Winter Wonderland.

I was beginning to think I wouldn't make it up to the mountains this season. Because of schedule conflicts and money, any chance of snowboarding was looking grim. My girlfriend surprised me for my birthday by informing me that she booked us a place to stay in Tahoe. She even found a place that allowed dogs to stay, so we could bring our pug Coco.


We drove up on a Saturday after my girlfriend finished her shift at work. It was a nice drive filled with jokes and stories. We also popped in No Country for Old Men, because my girlfriend hadn't seen it. I forgot how beautiful the visuals were in that film. Not saying I was peeking at the movie while driving, or anything...

When we began our trek up the mountain, I was beginning to worry. The only snow in sight was the dirty, brown snow on the side of the highway. I was really looking forward to seeing some fresh white snow. We got to our hotel around 8PM where we unloaded our stuff. We were both starving so we headed over to Harvey's casino to grab a bite at the Hard Rock Cafe. For the last two years, Jenny and I have somehow always wound up at this restaurant. It's become sort of tradition to eat here when we come up. Also, because I just turned 22, I took full advantage of the drink menu. I ordered a Malibu fruit smoothie, which tasted amazing. To eat, I ordered the Granny Smith and Provolone Burger. I still have dreams about this burger. Probably one of the best burgers I've had in my life.

Back at the hotel we hung out with Coco before passing out. I slept like a baby that night.

In the morning, I stumbled out of bed to open the curtains on the window. I couldn't believe my eyes. The sky was raining snow. We could not have picked a more perfect time to get up here. There was about 3 inches of snow on every car in the parking lot. It was quite a sight to behold.


Coco was getting antsy so we took her out to do her business. She was not as stoked on the fresh snow as we were. I can't blame her, having to walk around in the snow with her bare paws exposed. We thought ahead and brought her her little snow jacket. Yep, we're the kind of people that dress their dogs up. Regardless, Coco did her biz and proceeded to high tail it back to the room.

Driving through the fresh snow was an experience that was both exciting and terrifying. My girlfriend was a bit freaked out when we started sliding around the roads. I had winter tires on the scoob, but even still I would occasionally lose traction. There were even a few instances where I was full on drifting around turns. I was having a blast, but I could tell my girlfriend wasn't as excited. I drove as carefully as I could from that point up to the ski resort.


Because of the snow conditions, we were one of the first cars to arrive. We fed our dog, geared up, and headed out. I always worry with snowboarding that I'll lose everything I worked so hard to learn last season. But just like last time, it all comes back instantly. The fresh powder was amazing to snowboard over. The mountain was practically empty and there were no lines anywhere. I could not ask for a better day to be shredding. I worked on a few technical things like butters and 180s, but I was just having a blast flying down the slopes.

About 2PM our sore muscles told us we should call it quits. We headed back to the car to meet a very anxious pug. We packed up and headed off. The drive home was just as relaxing as on the way up.

I had a great weekend! Thanks to my super awesome girlfriend for an amazing trip I will never forget!

Mac Heaven.

My friend Ben Bunch asked me about a week ago if I would be interested in attending MacWorld, an annual mac product and accessory expo. Seeing that I had that Friday off, i was all for it. Ben, Matt Parcher, and I set off for San Francisco around 8:30AM to get an early start.

First thing we did when we got there was picked up our badges. I was stoked that they put my production company "Bokeh Pictures" on the name tag. We entered the convention like giddy school girls. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but we quickly got used to the layout. Because Ben, Matt, and I all had dSLRs hanging from our necks, we got a lot of looks. We also got a bunch of random people coming up to us talking cameras and technical specs. One booth even thought we were press so they gave Ben a coupon for a free iPhone case.

We easily spent 6+ hours at the convention just walking around checking everything out and talking to people. Just when we thought we'd seen it all, we'd find a new aisle that we somehow missed our first time around. The dangerous thing was, almost everything had a special "expo price." I splurged a bit and got some cool accessories for my iDevices.

First, I bought a "Pogo Sketch," which is essentially a stylus for the touchscreen interface. Obviously, I prefer physically touching the screen, but for drawing and doodling in apps like Adobe Ideas and Sketchpad Pro, the stylus is nice. It also works surprisingly well, you just have to make sure not to rest your hand on the screen when scribbling.



Next, I bought a "Glif." This ingenous invention is basically a kickstand for your iPhone. The Glif allows you to prop the phone up in either portrait or landscap as well as mount to a tripod. What I really enjoyed was talking to the creators who were at the booth. Apperently they aimed to raise $10,000 on a website called kickstarter.com, and they ended up raising well over $130,000. Overall, a very clever, well-designed piece of plastic that has multiple uses.



Lastly, I bought something I've always wanted, but could never justify buying. A company named Rain makes a very sleek looking MacBook Pro support riser called the "mStand." The fact that it was 20% off the MSRP was incentive enough to finally give in. The mStand looks beautiful on my desk next to the 23" Apple Cinema Display. I'm extremely happy with my purchase.



MacWorld was great! I had a lot of fun and can't wait to attend next year. Hopefully, Ben, Matt, and I can make it a tradition to go every year. Not to mention, MacWorld is located in one of my favorite cities ever, San Francisco. After the expo, we all headed out around town to snap some photos.

Here are a few of my favorite captures.







As many already know, I'm what you'd call an Apple fanboy. I'm big on design and aesthetics, so it's important for me that stuff looks sleek and matches. Apple does a great job at creating similar looking, simplistic devices.

Here is my most recent photo of my workspace. Notice the mStand and the Glif doing their respected jobs quite nicely.

Within White Fences

As if I didn't already have enough going on in my life, I was asked by one of my friends David Murakami if I would DP his film. This dude knows his stuff, so I was more than happy to help him on his project. A few weeks later he sent the script out. Wow! Talk about ambitious. I have no doubt that David will put it off, but wow! Let's just say one of the scenes calls for a car crashing into a limo. I'm excited though to get the ball rolling.

To give you an idea of the caliber of David's films, give this a watch. Take into account most of these sidewalks were not empty when they filmed the scene.



This past weekend we had our first shoot. The scene followed the "hitman" character waiting at a bus stop. To say that the lighting conditions were horrendous would be an understatement. We had to rely solely on the one streetlight from across the street and the occasional passing headlights from oncoming traffic. It's times like these when I'm glad I traded in my HVX200 for a Canon 5D. I shot the entire scene at ISO 2500, 1/30th, and f/1.4. Talk about extremes. The final image is a tad grainy, but it has an almost gritty, urban feel to it.

Here are a few screen grabs from the footage.




I'm very much looking forward to working with the very talented cast and crew of "Within White Fences" in the oncoming weeks!

Seeing Double.

I quite enjoy me some vinyl toys. No surprise. I check blogs like Spankystokes and Hello Vinyl daily to get the scoop on the newest vinyl releases. When Artist James Jarvis announced his Wisdom of Caleb series, I knew had to get one. The tricky part was deciding on which t-shirt design to get considering there were eight options.





I decided on the "Sausages" and "I Heart BM" ones. I couldn't get just one. My girlfriend found the BM hilarious, so that was that. I was lucky to get one of the "sausage" Calebs, which sold out pretty quickly afterwards. Not to mention the t-shirt poking fun at the infamous "Supreme" logo. Overall, really funny characters and top notch quality vinyl.



As with all my toys, I love photographing them. I try to find an environment that fits their character. So for my two Calebs, I put them in downtown Santa Cruz. I'd imagine they are both looking for the nearest public restroom to desacrate. These guys mean business.

Here are the photos.






While out, I also brought along another vinyl toy I recently picked up. This one is called "Sweety." She's an oversized candy with braces. She was more than happy to show me her pearly whites for this photograph.

Some More Long Exposures.

Sort of addicted to the art form. You never know if you're image will come out good or not. Long exposures are guesstimation in it's truest forms. Here's a few captures taken at night on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Special thanks to Ben Bunch and Anthony Cote for hanging out!

Study of a Space/Style.

For those that don't know, I'm currently a senior Film and Digital Media major at UC Santa Cruz. As with most students I have my qualms about the layout of the major, but my main concern is not getting into classes required to complete the major. I am also in what is known as the "production concentration," which basically means I'm focusing on the production aspect of filmmaking over critical analysis. I only have two more quarters left at this school, and I need to take two more production classes. Thank God I was able to get into the film production class I needed this quarter.

Film 172 is essentially an intermediate film production class. We are expected to have a decent knowledge of film terms and concepts. Making films is what I live for, so lectures for this class can get a bit dull. I understand the importance of the information, it's just a lot of redundant stuff most of us know already. Regardless, the focus of this class is to create one eight minute short film by the end of the course.

I had my idea for my short film even before the first day of this class. I've done a few stop frames in the past. Most notably "Sculpey the Slug" which premiered at that 2009 Santa Cruz Film Festival and "I-KAN Love" which won first place in IKAN's Short FIlm Contest. As an attempt to challenge myself, I wanted to raise the stakes. After seeing a few films online, I wanted to make a stop-frame with people.

Here are a few of the short films that inspired me.









So instead of animating an inanimate object or some clay sculpture, I plan to animate a human. Obviously, it would be easier to just film it like live-action, but that wouldn't quite get the look I'm going for. Also, I plan to tap into the imagination realm by including the animation of random household objects (i.e. iPods, pillows, slippers, etc.). The story I have planned is a bit elementary in terms of content, but this is more so I can focus on the style of the film.

Eli Hollinder, our professor for Film 172, gave us the assignment of studying a space/style. He recommended that we shoot in a space or in a style that we planned to use for our longer film. This was the perfect opportunity to try out the "style" of my film, because up until then I had never experimented with it.

After waking up one morning to catch the sunrise via timelapse, we set out to film everyday actions, but by taking bursts of photos. When we were all done, I think I had somewhere around 2400 photos. I then spent the rest of that day editing together the photos with sound. It was not always easy to pick the best sounds for each action, but I like the way the sound design turned out. Sound has never really been my forte, so I hope I can change that with this assignment!

After showing my class my work, they seemed pretty impressed. This was a big ego boost for me. Sometimes when you sit down with an edit for so long, grueling over the small, minute details, you can quickly lose focus of the piece as a whole. Many of the students asked how I did the intro timelapse/dolly shot. The teacher seemed pretty impressed with the work too. I'm happy with the overall outcome of the study and can't wait to get started on the real project! Check back in a few weeks and I should have the film online. For now, you can check out my tests below.

Cookie Monster NOM NOM

Ever since I started using Instagram on my iPhone, I've made it a point to follow people I find interesting. I recently started following a user who constantly posts photos of their baking endeavors. I think her name is something like "artiki." Anyways, the other day she posted a photo of her "cookie monster cupcakes." Once I saw those, I knew I had to make them. Because my baking skills are way below average, I relied on the aid of my girlfriend to help out. We got all the necessary ingredients and began concocting our sugary little morsels of sweet confection. We let them cool over night and then in the morning Jenny and I decorated them in the image of the notorious "cookie monster."

They turned out delicious. We brought them to my girlfriend's friend's house who was having a party that night. That was the last we ever saw of them. I made it a point to snap a few photos to remember our tasty escapades!