I woke up at 4am this morning and could not get back to sleep. Turning around in my mind were all the things I have to do, and a mounting anxiety that I won’t be able to accomplish all of it. Only a week ago I was on holidays in Germany and Austria, gorging on cheese and bread. After a transit of 25+ hours, with the addition of an unwanted overnight stay in Melbourne, we were welcomed home by tropical cyclone Marcia. She provided a merciful few days of cool weather and soothing rain for guilt-free rest… however the sun has now come out, my jet lag is gone, and there are no more excuses. My sweaty back is stuck to the chair. It’s time to work.

Diary Comics Compendium 2014

Ongoing, this project feels like a rock chained to my leg. There is just so much to be done, in correcting colours, arranging layout, adding typography and a million other tiny little details. I can only hope that the finished result is worthwhile. On the positive side, I am getting a font made out of my own handwriting and although it is still in development, I’ve had the chance to play with the latest version and it looks surprisingly natural. Of course, the perfectionist in me then insists on updating the font in each of the diary comics where I’ve used digital typography, adding to the production time.

Chasing Shadows

I’ve given myself a couple of weeks away from this whilst tumbling down the ski slopes of Austria. I had sent the latest script draft to fellow DVA candidate student and  talented script advisor/writing magician Mariana Shek before I flew out, and recently received some helpful suggestions from her which I’ll implement shortly. I had a moment of reassurance when I reread the script on the flight back and realised that actually, it really is coming together. A bit more work is needed, the addition of some scenes and the possibility of cutting out one of the characters entirely, but the story has a structure, the characters are gaining dimension, and the themes are speaking clearly, without sermonising. There’s a long way to go, of course, once the script is locked in the drawing will begin, an arduous task that will present its own set of problems. Andi Spark reckons I’ll get one page done per week. With only a year left of the doctorate, and the exegesis left to write, that’s a worrying prediction.

Teaching

Semester One 2015 kicks off in just over a week. I’ll be teaching two courses, 3121GFS Sequential Art and Illustration and 1114GFS Reading the Moving Image. 3121GFS alone has fourteen contact hours per week. Its going to be crazy. Good thing I’ll be sharing teaching duties with Paul (Soldier Legacy) Mason, as well as a couple other guest lecturers including Travis D. Hendrix.  It should be a hella fun course, and I really can’t complain about getting paid to talk about comics. For now though I need to make sure the first few lectures and tutorials are well prepared and watertight- nothing worse than having to improvise in front of 100 or so third year animators and film students in the first weeks. Later in the semester, once most have stopped paying attention or attending entirely, that’s the time to relax and riff.

Okay… I think that’s it. It doesn’t seems so bad, now that I’ve written it down, after all.