Miles had the idea to make his own TV commercial. This is what he came up with.
Miles’ Umbrella Ad from Scot Hacker on Vimeo.
Silver Balls
Accidental team effort: A while ago, we ordered a set of super-magnetic BuckyBalls from ThinkGeek. Miles soon discovered he could stick them to the nails in our wooden floor, and stack them up in delicate little towers. Amy, with her amazing eye for detail, saw something beautiful in the scene and started taking pictures – close up, and with a very short depth of field. She accidentally left the camera’s light temperature sensor set to Tungsten, which caused this gorgeous bluish cast.
Remembering that ThinkGeek has a section attached to each product in their catalog for “Customer Action Shots,” I submitted the image alongside their BuckyBalls product entry. Next day, amazed to discover we had won this month’s user submission prize!
I’m totally in love with Amy’s shot — and with Amy. And with Miles.
Happy New Year everyone. Love to all.
Patrick’s Army Chronicle
Miles (7) has started his own newspaper, The Patrick’s Army Chronicle. Well, “started” may be too strong a word. He created issue #1 sometime between 5:45 and 6:45 one morning, before we got up. Nice ratio of copy to ads. And just in time to beat the SF Chronicle’s move to full-color printing by one day! Way better photos, too. A bit of concern on this end re: his interest in advertising, but with conversation keeping undue influence at bay, it’s all good. Gotta admire his industriousness. My fave: “New code pen. It doesn’t rite Inglish, it rite’s codes!” Though the sheer terror of “Beehive hangs from catsle wall” is nothing to sneeze at. Also includes a one million dollar reward for the unconditional capture of Squid Man.
Miles and Scot Build a Fort
Over the course of summer 2009, Miles and I spent almost every dry weekend working on a backyard fort project. Awesome father/son bonding experience. He got to learn lots about planning and working with tools, and I really enjoyed having something analog to work on for a change. Took pictures along the way, and finally got around to putting them together in an audio slideshow this week.
Law of the universe: All projects turn out to be more complicated than when first conceived, and this turned out to be true of both the fort build and of making the slideshow. So many fiddly details behind the scenes that are never apparent in the final product.
I actually recorded Miles talking about the build in two takes (with a professional Marantz audio recorder borrowed from the J-School), then edited them down in Garage Band. Did my best to match audio to the visuals, but in order to utilize all the best clips, there are a bunch of areas where you’ll find him talking about something out of order. No matter – it’s just for fun.
Audio slideshow (note: there’s a full-screen option in the slideshow viewer).
Geek Notes
The original plan was to do the slideshow by importing still images into Final Cut, where I could edit durations and audios all together. However, the discrepancy between still image/video aspect ratios and pixel shapes (square pixels for still images, rectangular pixels for video) kept resulting in weird output. Fiddled with it forever but just couldn’t get it right, so decided to do SoundSlides after all.
Neither SoundSlides nor iPhoto provide audio editing functionality, and I still needed a way to sync up the images with the audio where possible, so this is what I ended up doing:
- Arranged and edited images in iPhoto, exported to a temporary QuickTime slideshow.
- Also exported the images from iPhoto with filenames set to “sequence.”
- In Garage Band, imported both the temporary QuickTime and the .WAV files from the Marantz audio recorder. This gives you a timed thumbnail preview in GarageBand you can use to sequence your audio.
- Since I had two takes of the audio and wanted to select bits and pieces from both, created a third “temp” track I could use as a holding bin for audio scraps I hadn’t decided what to do with. This seven minutes of audio is the result of two full evenings of audio editing!
- Set the “movie” track to “Hide” in Garage Band so I could export an MP3 of the finished audio.
- Imported the sequenced still images and the final MP3 into SoundSlides Plus to create the captions and final output.
Miles in the Mirror
Digging through some old images, stumbled across this one, shot by Miles (age six) while playing with my camera. Quite beautiful … seems to have a real sense for the camera. He must get that from his mother.
Carver Park Reserve
Wrapping up an excellent – but sad – 10 days with relatives in Minnesota. Excellent because Minnesota is always excellent this time of year, lush and verdant, with endless trails and meadows fed by those famous 10,000 lakes. Excellent because it was wonderful to see family and because I really needed the downtime. Sad because we were there to say farewell to my father-in-law, who passed away a few weeks ago and is deeply missed by all of us.
Click Replay for hike animation
Wrapped up the visit with a lovely 3-mile walk through Carver Park Reserve with the family and kids through rolling hills. Returned with a few tics and lots of great memories.
Farewell Ben – we’ll always miss you.
Spaghetti Dogs
Had some freaky food fun today… cut hot dogs into segments, pushed pieces of dry spaghetti through, boiled. Despite the faces in these shots, Miles loved them, said they looked like Cerise Tinh from Star Wars… without a face.
After clicking Play button, click icon at lower right of slideshow to view full-screen.
Black Hole –> Fluff
Miles’ cosmology, cont’d.:
“A ball of fluff falls into a black hole, and out comes me, a ball of fluff!”
Kittens
Why having a 6-year-old around the house is the greatest experience in the world:
That’s not our house, but minute-to-minute life isn’t far off from this girl’s wonderful stream of consciousness existence.
A Younger, More Hirsute Me
Came across these photos in family albums a while ago. They’ve been hanging on the fridge. Thinking it’s about time it became public knowledge that I used to be hairy and play guitar on street corners in San Luis Obispo. These are circa 1984. Mother of Pearl, that was 25 years ago! Now it’s all I can do to keep my hair short enough to not emphasize the bald spot that’s growing like a hole in the ozone layer.
