new new new

new video:

new website:

new obsession:

busy busy summer dayssss

just an update!

boy oh boy what a busy summer!

dscheinert and myself have been busy chugging along through post production on the hundred in the hands music video. it'll be done by the end of the month, but i doubt we'll be able to release til the end of the summer when their new album DROPS! shabam!

anyways, here are some snazzy photos we took on set to whet your appetite.

we're also getting busy building a presence on the internets or whatever. now that our careers are taking off (or something like that) and we have to act like real human beings, we've decided that a website would be nice right? and business cards. yes business cards! so we dont have to keep writing our email addresses on napkins or people's palms. so expect those sometime this summer!

aside from that schein-dawg and i have been video treatment writing beasties. we're pretty excited about our new pitches and hope somebody else out there is too! we'll let you know if we get any bites! :)

-daniels

DANIELS signs to warp records! (as music video directors, not musicians, sadly)

we are proud to say that daniel scheinert and I have signed to warp records for UK representation to be a part of their awesomeeee roster of directors! weeeeeeeeeeee!

boy oh boy

its been awhile since I've posted in this thing. and thats mostly been because things have been getting busy.

its been exactly a month since coming back to los angeles and a bajillion things have happened. like... starting my job at dreamworks... and then quitting it a couple weeks later. and things like that... what??!

i guess things are really moving forward for daniel scheinert and I and this entire month has felt like ive been working two full-time jobs and i realized id have to pick between jobs. so i decided to be smart and quit my reliable, well-paying, well respected job and go be artsy or something.

whatever dudes! following my dreams!

flying out to new york city to shoot a music video for the hundred in the hands tomorrow! really psyched i'll let you know how it all goes! everyone stay healthy until then! im so stinkin sick, blegh.

little women

As I am preparing to permanently move to the west coast, I have been cleaning out my junk from parents' basement. Being the packrat that I am, I am unable to throw anything away, and instead I have spent most of the time looking over old things that I have completely forgotten about.

In my perusing, I came across an old notebook circa 4th or 5th grade filled with dumb stories I used to write for fun. though there are several stand out pieces, this one made me chuckle for quite some time. Here it is, grammatical errors and all (movie producers, eat your heart out):

Little Woman

(the funny version)

by daniel kwan

Interduction: in the normal version little woman was soposed to mean younge woman. but in mine it is like a olden day "Honey I shunk the kids". Ted Hudson

and then it stops. hahah. I don't know why I just stopped after ted hudson, but now the world will never know what story my 10 year old mind wanted to tell of tiny women. Anyways I should get back to trying to throw away my memories but not really doing anything. i will let you know if i come across any other nuggets of greatness.

i hate sitting on unreleased things

but i guess thats what im going to have to do... I currently have two things that I worked on this semester that I am just waiting to get out, but for some reason or another i haven't.

the first is the music video for FM Belfast that daniel scheinert and I have been slowly chiseling away at all semester. its been done for about a month now (at least thats how long it has felt like), but we are still waiting to figure things out with the band's publicist. sigh. we've been getting a lot of great feedback and a few people have requested to screen it at a couple smaller film festival/eventy things. I will keep you updated as to when that will happen.

and then there is this little short that i worked on (again with daniel scheinert) that we did in the last month of the semester, that started out as a ambitious class exercise, and ended up being something i like enough to sit on for a bit. its the first time ive written and directed for live action in a long time (cause it has all sucked in the past :p) and even though its less thought out and took less effort than most of the live action things ive done in the past, im happy with it and am thinking of submitting it to some small festivals? crazy? i dunno. it still needs some work. and i hope once i get to my computer again i can get it fixed up. i am pretty sure it will be screening at tiwwi's next show and tell screening early june, so i'll keep you posted.

as for daniel and i we will be busy as ever working on things. here is a quick poster i did for timmy and the tiny tigers, daniel scheinert's awesome tv show he's been trying to figure out for awhile now. this is only a mock-up so we can put together a pitch packet, so everything about this show is subject to and probably will change, especially the tiger puppet designs. but whatev. its going to be awesome.

i can't do much right now besides think of new things as my camera and computer are out in LA while i wait here in massachusetts to graduate (sad how crippled i am without technology). but hopefully youll be hearing from me soon!

its alll coming tooo an ennnnddd

Hello blog. it has been awhile.

so basically, it doesn't really feel like school is going to be done for good. i haven't been able to post much lately cause i'm trying to get everything done before i have to find a job, find a place to stay, put all my stuff in my car and park it somewhere, fly back to boston, graduate, fly back, keep looking for a job, become famous or rich, or both.

just kidding on the famous/rich party. im already famous.

daniel scheinert and i have been working ferociously on things. the fm belfast music video is finally done after taking a bajillion years to make. daniel has decided that from now on he is going to go into music videos with a clearer idea. haha. but this video was a lot of fun and i'll post it here as soon as we hear from the band's publicist (they are from iceland, so they are all probably battling volcanoes and stuff). here is a photo we took during one of the many little shoots we did for this video.

i am wearing all of the clothes i own plus more. and now i only have four outfits because one of my batches of laundry got stolen after this shoot. haha.

also this weekend i shot a quick fun project for my last class ever. it was a short 4 hour shoot with a crew of like three people (the best crew in the world, in case you were wondering). It involves a 7 year old boy dealing with issues far too complicated for him to understand. and urinating on things. its going to be fun. i'll post it in a few. here are some production stills hahha..

i caved.

i got a twitter.

it was because i really wanted to tell the world how much i want to see the new scott pilgrim movie, but realized it wasn't blog worthy. sigh. you can follow me if you want. who knows if ill use it...?

https://twitter.com/dunkwun

(btw, the trailer for the scott pilgrim film was just released today. i got so excited i decided to buy all of the graphic novels so i could read them again. don't judge me. i know it looks ridiculously stupid in a dumb-action-comedy-that-has-quirky-and-self-deprecating-characters-with-hip-michael-cera-and-even-hipper-music, but really its going to be just ridiculously stupid. in a good way.)

3 quick things before i go to bed.

1. remember fast? its online! WHAT?

2. remember cs4? forget it, here comes cs5! WHAT??

3. remember jon klassen (i've mentioned him here a couple times, he makes some of the most endearing illustrations ever)? well i met him cause apparently he works at dreamworks and ive been grabbing lunch with him every week! WHAT???

hopefully next time i'll something more productive to speak of.

(p.s. i know you might think that dreamworks has brainwashed me, but i just had to let you know that how to train your dragon is coming out this weekend, and believe me it made me feel like a kid again. 100% on rotten tomatoes so far, so go watch it in 3d, cause for once, the 3d is beneficial, if not essential.)

This Is What We Imagined

Hey,

Just thought I'd let people who were in the LA area to know about this sweet little collective of people called This Is What We Imagined (or TIWWI) that daniel scheinert and I are kind of (?) apart of. And Fast, the short we were working on is a part of it or something.

How it works is every few months there is something called a WEEKEND OF WONDERMENT, where everyone gets together and rents a bunch of equipment and just shoots some stuff. It is wonderful. i guess. :p

and then in about a month after the shoot there is a wonderful show and tell screening with an open bar and we all have a good time. i havent met that many people involved yet, but of the people i have met they are all pretty awesome.

so if you'd like to see these fun little projects you can come to the next show+tell:

March 13th - 9:00PM
REC CENTER STUDIO
Echo Park - 1161 Logan St.
$10 / +21 / OPEN BAR

itll be a good time.

good morning campers!

hey again!

sooo i helped out daniel this weekend shooting some stuff.

first on tuesday we did some work on an ongoing music video shoot we've been doing for FM belfast, a sweet icelandic band.

we still have a few more shoots to do but, itll be pretty crazy in the end.

James rocking out at the bar....

Then later this saturday we shot another quickie short called Fast starring the charming Charlyne Yi. This piece is going to take a lot of post work, so you may not see it for another month or so, depending on how much time we have to work on it (daniel just got a job at the mill and im so excited for him :p).

charlyne preparing for a super special effects shot. hahah. or something.

peter's "but they won't be looking at the heel" tattoo

and on another awesome life update. I have a computer!! and am now in the process of installing a a shmillion things so i can start getting to work. i dont even have photoshop yet and its making life hard. :p

-danielk

life update... no work done.

wow.

it has been awhile since ive posted anything. i think it has something to do with me living a postworthiless life. or i am lazy. anyways here goes a short summary.

-well. im in the wonderful los angeles. the road trip was wonderful. i have a ton of footage that i will hopefully someday find the time to edit into a 1 or 2 minute montage of awesomeness that will make you all jealous. the days upon days i waste digging through all of the pointless footage i captured will be worth it just to make you jealous.

-and i am workstationless. AKA i have not been able to get any work done. But I am sketching and brainstorming on paper... so hopefully by the time i get a computer *shabam* something will get made!

-i have been meeting with the indispensable daniel scheinert regularly on some exciting projects. none of which we have much to show for just yet. but exciting nonetheless. a majority of our ideas have surrounded buttholes. daniel can testify.

-my internship has not started yet, but it promises to be awesome! so far i have eaten two wonderful meals and saw wes anderson give a q+a session. and it hasnt even started yet! looking forward to actually working :p

-what a sucky post. i wouldnt have posted anything except an eager follower (haha) emailed me and reminded me about this thing.

- stay tuned! (i miss you all)

road trip

whats up america?

i've been on the road for the past few days we're currently in new orleans. you can follow us from my friend's tumblr.

bengitkind.tumblr.com

see you guys in los angeles.

quick animation. thoughts. aspirations.

here is a little animation i have been working on for a class. i guess its more of an exercise in learning hand drawn animation, which i realize i suck at and do not have much patience for... i hope i have enough discipline to keep practicing... sigh.

its supposed to be based on the little red riding hood tale. or something my teacher said. im not really good at basing my work off of anything. i kind of just wanted to do a fun sequence. i hope you like. oh and super thanks to amelia who did the last minute "ufs" and "ughs" recordings in a bathroom on my laptop a few hours before this was due. haahah...

i worked on it the past two or three weeks, but honestly was only able to put in three of four days of good work because i've been busy with planning my move. ugh, so stressful.

next semester i think i am going to just work on one big animation project. i still want to do a ton of collaborative things with the people i love. but for myself i want to see if i can actually work on something that i can actually work on diligently for more than a month. call it a practice in controlling my creative attention span. i dont want anything too crazy and overly effected. i mostly want to concentrate on a single good story for once. also, it may or may not take place in a retail clothing store.

wellll time to go apply for loans and stuff. weeeeeeeee

life updates and a new video from daniel and dan.

Hey dudes!

i havent posted in awhile. mostly because I have been too busy doing absolutely nothing!

i don't know what it is, but i think its cause i see the end in sight.

I've been drawing alot, and watching a lot of the office (after a 3 year haitus), and mostly... i just feel kind of sick all the time so im constantly tired.

in other news, i figured out where i will be interning for the spring semester. you are now talking to the future creative development intern at dreamworks animation. doo doo doo. im pretty psyched. they have free food too!

also, here is a video daniel scheinert and i shot with some of the kids we were "teaching" from new york film academy for fun while we were in boston. we sort of... made it up as we went. what else is new.

in a few more weeks i will be heading over to the west coast.

a new reel!

so here it is.

(click on the link to view it in HD)

this is a compilation of the the stuff i've made while teaching myself photoshop, illustrator, after effects, etc since i first started this "makingg mediaaiaia" thing two and a half years ago. i feel so much has changed since then. its absurd.

when i first applied to transfer to emerson college, i didnt know the difference between film and video, i think one of my favorite movies was "that thing you do", and some of my best work at the time consisted of me and my friends recording ourselves running around topless in my basement at 3 in the morning pretending to do karate with our hair gelled straight up using the built in webcam on my laptop. i dont even know how i got into the film program. hah. i felt like it was a fluke and i was scared to death that in the end i would just fail miserably.

thats probably why i tried so dern hard.

i remember the first thing i ever did in after effects (haha what a lame thing to get sentimental about) was making a cut out purple crayon walk across the desk. a very simple maneuver, but it took me hours. when i showed the final video to my professor of my intro to media productions class he told me i should become an animator. i laughed at him.

and now i want to be an animator... sigh. not a great one yet, but i am so excited to learn.

i feel like its unfortunate that it took me until my last year to really get a grasp of what i want to do and what i want to learn, and now im graduating and going into the real world. but then i also realize that emerson college is notttt the place for an animator. i learned 90% of what i know about animation and software out of class on my own from the internet (i dont get out much) and then i look at other schools like gobelins and supinfocom and i cry.

but then i realize... i knew nothing at all about what i wanted to do before i came to this school. and even if i have a lot of issues with the administration, and the school no longer really fits my needs, it was a great ground for me to explore what was out there and meet other people i can geek out with... and i guess thats what college is for right? i guess i could always go to one of those awesome animations schools later (except they both conduct classes completely in french :[ ).

haah. im sorry, instead of just writing about my reel im getting all contemplative and junk. anyways, i dont even know if this is all i want to do. i mean i love doing this and its a ton of fun. but i also want to play music. and write childrens stories. and dabble in live-action filmmaking (that is, afterall, technically what i am majoring in plllllttllttt). but ill stop now and write more of this stuff when i actually do graduate in the spring. see you theeennnn.

by the way, thank you for anyone who actually visits this thing on a regular basis. it means a lot to me. truly.

- dan kwan

its been awhile

i have not been keeping up here. sorry, for all you loyal followers hahah. finals and now evvys production week have been killing me. ive been really tired.

i know a lot of you have seen this already, but here is the working intro to my computer animation that i want to finish during the summer... lets see how that goes.

in other news, i still don't know what im doing this summer. but i may be promoted to a manager at the digital production labs so i can work over the summer. That would be sweet. 

peace.

house keeping, for my own reasons.

so here is an update more about my life and things that are happening than anything else. ill try and keep it short.

i found out this morning that i got nominated for three evvy awards, which is funny considering i only submitted for one category. no it is not rigged (as much as many would like to think), just some of the people i worked with in the past either submitted for me, or submitted with me. ive seen some of the things some of the other people have done and its not bad, so i dont think much will come out of the two random nominations. the only one i really care about is the outstanding animation category (big surprise). of course, being lame, i submitted balance hoping to get it seen some more. the other two things i got nominated for is outstanding visual effects in film or television (which i think is cheating because i wouldn't consider what was submitted to be a "visual effect", it was just a small animation), and outstanding graphics package (which the entire graphics team from last year submitted, haha i love those guys) we'll see what happens...

speaking of balance... the campus movie fest northern regionals is this saturday so amelia and i are going to nyc. woo! im doubtful i will get much further than this since campus movie fest isn't really a venue for animations, but ive enjoyed the ride thus far, and am content with what my week of work has given me already. i will let you know how that goes : /

speaking of balance.. again. this semester has had to have been the worst as far as me being able to balance my responsibilities. looking back, on this semester i can see that i have fallen behind in several of my projects, some projects i downright dropped, and many other projects have just lacked the concentration that they needed. though i feel like this has been a pretty productive semester and there are many things that i am proud of doing, there are a lot of things hanging over my head and it stinks. i still got a few more projects to go before the semester is over...

one of which is the evvy awards. this year will be kept in my mind for many reasons. but one of the reasons will probably be the fact that this year was plagued by my positions as the lead graphics for the 28th annual evvy awards. i wont go into too much, but it was a lot of work.

though i will admit, i learned a ton this year because of it... and i am WICKEd looking forward to hell week not even kidding. the idea of having an entire week to work on one project and one project alone (even if it is an entire show graphics package) sounds soooo good right now. plus i got good people around me. i think we might watch that documentary, helvetica. yes the movie that is entirely about a single font.

okay i think thats good for now. i was going to post about my summer plans, but i think i'll save that for another post.. mostly because its all up in the air and i dont even know what its going to look like yet. 

and i bet you thought i was going to go an entire post without a single visual element? YOURE CRAZY! this is for amelia heheh. i shot it on a crappy little digital camera that shoots videos that look like they were shot on a cell phone.

so i decided to make a new blog

reasons for such a decision:

1. i want to do more with my life than other people's projects. im ready to do my own thing :)

2. i need to become more okay with showing people my unfinished and imperfect projects

3. i miss taking pictures.

4. i hate talking to people in person, so this serves to be a much better form of communication for me. i hope through subtle hints to let the people i love know that i miss them. but very subtly.

5. i am horrible at keeping real journals. mostly because i know no one will read them. 

6. i want to become famous.

7. i have a lot to say and no one to say it too.

8. mostly i just want to become famous.

 it is not just about my life. there is no theme. it is a blog just for me.

its a pretty selfish blog. it will give me a chance to post whatever i might create whether it be pictures, animations, videos, illustrations, written fiction, blah blah blah blah. i wanted to create a more cohesive idea when conceiving this blog, but then i decided i did not like the idea of limiting myself. i will show you everything and anything that i find that i think is cool or funny or inspiring. i will talk about current events, i will talk about my day!

mostly, i was hoping that this would be something of interest to you.