R and I drove north to Sonoma Valley last weekend to spend a few days away from our regular lives; to see some more of this beautiful state; to indulge on some excellent food and wine; and to celebrate Valentine's Day, just the two of us. Maybe it was foolish to drive seven hours to get to a wine region when there's a fantastic one right here in Santa Barbara County, but on the other hand it was time to pay our respects to the birthplace of the California wine industry and see what all the fuss is about. Needless to say, this trip helped deepen our immersion into oenological snobbery. It was also great fun.
I mentioned a few entries ago that one of my backdrop videos didn't feel right for the project and had to be heavily blurred into abstraction before it was usable in the concert. Well, last night in a fit of inspiration, I took the original video, chopped it up, played two minutes of an industrial sounding Portishead tune over it, and severed its ties to the backdrop project. I think it works better this way. There's a lovely sense of dread looming over the otherwise festive dancing event. Perhaps ThreadSpinner's song was too hopeful and happy; I needed one with more emotional contrast to the images, as counterintuitive as that may seem.
This is really just a scribble. It was fun to take a break between bigger projects -- namely the backdrop collection (which was so huge I'm still blogging about it) and E&B's wedding video (which has been impeded with one false start after another so far) -- to put something together quickly with no real purpose. I like working on videos the most when there is no outside pressure, when I'm just doing it for myself. I hope to add a few more of these to the mix in the coming months.
Sorry if that last post was a little long for the Twitter era. I'll try to keep this one under control.
The concept for this backdrop is similar to the one for "Liar's Chair" in that it is an abstract visual design made up of four or five distinct pieces, none of which are really related to each other. For some reason this one had a way of collecting the ideas I had that just didn't seem to fit anywhere else.
I floated a flashlight in the kitchen sink, hopped a fence to shoot in a park after hours, and manipulated various sources of light (e.g. Christmas lights, the sun) to get some pretty random results that sort of inappropriately suggest "running away" considering the lyric used is actually "I'm NOT running away." Whoops.
The version we ended up using was essentially a first cut. I had intended to circle back to it and try to fuse the separate pieces together better, but the band seemed satisfied by what I already showed them and I was up against a deadline, so the revision never happened.
What's really surprising, especially after me telling you how this one should have failed, is that it worked really well. This was the penultimate song in the main set -- near the climax of the concert, if not the climax itself -- so it had to work. When it did, it was one of the best moments in a night full of great moments.
This may be the only entry in the series in which I post a complete song. My recording of it is not solid all the way through, but I liked one section near the beginning and one near the end, so I figured this is easier than posting two separate videos. Plus, posting stills doesn't really work for this one; you need to see it in motion.
I cheated a little bit in my editing: two shots from the video are actually from the sound check, rather than the actual concert. How else was I going to get a close up of fingers on a keyboard?
Final thought: The guitar part in this song rules!
When I first started discussing this project with the band, Sarah (the lead singer/songwriter) listed some images and feelings she associates with a few of the songs. Most of what she told me was open to interpretation, and I probably didn't come anywhere near close to recreating what she envisioned, but it was still helpful to get inside her head a little.
One song that she did not give me any thoughts on is "The Unmaking." I was kind of relieved because this is one of their older tunes that I had listened to a bunch, and I already had something in mind for it. For some reason this song screamed science fiction at me. Maybe the backing synths sound kind of like a UFO landing or something -- I didn't over-analyze it. I just knew that was the direction I wanted to take this particular backdrop.
Okay, now jump back ten years. I was in college, taking a summer course in Barcelona. A few classmates and I went out with some locals to a hole-in-the-wall club down some dark alley. The entrance was unmarked and the place was about as big as our kitchen. It was stuffed with people dancing to techno music and it had episodes of the original Star Trek series projected on the wall.
I liked how the old television show was being used for a purpose for other than what was originally intended. I'm sure the episodes had a story line, but of course nobody was trying to follow it. That wasn't the point. There was a pulpiness to it -- a sense that it could go on for a really long time without attracting too much attention, just adding to the club's ambience with trippy special effects and cheesy acting. I've been in other bars since then where they play film noir on plasma screens usually reserved for sports games. They are like moving, old-time photographs on the wall. I like that kind of stuff. My backdrop video project as whole was meant to be a decoration like that... and the segment for "The Unmaking" had to be sci-fi because of Barcelona.
So what better opportunity would I have to pull out the Star Trek influenced Super 8 film that my uncle made with some of his friends in the late 1970s? Growing up, my brothers and I referred to this piece of work as "Uncle Jimmy's Space Movie." My dad would set up the old screen and projector once in a while and treat us to a showing of it and a few others my uncle made. They were a huge inspiration at the time and planted a desire for filmmaking in me.
When my dad eventually bought a video camera, two things happened: (1) I started making my own movies, and (2) we transferred our collection of 8mm films to tape. Then, sometime post-college, I went through the VHS tapes and digitized some of the contents in order to further preserve them. This included the space movie as well as the "Mud Brothers" clip I showed you last year. I really didn't have any other plans for these old films at the time, but I was happy I had them handy last August.
Part of the charm of the space movie lies in its roughness -- in the loose editing, in the decay of the original film, in the jittery projection. I didn't mind all of that, but I did make a quick pass through and edit it down a bit for the backdrop. Some of the talking scenes went on too long for a crowd who wasn't meant to follow the story. The problem with this shorter cut, however, is that I ended up with three and a half minutes of a space movie for a backdrop that needed to be five minutes long. So I had to supplement it with some of my own original footage.
After my additions were made, the backdrop was no longer about the space movie. It was now about what was happening in a room where the space movie was playing. It plays on a TV screen in the shadows, and there is a mysterious figure who crosses back and forth in front of it. Eventually we follow that figure out of the room and see where he goes. It all comes together in what I think is a satisfying conclusion, tying together the inspiration and the inspired, bridging 30+ years of a genetic bond over artistic creation... I'll shut up now.
This backdrop includes a cameo from a much younger version of my dad, seen on the "video conferencing monitor" in the movie within a movie below:
It also includes a cameo by me, in a brief sequence that attempts to match the space movie shot-by-shot:
Are you starting to see why I was nervous about showing this one to the band (not to mention a crowd of 150 concert attendees)? In the end I think it worked fine as a set decoration, yet I like that there were a few extra rewards in there for anybody who might care (i.e. me).
Finally, here's a clip. Keep in mind you're only viewing about a third of it. I might try to get a full-length version online eventually, but this better suits my needs right now. Enjoy!
P.S. A big thank you to my uncle Jim for allowing me to use his work-of-art!
I love how colorful the main page of my blog has been lately with all the stills from my backdrop project. I'm afraid to post anything that doesn't contribute to it. The sunset above should do. There are a few more shots from that incredibly scenic evening as well as some other recent events in my Santa Barbara 2010 gallery. I'll be adding to that album as the year goes on, so check back once in a while.
You may have noticed a new link labeled "Questions?" in the menu bar above. It will take you to my page on a social networking site called Formspring. I think it's a cool idea. Everybody likes to be interviewed, right? It makes us feel important (sometimes invalidly so :-). If you've ever wondered something about me but were too afraid to ask, now's your chance. You can do it completely anonymously. Just keep in mind, if I don't like your question, I don't have to answer it.
I was off to such a good start with blogging in January, and then I let it slide when our schedule filled up. Plus, I started editing a wedding video in my free time. Those sons of guns are a lot of work; it's still going to be a while before I have anything to show you. But I did take a break from it to put together some additional ThreadSpinner clips, so you can expect the backdrop series to continue again soon. The next two should be pretty epic.
That's about all I'm going to do for today. We've got a lot of fun stuff coming up soon: the SB film festival, wine class, a few trips. I'm also feeling inspired to start on a fresh video project. Up next I want to make some kind of narrative short film. It'll probably be a while before I get to it, but I will enjoy dreaming it up.
We're halfway there. Are you still with me? Ah, that's okay -- I'm mostly doing this for myself anyhow.
The backdrop for "Liar's Chair" attempted to with ceiling fans what "Summer Storm" did with sprinklers (it didn't quite work, however... more on that below). There are also some flashes of purplish light (sped up horizon tilts through trees at a slow shutter speed), bursts of almost unrecognizable freeway traffic rushing by, and an electrical current running through the second half (one of the few effects I used that was not captured in-camera but rather taken off the Adobe Premiere effects shelf and tweaked to look more explosive). The still frames you see here don't do the actual results justice because this backdrop is all about patterns of unrelenting motion and timing to the breakneck pace of the music.
The bummer part of this particular backdrop is that the first minute or so could barely be seen on the theater's screen. There just wasn't enough contrast in my ceiling fan footage. Add to that bright stage lights and a projector that wasn't great with subtle shading/color, and you're limited to subtle background movement when you wanted something audacious. Luckily, by the time the lightning bolt showed up, the visuals were complementing the band's energetic performance nicely. That's the section captured below.
The backdrop for "Summer Storm" was one of my favorites. It's one of the few ideas from my initial brainstorm session that made it from concept to completion relatively unchanged. What I did was take about 20 shots of the lawn sprinklers in our courtyard up close and at a really high shutter speed so that the individual droplets of water were visible and appeared to hang in the air. The video starts off in slow motion, so that the frames change to the beat of the music, and as the music picks up tempo and builds, the droplets become a flurry of color and motion. It was quite a sight when scaled up to the large theater screen (in my own humble opinion).
I like that there is some ambiguity as to what you are looking at in this video. It does look kind of like a rain storm, which fits with the song's title and lyrics, but there's an awful lot of sunlight where you would expect gray and there are flowers and other objects in some shots that are clearly not getting wet. What is it then, confetti? There are a few hints along the way, like in the shot below were you can vaguely make out a key shape in the background.
But we decided to cut the more obviously revealing shot (below). Seeing the sprinkler at the end felt like a twist that cheapened the abstractness of everything seen before it. So maybe the audience was left wondering... or maybe they didn't care... I don't know.
As usual, I'm also posting a clip from the concert. You actually don't get to see much of the backdrop in action here, but I really like these shots of the band members, so this is what you're going to get.
Our Christmas vacation was pretty incredible this year. It started with six days of visiting family in Minnesota followed by seven days of touring Costa Rica with our friends S&Q. We went from freezing cold to sticky hot; from flat, barren land to lush volcanic jungle; from feeling native to we-don't-even-speak-the-language alien... Yes, the two places are quite a contrast from each other. Our home in California falls somewhere in between, and I think it's safe to say we were ready to return to it by trip end.
I'm really glad we were able to see our families. (Photos here.) It just wouldn't feel like Christmas without them. We're lucky everything worked out travel-wise considering the massive snowstorm that hit the day we left. The drive to the airport was a slow one and we doubted the timeliness of our itinerary every step of the way, but we made it, flying away just before the weather worsened even more.
I could probably write about Costa Rica all day, but perhaps it's best left in our travel journal. In short, the trip was fun and adventurous. We went canyoning, ziplining, and rafting; saw a bunch of animals in the wild; toured a chocolate plantation (sampling the product at every stage of making it); relaxed in hot springs and in hammocks... Maybe you should just check out the photos. All of this talk about vacation is making me lazy.
We didn't send out a holiday letter this year, but if we had, it would have looked something like this...
Happy holidays, everybody! It's been another memorable year and once again we're so thankful to be healthy, employed, and blessed to have all of you as family and friends.
This year has had its share of professional developments for the two of us. Jeff recently took a position as a Technical Analyst for Ameriprise Financial. He continues to work from home but makes occasional trips to the office in Minneapolis. He's grateful for the additional opportunities to visit family and friends while he's there.
Raia remains with DuPont and is excited to see the display technology she is helping develop move closer to fruition. She recently submitted some of her work for possible publish and presentation at a national conference. One day you might be watching an OLED TV with a good chance that Raia helped make it possible.
Work keep us pretty busy, but we still try to get out and see the world when we can. This year we camped in Joshua Tree, Yosemite, and Sequoia national parks; skied at Mammoth Mountain; attended weddings in Massachusetts and Minnesota; and wrapped it up with an adventurous vacation in Costa Rica (blog entry still pending).
Other than that Jeff has been working on some music videos, Raia has been taking some pottery and cooking classes, and both of us have been enjoying life on the sunny coast of California.
R and I drove north to Sonoma Valley last weekend to spend a few days away from our regular lives; to see some more of this beautiful state; to indulge on some excellent food and wine; and to celebrate Valentine's Day, just the two of us. Maybe it was foolish to drive seven hours to get to a wine region when there's a fantastic one right here in Santa Barbara County, but on the other hand it was time to pay our respects to the birthplace of the California wine industry and see what all the fuss is about. Needless to say, this trip helped deepen our immersion into oenological snobbery. It was also great fun.
