I'll Be Right Here

Another paper cutout project completed! I ordered a moon poster online and then I drew and cut out the bicycle and the trees and taped them to the poster. This one doesn't make use of silhouettes the way I usually do with these, but that wasn't possible with the moon poster. I tried positioning the bicycle and trees out in front of the poster, but lighting the moon to match the movie still and keeping unwanted shadows out proved to be an insane balancing act and in the end this looked better, anyway:

I figured the bicycle/Elliot/E.T. would be the trickiest part, but it actually wasn't too bad and I got it right after two or three attempts:

The trees were really tedious and took quite a while to complete. Originally, I planned to make four or five, but then decided it would look too crowded with that many trees. Plus, they are a pain to cut out:

I used two studio lights; one to the left with a blue filter and a second one to the right with no filter that I set to fire at the lowest power. I taped the poster to a black bedsheet and then taped the bicycle and trees in place:

This blue filter cast a strong blue hue to the shot, which helped match the color seen in the movie. Using two lights – one without a filter – made the lighter areas of the moon appear white, instead of everything looking like shades of blue. I rarely use these things, but this time it came in handy:

Coming up next: Mad Max...

War of the Worlds

My latest card stock project:

I used a small high-intensity LED that I positioned behind the tagboard and directed it through a hole that I cut in the board. The aerosol can of photography mist in the picture below provided some dramatic "smoke" in the shot. Behind the scenes:

This whole thing took longer than intended because I accidentally set the first alien tripod guy on fire!

You can see the flame just starting in that picture. Those studio lights get scorching hot very quickly. Lesson learned. It burned up the tripod and part of the tagboard in just seconds. I guess it was a fortunate accident because the LED light I ended up using provided more of a directional beam and I got the effect I was looking for on the first try... after some serious repairs, ha.

The photographic aerosol mist was cool, but pricey and it produced a faint mist without looking very substantial. I think a fog machine would work better. Maybe I'll try that for my next one.

Ah, Memories

October

It's the month for scary movies and sitting around a fire in the backyard. Over the course of the summer, we have burned nearly all of the old, dry wood that we got from the Conrad's last spring and man, did that stuff burn well! We're down to the last of it and it's crazy how easy it is to get a fire going with that wood. I think my hoodie permanently has a wood smoke smell to it by now, but that's OK. You can tell where I'm at by following the visible trail of smoke coming from it.

My brother Dave's wedding was on October 18th. Dave planned it all out in exactly the way you would expect an engineer to plan out a wedding; with spreadsheets and schedules outlining each task that needed to be done each day leading up to the wedding and then a carefully planned schedule for the wedding itself. It's kinda funny because he is the last person on earth to have any clue about weddings, but since he married a woman who is not familiar with U.S. weddings and who only arrived two months before the wedding, it was up to him to take care of most of the arrangements. Daphne did do a lot and put quite a bit of effort into the wedding preparation herself, though.

Lots of Daphne's Filipino family and friends arrived for the rehearsal the evening before and it was funny how they were all freezing to death when it was 48º out that night. We got to meet her dad, Felix, as well as her grandparents (who were super cool) and several of her friends. Abby and Shelly were both there and they had both recently gotten engaged – Abby was engaged on the 12th, so we'll be flying down to Houston for that one next June and Shelly's wedding will be a week later up in the Twin Cities.

The wedding went well and actually was a lot of fun. I am usually not a fan of weddings at all, so if I say it was fun, you know it was fun. The groomsmen all wore traditional Filipino barongs (Dave bought them for us), which are way more comfortable than wearing a tux. The barong is a very thin lightweight shirt made from either banana or pineapple fibers and has some fancy twirlydinks all over it and is worn with a light cotton long sleeve undershirt. The history behind these things is that back in the day under Spanish rule, Filipino men had to wear these see-through shirts so that they could not conceal any weapons. Somehow this somewhat demeaning outfit was given a more positive meaning over time as it became the haute couture of Filipino weddings and is worn for many ceremonial occasions.

So yeah, the wedding was awesome and I played guitar at the reception and Cynthia sang. Near the beginning of the reception as people were arriving, my aunt Tammy accidentally set her napkin on top of a lit candle at her table (every table had four lit candles) which then set the top of the table on fire. Some of the decorations burned up and part of the tablecloth burned, but we got it out. Good times.

Yeah, this is a weird pose. The photographer was not the best at posing people... or setting the white balance on his camera.

I forgot my guitar strap.

Cynthia has been working hard on her Couch to 5K program and has been running every other day for about eight weeks. She ran the Costume Run with several of her friends and had a blast. It started at NewBo and ended on the stage at TCR, where they drew prizes and awarded the fastest runners and the people with the best costumes. Afterwards we all went out to grab a bite at White Star.

Next up... Halloween. We were a 20s flapper and a silent film villain. I made intertitle cards with responses for all the possible questions or interactions I might have at work and I pulled out a card when someone stopped by to talk. "Mark, when will you have that mockup ready?" I strike an appropriately sinister pose and pull out a card:

No one seemed to think it was as funny as I did, but that's their problem! "So... you'll have it ready soon?" 

We carved up some pumpkins. Check 'em out:

OK, so here's a tip if the lame tealight candles don't really cut it for ya (cuz they don't cut it for me). Take a roll of TP and soak it in kerosene. Then drop it into your pumpkin and light it. WHOOSH! Yeah, that's more like it.

Happy Halloween!

Silver screen

I really like watching movies. Not TV shows so much, but if I had a job that required me to watch movies all day, that would be alright. Old movies are especially fun to watch, for some reason. It's interesting to see how early movies have clearly influenced contemporary flicks and often been remade and presented as something new.

There are a number of elements in older films that make them interesting to watch. One, they had no CGI or sophisticated special effects of any kind. Any fancy stuff had to be done by hand and since they were inventing techniques as they went along, it required a lot of creativity and invention. Making the transition from stage acting to film acting (two very different things) took some time, too. Stage acting required exaggerated movements, expressions, and dialogue since much of the audience often sat some distance from the stage and did not have the benefit of being up close to the action. This is why much of the acting in early films was so melodramatic and overstated.

Another thing that makes old movies so fun to watch is that society and culture has changed so much over the past one hundred years that much of the common parlance back then has been lost and comes across odd or just plain funny when we hear them now. This is true when it comes to styles of dress, mannerisms, and the contrast between the things that are entertaining now and the things that entertained people back then.

I'm a fan of the film noir genre from the 40s and 50s, but I also like to watch some of the early silent films. Some of them actually hold up to today's standards – as far as dialogue and plot go – but others are just bizarre. For example, I watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari earlier this week. This movie is full of creativity and weirdness, but the weirdness is what really makes it shine. It was filmed in Germany in 1920 and had a very surreal, expressionist set with crooked doorways, oddly-shaped windows, leaning walls, and strange props. If Tim Burton traveled back in time, this would've been his movie.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is all sorts of disturbing and most of the time I really had no idea what was going on. That just added to its creepy, sinister vibe. The dialogue frames in the movie were few and far between, so a lot took place between each one, leaving me guessing as to what was going on. One of the characters, Cesare, was especially chilling and I think his appearance has inspired the makeup for a lot of metal bands. He sort of reminded me of Edward Scissorhands, too, for some reason. It moved along, though, and didn't drag on into tedium (which old-timey movies sometimes do).

Anyway, here are some stills from the movie. Those old-timers knew how to keep it creepy!