Christmas Blog 2012

Hey everyone, Merry Kanishmas. Kanish Kringle loved our Smingerbread House and left great presents. That was a Chowder reference if you didn't know. It's Christmas which means it's time for family, fun, and presents. In our family, we start the festivities the day before, so lets start there, on Christmas Eve.

It started out with lots of cleaning up. Since I don't have that much stuff here since most of it's at college, I didn't have to do that much. After the cleaning we went over to my grandparents were we exchange gifts there first, or last depending on the year. We met at McDonald's, like we do every year. When we were little, it was so Santa could get set up while we were away. We're older now so we know some things we didn't before, but we still go over there because it's fun. I got some cool things. Got money, Blu-Rays, (continue list afterwards.) Here's a picture

Tin Tin not shown. I got a nice model of the Monkee Mobile, lots of detail, a set of American coins from my birth year, the hat that I'm wearing that will be really warm, the bag of money that's hanging from the hat, X-Men Origins Wolverine and Wonder Woman on Blu-Ray, Planet of the Apes, Amazing Spider man, and Big Bang Season 5 on DVD, and the new lounge Pants. The Fedora I've had and wear regularly, aka; not a gift.

After their house, we went to Christmas Eve mass. Good service like always. But the big thing was when we left mass we had an inch or 2 of snow. It was a Christmas miracle for all the little kids who wished for a white Christmas. We didn't have any snow before mass, so this was cool. We watched part of the first airing of A Christmas Story on TBS. Now time for bed and await the fun tomorrow.

Now time for Christmas Day. I went to bed earlier than normal the previous night. I went to bed at 11 instead of 12. I was about to wake up. I was. It was 8 AM and I realized I had my 9 hours, but I had to let my body catch up to my mind. Well then my brother came in and flashed the lights saying wake up. Actually it was "I'm the spirit of St. Nicholas and you've been a bad boy." I caught up quickly and corrected him with "actually the other guy punished the bad kids." He knew but couldn't remember his name, and neither could I. I get downstairs and we had our gifts around the tree like always. Here's a picture of it all.

 

Top Picture: Tool set and bag, new video camera, Yellow shirt; short sleeve, long sleeve, and hoodie, headlamp, whoppers, Hershey Cookies and Cream Bar, Captain America Blu-Ray, Amazon $25 gift card, light up pen, Pokemon Stickers, and a chocolate bar.

Bottom Picture: My brothers and mine new PS3, a second Dual Shock controller, Inception, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes both Blu-Ray

There's a story to the pen. Dad was at a seminar thing and the speaker had pens. He gave them out and said they made great presents for the kids. Dad the jokester. I also really like the digital video camera. I can do travel vlogs now. That's something I've wanted to do but didn't really have the tech nor the money to do that. Now my joke of "I have a webcam" when my video club asks what we have tech wise is dead. I actually have a camera. I'm still gonna say "I have a webcam" but also going to add "and a digital video camera with 4X digital zoom." It's no where on par with the DSLR cameras some of our members have but oh well.

Now for a fun thing. Because my aunt moved away we now have Christmas at our house. Prety sure I've said this in previous blogs but this is for you new guys. This is where the cleaning comes into place. We cleaned up and hosted a party. We had my grandparents, second cousins, grandparents good friends and their son, and one of my mom's friends. This is my cousin whom I share many interests with. It was fun talking with her, however short it was. She's not very talkative. We ended up watching Captain America on Blu-Ray our new PS3. It was cool even though we only got about a third of the way through. After a third we had our fun with our family sing along. My grandparents friend plays the accordion and she brings it to most every party. We sang our songs and I recorded some of the evidence on my new video camera. It's amazing what an accordion, a packet of sheet music, and maybe a couple of drinks can do. I won't upload the video because I don't have their OK and I don't think they'd want it out there.

After singing fun time it was time for dinner. We had the entire dining set, the chairs from the dinning set in the basement, the card table set, and an extra folding chair, all for us. That's 13 chairs and 2 tables in total. The "adults" sat at our dinning room table with the leaf in it and the "kids" sat at the card table in the living room right next to it so we are part of the dinner to an extent. We kind of just overheard our elders conversation and then add our own commentary on it or just go off on our own conversation. We had beef, smoked and roasted. We also had potatoes, green bean casserole, broccoli, and rolls. I had rolls and broccoli. I love cooked broccoli with salt. Afterwards we had dessert, homemade chocolate cake and pumpkin pie and store bought ice cream. I had cake and ice cream. It was good. The party didn't last long after that. I did get to show my cousin my latest set-up and additions to my nerd cave in the basement. She's a gamer, I'm a gamer, I put all the standard def games on our old standard def TVs in the basement.

Now I have one more party to host tomorrow. I'll post that tomorrow as an add on to this entry. So if you're reading this tonight, you are awesome so a shout out to you now. Well this has been Pokematic signing off and bu-bye, until tomorrow.

The next day.

Hi I'm back. Today I didn't do much for the day. At about 4, Mom's best friend and her kids came over. We went to our local comic book/trading card/video game/other nerd stuff store and looked around. I found they had Pokemon tapestries, and I'd buy them if I had the room. Things like that I would hang with pride, but I don't have the room. Got to many Naruto posters. Anyways, after that, we played super smash bros in my nerd cave. It's been a while since I used all my controllers on my N64. It was fun, and we almost got Ness unlocked, but then the game froze on me. First time that happened. We exchanged gifts and that was fun.

After they left, Mom's college friends came over for our Christmas party. Her friends have kids that are around the age of my brother and I. We hung out, played Risk, and enjoyed each other's company. Risk was fun, even though I lost. I got Asia for the most part, even though I was never able to get the 7 man bonus. Oh well. We had Pizza and enjoyed more fun time. We exchanged oranges and Chocolate bars. Now I can say this has been Pokematic signing off and bu-bye.

Lets shoot a short film

Hey everyone, so today I spent all day with my film club filming a short film. This was an all day event, that involved lots of shooting on location, with 4 or 5 different locations. One of which was a convenience store and another on a bus. It was really interesting.

Now as an engineer with some experience in video production, I lacked much of the skills which would be required to shoot to the level in which we were. I don't know how to operate an audio recorder of professional quality with all the specific settings. Low gain, high pitch, other things either on or off. I don't know what all that does. Mono or stereo or 5.1 surround, the extent of my understanding. I could work a DSLR camera if shown how, but I don't know all that would need to go into framing a shot. I could try, but I'll let the other guys handle it. I can act, but not to the level of the guys in the theater department. I ended up being an extra in one scene and equipment pack mule. I did have the plastic bag and the coke bottle that were useful, and added to the cool toys for the set up shot.

Now here's how my day went. I got up at 7:30 because I could have sworn the director said crew be there at 8:30, and I wanted breakfast, and since I lack a car requiring me to walk to the location, I allotted plenty of time. Well turns out the caf opens at 9 on the weekends. I wouldn't know that since I always sleep until at least 9 on typical weekends, with atypical involving some other form of breakfast available that's better. So I stocked my pockets with a couple power bars and ate one before leaving, since we were planning on eating at Jimmy Johns and I'm not a big fan of sandwich places. Well turns out no one showed up until 8:30 and that was just 1 person. Everyone else got there between 8:45 and 9. Oh well.

We start getting ready to film at about 9. Our audio person couldn't figure out how to turn on the audio or exactly what some of the settings were. I was able to do turn it on and that was the extent of my abilities. She figured out the rest. I ended up playing "guy milling about in store," and "dude," 2 extras. I got to just look around at the merchandise, and look like I was looking for beer with my friends, while watching the craziness. What exactly is that craziness, you'll just have to watch the video. We did end up making a bit of a mess with the fake blood. I asked our Director of Photography if he wanted help cleaning it up but he said it was fine. OK.

After that, we went on to do the exterior shots. Before I went out to do them, I got a 12 oz coke in a glass bottle. I've had 8 oz but not 12. This bottle is big. It doesn't have a twist off top, but good thing I have a can opener that I could use as a bottle opener on my multi-tool. This inspired one of my other friends to get one since he could open it due to my resourcefulness. Anyways, the next shot involved a little girl as a character. It's true, never work with animals or children. I later had a run in with the animal part, but here's what happened with our child. She was rather shy and quiet. When I heard that she might flub her lines but I didn't expect her to just not talk and get super stage fright. We ended up getting what we needed.

We waited for our main character to clean up to do the before the store scenes. And while waiting, a guy nicknamed "Sponge bob" came out to his corner and started his yelling free-styling and stripped dancing. He has his shirt pushed up so it's just on his neck and his chest is exposed, with his pants sagging. He harassed our guys a little since we were shooting some shots from across the street. Luckily once our director said that we were shooting a short film he left us alone. We got our shots on time, thankfully. Now time to break for lunch.

Most of us went to the caf right next to our next location on campus. In the credits, a joke is going to be Bistro 3 (the caf) catered the event. Our next scene involved the bus stop right our side the caf. It's adjacent to dorms, so naturally some guys start harassing us. They're throwing some really bad ones at us, ones I don't wish to repeat here since they got really R-rated and I like to stay at most PG-13. I was just thinking, "OK shut up guys, you're just being obnoxious." Then they quoted Money Python with "you're mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries." That made me laugh, but glad that the director was able to get them to shut up.

Our next shot took place on a bus. That was fun. All 7 of us and all our equipment just get on one of the city buses and go for a 45 minute ride and shoot. I didn't have any part because I had extra parts in the convenience store. I just ended up talking with a friend while this all happened.

Our final shot took place at our main character's house and his "girlfriend's" house. His house had lots of fun stuff, comic books, comic book DVDs, video game Lego's, action figures, and the like. It was fun. I brought my Naruto key chain, Naruto figure, Trunks action figure, spongebob cereal box prize, and hidden leaf headband. Everything else was brought by either our star, or the guy whose house we were filming at had it all on hand. We shot it at one of our member's house, and he and his roommates have a cat with extra toes. The extra toes look like a thumb on her one paw. It's really interesting.

Like I said, most of my duties for this project were equipment lugging and extra. I carried the tripods, boom mic, and other stuff from location to location. Well location to car, and car to location. The rest of the time I mostly spent time being behind the scenes and bonding with other guys who weren't doing anything at the moment. Fun time.

Now I've been keeping things under secret this whole time. I don't want to spoil anything. Once it gets all edited, I'll be sure to embed it here. But I warn you, it is R material. It has some f-bombs and some strong violence. So strong that it made one of the cameras get blood on it. It might seem like it has more swearing due to the amount of times we ran scenes, but there is swearing. Not something to watch with your kids or parents, unless you guys are cool with that. Well this has been Pokematic signing off and bu-bye.