So roughly twice a day my son will ask if it's christmas time yet. I think he's figured out that he'll be getting presents when it's christmas. Either that or he's just happy to see his holiday choir come out of storage. Here's a movie of him, well not really conducting, but at lest coordinating the singing:
On a totally different note, I'm trying to freshen up my magic card trick skills. I'm doing this mostly by just carrying decks of cards around with me and practicing the basics. Hopefully I'll have a couple of tricks down by Thanksgiving. Audiences always make it more fun, but I don't want to bring anything out if I'm so rusty I ruin the trick. We'll see.
Finally, I'm reuploading the video to the last contest. Mostly because I went to review it and thought "This looks like a black bear and a puma fighting on a moonless night." Or, in other words, it's too dark to see anything. And though I'm not so happy with the video, much like most of what I do after a few days, I'm just going to fix the brightness and toss it in again. I'm sure I'll re-link to it when the better version is up.
Well, I've made my fourth entry into a video contest in as many weeks. I've put together a quick montage of SCA fighting that we did at a kind of super sweet 16 birthday party. I was also coordinating the video of the party, so we managed to get a 2 camera shoot of the fighting for bettering editing. Anyway the video can be found here. Don't be afraid to watch and rate it, though I don't know if that will have any impact on the contest outcome.
With Thanksgiving next week, I don't know if I'll shoot any personal video. But I suspect I'll be entering more contests in the near future.
No real pictures or movies to post right now, but there are some meat ones over on my wife's blog.
. . . is a diet that works. I'm in a weight loss contest with my brothers and I've started my secret diet for the last three weeks. I hate the diet, but I'm dropping weight too fast to justify anything else. Why can't exercise have this effect?
I've entered another video contest, but they haven't posted the video yet. So, I'll post the direct link when it's up.
And finally, two pictures of my son. One in normal clothes and one in his current superhero phase.
I've noticed recently that my son, who is 3, is very easy to reason with. It really became apparent last week when he put a piece of plastic wrapper up his nose. At first he was freaking out and REALLY wanted the plastic out, but after one attempt to get it out with tweezers he changed his mind and said he'd rather just leave the plastic in than have the tweezers in his nose. But throughout the entire plastic in the nose adventure, which involved a trip to urgent care and about half-a-dozen more attempts by the doctors to get the plastic before they successfully extracted it, he would freak out if any of the extraction devices came near his nose. But if I told him that they just want to look with a light to see if the plastic was still there (and they really were just looking) then he would almost immediately clam down and become completely cooperative. The whole incident was so surreal, I'd love it have it on film just to see what it looked like from the outside.
I'd say he's becoming more independent decisions, but he's always been as unpredictable as he is opinionated. So, it's always been easier to let him make his own choices.
On a side note, I've entered a clip of him into a Parenting Magazine contest. I don't know if it should count towards my 4 contests in 4 weeks as it's old footage that didn't require any editing. I think I've posted it here before, and since the contest is decided by judges with no viewer tracking, I'll just post the link to his video: Video Contest
Oh, be aware it will automatically roll into the next kid's video at the end of his. And so on. If you're not careful you could end up watching a lot of kids the someone thinks are cute.
Click the link to watch my video. Big thanks to my brothers, their wife and girlfriend and my wife for putting up with my directing so I could make this commercial.
I'm a little disappointed by the motion artifacts in the uploaded video, but it already has almost 200 views so I don't want to repost it. Oh well, they say finalists will be asked for better versions of their commercials, so I guess I'll cross that bridge when I'm a finalist.
My son has decided that his shoes have to be Velcro and he's not wearing any belts. I couldn't figure out why he was having such intense opinions on what seemed like unimportant issues. Then I noticed that he can put on his own shoes, but only if they Velcro. And a belt makes it too hard for him to use the potty on his own. So both decisions are based on his need for independence. It made me think about what I maybe doing just because it's easier. It was something I was thinking about on a recent video shoot, 2 hours of documenting limos for a promotional DVD, and I was wondering if I'm not putting enough effort into any of my video work, professional or personal. Or maybe, I need to be focusing more on the video work over other hobbies because I'm rusty. I just don't know. Well, I'm still trying for my 4 contests in 4 weeks, and here's number 2:
I don't think there is any audience voting, so o e-mails to friends about this on. It's a trailer for the upcoming movie Australia, the contest supplies the footage and some audio and then you cut on your own. My main complaint with the footage was that it was pre-edited for other purposes, which made re-pacing it a pain. Oh well, I could still win a trip to Australia or NYC. A free trip to NYC is less exciting though.
Finally, here is possibly the funniest thing I've seen this year. If anyone has an idea close to this funny, let me know and I'll do whatever it takes to make it into a movie.
