Improv Scene performed by Team X:

A man had shipped his wife a dress. She hadn’t taken it out of the box yet so he asked “Why is it still in the box?”
“I’m clumsy, and was afraid I’d rip it,” she said.
She took it out of the box, tripped and it ripped.
Cut to two days ago at the store.
Shopkeep: The dress is very fragile. Be careful with it. 9 children died in making it.
Cut back.
The husband screamed, ”9 children died for that.“ During a back and forth she manages to rip it again.
Cut back.
Shopkeep: Of course money isn’t enough if you want to buy a dress like this.
The shopkeep starts to unzip his pants.
Cut back.
Husband: I was surprised. I kind of liked it.

Before the scene could go on further about felatio it was edited with a shout, “Kids, get in here.” Everyone got on stage and the father said, “Now we’re going to make this married couple a beautiful dress. I don’t care what it takes. How hard it is.”
The kids all chimed in with complaints.
”If one of you or all of you have to die so this dress can be made perfect, so be it.”
It was meant as a one off joke, and the scene could have returned back to the couple’s scene with a nice laugh. Instead, one of the kids walked up and said, “I don’t want to make the dress.”
The father exploded. “How dare you.”
“It’s just, I want to be an accountant.”
“But what does that have to do with a wedding?”
“Well, so the bride and groom know what to do with their finances.”
“Of course, of course.” The father hugged the kid, “Go, run off, and be an accountant.”
All of the kids said they also wanted to be accountants and the father hushed them. “We have a dress to make. I don’t want to hear any of that.”
Another kid got up. “I want a dress like this when I get married,” she said.
The father misheard her and responded, “You’re getting married? Well, you shouldn’t be here- go ahead and run off.”
It established a game of how do the kids manage to run off, and one by one each of the 6 kids came up with a reason and got to run off, until only one was left.

What made the scene great was how it pushed past the one off joke and found a brilliant, simple game. The kid’s game was, ‘What can I say that gets me away from my crazy father?’ and the father’s was, ‘How can I relate their choice to a wedding so I can let them run off?’

The lesson is to let a scene grow, and not come in with some absurd idea. If the scene had started with “Get in here kids. We’re going to make this dress, and I don’t care if all of you die in the process. That is, unless you prove to me why you’re too important for this,” it would have fallen flat. Instead, it earned its absurdity by growing one step at a time.

My butchering of the transcript doesn’t give it credit. Watch it here. The scene is from 12:31 to 17:37

My web presence is chaos right now.

I run:

• jeremyshuback.com
• frogsbull.com
• youtube.com/user/thebulfrog
• thepspod.com
• exustraining.com
• twitter.com/thebulfrog
• frogsbull.tumblr.com
• a google reader feed
• a gmail account
• a facebook account

It’s a bit overwhelming. I’m set on simplifying, and in the light of what can I remove, let’s go through them one at a time.

Jeremyshuback.com
I’m proud of what my site has accomplished. Check out these specs:

(over the course of a year and a half)

Most of the people come for the tutorials. While people find them helpful, I’ve finished teaching the foundation of how to use Photoshop. The next challenge is pushing myself with increasingly more difficult tutorials. How do I use the tools to create? Future tutorials will include me creating a website and other works of art and design. The rule of these video tutorials is if I’d watch them myself, I’ll assume others want to see them as well.

The main purpose of my portfolio site is to showcase my work to employers and potential stalkers. It’s a bit of a cluster fuck at the moment. When visiting you ask if I’m an animator, matte painter, illustrator, designer, teacher, or improvisor? There’s no point of focus.

My demonstrable strengths are matte painting and web design. That needs to be the focus, with everything else pushed aside. Once I work on my print design portfolio and motion graphics reel they can start to take the spotlight.

Frogs Bull
The blog exists to keep me motivated. It’s there to show my process in writing, improv, design, and painting. I have another post coming up focused on this subject.

Youtube Channel
This is gaining the most momentum. It just passed 13,000 views, with each video ranging from 100 to 600 views. I’m getting roughly one new subscriber a day. I think of the youtube channel as a less frequently updated version of my blog only containing the videos.

ThePSPod
I just made a final episode saying to go to the youtube channel.

ExusTraining
A second ship to bail. It will echo the youtube videos and have a sign up form for those interested in learning in person. I’ll spend time on it again when I get 10,000 youtube followers. It could be a while.

Twitter / Tumblr / Facebook / Google Reader
Using the bit.ly sidebar, tweetfeed, and a facebook app, I can now star a post in google reader, have it show up on twitter, and get aggregated on tumblr. Facebook is facebook, and the less time spent on all of these the better.

So to wrap it up – my barely visited sites will get dropped for good, keeping my portfolio site, an ongoing blog, and a set of tutorials. Micro posts on twitter / tumblr will fill out the rest. I get the impression this could all be reduced further. This is a first step.

It will take time, but the eventual goal is to have only two sites – JeremyShuback.com for my portfolio and TheShuback.com (still to come) for my blog. For now, I’ll keep with my baby steps.

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
-Chopin

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
-Da Vinci

In design the one question I ask myself again and again is ‘How can I simplify this further? What else can I cut out?’ The perfect design would be a single red button that when pressed reads your mind and does exactly what you need. We’re not quite there, but it’s the ultimate goal to shoot for. In writing and drawing simplicity is getting as much information in as few lines as possible.

I hold by the mantra Keep It Simple, yet default to absurd complications. Instead of breaking down a problem and reducing it to a series of steps I’ll look to solve everything at once, and end up in a pool of chaos. I make it increasingly more complicated before realizing the need to simplify.

For example, the theme of this post was ‘How to simplify all aspects of my life.’ The intention was to strike away all of the unnecessary activities and leave only the crucial acts that improve me as a person. I’m currently over 5,000 words in with subjects ranging from blog updating to analyzing improv. I detoured to dozens of subjects before getting to the major issues of simplifying my life down. Reducing this post to its simplest form has become a game of making it into a series of posts on reduction. The irony is not lost on me.

The question I set out to answer in the next series of posts is:
What can I take away without losing a thing?

We’ll start with the simple and escalate. A major time drain is my RSS Reader. I have almost 200 subscriptions (View code for XML), split into 10 categories, and while I love them, they detract more than they add. Let’s strip them away, one category at a time:

News.
Cut it. I read the news to understand connections that tie the world together, and a daily news article cannot provide that depth. If I need to know what’s going on look to books. Tell Me No Lies is a great starting point for finding the very best Investigative Journalists from Greg Palast to Seymour Hersh.

Random.
Cut. This is literally a waste-time folder.

Animation.
Cut. If I need to see good animation I’ll stick with Disney. Until I get back into animating, I have no right following the latest.

Artists.
Cut. While some are incredibly talented, looking at an endless stream of pretty pictures doesn’t help me. For inspiration look to art books, museums, gallery openings, figure drawing, and sketch crawls.

Comedy.
Cut. I imagine you’re starting to get the idea. A funny youtube video can’t compare to a good show, book, or movie.

Design.
Are you listening? Cut it out. There’s better resources out there.

Visual Effects.
Cut. Better to get work done than spend time on how others approach it.

Writing.
Cut out the daily dreck and replace with revolutionary works of art. Reading a blog on writing is useless compared to great books like Robert McKee’s Story.

It’s the same for all of the categories – don’t read a blog when there’s a more useful, more informative alternative out there. My blog reading is reduced to the two categories remaining.

Friends.
I like my friends, and only a couple have blogs, so these will stay.

Los Angeles.
One bastion of usefulness is finding fun one-off events. Sorting through 100’s of entries is a sucker’s game, so I downloaded NetNewsWire and set up a Smartlist searching for the term “Los Angeles.” Problem solved.

In addition what’s left are posts that inspire and challenge:
Hyperbole and a Half, XKCD, and Stephen Pastis all have hilarious quality material.
Kottke and Waxy collect the best of the best, scouring the web for places to inspire, limiting it to no more than an article or two a day.
Drawar writes fantastic articles on design. In time I’ll learn to drop this as well.
Timothy Ferris is the sort of workaholic that makes me inspired to get off my lazy ass every time I hear him talk.

I have stripped away the fat, given myself time, and only started on the path to simplification. I ask again, What else can I cut out?

Next post – How to unify Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, my blog, and every other bit of the web into a simple whole.

About four months ago I made a goal to myself to write a 1,000 words a day. For the most part, I’ve not only met that, I’ve surpassed it. Every so often what comes out is something I love. More often what comes out is less than perfect. And then there are those days when 2am hits, I haven’t written yet, and I know I need to get up at 5:30 the next morning so I type as fast as I can because I have a goal to make, yet really love sleep. This is a result of the latter.

Jim looked at his plate. It was covered in gravy.
“Mother,” Jim said, “What’s with the gravy? You know how I feel about gravy.”
“It gives you strong bones,” his mom said.
“That’s certifiably false,” he said.
“Just eat your gravy and stop being such a wise cracker,” his mum said.
“Listen mum,” he said “I-”
“Don’t call me mum,” mum said, “You too narrator.”
Damn. I didn’t realize you realized I was here.
“Of course I realized you were there. What? You think I can’t read? I’m some sort of idiot?” mum said.
“What did I just say?” the attractive, vibrant mother said.
“Who are you talking to Mom?” Jim asked.
Jim apparently couldn’t hear me when I wrote these lines in between.
“Yes, but I can,” she said.
“That doesn’t really answer my question,” Jim said.
“What? Oh. Nobody. Eat you’re gravy,” she said, despite the obvious fact that gravy is not good for anyone.
“No one asked you,” she said.
“No one asked me what?” Jim asked.
“No one asked you to stop eating,” she said, “Also, do I get a name?”
“Mom. I’m sorry. I know how you hate being called mum.”
“Nancy. Let’s go with Nancy. Call me Nancy,” the lady said.
The narrator got sick of dealing with Nancy so the story came to an abrupt end.
“Ooh la la,” Nancy said, “I write in third person even when talking about myself. Look at me. I’m so fancy.” Fancy Nancy started prancing around the kitchen to push in the point.
“Don’t call me that either,” she said.
“Mom, you’re scaring me.”
I said abrupt end. Abrupt end.

The end.

“You call that a story?” Nancy asked.
The narrator stayed silent, as the story had already ended.
“Clearly not, if you’re putting in little lines like that.”
If the narrator didn’t move, perhaps she wouldn’t realize he was still there.
Nancy tapped her right index on her crossed arms, staring up at the ceiling, shaking her head.

The end.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing, improv, and compositing related work recently, so it was good to do get back into drawings. I was attempting to challenge myself with each of these- seeing how far I could push the feathering on the bird, the volume on the cow, and the linework on the horse. They were a good stepping stone to put me back into a drawing mindset, as there’s a lot of drawing to do if I’m to finish a big project coming up.

“Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.”
-Robert M. Pirsig

I’m ready to give this blog a focus.

It’s a channel to inspire others as I inspire myself. It’s my look into the creation process of different forms of art – writing, design, painting, drawings, animation, motion graphics and improv. The focus is on the deeper principles that unite them rather then the minutia that sets them apart.
        What’s the best process to improve an art? How can I break it down to a science? How do they all relate?
        How do I approach art so I grow as a person, and how do I approach myself so I grow as an artist? By answering that, craftsmanship falls into place.
        Every post will be about the creative process. They’ll start with a finished product, and lead up to how I got there. The finish can be a sketch, a painting, a website, a design, an improv show, or a short story.
        I won’t focus on quantity, only publishing when I feel I have something to offer. However, the only way to reach a place of quality is by publishing as often as possible. My ideal is a post a day. On the horizon is a series of websites, a series of illustrations to complement some stories, and a motion graphics reel. None of these will be quick. The blog is here to inspire me and push me forward.

“Quality is not an act, it is a habit.”
-Aristotle

If you’re a Jewish artistic improvisor living on the west side of LA, here’s a guide to some of the best events going on around town.

The best places to draw are:
Dr. Sketchy’s (every other Sunday night)
Drink and Draw (Thursday night)
YWCA in Santa Monica (Tuesday night)

The Gallery Openings worth attending are:
Gallery Nucleus
Merry Karonowsky
Billy Shire

The best places for improv are:
iO West (Groups to catch: USS Rock n Roll, Sweetness, King Ten, Dasariski, and Beer Shark Mice and many others)
UCB (Groups to catch: Convoy, Last day of School, Shitty Jobs, Facebook, Assscats or just about anything else.)
Westside (Specifically Monday & Thursday nights at 10, partially due to the fact that I perform on Monday nights, but also because it’s a good show.)

For the Conservadox Jews, your best bets are:
PicoEgal (younger)
Ikar (hippier)
BDJ (modern orthodoxyier)
Beth Am (conservative learned-er)

To find concerts use SonicLiving. It scans your iTunes library and sends you emails or creates a calendar based on what artists you like.

While it’s possible I’m the only person this list helps, I’d like to believe there’s 100’s of Jewish artistic improvisors out there who were waiting for a list just like this.

For more events, I suggest my old roommates site: http://www.rentfoodbroke.com.

After reading how the David after Dentist family earned $150,000 from the video, I couldn’t resist the temptation of figuring out the only logical way for it all to end.

Enjoy.

After making the hit youtube sensation “David After the Dentist” where David, drugged up on nitrous oxide says how he feels in the most lovable of ways, his dad, the creator was surprised and delighted to watch the view count pass 60 million. He knew there was money in 60 million followers, so he quit his job as a real estate agent to dedicate himself to this hilarious video full time. He set up a blog, sold t-shirts, put up some ads, and was able to rack up about $150,000 from it all, He wasn’t able to maintain the momentum and “David after the Dentist” started to feel more and more like a one hit wonder. He didn’t want it to go away, so he started creating new content.

The first videos were just his 8 year old kid, David, telling short jokes. For obvious reasons those didn’t get the number of hits as the first one. So he decided to start drugging his kid and taking him on car rides on a weekly basis. At first audiences were appalled by the idea, but when they saw just how adorable each of the installments were, they loosened up.

While the first video had David saying such lines as “I didn’t feel anything” and “I feel funny” later installments became darker with David, in a drugged out state saying things like, “Why do we have to keep doing this? You’ve destroyed my childhood. You’re the worst father. I want you to die.” as his dad yelled at him, “Shut up and be cute. We need this money.” In later videos David was completely unconscious as other people moved him around as a puppet. While not the fervor of the original, these also gathered quite a view count.

As David grew older the cute factor got old so they had to resort to more and more extreme measures. David after Heroine, David after PCP, and David after E were all big hits. His popularity waned for a while but had a huge boost when he got into cutting himself and defecating in public places.

Now David can be seen on the corner of 5th Avenue and K street panhandling for change, camera in hand, waiting for his next big moment to hit.

I was planning on doing one comic per post for five or so posts. I scanned them in in one swoop, so figured why delay? Here’s three more comics to round out the set. If you haven’t read these, you don’t know comics.

Maus, Art Speigelman telling his father’s tale in the Holocaust.

Sandman, in which Neil Gaiman rewrote the comic genre

Sin City, Frank Miller being Frank Miller

PS. I’m starting to feel like my blog is lacking direction. I’m all right with that. Perhaps when I start wanting readers, that will change. For now, I’m happy.

Congratulation to all the New Rabbis out of AJU. Here’s my sketch from the ceremony last night.