Easter weekend

We spent the holiday at R's aunt and uncle's house in Maryland. It was similar, in a good way, to our Easter last year: delicious meal, fun hiding eggs for the kids, nice to be around family. The biggest difference is that it ended with a late night after making a traffic-filled trip up to central Jersey to bring R's grandparents home. On the positive side, we enjoyed having the extended visit with them.

The rest of the long weekend was good too. We took a hike in Brandywine Creek State Park on Friday afternoon. This was considered a moderately difficult trail with heavy emphasis on moderately (uh-oh, hiking in New Zealand may have made us trail snobs). Friday night we went out to celebrate a postponed St. Patrick's Day. It was weird being in a bar without a camera to hide behind. The dreaded hiccups of death overtook me three hours in and we made it home in time for me to fall asleep during a movie. No offense to the movie, Enchanted. R was glad to see a happy movie again and, having grown up on Disney princess movies, she enjoyed some of the parody aspects of it. Saturday's selection, Gone Baby Gone, brought us back to the world of gritty violence that seems to be dominating our viewings of late (sorry, R!). Let's see... we also went out for coffee and a walk Saturday afternoon, we ate a Peruvian dinner that night, and I had some time to work on the next Bud Light video here and there. It's coming along okay but still needs more time.

My music video shoot will be happening on a Saturday night in late April or early May, depending on the actors' availability. I'm going to use the time before then to learn more about this camera. I've never taken a photography class, so many of the concepts are relatively new to me. With my old camera I never had to worry about finding the right balance between shutter speed and aperture... or how to effectively read zebra stripes... or how to use gain without noticeable grain. I want to learn this stuff. My new camera has an auto setting, and that works okay when I'm run 'n' gunning a Bud Light video, but I'm going to be more picky with the music video. I'm going to try to stay in manual mode and hopefully not screw up my intended vision too much.

Way Gone Fishin'

As promised, here's a short clip I put together as a test of my new camera. Am I ever to going to get too old for this kind of lunacy? Doubtful.

Please note that this is not a Cottage Cheese clip, even though The Fisherman could easily pass as Bread Man's older brother and the formula of one character walking into a room to interact with an equally weird character should look awfully familiar. The big distinction is that this clip is not about food. I have a bunch of ideas for CC sketches, but this is not one of them. When I'm ready to return to food comedy at its finest, you'll know it.

P.S. The link above is for a superior quality Veoh video. If you are unable to play it for one reason or another, here's the lower-resolution YouTube version as well.

P.P.S. The fish "special effect" isn't going to blow you away in either version.

Man, I love this camera

I've been using my new video camera quite a bit in the last few weeks. As I become more familiar with it, I'm appreciating it even more. The above stills are from a project I worked on for Wilmington Renaissance Corporation (WRC) last week. The final product is a 2.5-minute video that mixes still photos and live action to promote development in the city. After some very late nights of editing, it was barely finished in time to play at a "State of Downtown" event on Wednesday in front of 250 people, including the mayor (who also makes an appearance in the video). I'll give you a heads up in a week or two when it's available to view on WRC's website.

Possibly more entertaining for you -- I have a fun, Cottage Cheese-esque short to show sometime soon. It was made quickly without much of a plan one night as a test of shooting/editing in widescreen at 24 frames per second. It also gave me a chance to play with some post-production techniques I've been meaning to try. If you liked the Bread Man videos, I think you'll get a kick out of these results.

Speaking of tests, the twilight shooting I did for the WRC video was a good test for a music video I'm planning to direct later this spring. The video is for a song by The National (although it's not endorsed by the band or their label, of course) and will be starring our friends S & Q. This is the project I'm the most excited about right now. I'm thinking of it as a sort of paean to Wilmington and a return to the atmospheric, late-night designs I've attempted to create in the past. Nobody is paying me to work on this one, and I'm glad. This one is for me again. Finally.

I am being paid, however, for the latest Bud Light video, which was shot last Thursday night. It has been waiting to be edited since. I'm curious to see what I picked up and how it comes together; I just couldn't bring myself to sit in front of the computer for much of the weekend after the PC-overkill that was the previous week and weekend. The video currently playing on BudLightFilmCrew.com was not done by me, by the way, but it's worth checking out. It covers the first of the two auditions for our new hosts. The winners will get to co-host the videos for the summer at $50 a pop. Okay, so there's not much money in it, but who wouldn't want the fame associated with being on Out & About's 3rd most visited web page?

The weekend was good. On Friday night we attended a surprise party held for our friend Cindy to celebrate her finishing chemo treatment. During the party, her husband, Gordon, screened a 60-second commercial he made that won 2nd place in a recent national contest. Dogfish Head, the beer company holding the contest, is flying him down to Austin, Texas at the beginning of April for a festival of the best entries. Way to go, Gordon! Actually, way to go, Cindy too!

On Saturday, R joined me for the ultimate frisbee game. She did great (she even made the news), despite having not played since college. Afterwards we went out with the team for an incredible buffalo chicken cheese steak. I spent the afternoon working on taxes, one my least favorite activities in the world. Luckily for us this year, my employer is paying to have our taxes done professionally, although it still took a while just to collect all the info and fill out some forms they needed. I shouldn't complain. That night we watched the polarizing No Country For Old Men. Wow. I can understand people's frustration with the ending, but now that it's sunk in, I can't imagine it wrapping up any other way. There's something note-perfect about the tone and the pacing of the film. It makes filmmaking look easy and challenges the viewer to accept its uncompromised vision. Talk about a punch in the gut.

We woke up on Sunday and went out to brunch at Kid Shelleen's. After that I attended a film club meeting. This is a group of local filmmakers interested in networking, discussing movies, and helping each other out on projects. They're talking about holding a festival for member-created shorts, which could be a great opportunity to share some stuff and see it play on a big screen, so I'm excited. Immediately following the meeting, R and I ran a 5K in Trolley Square. I do not recommend doing that two hours after consuming cinnamon rolls, a huge omelet, toast, potatoes, and a large glass of orange juice. After the race, my stomach was so upset I couldn't finish a beer. Our day was rounded out with some grocery shopping, cleaning the house, and doing some laundry. You could say it was an ambitious Sunday.

There's your update on things. Life is feeling really exciting right now; overwhelming at times too, but exciting nevertheless. Change is once again (possibly) on the horizon, as it so often is during the spring. Expect details over the next few months.

Mr. Ez

Check out the little guy. He's my new nephew, Ezra, born on March 7th by means of R's sister. Congrats, C! We are looking forward to meeting the dude later this Spring.

Upsidedown Orion

It's a challenge to pick out only a few photos from our trip to New Zealand to post on this blog. We snapped about 900 of them (although about 200 were duplicates or didn’t turn out well). When you take that many, you're bound to get some decent ones, even if none of them do the actual sights justice. Anyway, check out our gallery to see some more of our favorites:

http://picasaweb.google.com/jrfinc/NewZealandFavorites

The bullet train that was our two-week trip rolled through the month of February and left us looking back with wind through our hair. Add in the pre- and post-trip crunches at work, and there's a large portion of the year gone before we even had the chance to get used to replacing 2007 with 2008 in applicable online entry fields (the modern day equivalent of forgetting to write the new year on checks).

In short, the trip was amazing. I won't type you through the complete itinerary. If you are interested, here's a copy of it from the tour company's website (although we did the loop in reverse). Yes, we took this trip with a tour group, which can sometimes be a bust, but I think it worked very well for us. For one thing, we saved so much time not having to plan where to sleep every night, where we would eat, what trail we'd hike, etc. They made the decisions--good decisions--for us. They also saved us from learning how to drive on the left side of the road and from getting lost constantly, which is what usually happens, at least when I'm in charge of navigation.

There were 16 people in our group, half of them were younger than 40, all of them were fit and active. We had some awesome guides as well that were very knowledgeable and basically catered to us 24 hours a day. They got us awake and moving at sunrise every morning and we kept busy until sunset. We'd spend a few hours traveling in the van here and there, but mostly we were outside hiking, biking, or kayaking. And they were good about taking us off the beaten track and avoiding hordes of tourists.

I'm not convinced there were hordes of tourists. The country is very much un-developed... and, discounting the sounds of the birds, strangely quiet. The biggest city on the south island, Christchurch, was not very big. The pristine lakes didn't have houses surrounding them; they rarely had boats or water-skiers on them either. Excluding the people in our group, with whom we quickly became close friends, we felt alone and secluded, and that's the best way to see the gorgeous scenery that dominates the land. The city of Queenstown was hopping, but by the time we got there it was a welcomed change. It made a night out on the town more fun.

R and I kept a travel journal during the trip. Here are a few adapted notes from there:

• There are 10 times as many sheep as there are people in NZ.



• You can drink the water directly from almost any river or creek in NZ... and it all tastes really good. We tested the theory and also added glacier water to it.



• The wine is good too. We drank some almost every night, including the nights during our three-day backpacking hike. On the other hand, the beer wasn't nearly as impressive.



• I was bit by an eel. We went swimming the first night of our three-day hike. R jumped in off the dock. Being less brave, I sat at the end and dangled my feet in the water for a few minutes... until I felt a nibble on my big toe. It didn't break the skin; I just assumed it was a fish. I mentioned it to one of the guides who was there with us and she pointed a flash light at the water. "It's just a trout," she told us. I wanted see this thing for myself, so I grabbed my glasses and came back. That's when I noticed the guide was lying to us, probably to keep R, still swimming out a ways from the dock, calm. It was an eel and it was about a meter long. "Whoa... that's a smaller trout than I expected," was my vocal response. The guide whispered to me about how eels have a way of biting down and not letting go. "R, why don't you come out of the water now…" We managed to get R out safely and then broke the news. That didn't stop our other guide from jumping in the water right over the eel. We kept on eye on the thing with our flashlights (it seemed drawn to the light)while the guide cooled off . A few minutes later it disappeared under the dock. We told the swimmer and--SPLASH!--he was out of the water quick. I did not make it into the water that night.



• I did go swimming the next afternoon in a mountain lake. I am claiming it was the coldest swim I've ever taken. My feet turned numb while attempting to get in. But both R and I did go under, however, and swam around for a little bit. It actually felt good after the day's arduous hike, and it was as close as we were going to get to a shower.



• It was hard to get a sense of scale around some of the massive mountains and wide open spaces. While kayaking, we had a waterfall in front of us that was three times the height of Niagara Falls. It didn't look it because of the enormity of the mountain behind it. There was another waterfall that we guessed was about a kilometer away. It turned out to be 9 kilometers away. Our photos are even less representative of the actual scale.



• We arrived home 30 hours later than scheduled. Our flight over the Pacific was turned around over an hour into it due to a weather radar problem. They weren't able to reschedule the flight until 22 hours later. The good side was that we got an extra half day to spend in Auckland, a city that was otherwise excluded from our tour. When we got on the rescheduled flight, the same problem was still occurring (at least it was noticed before took off this time), so we had to switch planes. The airline gave us $50 each to spend in the duty-free shops while we waited for the other 747 to be prepared. R let me use her voucher to buy a new set of ear buds with the combined amount. Thanks, R!



• I finished The Kite Runner a few days into the trip (R, being the speedy reader she is, finished well before me). It was an entertaining enough read, but it's far from classic literature and ultimately quite forgettable. I hesitate to write that because I know the novel is loved by so many people. Getting a peek into the harrowing state of affairs in Afghanistan was fascinating; I just think the author should have spent less effort creating unbelievable plot coincidences and more on adding dimension to his characters. Up next for the book club (for those of you following along at home): The Human Stain by Phillip Roth.

All right, let's wrap it up.

During regular life, R and I spend just about all of our energy on getting through the work week. When free time comes around, we need it just to recover. In New Zealand, we were able to focus our energy on having fun. There was something about the fresh air, the increased physical activity, and good nights of sleep that brought out our strength and renewed our enthusiasm for facing a new day. I can honestly say I went through entire days without thinking at all about my job. That's a remarkable feat... and the sign of a good vacation.