ZOMG.
Today I got the best illustration gig EVER. It's for the Scripps alumni magazine. I'm going to wait on posting sketches and whatnot until the issue comes out or they decide not to use it, but let this be a hint as to what it's about:
Just outside of Greater Los Angeles, in a town called Claremont, are five colleges - Pomona, Pitzer, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, and Claremont Mckenna. At the start of the Great Panic, when everyone else was running, literally, for the hills, three hundred students chose to make a stand. They turned the Women's College at Scripps into something resembling a medieval city. They got their supplies from the other campuses; their weapons were a mix of landscaping tools and ROTC practice rifles. They planted gardens, dug wells, fortified an already existing wall. While the mountains burned behind them, and the surrounding suburbs descended into violence, those three hundred kids held off ten thousand zombies! Ten thousand, over the course of four months, until the Inland Empire could finally be pacified. We were lucky to get there just at the tail end, just in time to see the last of the undead fall, as cheering students and soldiers linked up under the oversized, homemade Old Glory fluttering from the Pomona bell tower. What a story! Ninety-six hours of raw footage in the can. I would have liked to have gone longer, but time was critical: One hundred a day lost, remember.
We had to get this one out there as soon as possible. I brought the footage back to my house, cut it together in my edit bay. My wife did the narration. We made fourteen copies, all on different formats, and screened them that Saturday night at different camps and shelters all over LA. I called it Victory at Avalon: The Battle of the Five Colleges.
The name, Avalon, comes from some stock footage one of the students had shot during the siege. It was the night before their last, worst attack, when a fresh horde from the east was clearly visible on the horizon. The kids were hard at work - sharpening weapons, reinforcing defenses, standing guard on the walls and towers. A song came floating across the campus from the loudspeaker that played constant music to keep moral up. A Scripps student, with a voice like an angel, was singing the Roxy Music song. It was such a beautiful rendition, and such a contrast with the ragin storm about to hit. I laid it over my "preparing for battle" montage. I still get choked up when I hear it.
--Max Brooks, "World War Z"
Just outside of Greater Los Angeles, in a town called Claremont, are five colleges - Pomona, Pitzer, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, and Claremont Mckenna. At the start of the Great Panic, when everyone else was running, literally, for the hills, three hundred students chose to make a stand. They turned the Women's College at Scripps into something resembling a medieval city. They got their supplies from the other campuses; their weapons were a mix of landscaping tools and ROTC practice rifles. They planted gardens, dug wells, fortified an already existing wall. While the mountains burned behind them, and the surrounding suburbs descended into violence, those three hundred kids held off ten thousand zombies! Ten thousand, over the course of four months, until the Inland Empire could finally be pacified. We were lucky to get there just at the tail end, just in time to see the last of the undead fall, as cheering students and soldiers linked up under the oversized, homemade Old Glory fluttering from the Pomona bell tower. What a story! Ninety-six hours of raw footage in the can. I would have liked to have gone longer, but time was critical: One hundred a day lost, remember.
We had to get this one out there as soon as possible. I brought the footage back to my house, cut it together in my edit bay. My wife did the narration. We made fourteen copies, all on different formats, and screened them that Saturday night at different camps and shelters all over LA. I called it Victory at Avalon: The Battle of the Five Colleges.
The name, Avalon, comes from some stock footage one of the students had shot during the siege. It was the night before their last, worst attack, when a fresh horde from the east was clearly visible on the horizon. The kids were hard at work - sharpening weapons, reinforcing defenses, standing guard on the walls and towers. A song came floating across the campus from the loudspeaker that played constant music to keep moral up. A Scripps student, with a voice like an angel, was singing the Roxy Music song. It was such a beautiful rendition, and such a contrast with the ragin storm about to hit. I laid it over my "preparing for battle" montage. I still get choked up when I hear it.
--Max Brooks, "World War Z"