Not art, but art related

So I was at my usual coffee haunt last night, doing my doodle thing in my sketchbook. I was at an elevated counter on a stool facing a window to the street and some outside seating generally for smokers more than weather permitting--this is important at the end, take notes, kids. Anyway, I was mostly trying to panel out a 2-page idea and a 3-panel idea (that I can't seem to get lower than 4 panels) I had that sounded like good practice since my visual narrative skills are sub-par (read: not where I want them to be at my age) and I was being painfully scatterbrained and indecisive about it all night.

At the end of the night an older white guy with a shaved head (sure he could have been cue-ball bald...) walked up to the two people next to me, a darker-skinned guy with a short tightly-haired beard in what looked like a faux-military jacket that I forget the country of leaning against the counter, and the girl sitting at the end of the counter, a lean brunette with short hair and a few of those rings that cover the middle segment of the finger--these were particularly noteworthy because whenever she'd plop a hand down I'd hear a clank of her metal against the roofing copper that's used to cover the counters, and the nearly 3 hours I was there added up to a lot of clanking. The two guys had a brief chat, she was half in half out of it, and then the guy who had walked up noticed me doodling and asked to see what I'd just scribbled. I told him I'd just erased that disaster, but here, flip through the whole sketchbook, but be warned the first half is from 2005 (2006 actually, but I remembered wrong) which is why things change drastically mid-way. He liked that I was "boarding" a lot in the most recent pages, continually pleaded with me to stop being self-deprecatory, asked me about my goals and concerns: visual narrative, which I'm "wonky" at, to which he again pleaded with me to stop being self-deprecatory, then told me to learn through emulation (oddly the same thing my art and animation teachers have all told me) and told me to simply keep at it and be positive before walking off.

Despite now feeling bad that I'd used words he deemed too negative and self-defeating to the point he had to insist I stop (his brow even furrowed), having just a short chat like that sort of made my night better as a whole. Then a moment later his friend next to me (dark skinned, faux[?] military jacket) asks if I thought it was weird or odd for a guy to just walk up give me feedback like that, and I said something to the effect of "Nah, any critical feedback after college, let alone good? Do you know how hard that is to come by?", to which he and the girl both grinned at. It was interesting that a guy would walk up, flip through it, notice a few pages ask questions. Quite awesome really. So then he motions out the window and points to the guy who I'd just been talking to who was now sitting just on the other side of the window I'm facing and next to another regular, an older short Asian guy with salt and pepper hair and goatee who's always nose-deep into his large-screened laptop doing something that takes all of his focus at all times, and says "...[T]hose two are ex-Dreamworks and Pixar," though not saying which one was which. I think I was able to keep my shock down to my eyes only half bugging out of my face. The third guy's background is Hollywood, and the lot of them are looking to use their experience to get into working as an animation house for video game cinematics. Which makes sense since almost all games have both miserable dialogue and worse directing for non-interactive sequences. Cheers to them whoever they actually are... well I think the guy in the noteworthy jacket flirting/mingling with the girl next to me said his name, but I had 5 horrible hours of sleep that day, so I barely remember anything but what's written down here.

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This post was originally about 1/5th this length. But then I got an itch to write it out in length because I can and I don't have an editor--if I did, all my "-ed" and "-ing" would be consistent.