Posts tagged with "friends"

Nick And Ali's Wedding

A trib­ute to Nick and Alison, my old laid-back room­mate (who taught me how to make a mean grilled cheese, offered a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge in Counter Strike, and intro­duced me to Lamb) and his new bride.

I would say some­thing about the wed­ding, but the video says it all.

Thumbnail: Brent
Thumbnail: Bronwen
Thumbnail: A Cupcake cake
Thumbnail: Greg and Amanda
Thumbnail: Trolley
Thumbnail: A shot in the mirror
Thumbnail: Signing
Thumbnail: Table settings
Thumbnail: Table six
Thumbnail: Karen in the dark
Thumbnail: Aaron drinks
Thumbnail: Three on the steps
Thumbnail: Final shot

At one point in the night I was run­ning around with my Karachi Outpost strapped on my back, and my cam­corder bag around my shoul­der, feel­ing like a one-man doc­u­men­tary team, even though my focus was on video instead of stills. There are a cou­ple of cam­era issues, such as focus and zoom speed that still bug me when I watch the footage, but until I can afford a Canon XL2 my cheap Hitachi DVD-cam will have to do.

Surprisingly, the eas­i­est part was pick­ing the song, some­thing that can take days itself. I need­ed a sin­gle track that would work through land­scapes, kiss­ing, and drink­ing, three things that evoke vast­ly dif­fer­ent emo­tions, and Tulips by Bloc Party was per­fect. Even the tim­ing of the lyrics worked out. I wish I could say that I was able to obtain a score for the music, ana­lyze it, and symet­ri­cal­ly break down the scenes accord­ing to the devel­op­ment. To be hon­est I just did­n’t have enough footage, so I just put what I could in the parts that would fit, with­out inter­rupt­ing the flow of the sto­ry.

The entire clip took about three sol­id days to com­plete, half of which was just get­ting the scenes in the right for­mat to work with in Adobe Premier 2.0. I was plagued by video for­mat prob­lems and asyn­chro­nous audio issues. It was also the first time I was able to try this lat­est ver­sion of Premier since I was run­ning 1.5 for a while. The process real­ly pushed the capa­bil­i­ties of my sys­tem; load­ing only Premier with the whole sequence took up 1.6 gigs of RAM. Render time was about 20 min­utes on a dual-core AMD 4400+. Uncompressed video size is almost 2 gigs.

Influences were Michele Gondry from the Hardest Button To Button video, as well as the smart and wit­ty stylings of Spike Jonze.

Birthday

I received a birth­day reminder two days ago in the form of a card from my par­ents (a Richard Scarry-esque draw­ing of a crowd of cats, cell-phones to their ears, with the line inside, “Can you hear me meow?”). I had most­ly for­got­ten, although it came to mind about a month ago, and the thought remained dor­mant until Pat brought it up today.

During the week I made plans to meet Pat and Jen for dim sum, not know­ing that they secret­ly invit­ed Aaron and Karen as well, and that it was real­ly to take me out for my birth­day. Afterwards, we came back here to play some Donkey Konga and Mario Party. As sim­ple as it may seem to sit around play­ing games with a bunch of friends, it’s rare to find a day that our sched­ules match. It’s even more rare to hang out with a group of peo­ple I can total­ly relax with and just have a good time, let alone be able to indulge in the plea­sure of a bunch of addic­tive par­ty games with them. These are real friends, peo­ple who remind me how good it is to laugh, and help me real­ize that I don’t do it near­ly enough any­more.

On a day that I ask for noth­ing, I was giv­en every­thing that I could have want­ed.

Today I Hit The Snooze

I also dressed down, and stole a drink from work. Two of my best friends final­ly met each oth­er. They got along famous­ly, bet­ter than any of my oth­er friends in the past. I sup­port­ed one on the biggest deci­sion of his life. The oth­er told me that I had always been her hope­ful out of the round of inter­views for my job, over a chick­en sand­wich and some onion rings. I learned the four Cs of dia­mond appraisal, and saw a car­bon spec through a loupe for the first time.

I met two cats; one rolled into my lap while play­ing Double Dash with the best kids in the world. A fam­i­ly inspired me, and I dared to dream of some day hav­ing my own.

Stepping Through The Shadow, Part 2/2: The Friend Aspect

I choose to live and to
Grow, take and give and to
Move, learn and love and to
Cry, kill and die and to
Be para­noid and to
Lie, hate and fear and to
Do what it takes to move through.

—Tool, Forty Six & 2

Unfortunately, I’m not myself when I’m around my friends.

With them, I’m hap­pi­er, more con­fi­dent, extro­vert­ed. It’s usu­al­ly only with them that I can test the bound­aries of social con­duct, because I know that they under­stand me, accept me, and are will­ing to back me all the way. Sometimes, I end up say­ing some pret­ty embar­rass­ing things off-the-cuff, things made more embar­rass­ing by the fact that even my friends aren’t laugh­ing. But to find the bound­ary, one has to cross it at some point. And it’s such a fuck­ing pow­er trip to know that I’m test­ing myself as well, test­ing how far I’m will­ing to go, some­thing that I can only do with the right peo­ple.

Without my friends, I recede into my shell. I require them at par­ties, events, social func­tions just so I can inter­act with peo­ple nor­mal­ly. When I do find myself in absence of their pres­ence, I force myself to be social. I con­sid­er how I would behave if I was with them, and pro­ceed with cau­tion. It’s slow­ly get­ting eas­i­er for me when I’m by myself. Perhaps I’m gain­ing my own self-con­fi­dence when I’m not around them.

Something I that can only gain when I’m with them.

The Stepping Through The Shadow Series