Drawn from the Honeywell - The video that had to be

In September a rare opportunity began to unfold. I was contacted by JDA Software in Scottsdale, AZ to help them with storyboarding a series of videos.

In my first meeting with the JDA team, we ran through the current concept and discussed production. In a nutshell, the video would detail the way in which JDA software and Honeywell hardware combine to make the management of a shipping warehouse run smoother.

The head of the team asked me what I thought, and I explained how disastrous the superhero motif can be. Unless superheroes are used in an authentic and contextual manner, it will bomb. I offered some ideas as how to approach the video with this theme in mind.

The next night, I found out that the woman who contracted me as well as the team leader had been laid off. Everyone in charge of decision making was now gone. The man in charge of the video production, Kevin O'Donnell, was supposed to be flying out to Florida in four days. He needed storyboards and a shot list. I needed to know if the project was still a go. Later in the day, I received a conference call from Kevin and an executive from the JDA offices in Dallas. We were asked if we felt ok taking over the project ourselves. In addition to the art, I would need to write the script, dialog, and direct the shots for each scene.

So Kevin and I agreed to take over. Thankfully, Kevin is a top flight talent in production. We both worked together perfectly for the circumstances. He was able to improvise and frame shots while on location that enhanced everything I had in mind for each scene. His direction and final edit with sound and audio was awesome. It was a truly collaborative project.

Moving forward, with no accountability, micro-management, anyone to report to, we produced (what we feel) is some kick-ass and funny material.

We were notified that our video won the Honeywell National Partner Video Case Study Contest.

Here is our homage to everything we loved about the "SUPER FRIENDS," "60's MARVEL COMICS CARTOONS," and good old fashioned fun.

Public discussion "Drawing is Easy"

"Drawing is Easy" with Jeremie Lederman

On September 25th, I gave a talk at Gangplank HQ in Chandler, Arizona. It was an impromptu talk as the otherwise scheduled speaker was unable to attend.

The topic was "Drawing is Easy / What drawing is and all of the things it is not." The purpose of the discussion was to dispel many of the misconceptions regarding the act of drawing. Drawing is as normal a human activity as anything else we do, however, the cognitive benefits of drawing are invaluable.

Some of the points made during the talk included:
• Drawing is something we are already hardwired to do
• Drawing is not art
• Drawing has no species requirement
• Drawing helps to develop many of the brains cognitive strengths

Recorded and edited by my good friend Ita Udo-Ema at http://www.viewfromabove.net/

Fun Factoids for Fall Frivolity

Here's a bunch of fun factoids....

And when I say 'factoid,' I mean to say, go ahead and prove them all wrong if that's what floats your cupcakes...


TO BEGIN WITH:
Your brain makes snapshots, not movies. Unless it knows that it has a job to do, it will just use the snapshots to interpret what it thinks you need to see...

Stare in the middle of this, and watch your brain kick in with it's unique 'interpretations.'

1. The British Army issues antimicrobial underwear that soldiers can wear for months at a time.
   
2. In the entire state of Ohio in 1895, there were only two cars on the road and the drivers of those two cars crashed into each other.
   
3. Listening to music for an hour every day can reduce chronic pain by up to 21% and depression by up to 25%
   
4. In China, you can be a professional flatulence smeller and make about $50,000.00 USD a year.
   
5. Ben & Jerry’s actually has a graveyard where they bury all of its discontinued flavors.
   
6. Gary Kremen, the founder of Match.com lost his girlfriend to a man she met on Match.com.
   
7. Hitler suffered from chronic flatulence and took 28 different drugs to fight it.
   
8. Reincarnation is forbidden in China without permission from the government.
   
9. At one time, the US army used color blind people to spot camouflage colors that fooled those with normal color vision
   
10. You are more likely to remember something you’ve written in blue ink than something you’ve written in black ink.
    
11. When a person lies, the temperature of their nose rises -- This is known as the “Pinocchio Effect.”
    
12. You are more likely to be killed by a vending machine than you are to hit the Mega Millions jackpot.
    
13. In Iowa, it is legal for an employer to fire a female employee for being too sexy.
    
14. It takes about 15 minutes for a man to decide whether or not he’ll go out on a second date.
    
15. Dogs, just like humans, are more likely to steal objects in the dark when they think they cannot be seen.
    
16. The shiny coating you see on various candies is called “shellac” - A substance which is secreted from the anus of the female Lac bug.
    
17. Artificial Raspberry flavoring is partially milked from the anal glands of beavers. Beaver anal glands, known as castoreum (I guess anal glands was a hard sell), are typically used in vanilla and raspberry flavoring and can legally be labeled natural flavoring
    L-cysteine or cystine is used a dough conditioner. It’s sometimes made from human hair, but more and more from duck feathers and can be found in breads and baked goods.
    A red food coloring additive that goes by many names (Carmine, Crimson Lake, Cochineal, or Natural Red #4) is made from insects like the cochineal beetle.
    
18. Watching a horror movie can burn up to 200 calories - The same as walking for half an hour.
    
19. The pilot episode of the show “Courage the Cowardly Dog” was actually nominated for an Oscar.
    
20. If you take your age and multiple it by 7, then multiply it by 1,443, the product repeats your age 3 times.
    
21. If you make a fist with your left hand and squeeze your left thumb, this will bypass your gag reflex.
    
22. Dead people can still get goose bumps.
    
23. People see you as being about 20% more attractive than you think you are.
    
24. Early Christians were called "atheists" by Romans as they didn't pay tribute to pagan gods.
    
25. In 1980, a 2.5 GB disk drive was the size of a refrigerator and cost about $40,000
    
26. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
    
27. Coca-Cola was originally green
    
28. The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time TV was Fred and Wilma Flintstone.
    
29. In the course of an average lifetime you will, while sleeping, eat 70 assorted insects and 10 spiders.
    
30. Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories a hour.
    
31. The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
    
32. Flying from London to New York by Concord, due to the time zones crossed, you can arrive 2 hours before you leave.
    
33. There are more chickens than people in the world.
    
34. The porpoise is second to man as the most intelligent animal on the planet.
    
35. 315 entries in Webster's 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.
    
36. The Average man could lift over 25 Tons if All of the muscles in his body could pull in one direction.

The natural selection to flatten the earth into biblical proportions.

Understanding the origin of the 'flat earth' myth.

 Without a doubt, one of my favorite topics is true history. When you take a piece of history and remove revisions, myth or misinformation, you get 'true history.' This kind of topic gets a wide variety of reactions from people, especially those with a vested interest in the 'assumed history.'
Some classic examples of assumed history include:
• American Independence Day was July 4th
• Native Americans were not a civilization of math, science, or architecture
• Marie Antoinette told people to eat cake
• Napoleon was short
• Vaccines cause autism
and one of my favorites:
• The belief in a flat earth
Perhaps you are not reading this far yet, as you are Googling factoids about my list above. Perhaps you already did and are either angry, confused, or feeling lost as a human being...

However you feel, welcome to the rounding out of the earth. Welcome to true history, almost universally, no modern culture ever believed that the earth was flat.

Given the seemingly endless 'evidence' that goes back for centuries, it might seem hard to fathom that the flat earth theory is entirely untrue. However, as I present the information throughout this post, you will no doubt see how easily the myth became so deeply entrenched.

Most revisions of history occur when powerful forces have a vested intrest in certain viewpoints getting all the props. The basis for flattening out the earth was very simple, religion needed to look stupid. In the nineteenth century, there was a significant confrontation underway between science and established religion. The entire premise behind the flat earth was to reframe religion as an institution that opposed, blocked, and even murdered scientific advancement.

Keeping this thesis in mind, let's begin to establish the foundation of the entire big picture. All the way back to the 6th century B.C., Pythagoras — and later Aristotle and Euclid — explained through math and evidence that the earth was a sphere. Ptolemy wrote “Geography” at the height of the Roman Empire, 1,300 years before Columbus. Columbus himself owned this book.

The following image comes from Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de Sphaera (On the Sphere of the World)
written in 1230 AD. It showcases the knowledge that the appearance of ships on the horizon testified to a curved earth.

There were moments in history that some did speak up and profess a flat earth, but they were soundly put down by none other than the Christian church itself. Men named Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustesn made claims about a flat earth, but were resigned to obscurity. There were influential monks like Bede (670-730) who was very unambiguous that the earth was round, and even explained the tides of the earth being effected by the moon. There were countless scientists, priests, and philosophers who all affirmed the spherical nature of the earth. It appears that the church itself opposed the flat earth belief for centuries. It is not to say that the ancient and pre-modern church avoided all opposition to progress or scientific discovery, but it hardly earned the eternal role of subjugator and opponent of progress.

DIDN'T COLUMBUS GET PERSECUTED BY THE CATHOLIC CHURCH FOR HIS BELIEF IN A ROUND EARTH?

The entire person of Columbus has been distorted into a caricature of reality even greater than the story of Da Vinci. If you were to believe what we were all taught about Columbus, we would literally have to live on a cartoon planet. The truth is, Columbus was not at odds over the round earth belief with anyone. Eratosthenes has estimated that the earth was roughly 23,000 miles across (not bad, it's actually 24,900). The entirety of human navigation from that time forward did nothing but establish this measurement. When Columbus presented his voyage plans to the committee of Salamanca they rejected his plans. Not because of his belief in the shape of the earth, but the size. They argued that Columbus would not have big enough ships to carry the needed supplied for the journey. The Queen of Spain made a handsome contribution and apparently convinced Columbus that he was thinking too small. Ironically, the real story of Columbus that is the REAL story of Columbus is far more shocking...but that's a different blog.


OK, BUT THEY ALMOST BURNED GALILEO AT THE STAKE FOR THE ROUND EARTH DIDN'T THEY? YOUR BLOG POST IS SKIPPING STUFF...

No, that's not the truth either. Galileo was an amazing thinker, but he didn't appear in a vacuum. He was proceeded by Copernicus and other astronomers who all believed in a round earth. He was one man among a great number of thinkers who moved civilization forward. History tells that his friction with the Pope had far more to do with his insistence of heliocentricity as a fact, and pushed it during a time that Europe was undergoing reformation anxiety.

However, it's a long story to tell and reads nothing like the tales of imprisonment, torture, and rejection that history wants us to believe.

I found a fantastic link for your personal study regarding Galileo. Let it guide you on as you find intrest.
http://www.catholic.com/tracts/the-galileo-controversy



THANKS FOR ALL THE HISTORY, BUT HOW ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF THE MYTH?

Getting back to what I first wrote, there were opposing interests at stake. During the 1800s' there was some guy named Chuck Darwin taking cruises around the South pacific... perhaps you've heard of him? Well, it goes without saying that "The origin of Species" made quite a stir. Darwin is a significant figurehead in a large conflict that covered decades. That conflict was primarily between evolutionary biology and creation. Basically, the church against science. As it goes with any conflict, people get snarky. In painting the church as ignorant and people of faith as simpleminded, the snarky part of the argument gleaned a rather silly but effective tool.

The flat earth.
The claim that it was a long held religious belief was invented and propagated by the historian John Draper (1811-1882), Andrew Dickson White was also a noted supporter of this claim. He was the President of Cornell University, and made sure to propagate this myth in writing. One of the biggest influences on the ideas of a flat earth, Columbus, and the Christian doctrines famously stemmed from a work of fiction. In 1828, Irving wrote “The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus,” which sounds like a biography but is mostly fiction. It says that Europeans learned from Columbus’s trips to the New World that the planet was round. The idea that the sailors on board his ships feared falling off the earth, the church opposed him, and many other falsehoods stemmed from that book. Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), a French academic used old Christian writings to pin a flat earth belief upon the entire faith.

In order to avoid playing too lose and quick, there are certainly no shortage of examples to actually laugh at. There is an organization alive and well today called "The Flat Earth Society." But they have as much significance to the larger world of science as the Westborough Baptist Church does to modern Christianity.

Now, we sit in a time period where, even though the entire myth has been refuted by 'believers and atheists' alike, the idea remains firmly planted, even among clergy and academics.

If you wish to study this further, you will find (like I did) that the internet is exploding with volumes of academic and anecdotal research.

The Effects of Drawing on your Brain

Human beings are creative machines. Creation is an ongoing process that defines us both biologically and psychologically. Our brain has built in tools that allow each of us to adapt, alter, and control our environments in a way that secures the perception of survival. Unfortunately, our society has given a very confining definition to what constitutes an act of 'creation.

This brief post is going to try and offer you some food for thought.

As you read, it is vital to remember that your brain LIKES to create. It is in your DNA, it is in your cells, it is in your sub-atomic structure. YOU are a creative being.

Now, here is a question: Do you like to draw?

I didn't ask if you were an artist, if you were any good at it, or if you could draw a straight line. I just asked if you liked to draw?

Why?

The act of drawing effects your brain in a way like nothing can. Check out the benefits that drawing has on your brain.

1. Improves hand-eye coordination
2. It can actually add synapses to your neurotransmitters  This means that memories and experiences stored in your brain can become stronger, more vivid, and easier to access.
3. Drawing increases many of the cognitive functions that researches typically label as the 'creative' and 'right brained' activities.
4. Intuition increases.
5. Produces positive brain chemistry like Serotonin, Endorphins, Dopamine, and Norepinephrine.
6. Your brain stem can actually get thicker.
7. Your awareness of your surroundings can get sharper.
8. Your memory can improve.
9. It produces an overall state of alertness that all of your other brain functions can use for improvement.

Why?
Brains are mysterious. These results are studied all over the world. But I submit that 'drawing' is the purest form of creation that can produce deliberately. We are literally taking our brain's machine and creating something 'outside' of ourselves as an interpretation of something inside of ourselves.

Drawing effects the brain in a way that music, reading, sports, singing, or nearly any other activity can induce.

So, what constitutes drawing?
...anything your hand puts on a surface for the simple reason of 'just because'.'
doodles, sketches, creative dabbling, you name it.

It does NOT have to be art, it does not have to look like something, it has no rules, it has no evaluative property, it is just whatever creative little thing you just made.

Our society tries to shout down our right brains by the time we are 8 years old. That does NOT change the nature of what the brain IS.

I know drawing scares people, but that's not your fault. If you are overweight, does that mean you should NEVER work out? If you play an instrument, did you have any expectation that you were going to be proficient without a lot of practice?

Don't apply rules of perfection to drawing that you do not apply to anything else. That is the lies and fears of bad programming passed on to you from an inherent fear of 'creativity.'

Here are some examples of 'drawing'

 


Now, the one major rule that DOES exist to gain these benefits, you have to draw consistently. I suggest stapling a wad of paper together, and calling it your sketchbook. Nobody has to see it you know...

While I could never cover the entire topic here, if you are interested, I recommend a time honored book.

Please stay tuned. I will be addressing more about this in future posts. Feel free to ask me any questions you might have on this subject!

Go draw something

How the Three Stooges saved Star Trek with J. Edgar Hoover's favorite Communist

Everyone loved Lucy. She was adored on a scale that few celebrities will ever know. Hollywood loved her, Famous actors loved her, charities, Mr. Spock, even J. Edgar Hoover! The status she held as a comedian and sit-com icon was so over reaching, that many people don't know the even more fascinating story behind her life.

Few would argue that Lucille Ball stands as an American comedy icon. Her success and influence was unique for its time; opening doors for other female comedians for decades to come. Would it surprise you to know that comedy was not Lucy's intended career path? She began as blond headed Mrs. Diane Belmont, eager to establish herself as leading lady material. Early in her career, her mind was firmly set on breaking into the industry as a serious actress and Broadway player.

A blonde Lucille Ball, 1930s'

In the 30s', she left her New York home and moved to Burbank. Initially, her career consisted of the typical grunt work and filler roles that would ingratiate herself with the studios. Where I submit that her career got interesting was when she signed a contract with the venerable RKO Studios as a role actress.

During the depression era, RKO was a dominant and influential studio. Their diverse portfolio offered many entertainers opportunities for work. RKO also happened to be the home of the Three Stooges.

Needless to say, slap-stick comedy and serious film making were miles apart from each other. Yet one day in 1933, Lucy had a notable speaking role on one of the Stooges episodes. How did this happen? The details are sparse. Keep in mind, Lucy was NOT interested in comedy. Rumors detail that Lucy's propensity for humor was quite well known. She always avoided pursuing comedy in fear of being type-cast. However, she had mentioned that Curley was one of the few comedians who could always make her laugh. Thanks to Curley, she was open to this brief role.



In 1933, she appeared on the Three Stooges short "Three Little Pigskins." On the set, she was able to let her natural sense of humor play out and ham it up. While she kept this role quiet for most of her career, other sources within the Stooges Trivia world mention how much she enjoyed this experience. Perhaps one could speculate that it softened her up to performing in comedy. There is only one quote that I could find from Lucy regarding her part, "The only thing I learned from The Stooges was how to duck... and I still got wet."

Blond Lucille ball with Larry Fine

Lucy apparently resumed with her efforts to become that serious actress and Broadway player. However, she never quite broke through to the mainstream, and again comedy opened up to her. She later wound up with a role in the Marx Brothers film "Room Service."

THE RED COMES OUT!

Now in regards to the seemingly nonsensical title of this blog, as of 1936, Lucy was a registered member of the Communist party. This was nothing more than an appeasement of her grandfather's wishes as he was an adherent believer. During the era of the RED SCARE, Lucy and her husband Dezi Arnez were called to testify before the House Committee. However, J. Edgar Hoover considered "Luci and Dezi among his favorite entertainers in the world." 

She would not have survived the investigations were it not for her successful career in comedy (and her denial that she ever intended to act in accordance with the communist principals of the party). Dezi Arnez said in his testimony, "The only thing RED about Lucy is her hair, and even that is not legitimate."

For historical accuracy's sake, let it be known that Hollywood itself initiated the infamous 'Blacklist." This blacklist began long before the McCarthy hearings. The belief that McCarthy created this is a historical myth.

WHERE NO WOMAN HAS GONE BEFORE

This now leads us to the big pay-off of my seemingly ridiculous premise. Lucy was a driven, vigorous, and shrewd business woman. Her negotiation skills were legendary in the industry. She and Dezi went on to establish the formidable production company, 'Desilu Productions.'

Gene Rodenberry

One of Desilu's most notable programs was Star Trek. Many at Desilu felt it was a childish Buck Rogers show and balked at giving Gene Rodenberry and his vision a chance. Lucy, however, felt that is was smart television and represented genuine science fiction. Her support for the Star Trek concept was so strong, that it was given a second pilot episode. At the time, a second pilot was unheard of.

Star Trek hit the airwaves in 1966, and Rodenberry often stated that the first season was a nightmare due to the industry's constant meddling. Gene said that his experiences were so Hellish that he was always ready to walk away. Lucy intervened and convinced him to hang in there for two more seasons. However, as most of us know, the studio dropped the show after only three seasons (before discovering that the 18-49 demographic was a goldmine).

So, were it not for Curley's unique humor, Lucille Ball would have surely missed her true calling. Thanks to her exposure to comedy, she built a career so successful that she not only made a fortune, changed the entertainment industry, but even charmed one of the creepiest leaders in the FBI into giving her a pass.

I often think that Mr. Spock's resemblance to our dear friend Moe Howard was no accident. Just imagine where Science Fiction might be today were it not for three abusive Jewish comedians.

Thanks Guys! Live long and prosper!

This random information brought to you by Jeremie Lederman of Lederman Studio!