I'm up for living like a homeless man for 3 days.

I was talking to my friend Patrick when he sent me a link to a music festival called "Lightning in a Bottle" which is going on Memorial Day weekend and I think I'm pretty much sold on going.



Time to start saving!

In other news, I've started up a demo reel which I'm going to use to appeal for editing in my film program. My friend Jay opted for me to appeal seeing as he is highly confident in me taking editing and has decided to talk to some of the department ups.

So far I've been just compiling works I'm proud of and finishing editing my DSLR project. I haven't had some time to work on it over the weekend because of my social life and work, but I'll get around to finishing it this week, i swear!

Oh god, this music festival video gets me excited!

Roughin' It.

So I lived like a homeless man for 2 days at Malibu..

Jess and I decided to travel to the coast for no real reason with no real destination. We just roughed it in the back of my car and found a campsite by the beach. It felt good to be away for even just a little bit.

Next time we're going to try to do this but with only 20 bucks :D

On a side note, I've just finished color correcting my Feb DSLR project and moving on to color grading and animating some titles in After Effects. 

Ponyo/Feb DSLR Project Update

I got to see Hayao Miyazaki's "Ponyo" yesterday which he did in collaboration with Disney. I've been a fan of Miyazaki's work especially since I grew up watching "Totoro" on VHS before my double digit days.

This is one of those movies that make me feel nostalgic about adolescence and how everything can seem so magical from a child's point of view. I'm not a super big fan of a lot of Japanese animation today, but it's good to see that there is still some out there that are still being hand drawn.

To keep things brief, the story is about Miyazaki's vision of the much familiar "Little Mermaid" story. Like much of Miyazaki's work, there are a lot of mystical and magical tones to his films and "Ponyo" is no exception. The plot wasn't anything sophisticated or flashy, but that's what made the film so much easier to take in. Allowing me to not get too drowned out in the plot meant for a very relaxed viewing in which the visuals took the front stage to help tell the story of Miyazaki's vision of Ponyo's world.

The world in which Miyazaki fabricated to house this story is nothing less than breathtaking. Many of his films are located in some sort of countryside type terrain, usually involving forests or a rural town. In "Ponyo", we get to see his perspective of the sea which I think is one of his best yet. I have this weird affinity for water and just love the way he portrayed a small port town and his use of speckled light hitting the ocean floor underneath. I can go on and on about how visually amazing this film is, but I highly suggest to check it out for yourself.

As for other news, I'm currently on Spring Break and couldn't be more thankful to have a week to myself. I'm happy to say I've finished cutting the February DSLR Project I've been working on and I'm about to move on to color correcting.

I should be able to finish everything up by this week but I don't plan to post it up until sometime later. I'm currently trying to save some money so I can buy a Vimeo Plus account so I can upload it in HD and so I can upload files bigger than 500 mb's. Hopefully that will be sometime soon!

Moving.

So I've decided to move from my old LiveJournal account to a blogger account to get a much more professional and less personal feel. I think for the most part, I'll keep things relative, but don't be surprised if I post a few personal things here and there. I've decided to cut things off from my previous blog due to the fact that I've had it for some many years (since 2005) as a personal blog and at some point the blog was even shared by another Joe.

Anyways, continuing where I left off, I'm still testing out my workflow with my DSLR footage from my Canon T2i. I've basically decided to give myself practice with my DSLR by making a simple "daily life" kind of video that I plan to put on Vimeo. Nothing too major, just some days I've shot from February 11 to early March. So far I'm still in the process of cutting it all together, then on to color correcting, and then I plan to add some motion graphics/kinetic typography to make things a bit more interesting. This will be my first personal video project that I have shot and edited on my own in maybe 4 or 5 years, so I'm pretty excited as to how this all turns out.

Here's some finalist videos that caught me eye from the Vimeo Festival. Definitely some good stuff out there.

"Nuit Blanche" by Spy Studios.



And here's one called "Pennies Heart" from Phos Pictures, those same guys who did "Last Minutes with Oden". I'm kind of surprised that they're stuff was so good that two of their videos were nominated for best documentary.



Well, that's for my first post. Hope you treat me well, Blogger.