Jim Ojala

James "Jim" Ojala (born May 6, 1977) is an American special effects and makeup artist, screenwriter and film director.

Career overview

Ojala grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, where he developed an early love of film through horror movies and the works of directors such as Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, George A. Romero and Buddy Giovinazzo. Following his graduation from Duluth Central High School in 1995, Ojala began his career working in public-access television. There, he and his friends created the series My Three Scums, a horror comedy sitcom about a dysfunctional family of mutants and monsters which he described as "sort of an obscene punk rock Munsters on crack". The series ran locally for three years, after which Ojala sent tapes of the show - in a large box filled with inflated helium balloons reading "I LOVE MY THREE SCUMS" - to Troma Entertainment co-founder Lloyd Kaufman, who was impressed enough by both the series and its eye-catching promotion to offer Ojala an internship on the feature film Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV. Upon receiving the news, Ojala immediately quit his job as a medical records filing clerk and moved to New York to work on the film.

Jim

Jim is a diminutive form of the forename "James". For individuals named Jim, see articles related to the name Jim.

See also

Jim (comics)

Jim is a comic book series by Jim Woodring. It began in 1980 as a self-published zine and was picked up by Fantagraphics Books in 1986 after cartoonist Gil Kane introduced Woodring to Fantagraphics co-owner Gary Groth. The publisher released four magazine-sized black-and-white issues starting in September 1987. A comic book-sized continuation, Jim Volume II, with some color, began in 1993 and ran for six issues until 1996.

Jim, which Woodring described as an "autojournal", contained comics on a variety of subjects, many based on dreams, as well as surreal drawings and free-form text which resembled Jimantha automatic writing. Besides dreams, the work drew on Woodring's childhood experiences, hallucinations, past alcoholism, and Hindu beliefs. It also included stories of recurring Woodring characters such as Pulque (the embodiment of drunkenness), boyhood friends Chip and Monk, and, in Volume II, his signature creation Frank.

Content

Jim is made up of a variety of short comics, text pieces, and artwork. Most of the works are short comics based on Woodring's dreams. Some of the pieces are surreal parodies of advertisements in the Mad tradition.

Gimel

Gimel is the third letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Gīml , Hebrew ˈGimel ג, Aramaic Gāmal , Syriac Gāmal ܓ, and Arabic ǧīm ج (in alphabetical order; fifth in spelling order). Its sound value in the original Phoenician and in all derived alphabets, save Arabic, is a voiced velar plosive [ɡ]; in Modern Standard Arabic, it represents has many standards including [ɡ], see below.

In its unattested Proto-Canaanite form, the letter may have been named after a weapon that was either a staff sling or a throwing stick, ultimately deriving from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph based on the hieroglyph below:

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek gamma (Γ), the Latin C and G, and the Cyrillic Г.

Hebrew gimel

Variations

Hebrew spelling: גִּימֵל

Bertrand Russell posits that the letter's form is a conventionalized image of a camel. The letter may be the shape of the walking animal's head, neck, and forelegs. Barry B. Powell, a specialist in the history of writing, states "It is hard to imagine how gimel = "camel" can be derived from the picture of a camel (it may show his hump, or his head and neck!)".