A few quick things

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.

Video backdrop series, part 5: "Liar's Chair"

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.

Video backdrop series, part 4: "Summer Storm"

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.

Feliz Navidad

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.

2009 holiday letter

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.

Have a great 2010!

Video backdrop series, part 3: "Follow"

Part of what made this project so much fun was the open-endedness of it. The band had the final say on what stayed and what went, but otherwise I had all the freedom I could want, allowing for my own artistic expression to be layered on top of their music. The vision for "Follow" was one I set out to construct deliberately. There was a feeling I wanted to convey and, while I did struggle with getting the flow of it right, I'd say the results were more or less successful.

This one can be filed in the literal category -- not literal in the sense that the lyrics are directly translated to the screen but rather in the sense that most of the images are identifiable as what they really are. The band said they wanted abstract, but in this case I took a risk and gave them figures on a moon-drenched beach, rolling (then crashing) waves, and even a lifeguard stand. These images were meant to create a sense of place... and it was a place I like to be. In fact, I was at this same location enjoying a bonfire under a full moon a few nights before the shoot. That was the inspiration.

This shoot involved some low-light photography, which is always tricky. You don't realize how dark the world can be until you take a camera outside after the sun sets. Some of my images turned out grainy and/or blurry. For consistency, I degraded the good shots to match the bad ones in post-production. This gave the video a kind of vintage film look that appears like a stylistic choice rather than a shortcoming. Maybe.

The snippet below is my favorite single shot from this backdrop. It's 45 minutes of a rising moon condensed into 20 seconds. It was a tricky shot because I didn't know exactly where or when the moon was going to come up, what arc it would be following, and what exposure I needed on the camera. And I only had one chance to get it right. I learned that shooting time lapses of sunsets are much easier than moonrises.


And here's a clip from the show. This recording turned out only so-so, but you can see a few shots from the backdrop in it and hear some of this wonderful, emotionally complex song.

Video backdrop series, part 2: "Six Keys to Walking Safely"

Some of the backdrop videos began with a clearly defined vision that I then attempted to materialize the best I could. Others were born from experiments with the camera where I simply captured what looked cool and later decided how the footage would be used. "Six Keys" falls into this second category.

R and I were heading out to a show that was part of the city's Old Spanish Days Fiesta, and I decided at the last minute to bring my camera along because at that point in the project everything was a possibility for use. The clock was ticking and I only had concrete ideas for about half of the songs. So I taped some traditional Mexican dancing at this Fiesta show because the color was too vibrant and the motion too constant to pass up.

I spent quite a bit of time editing the footage into a big, multi-layered swirl to go along with "Six Keys," one of the band's faster paced songs, and was pretty happy with the results... but somewhere in the process I lost sight of the original goal for these videos. Sometimes when doing this type of work I become obsessed with the details and forget about the bigger picture. I didn't really think about whether it any sense whatsoever to associate Spanish/Mexican dancers with the music; I was too busy choosing the right dissolve transition between flamenco and hat dancing.

I showed the resulting video to R; she didn't like it. I showed it to the band; they weren't crazy about it either. I loved the original video (I still do), but it wasn't right for this purpose. The images needed to be more abstract. Nobody wanted to see faces or colorful skirts or sombreros. Once I took a step back from the editing, I agreed.

But I wasn't ready to throw away the work I'd done altogether. My solution was to blur the images beyond recognition. The color and motion would remain mostly intact, but the detail would be obscured to the point that it looked like you were watching a reflection in a puddle.

A shot like this:

... became this:

At first it felt like a shame to cover up all of the detail -- for one thing I could have edited quicker if I had started with the blur -- but I liked the idea that there were hidden images in the backdrop, vaguely calling to mind some of the local heritage and perhaps subliminally telling the crowd to get up and dance :-). The revised backdrop works for me. What it's missing in dimension and clarity, it makes up for in fluidity and mystery.

Here's a short clip from the concert to give you an idea of how the backdrop looked in action:

Video backdrop series, part 1: "Where the Game Begins"

I'm going to try something new (and possibly even more self-indulgent than usual) on this blog over the new few weeks/months. I'm going to post an entry for each of the backdrop videos I created for ThreadSpinner's album release concert in which I describe -- and show clips and/or stills from -- the videos and discuss some of the thought and work that went into making them during August and September of this year. There will be 10 parts to this series in all, so this could take me a while, but some of the descriptions will be less detailed than others and most will probably read like a stream of consciousness. Let's see how it goes. And don't worry, I'll still be mixing in some regular blog entries as well.

If you have no idea what video project I'm talking about, you can read more about it here and here. Let's get on with it then...

What better place to begin the series than with "Where the Game Begins." This is not the first video I made for the project, but it was the easiest. Some of them I struggled with for hours and hours, trying to get the look and feel right, but not this one. I literally spent 15 minutes shooting it, 15 minutes editing it, and then put it away until it was time to synchronize it to the click track. I didn't second guess myself because this one just felt right, and I needed to rely on intuition if I was going to have time to finish ten of these puppies.

The reason this one was so simple is because the whole thing was caught in a single shot. All it is is a blurry close up of a candle flame flickering roughly to the beat of the music. It starts off as an unrecognizable little spark in inverted black and white. As the song builds, the image gradually grows more flame-like, and then in a key moment, it switches to color and the audience should finally realize what they are looking at: a fire that complements the burning passion in the heart of the song. Well, that was the idea. I'm not the most subjective critic.

I really loved the moment of that switch to color. This song was played pretty early in the show, before the audience really knew what to expect, so this was the point when they were shown that the video was indeed timed to the music. I'm a little surprised we managed to pull that off actually. If the images had been half a second ahead or behind the music, the moment would have been missed altogether. Timing-wise the entire show went off without a hitch.

The clip from the performance below contains only the second half of the song -- it starts right before the "switch" -- so you miss a lot of the build up, but check it out to get an idea of how the backdrop video was used in the show. I can't stop watching it myself.

Stranger in a strange land

Sorry that blogging has been kind of low on my priority list lately. The last few months have been a mix of being really busy and being really lazy -- I'm pretty sure one causes the other -- and neither is conducive to stopping for reflection.

I started my new job on October 19th and kicked it off with the aforementioned three-week stint in Minnesota. The office is in downtown Minneapolis, but because this trip was only partially corporate-funded I slept at my younger brother's place in the very surburban Maple Grove. It was nice having an extended visit with my bro. We played some pool, drank some Irish whiskey, listened to AC/DC, etc. Can you tell he's a bachelor? Anyway, I really appreciate his and his roommate's hospitality, as three weeks is a long time to put somebody up.

I drove north to see my parents for my first weekend out there. The rain let up enough for my dad, older brother, and I to get to the hunting shack to cut the grass in preparation for the hunting season. My mom cooked some meals for me that helped break up three long weeks of eating unhealthy restaurant food. On Sunday my grandparents had me over for lunch and later I got to see my little niece in Duluth. She had no idea who I was, but she was all smiles anyway. These moments, along with some additional reconnecting with friends, were what made the three weeks away worth it on a personal level... but just barely because, man, did I miss my life -- and my wife -- in Santa Barbara.

Luckily, R flew out to see me for my second weekend away. We rented a hotel room downtown and shut the rest of the world out for a good chunk of our time together. We did get out for a walking tour (during which R took the cool, surreal photo of me above in the new Guthrie Theater), comimos unas tapas, and saw Paranormal Activity, which didn't quite live up to the hype (I recommend seeing Where the Wild Things Are instead). It was a low-key Halloween, and I'm still kicking myself because we didn't take our annual "mimic the pumpkin" photo. But I guess we were too enamored with each other at the time to care.

I could ruminate some more on the new job, but this blog once again feels too public for that. In short, it's going pretty well. Being at the office to meet the people and begin to learn the systems was absolutely necessary. There were moments, however, particularly while driving in traffic through the gray or navigating the skyway like a rat in a maze, when I started to doubt the decision. It felt like such a different world out there. There were shades of the past and possibly hints of the future in that trip, but more than anything it reminded me of how much I love my situation out here and how I'm not ready to let it go. Fortunately nobody is asking me to give that up yet, so I think taking the job was the right move. It's a career boost and has some definite long-term potential.

See some more pics from the business trip here.