chase the light

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.

For no reason other than Meat Loaf shot that video there I thought I’d check out the Greystone Mansion. Turns out a lot more than that has been shot there over the years. Most recently that crazy ending in “There Will Be Blood“. Apparently they got a cut in the rate to film there for restoring the bowling alley. The mansion was closed but I walked around the gardens and peaked in the windows. Not much to see but it’d probably be a nice stop to have lunch. I give it an 8 on the boring scale. Hard to get excited about some place called greystone. blah.

The holidays were mellow. I had to work New Years week so I didn’t really get to go out and do much. Like a lot of people this year we cut down on the gifts so it was nice not to have to worry about it too much. This year I made all the gifts anyway, so that was fun.

Earlier in the year I got about 625 slides and negatives from my parents and started laying out a book. They were from 1961 to 1971 as close as I could figure. It was pretty fun to try and date the actual slides by the little clues that they give away. After a few months I sent the book off to Blurb and had two 300 page books made. One for my parents and one for my sister. They came out amazing and are really fun to look at. You can see a preview here. I also printed and framed up a photo I shot back in the 80’s from a trip to Michigan for my mom. It’s hanging above the fireplace now so that’s nice. That can be seen here.

So that was the holidays. And that is a photo of The Americana on a quiet night before the holiday storm. Also Floyd the dog hates sleeping on anything cold or hard so he would crawl under my parents Christmas tree to take advantage of the skirt.

Mary Ellen Mark was in L.A. tonight to present and talk about her new book. Seen Behind the Scene. It’s a compilation of images she has taken as a Unit Stills Photographer over the last 40 years. There’s a list of maybe 50 photographers with real name recognition. Top of the heap is probably Ansel Adams and then maybe Annie Leibovitz, but somewhere in there lies Mary Ellen Mark.

I tried to take my best Mary Ellen Mark type photo above. It was the least blurry photo I shot so I failed on technique, but she did write in my book… “Film Forever”. Which is exactly what I used, so I got an “A” for effort.

I’ve been working on Monsters vs. Aliens the last few months and the posters have now replaced Madagascar 2 around the campus. Also this week I did some “walla” for the movie. Walla groups are used to create crowd noises for the background of movies. A group of us gathered outside and yelled at invisible monsters, ran screaming from invisible monsters, hurrayed for invisible monsters, gasped at robots, and acted like road rage drivers that are stuck in a traffic jam. Oh, and whispered. walla, walla, walla, walla….

I found Tiki Bar TV via an iTunes podcast several years ago. It was one of the first video podcasts so I subscribed. I like the show but know it’s not to everyone’s taste. It’s kinda looooww budget. But come on! It’s a tiki bar! They prescribe drinks to solve problems! It’s made in someone’s apartment! They’re canadian!

There’s usually one episode a month or so. Well, this week I was sitting at new work and stopped by the website and noticed they were having a DVD release party just a few miles from work. I thought I’d just go have a visit and also get to check out a long time Tiki Bar in North Hollywood. I rsvp’d through Upcoming.com and went about my business. On Wednesday, the new camera flash and wireless transmitter I ordered arrived and I set it up that night. I thought, oh, tomorrow’s the Tiki thing I should take my new flash set up and shoot some photos! Perfect opportunity!

I did a drive-by of the Tonga Hut but was hungry first so I grabbed a little Pollo Loco beforehand. I found a spot to park right outside the bar. I slung my camera around my shoulder and carried my flash in my hand. Nobody was outside but the bar was plenty full. I walked through until I ended up near the back and a slightly frantic woman spots me with my camera gear and ask me if I’m the press!! I kinda laugh and say no. She goes, “oh, you’re a fan? You have a big camera I thought you might be press. Can you take photos tonight???” Um… yeah… was kinda just going to hang out briefly then… I dunno… kinda tired really… Just then, Rachel hands me her card and starts giving me sheets of paper of what’s going on tonight, who’ll be there, arrivals and such. She was a publicist that was helping out a publicist friend of hers who wasn’t able to make it. I realized I wasn’t really prepared for shooting all night. The camera battery was only half charged and I’d been firing the flash off all day just messing around with it. I had also shot a bunch of pictures on the smallest card I have and only had 30 shots left!

Soo… I ran down the street to the gas station and bought some AA batteries for the flash and fortunately had my camera charger in the car WITH an extra battery. I found a plug along the wall and started charging and hoping my other battery would hold out. Then I started looking through the photos on the card a deleted anything that wasn’t essential. Which was a lot, because some I could actually reshoot the next day. Just things around work. I ended up with room for about 150 photos. But at least now I’m ready!

Dr. Tiki and some of the cast shows up so we run outside and I start firing away and the flash works beautifully! My camera battery never runs down and by the end of the night I shot all 150 of those photos. I got home packaged them up and sent them off to the publicist that night! Who knows, right? Just being professional about it all.

I picked up a t-shirt and had the cast sign my DVD before I headed out very pleased with myself. And to think, earlier as I was sitting there enjoying my El Pollo Loco chicken breast, salad, and veggies I was so tired I almost went home.