"Miami" blip

I feel like posting something that has nothing to do with my personal life tonight. Previously, I mentioned (warned?) that there would be some remnants of my recent backdrop video work continuing to appear on the blog, and this is an example of that. It's a remix of the food coloring experiment I originally wrote about in this entry. Since I didn't have a clip to show at that time, I'm posting one now.

The video is a little sloppy. You can see reflections in the glass and the editing isn't as transparent as it could be. The original, set to an unreleased ThreadSpinner song, was slower and the imperfections weren't as perceptible when it was played on the lesser-contrast theater screen. In the clip above, I swapped the music with a song by U2 ("Miami" from their Pop album), condensed the run-time, and re-organized things a bit.

This isn't going to forever change the face of Internet video or anything. Treat it as a doodle similar to the Silence blip from a few months back.

An exclusive first look at...

... my pregnant wife! There have been some requests to see how things are progressing, so here you go. She's definitely showing, whether she wants to admit it or not. We have another photo where she's purposely sticking her stomach out as far as she can, and let's just say I don't have permission to post that one. It's a preview of what is to come.

Changes are underway. Maternity clothes shopping has begun. Time speeds on.

Five Years

Five years ago I watched the most beautiful woman walk down the aisle of a church in Alabama. We locked teary eyes and stood together in front of our closest family while we exchanged vows. I'll never forget the fiery love I felt on that day and in the time since. Today we celebrate an anniversary, but one day is not enough to express what this relationship means to me. I've been chipping away at it, at least a little bit, each day... and I fully intend to continue.

Yikes! Sorry if my posts have been on the sappy side and not terribly modest lately. Life is good right now, and I'm proud to report it. I realize something like the announcement of R's pregnancy isn't "the biggest news" in everybody else's life, but it is the biggest, most life-changing news in ours and this blog is about our lives after all. Moving to California was big news; Having a child required a grander statement. That's all I meant with the title last time.

We're hitting a bunch of milestones this spring. Come back in about two weeks for another one...

The biggest news

I would like to announce, with so much joy and excitement, that my lovely wife and I are expecting our first child in October! Yes, I really typed that. The last few months have already been an emotional thrill ride, and it looks like there will be much of that to come.

R is doing well. She had what seemed to be a pretty typical case of morning sickness, but is feeling better, if still more tired than usual, these days. We've been trying to eat better and get enough exercise. We're both reading books about pregnancy and how to care for a child. It all sounds rather intimidating at this point, but we're going to take it one step at a time. I'm very anxious to meet this new person, but I desperately need this time to prepare and also want to make the most of life without the weight of fatherhood while I can, so I'm not exactly wishing these nine months away. The stork will arrive soon enough.

We learned the news ourselves on Valentine's Day morning while we were in Sonoma County. No, it wasn't the best timing for a weekend getaway in wine country. R had to skip the tasting part of our weekend, and I... had to cut back a bit :-). It also explains the conspicuous absence of a wine glass in the photo in this entry about the weekend. You may have also noticed my write-up was rather spare on details. I feel like the secret we've been carrying (pun somewhat intended) has put a bit of a wall between me and you, so it feels good to finally make the information public. This opens up so much more to tweet about too :-)

Among other decisions, I have to make one about the future of Midnight Toast (the blog), regarding how much detail to include about the pregnancy and our child's life. Safety and privacy are suddenly a higher priority. Maybe I'll start a limited-access family blog and reserve this one for my creative projects. Maybe not. One way or another I'll be taking a ton of photos and video, and some of them will be available in one place or another. I've already started recording a series of video interviews with R about her pregnancy and will continue with those about once a month until this baby is born. Something like that probably won't make in online, but I have a feeling our little family will enjoy watching them in the future.

Being a dad will be a huge adjustment and full of challenges, but I'm looking forward to it. Life has a way of telling you when it's time for the next phase. And following those signs has worked out pretty well for me so far, so I don't see any reason to stop. R and I are happy... scared, too, but mostly just happy.

Video backdrop series, part 10: Closing thoughts

I put together a total of nine videos for the concert backdrop. For the tenth one, the band used the exceptional "Night Chorus" music video directed by Matt Walla. You may have read some praise from me about it right here. How fun was it to see the band playing in front of images of themselves from the music video? Very fun. The video was perfect. The energy in the room was perfect. The night as a whole was perfect. And I'm not just glorifying the past. I knew this would be a night to remember while it was happening.

Since the tenth video wasn't my own, I was originally going to use this final installment of my blog series to show some clips from my footage that didn't "make the cut" for one reason or another, as there is a substantial amount of it. However, I find myself wanting to wrap up the series sooner rather than later, so pardon me if I take some short cuts here. Instead of clips, I'm going to give you some stills.

One idea that didn't find a home was a series of nature shots I took at various locations over the course of the shoot. Each contained some subtle movement (e.g. a leaf dangling from a cobweb, ripples in a stream, bugs swarming around branches, a fading sun), but it may have been too subtle to work as a backdrop. We needed exaggerated motion and contrast in order for it to be picked up by the projector and remain recognizable behind layers of stage lights. Not only were these images a little dull, they were also too literal. It felt more like stock nature footage you see between segments on PBS than an accompaniment to a rock show. See for yourself:

Then there were some alternate shots -- for backdrops that did get made -- that just weren't needed in the final edits (or were, again, too literal). These probably don't mean a lot to you because you haven't seen every shot that I did use, but here's a little sampling of my B-roll below anyway. (A little trivia: the hand in the first one belongs to R and was meant to be her cameo as she "pulls back the curtain" between the sidewalk and the trail in "Waking World," but, alas, it was too cheesy to include.)

I also have a few unused time-lapses that I'm not going to post yet. These are just some experiments that will likely make an appearance in some future, unrelated entry on this blog. They need a little more distance from this project and the right choice of music before they will be ready for viewing.

That about wraps things up then. It was a lot of work to document all of this, let alone create the backdrop videos themselves, but now that it's done I'm really glad I have a written and visual record of the project. Maybe "work" is the wrong word because I had so much fun stretching myself creatively (and technically, for that matter) to stitch together this quilt of abstract images for the concert. (Hmmmm... Why didn't I call this "The Quilt Project" instead of the "The Sweater Project"? That makes much more sense.)

Finally, I'd like to thank ThreadSpinner one more time for giving me this opportunity and so much freedom to build my own artistic endeavor on top of theirs. They took a huge risk by asking me to help shape their image at one of their most important concerts to date. There were times when I wasn't sure I'd be able to pull it off, but I've come to the other side with more confidence in my vision and a huge sense of satisfaction. The band makes for an imagination-spinning muse, one I'd like to work with again in the future.

Minneapolis is my flash-sideways

Great photo by R, eh? It was taken on Figueroa Mountain on my 31st birthday. It's sort of a companion piece to the one in this post.

I'm in Minneapolis for work this week and have a few minutes for a quick entry from my hotel room, so let's do this. And let's do it without over thinking it.

I've been feeling a little out-of-touch with you lately, and there's a complicated answer for that. Life in general has been feeling more complicated than usual lately. It's complicated. It's a Meryl Streep movie. Yawn.

It feels like my brain is degrading.

It's more difficult to connect with people than ever before. For some reason I thought it would get easier.

I recently reopened my private, written journal, but after one marathon session it has been largely neglected as well.

I'm still thinking in terms of 140 max characters. I blame Twitter. So much for writing that novel.

I want to be here and there and nowhere.

This is what I get for starting a blog entry without much of a point. I'm all over the place tonight. Let's forget this ever happened.

But first, view this beautiful woman, partially shrouded by wildflowers:

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.

Video backdrop series, part 8: "Waking World"

While this is not necessarily my favorite video from the backdrop series, "Waking World" is probably my favorite song from ThreadSpinner's new EP. My head was flooded with images the first time I heard it, and that is essentially how I define a good song. It takes more effort to NOT create a video for something like this.

If you haven't done so yet, go and download ThreadSpinner's EP (details at the band's website). It's inexpensive, well-produced, and full of gripping, inspiring tunes. This video project would have been a lot more difficult if I hadn't liked the music so much.

Because there wasn't much struggle in the idea phase for this one, and because the motif I had in mind seemed to match up okay with Sarah's suggested themes, this was the very first backdrop video I shot. Here's an excerpt from an email I sent the band describing the concept:

"I want to walk down State Street at night and then speed up the footage, maybe add some motion blur. I'll also walk on a trail in the woods under sunlight and give it the same sped-up treatment... and sort of blend them together, dissolving back and forth. It might look a little repetitive, but the frantic forward movement will suggest the kind of searching you describe, without distracting the audience from the music too much. When I'm on State, maybe I keep going all the way to the end of the wharf and end with a shot of the vast ocean. In other words, what we find at the end of the 'search' is a dark, blank canvas of possibility..."

I burned quite a few calories hoofing about six miles total with my camera pointed in front of me. Some of the walking footage was sped up to 1500% in post-production, so I needed a lot of it to cover a four and a half minute song.

The original cut was relentlessly fast-paced, but I ended up making some changes after hearing a live recording of the song and discussing it with the guitarist, Jon. The energy and tempo were slightly different in the live version; there was more "build." That was one thing I had to watch out for -- the songs would not be performed exactly as they were recorded. Jon eventually gave me some bootlegs from a practice session, and I worked on timing everything to them instead of the ones from the EP.

The revised video starts with an almost drunken, blurry-eyed stumble through a riverbed and gradually speeds up into a tear through town. In post-production I added the black, feathered border, giving the video a kind of tunnel vision, which was meant to tie into the lyrics about "tunneling through earthen promises." Near the end, the video turns into a big, chaotic blur before finding some peace in the darkness off a pier. It was another case where I had to loosen up on the editing and just let it flow.

Here's a quick look at the concert performance. This clip is from before things get really out-of-control. I was working on another clip from later in song, but the pieces weren't quite fitting together, so this will have to do.