chase the light

Starbucks #1

If you’re ever in Los Angeles at night, especially in the rain, have a drive by the L.A. Museum and look at the street light installation. You don’t even have to get out of the car, but if you do every photo you take of yourself you’ll look like a movie star. It’s a very flattering place to take pictures.

This is Art. It’s his birthday. He loves this photo. Cake in the rollover. It says spanish stuff on it.

Today at DreamWorks we rounded up all the Pixar Luxos and destroyed made them disappear. Don’t they looked frightened with their little environmental bulbs? One made a run for it. It wasn’t pretty. Oh, and this is a brand spankin’ new point and shoot Canon sd880! So I did a pano. Because I do that with any new camera I buy. For some reason.

We just drove around today. Until the sunset and then got yogurt. Red Mango. Which as of this late writing has gone out of business.

After the Doo Dah Parade we headed down to Long Beach to go to the aquarium. To see the aquaria. They were reopening for the night between 5 and 9pm. From Pasadena we stopped by the house, then Yogurtland for a quick treat before heading down. We did a little tour of Long Beach then parked and bought our tickets. It wasn’t as crowded as I was thinking it might be so that was good and we could walk around easily.

I like the tanks where you can pet things. Like rays! Rays are cool. Unless your name is Steve. Then they’re so not cool. Sharks are ok, they’re just not rays. Sharks have bad connotations too. Such as “shark bite”. You don’t want one of those. A “ray bite” is not so bad. It’s more like a slobbery dog kiss. Calling someone a “shark” is bad. Such as “pool shark”. Again, “pool ray”, not as bad. Then there’s guys named Ray. They’re always nice. If I met a guy named Shark I’d hate him immediately. A ray of light is a good thing too. And don’t get me started how much I hate my Shark Hand Vac. It’s lame.

Anyway, I liked the rays, I liked the sea lions, I liked the puffins, I liked the sea dragons, I liked the jellyfish, but I didn’t like the caf?©. Lousy food. Liza was disappointed in the Liza fish. A genus of the mullet fish.

I’ve been to the Rose Parade a few times and frankly it’s a much better experience on an HD TV in the comfort of your own home. No cold night sitting on the curb, no sleeping whatsoever, no hunger, nobody throwing things at you from their cars, and no trying to drive home after all of those things, and no sleeping the rest of the day. So I stopped going.

Then there’s the Doo Dah parade which is the exact opposite. It would be lousy on TV and you can sleep in and still get a good spot. Like we did! The parade starts at 11:30 and we parked right next to the parade route. We had to sit in the sun for a short time but the last half of the parade the sun swung around and put us in the shade.

I did shoot some HD video so as soon as I get around to bothering buying a hard drive, capturing the tape, and editing the footage, I’ll post it… Don’t wait up.

Liza got back in town Monday night! She’ll be here for a few months and off we went tonight to the Jim Henson Studios, formerly A&M Records, formerly formerly Charlie Chaplin’s studios.

Jim Henson’s Creature Shop was doing a demo of their technology and also held an open house. They did some motion capture demos along side of puppeteering facial animation. Fun stuff. After that we walked around the studio lot and saw some puppets from The Dark Crystal, the Muppet Show, and various creatures who all looked slightly familiar. We went into the workshop in back and they had a rack of muppets that was hilarious looking. All colorful but not animated at all. No spark of life in them at all. Also we saw one of the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal. After a bit of research Liza found out he was SkekOk the Scroll-Keeper.

We even saw Charlie Chaplin’s footprints and signature that he put in some cement outside one the the studios. The cool thing is that there aren’t really public tours of the studio so it was nice to have a look behind the gates.

Then there was that little ditty back in 1985 called “We are the World” that was filmed and recorded at the studios when it was A&M Records. Fun stuff!

Ain’t she cute with her muppet pals?

Each lighting team on Monsters Vs. Aliens is named something monstery. So far I’ve been on three teams on this show. Team Freak, Team Thing, and Team Gort. Team Freak leader Robert took us out to lunch as we wrapped up our sequences. We ate at Picanha in beautiful downtown Burbank. Russell on the left is looking pretty beat up. He had to do all the heavy technical heavy lifting for the team. Udai the lighting lead gave us a thumbs up. Robert the Supervisor on the right is smiling because we made him look good.