Wisconsin raised, San Diego resident, Jeff Halleran, is one of the earliest proponents of The Predatory Bird. His personal blog is a veritable treasure trove of the Lesser-Spotted California Thrashers that he observes and documents around the San Diego area.
Amongst other fine specimens you will find such rare and awesome gems as reasonably new Dave Coyne clips; rampaging Blood Wizard, Drew Dezort; the legendary Ed Devera and OG Zero rider Aaron Harrison, killing it consistently.
In this quick video, Jeff puts his original Predatory Bird Lifestyle Item through some rigorous field tests. We’re happy to report that The Lifestyle Item does not disappoint.
Paper Trail
The live-action performance in the intro to Joe Pease animation experiment ‘Paper Trail’ is truly exquisite.
In this post Joe answers 3 quick questions about animation and the animators he considers to be some of the greats.
https://vimeo.com/72560855
What’s the first animation you remember watching that got you sparked on the medium?
I would say Disney movies would’ve been the first. The Jungle Book and Sword in the Stone. In Aus we also had these short claymations between programmes called Pingu, have you seen that?
Yes! I used to love Pingu, it was consistently pretty hilarious.
So good! I don’t think Americans know about it.
What do you think is the appeal of animation rather than live action?
I like the look of certain styles of animation. I’m really into line drawn animation. Also, the fact you don’t need to rely on other people to work on it. There are not really any boundaries to what you can do either, which is cool.
Which animators do you find inspiring?
Frank and Ollie, the original Disney animators are incredible.
This guy Bruce Bickford who did Frank Zappa music videos.
Ray Harryhausen for how epic his stuff was before anyone.
I’ve also been super into motion graphics recently. Here’s one by a production company in the UK called Animade
What about Matt Stone and Trey Parker?
Of course! How could I forget?
A Pictorial Journey Behind the Scenes of New Balance Numeric’s A Place in the Sun
With the release of A Place in the Sun New Balance Numeric also announced that they’ll be adding Toy Machine’s buff & tight Jordan Taylor and Sk8Mafia powerhouse Tyler Surrey to the team. This turn of events does a great service to skateboarding as these are two of the truest rulers in existence and they deserve all the encouragement we can collectively raise. You can see more from them in the full-on, alternate-angles/behind-the-scenes video extravaganza that I’ll hopefully have finished by next week.
In the meantime, below is a 7 part review of the recent past that includes the trailer for aforementioned video extravaganza and a photo essay covering a small portion of the making of A Place in the Sun.
1) New Talent on New Balance
2) Breakfast of Champions
Hollywood! The home of cinema, celebrity and breakfast burritos a la Surrey, Taylor, Brown and Rattray!
The first thing we did after breakfast was stop by the clinic so Tyler could back tail this small ledge. As you can see there’s a sweet leaf sign with an arrow pointing at him.
Pretty soon Russell was standing on top of his truck uncertain as to whether he feels mildly anxious about this project or if he’s just getting hungry again. Continue reading “A Pictorial Journey Behind the Scenes of New Balance Numeric’s A Place in the Sun”
Shoe Release Revisited
This post celebrates the fact that
1) For whatever reason, I finally uploaded the classic short video pun Shoe Release to YouTube
AND
2) I discovered the wordpress video lightbox plugin
Click the image for an amazing and entertaining trip down memory lane.
The Best Worst Graphic Ever
Over the years at Zero there have been a lot of graphics. Often terrifying, frequently strange and sometimes hideous. Today I present to you The Best Worst Graphic Ever. Taken from a photograph of a questionable spray-stencil experiment The Best Worst Graphic Ever sprang, like so many terrible mistakes, out of boredom. What we have here is a crude attempt to depict the demonic spirit that rages through the woods of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2. The graphic is amateur, the logo wonky and haphazardly placed and the signature awkward and incongruous. This could all conspire to leave the final product as merely the worst graphic ever, which brings us to the moral of the story: never underestimate the strength of a well chosen disclaimer.
The Best Worst Graphic Ever will be on display at Cal’s Pharmacy this evening, Friday July the 12th, from 7pm as part of the Chromeball wrap party
The PB Comic Parts 3 and 4
In Part 3 our hero finds the drive to overcome his fear of dropping in, he learns to rock and roll with disconcerting speed and the boys are dumbfounded by Morbid’s impressive pop.
In Part 4 our main kid returns home from an eventful day at the park only to receive the terrible news that his old man will never be coming home. As his mind recoils he makes the questionable decision to carry on with the regular school week and make his class presentation about skateboarding. Of course there’s always some bright spark chomping at the bit to ask a dumb question.
Attack of the Memes: The Strange Connection between Joe Pease, Saatchi and Saatchi and Professor Richard Dawkins
At Cannes the opening speaker of Saatchi and Saatchi’s 2013 New Directors’ Showcase was Great British evolutionary biologist, Professor Richard Dawkins.
Never afraid to be the provocateur Dawkins is hated, with vitriol, by many of the same people who oppose gay marriage, for his publicly expressed sentiment regarding a belief in God. Regardless of whether you’re bothered about his joyous banging of the atheist drum I rank The Selfish Gene as possibly my all-time favourite popular science book.
At the 5-minute mark of Dawkins’ NDS intro, the ensuing new-media-nightmare-trip – designed to illustrate the idea that the spreading and transformation of internet memes is analogous to (and even an extension of) evolution by genetic mutation – doesn’t really do justice to the memic beauty that flowed from Antoine Dodson’s brilliant Hide Yo Kids, Bedroom Intruder, news segment (this all ties in with the theme of the showcase this year). But, the floating Dawkins head, the Mars Attacks brain graphics and Dawkins electric recorder performance is well worth checking out.
http://youtu.be/GFn-ixX9edgBesides all that, Peter Brings the Shadow to Life by friend-of-the-bird Joe Pease ended up being featured in the showcase. He shot it on his telephone, during various afternoons and evenings between November ‘11 and Summer ’12. That it’s been included in the reel is a wonderful, encouraging, positive, turn of events for the oftentimes persecuted young warehouse manager.
Bleach
Backstory
I made about 15 of these Flying Gullotine WuBird sweaters. They were printed black on dark grey so the logo was subtle, revealing itself in sunlight and hiding in shadow. I sold them for around 30 bucks plus shipping and the resulting, staggering, profit is waiting to be reinvested in a vague coagulation of ideas I generally refer to as, “The Next Phase”.
I didn’t go particularly hog-wild on promoting their existence but slowly, steadily, the Flying-Gullotine sweaters did their thing. There came a point when there were only 5 left (you can crunch those numbers on a mere three hands).
At that point I thought, “I’m over this dark-print-on-dark-fabric shit”. Time for bleach! The question was: how will these heavily dyed cotton/poly blend sweaters react to bleach?
According to multiple web sources polyester reacts poorly to chlorine-based bleach. Some of the sites say it will cause the polyester fibres to become brittle and turn a putrid shade of yellow. I dismissed this as petty fear-mongering and color-shade chauvanism. The care label on the sweaters also clearly states “NO BLEACH” but this was no time to be discouraged by oppressive rules on tags; chlorine-based bleach was what I’d already bought from the shop. 
The worst thing that can happen, I imagined, is that the sweater melts or disintegrates and that would be something worth seeing.
Method
Emboldened by the willful disregard of caution signs I squeezed about a quarter bottle of Clorox laundry bleach into a shallow plastic tray and filled it up with enough water to more or less cover the sweater, gently swirling the solution to ensure an even mix.
CAUTION! BLEACH IS CORROSIVE.When messing with it please:-
- DON’T SPLASH IT IN YOUR EYES.
- Wear some rubber gloves.
- Don’t drink it.
- Don’t throw it.
- Don’t mix it with other household chemicals, especially anything acidic as you run the risk of releasing noxious chlorine gas via molecular vandalism.
I pushed the sweater down into the bleach solution slowly, so as to avoid splashes to the face. I folded it in, first one way, then another, turning it, unfurling any creases in the sleeves. I’m going for an even colour treatment here, not tie-die. I’m wearing rubber gloves. I left the sweater to soak for at least 2 hours. Every 15 minutes or so I’d move everything around and refold the sweater differently to ensure even uptake of bleach water. I rinsed it in the shower, squeezing and kneading the crap out of it, poured everything down the plughole and threw the sweater in the washing machine on a cold cycle to evenly kill the process. Then, when it dried and I realised that it looked the same as when I started, I repeated the entire process one more time and hung the thing out to dry.
Result
The WuCrew sweater bleached to a variable chocolate brown
Analysis
Using a fairly dilute bleach solution gave some level of control as the reactions were less torrential. The polyester fibres were degraded to a perfect shade of putrid-yellow (an end result similar to what solar photons might achieve over a longer period following a slightly different chemical pathway). Luckily we are working with 60% cotton. The cotton is affected in a different manner and in this case the combination is a very acceptable shade of chocolate brown. It’s a winning result and the fact that the colour of rot is involved is a wonderful conceptual bonus since, of course, putrefaction is one of the underlying processes that sustains life on earth.
Conclusion
