Longtime readers of this blog may remember (but probably not) that I’m working on something or other called Your Face is a Saxophone. It was coming out in February of this year, until it was coming out in April. Needless to say, neither of those things happened.
First, let me explain what the hell Your Face is a Saxophone actually is: it’s an animated comedy series about people working at an advertising agency. All of these people have inanimate objects instead of heads.
The title does not, however, come from the fact that people might have saxophones for heads. Here’s the character Blake O’Malley explaining it:
“Your Face is a Saxophone” is a statement that may not be true, and may not make sense, but it would definitely get your attention if plastered on a billboard. Thus, it is a metaphor for all of advertising.
Anyway, my plan was to release a pilot episode at the beginning of the year, and raise funds on Kickstarter for the rest of the season. The funds would be used to buy a computer that didn’t choke on this really, really simple animation, microphones that didn’t suck, register as an LLC or corporation or whatever, and other things. There are several reasons why this has not yet happened:
The cast and I recorded all the voice acting over the last weekend of January. After having animated the four-minute Goliath over the course of three days, I figured that I could animate a full 30-minute episode in a few weeks. However, I’d forgotten just how low-complexity Goliath actually was, as well as the fact that it took me about a week to recover from the sleep deprivation I’d inflicted upon myself to finish in three days.
In addition, it turned out that I actually did need some money. I bounced around between a bunch of jobs, which took up a great deal of my time. In hindsight, I would have been perfectly capable of working on Your Face is a Saxophone during my free time, but for the most part, I didn’t. Working for The Man burned me out, and I wanted nothing more than to be lazy. So I was.
It is now November. I am spectacularly displeased with myself, as I have not been able to get this one damn episode done for the entire year. So I declare now, to the entire Internet, for reals this time:
Animation for the pilot episode of Your Face is a Saxophone will be completed before the end of 2010.
There are a few methods I’m using to ensure this:
- I’m bringing David Lanz, who voices Blake, on as an environment artist. Evidently, Apple Motion has no idea how to handle both a 2.5D environment and moving characters at the same time without overloading a computer. I don’t think it even knows what a GPU is. In addition to distributing the labor, Dave’s skills with Cinema 4D (an actual 3D program) will cut out a tremendous amount of time lost to crashing, freezing, and exploding.
- Dave’s duties will also include becoming officially Very Disappointed In Me if I don’t achieve a minimum level of productivity on a given day.
- I’m going to write a blog post every day about progress, so that the entire Internet can also become Very Disappointed In Me if I’m lazy.
- No more taking odd jobs. For all intents and purposes, I am officially employed full-time at Plankhead. Speaking of which, I probably shouldn’t be writing any more blog posts at 3 in the morning.
Here goes nothing.
I say, Wilfred, I do believe that it would be rather marvelous were I to have a telegraph machine that could fit in my pocket. 
Intellectual Property Law Has Gone Quite Far Enough and Is Now Hereby Null and Void
A court has ruled that it is legal to remove works from the public domain and put them back under copyright in the United States.
Okay. That’s it. I can’t take these ridiculous decisions anymore. I’ve been thinking this for a long time, but now I’m just gonna come out and say it:
Intellectual property law in the United States no longer serves the public, and until it has been reformed to do so, it is to be ignored.
We the people of the United States of America have the right, and duty, to disregard and oppose these unconstitutional sections of the law. They no longer serves to, as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The law in its current incarnation actively impedes the Progress of Science and the Arts, and the limited Times are now so lengthy so as to be effectively unlimited. Copyright, patent, and trademark law together not only no longer matches the description in I.8.8, but it in many cases violates the First Amendment.
I believe in the necessity for there to be laws which promote the progress of science and art, and grant the creative persons responsible for such advances the exclusive right to claim a reasonable level of authorial control for a limited time. The former need is not being met by the law at all, and the latter is incidentally met in an unsatisfactory way by the current overarching and easily-abused law. But by upholding the current useful portions of the law, we validate the entirety of it.
As a citizen of the United States, I hereby declare that I do not consent to governance by Intellectual Property law, including, but not limited to, the current laws pertaining to copyrights, patents, and trademarks. I encourage the like-minded people of the United States to join me in affirming our non-consent, and continuing to do so until the law once again serves the public good as outlined in our Constitution.
In regards to my own work, I would appreciate it if the spirit of the Creative Commons licenses I release them under were respected, but please do so out of goodwill, and not out of a false sense of legal obligation to do so.
To the extent possible under law, Zacqary Adam Green has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Intellectual Property Law Has Gone Quite Far Enough and Is Now Hereby Null and Void and the header image preceding it. This work is published from the United States. Not that any of this matters as of this writing, of course, because copyright is null and void; I’m just saying this for when one day it’s valid again.