE Pastor Zhang Rongliang
2. RELEASE Xu Na, Falun Gong
3. RELEASE Hu Jia, Buddhist / Activist
4. RELEASE Shi Tao, Journalist
5. RELEASE Guo Feixiong, self-trained “barefoot” lawyer.
He also asks for the People's Republic of China to "ratify ICCPR." ICCPR stands for the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In other words, Gadfly is asking China to adhere to this treaty enacted by the U.N. in 1966. Right now Chinese citizens do not enjoy freedom of speech or the right to believe and worship what they want in public. To learn more go to Exodus8one.org.
You can also watch the videos of the Gadfly filming himself transforming the rooms below.
So far I agree with both of these protests. Everyone deserves the right to choose their own religion. Free will is God given. I pray that my people in China will remain strong and hold fast to God's promises.

Team Report After Brooklyn

Our team has been home in L.A. for almost two days now. I'm still processing what happened in Brooklyn, New York, so this posting will just skim over the highlights.

When we arrived in Brooklyn on July 27th we had to find the church that we would be serving/sleeping in. The walk from the subway station to 2nd Evangelical Free Church of Brooklyn was really cool. The neighborhood is mostly inhabited by Chinese immigrants, so the streets are filled with markets and people. Already we had entered a great environment for our team to be introduced to a culture many of us had never experienced before.

2nd EV Free of Brooklyn was very much like our own church in LA. The church serves mostly immigrant families. They have a sort of community house next door that houses much of their staff much like our Nehemiah House. Most of our time was spent in their S.A.Y. Yes! tutoring program which we also run in Pico Union. These similarities allowed our team to fit the needs of the church very quickly. I was very impressed with our youth who jumped right in with the kids and poured so much of their energy and love into them. Along with a visiting team from Two Rivers Church in Tennessee we spent five days with kids from pre-K up to 5th grade. We tutored them in math. We colored with our kids, and sang worship songs with them. There were geography lessons, and trips to the park. On Thursday we took the kids on a field trip to a Biblical Art Museum and to Central Park. Once 1 o'clock hit we ran a Vacation Bible School for them and performed skits and Bible lessons. By the time Friday came around we had to say good bye to these precious kids. Our youth cried that night already missing the children we became friends with. Many on our youth team told us how good it was to be in our shoes at a S.A.Y. Yes! and experience how much we loved them. By the end of the week I asked if any of them felt more confident in being a part of ministry in our church now that they've completed this trip, and they all raised their hands. I couldn't have asked for a better experience for our young leaders to go through.

Our nights in Brooklyn were packed with taking in the sights, smells, and sounds of our surroundings. Remember that many of our youth have never been outside of California so this was incredibly beneficial to them. Above you see some of us eating at a traditional Chinese restaurant. The food was great, but very different from the Latin and American food that we are used to.

We also took the team to see the sites. On Sunday we took the ferry past the Statue Of Liberty. On a free night we walked around Times Square. We also saw the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center, but the most memorable site out of all of them was ground zero. We all had different emotions running through us as we prayed for our world over the site of one of our generations greatest tragedies. It seemed appropriate to pray with younger people in hopes that times will be better for them and their kids.

Over all this trip was about God showing us what kind of leaders we are as individuals and as a team. It seems to me that short term missions is not as much about teaching the people you visit as it is about what you learn and bring home with you. Pray with me that our youth will realize their role in God's body. Pray for our staff to be able to encourage and challenge them to commit to their roles and minister now rather than waiting for some undefined moment when they'll feel as though they are old enough to do something about the gospel.

Pray For The Children of Brooklyn

Our team landed back home in Los Angeles at about 8:30 Sunday night. It is good to be home, but it was also pretty hard leaving Brooklyn. While we were on this trip we were in the hands of our living God. Every moment was designed for us to either learn something about: ourselves, each other, or about others around us. Our hearts bled for the children we met. All of them

There was a little girl we called Lin Lin who liked to ride on my shoulders as we walked to the park. She always wore dresses and had her hair in pig tails. One look at her and you know how precious she is in God's sight. When I met her she came up to me and asked if I liked her little red buckled shoes. I told her that I did, and asked her if she would hold my hand as we walked back to the church. She was always very concerned that I only had sneakers to wear on such a hot day. She thought I should be wearing open shoes like her to stay cool. Lin Lin made it her mission every day to teach me how to count to one hundred in Chinese. I could only remember up to the number four. It was so fun to laugh with her, and receive corrections from her on how to pronounce fifty nine in her language. At only five years old she was a very giving person, and extremely intelligent. I often wondered how she will turn out ten or fifteen years from now. What choices will she make? How will life and circumstance effect her? Will she remember the things she has learned about God? Maybe the songs they sing about Bible stories will stick with her. I don't know, but please join me in praying for the lives of these kids. Almost all of them had tragic stories of broken families, deaths, abuse, rejection, and poverty. There was so little we could do in Brooklyn. Thank God it wasn't about us, but we had our brief moment in their lives. Prayerfully God made it something they could grab on to.

Please pray for Lin Lin and the other kids of Brooklyn. Pray that they meet Jesus, and that their families do too. God Bless.

Micro Loans

In our community a few of us have been talking about setting up a system to provide micro loans to people who might want to start a business. There are plenty of people in our neighborhood who have a craft or skill-set, but there aren't enough opportunities them to acquire or create jobs for themselves. We've also noticed an increasing number of pay-day loan establishments and department stores that essentially exploit their customer's lack of knowledge in how loans or credit works.
We thought it would be great to provide micro loans and also set up an accountability system with our clients that will not only educate them on loans, but will also invest in community. Each client could be assigned to meet with a small group of other clients each week, and everyone's approval of their next loan will depend on if they've all made their payments or not. This isn't a new idea. The Grameen Bank is not only a great model for this, but their founder, Professor Muhammad Yunus, won a Nobel Peace Prize for the success of this concept.
A few of us talked to a group of businessmen about our ideas, and one of them informed us of Kiva.org. We can pretty much set up the system that we need through this amazing website in the event that we become one of their field partners. Kiva.org allows you to create an account on their website and then find impoverished entrepreneurs across the globe. You can then lend small amounts towards their individual goals helping them start or continue their business. I'm pretty excited about this idea, and will be looking into it further. If anyone has any other ideas please leave comments.

BUMP Trip to NY

My church, First EV Free of Los Angeles, is organizing a missions trip to New York with our youth. The Evangelical Free Church has a program called BUMP where EV Free churches across America bring their youth to an urban EV Free church for service projects and ministry. In our case, we will be one urban church visiting another urban church on the opposite side of the country.
We will live in and serve in the Second EV Free Church of Brooklyn from July 27th to Aug 3rd. A big part of our mission is to organize a summer vacation Bible school (VBS) for the neighborhood kids in Brooklyn. It's our responsibility to perform a skit every day, and to lead the kids in worship. The theme for the VBS is "The Pirates of Pizazz" which I'm sure is a spin-off from the popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean.
For the past few months we've been gathering our team of students together every Sunday to practice the songs and skits. You can view some pictures of last Sunday's meeting at the Nehemiah House below.

(Thank you John Freiberg for letting me steal these off of your Facebook without you knowing it)

Edberg translating for John Freiberg as he speaks to the parents


Making sure we're all on the same page


Nehemiah and I going over the script

Kool DJ Herc Tribute part 1

After completing my illustrated tribute to Gil Scott Heron I wanted to pay homage to another godfather of Hip Hop. I found the picture below on the net of Kool Herc messing around with an old record player. This picture is a great gem of Hip Hop history so I wanted to incorporate it into my piece.

I took the picture into Art Rage and started painting Herc. As I was painting, I decided that I wanted the graininess of the old picture to show through, so I put the picture behind my painting and finished the remainder on top of the photo. I was careful to leave some parts unpainted so the photo could show through. I also set my painted layer to multiply so the painting had some transparency.

I continued painting Herc in selective places over the photo until I was satisfied with the texture and the rendering. The piece was supposed to feel like a quick loose sketch/painting so I incorporated some over-lapping brush strokes, and some sketchy pencil work.
At this point I was looking for a sweeping design element to add in the background leading upward. I was thinking of the B-boys wearing Adidas and Puma track suits and shoes back in the day. I added three stripes, but I later abandoned this idea once I took the piece into Photoshop. I'll cover that process in the next posting.

The Shooting Of Dan McGrew

Another UPA animation that I love is called "The Shooting Of Dan McGrew." This is another UPA production based on a poem. Again, the bold designs are intriguing. An interesting element to this piece is the fact that their character design is so interesting that they can get away with painting some of the background characters one color and still focus on them for reaction shots.

The Tell-Tale Heart

Old UPA cartoons have been growing on me lately. I love their bold design, and quirky animation. Below is a UPA production of The Tell-Tale Heart by: Edgar Allen Poe. Note the composition throughout this animation. They did a beautiful job of incorporating shapes that will remind your subconscious of the old man's eye.

Don't Ever Call Me Stupid

This is one of the refining passes on my latest assignment. I'm really excited because this is my first dialog piece ever.

Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes

My boss listens to National Public Radio (NPR) all the time and he told me about a show called "Talk of the Nation" that was going to be discussing Hip Hop artists and the image they portray to the world.
Listen to it here

The guest for the show was a film maker by the name of Byron Hurt who's documentary "Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes" will be debuting on PBS tonight. He went around and asked many prominent artists about their content and what they thought of the many ways "hip Hop" can be viewed as destructive. It sounds like Mr. Hurt was pretty much confronting these guys in front of a camera. I believe the film has interviews with Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, Jada Kiss, and a host of other artists in the lime light.

I think Mr. Hurt is doing great work. I also think he's doing exactly what many of us in the underground have been doing- transforming Hip Hop in order to prayerfully transform individuals.

Check it out tonight on PBS, and support. Peace.

B. Hurt's Myspace

Ballie's Final Turn

I tweaked the splining on Ballie's turn around for what will most likely be the last time. This animation is nowhere near the polished stage that I want, but it'll have to do. I'm moving on to other animations and projects. Farewell Ballie.

Purple and Brown

Aardman studios has really gone back to their roots with a series of shorts called Purple and Brown. The animations are simple and very well done. Below are some of my favorites, but they've posted a lot more on this youtube channel.

This Is War Tour Videos

Enoch "Who" Live


Jupiter 7 with B.I.G.P, Heavensake, and J Werley on the turntables


B.I.G.P. "Something Must Be Done" Live


Chef "Get Down" Live


Insomniaddicts "Fear and Self Loathing In San Francisco" Live

Linear Pass For Ballie's Turn

SketchCrawl #12!!!

Time for another world wide SketchCrawl! If you're in the Northern California Bay Area, we'd love to have you sketch with us. If you're not in our area, go to SketchCrawl.com and search the forums for a Crawl near you. (Don't worry. We have groups all over the globe)

Creature Comforts

Aardman Animations Ltd (Wallace & Grommit, Chicken Run, and Flushed Away) sent AnimationMentor.com some previews to their series entitled "Creature Comforts." They gave us permission to share them with the public so I posted them on youtube.com here. Keep your eye open for these animations on CBS in 2007. Below is one of my favorites.

Scary Mary Trailer

I don't know about you, but I have a lot of fond memories of Disney's "Mary Poppins." As a child there was nothing more entertaining than watching a witch haunt little Brittish children in the London fog.

Week 10

Look. Ballie's fat and happy!