Two-year-old in town

Because the wee one is not smiling in that photo, let me post one more...

...that's better.

The folks pictured above were our guests during the last week. That would be R's mom, sister, and our little nephew.

The boy is a handful! He requires constant attention and brings a ruckus with him wherever he goes, but as far as I understand, that's pretty normal for a two-year-old, so I'll let it pass :-) He's a sweet kid. We don't get to see him terribly often, and each time we do, he appears to have taken a leap forward in development. Now he's forming sentences and running so fast we can hardly keep up with him. Check out the footage below from a walk around the block to see him in action. He's a ball of energy.


Having guests is a good excuse to carry a camera when we go out and about, so I took a bunch of photos. A few of my favorites have been added to the second half of this gallery. Check them out because I'm counting on them showing you some of what we did and where we went. (This is my way of getting out of writing a full recap.)

It was good to see the in-laws. We're not used to being on the hosting side of a visit, so I hope we did okay. I was probably too distracted by work, as usual, and probably didn't make the most out of our time together, but I'm really glad they came and were able to enjoy Santa Barbara. I know R appreciated having some of her closest peeps around too.

I'll leave you with one more shot of little Ezra. What do you think... is the SoCal lifestyle going to his head?

Video backdrop series, part 9: "Darkness"

I have to admit this 10-part series is going on a little too long even for me. I'm looking forward to finishing it up so I can return to your regularly scheduled programming. But I can't quit this close to the end. We have two entries left. Bear with me.

The circumstances for this particular video were a little bit different from the rest. ThreadSpinner played "Darkness" during their encore, and that's a distinction right there because, at least in my opinion, an encore is a chance to experiment -- or play something unexpected and less rehearsed -- without necessarily reflecting poorly on the main set or the show as a whole if it's not perfectly executed. The band pulled out all the stops by playing a song that nobody in the audience had heard before. Not only was the song unreleased and unrecorded, but it was still being developed. I don't think the lyrics were even finalized at that point.

Yet the song and its performance ended up being one of the highlights of an already exceptional concert. It was epic and complex and came off a little bit looser than the other tunes, allowing for the band to really get into the music and feel their way through it. From my perspective, the music appeared to be driving them, rather than the other way around. I enjoy witnessing a band become bigger than a sum of its parts like that.

So how do you create a video backdrop for a song you haven't heard? Well, I was given a description of it as well as a backing track with drums and some effects added on. I didn't get the full picture of the song until I heard it performed at the sound check the day of the show, but I had heard enough to get the right pace, tone, and running time. There were some guesses involved too, and I was sure curious to see my results would fit with the music as well as I hoped.

One of the concepts I had been throwing around (for another song actually) was to shoot food coloring being dropped into water. It's a neat effect, but it's not a completely original idea. If you go to Vimeo.com you can probably find all kinds of examples of camera experiments like this. Shooting food coloring is sort of a rite of passage for videographers. I wanted to give it a shot too, but I wasn't sure if I wanted the results presented along side the rest of my backdrop videos, which were, at least to my knowledge, more original creations.

It was the weekend before the CD release party -- the band was finalizing the order of their set and rehearsing with the videos I had already delivered -- when I decided to go ahead and make this one last backdrop. The show just would have felt incomplete if the encore didn't have a visual to go along with it. This was a simple concept that I could shoot in my own home. And really, the look of the food coloring seemed a perfect fit for this psychedelic song.

My set-up was a glass pitcher filled with water, a white sheet of paper behind it, every directional light I had pointed at it, and my camera zoomed in just enough to cut out all of the "glare spots" caused by the lights and edges of the pitcher. I ended up setting up the shoot four or five times over the course of the weekend because little imperfections (reflections in the glass, out-of-focus food coloring) kept appearing after I imported the footage on my computer.

I probably ended up with an hour's worth of me dropping coloring into the pitcher and about five minutes of it that I could actually use. But those five minutes were pretty cool. I was able to alter the colors in my editing software and reverse the direction of the fluid movement to make it look like the coloring was being removed at times. I ended up being really happy with the results. And it's funny because I don't think any of those imperfections I was worried about would have been noticeable on the screen during the show anyway. The projector didn't show that much detail. Oh well.

I'm not going to post a clip from the concert this time. First, I really messed up the audio on this one. It wouldn't do the performance justice (hear it for youself at one of the band's live shows instead). Plus, my second camera ran out of tape by this point in the show. Lastly, since this is an unreleased song I'm not sure if the band wants clips of it online yet. So you're only getting the two stills below. Eventually, I'd like to use the footage for another short experimental video à la the Moonrise or Silence blips I already posted. It's on my list.