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GO SEE HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON !!!

In the 3 years Ive been at Dreamworks I have been lucky to witness and be part of some pretty incredible things. This film and its crew happen to be a couple of those. I am so proud of Dreamworks for How to Train Your Dragon. Directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois (Lilo and Stitch) came on in the final hour to completely re-rout this story from scratch from scratch. They collaborated with an incredible crew and the entire studio under an impossible deadline to create something that is truly awe inspiring and special.(and not just for Dreamworks.)
Chris and Dean asked me to come on board to collaborate with them and my friends Nico Marlet (lead designer/genius) and Takao Noguchi(awesome designer) to finalize the design of the main Character "Hiccup". Then a small team of us were asked to explore an entirely new Dragon and main character "Toothless the Night Fury".(Below are a couple of my pieces that appear in the art of book.) The environment was always open and collaborative. A couple character thoughts I suggested even made it to the screen in all of this. My contributions were definitely a speck in the big scheme of Dragons, So read the credits in the theater and give that amazing crew a round of applause. Theyve earned it. Dreamworks takes a lot of flack about their films both story wise and look wise, and sure, some of it is justified."SOME" of it. Its great that Kung Fu Panda opened some eyes, But wait, theres more. An incredibly talented team from many varied backgrounds and experiences came together to make Dragons something special. Go see it and have a blast!!!


Artwork copyright Dreamworks Animation.

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Goth Blogging 101 How Often to Post

This week Ive decided to resuscitate my Goth Blogging 101 series where I throw out some advice that answer common questions I get about how to get started as a Goth blogger. Previous posts in this series include Picking a Name for your Goth Blog and Generating Ideas for Your Goth Blog.


When youre getting started with a Goth blog, you probably have an idea of what kind of posts youre going to do. Are they going to be outfit posts? DIY tutorials? Longer articles? Diary-style? All of these posts take different amount of times to create and will result in a different posting schedule.  Generally speaking, the less time it takes to make the post, the more frequently youll be able to (if you want.)

An outfit blog can update every day if you can find enough time to take a picture and write down the details. On the other hand, you might not create a DIY project even every week so that kind of posting would be more rare and sporadic. Writing longer articles can take a while to do but can be done on a more regular basis than tutorials.

Add to that the amount of editing and processing youre doing. Add time to edit your post and reread for spelling and grammar mistakes (I still struggle with this occasionally.) If your blog posts include video, including the time it takes to edit and upload the video into your overall production time will help give you a better idea of how often its reasonable, ditto for pictures.

Most of us who are in the Goth blogging scene do a mixture of lots of kinds of posts. We might do more posts that take less time (like outfit posts) and only a few posts that take a long time (like longer tutorials, videos, etc.) and fill up the rest of the time with articles and personal posts.

So, what does that mean for you, if you run a mixed-content blog? In the beginning, I would recommend starting with a simple goal: one post a week.

One post a week isnt extremely difficult to keep up with, especially if you schedule it for a day youre not working or in school, like the weekend. Having that schedule keeps you consistent while you figure out your writing style and how long your posts take to do. You might even discover, at first, that this is pretty easy to do so you can build up a backlog of queued posts to fall back on when youre less enthusiastic, super busy, or what have you.

Over time, you might decide you want to post more or less frequently. A good friend of mine who runs a non-Goth fashion blog was talking to me and she said that she only writes a post when she has inspiration for it. Why, she reasoned, commit to writing something if I dont have something to say? Of course, for SEO reasons and readership-building reasons its good not to go too-long between posts (currently kicking myself for my beginning of year hiatus) but if you dont care about those things, this isnt at all a bad model.

As odd as it sounds, having more posts scheduled per week made it easier for me to write up posts. Why? Because it takes the pressure off. Oftentimes I would come up with an idea and I would think to myself, I only have 52 posts to make this year. Is this really good enough to be one of them? And then I would procrastinate. Now that I have two posts a week, one of them can be a shorter, fun post without making me feel like Ive wasted an opportunity to be profound.

If you are a Goth blogger, how often do you post? Do you have a schedule or prefer to keep it spontaneous?

If you arent a Goth blogger, how often do you read a particular blogs posts? How many posts do you think are too few? Too many?

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