March/April 2003

10th Anniversary On April 3, RAW and I celebrated out 10th anniversary. We are not normally celebratory folk but RAW managed to find a babysitter for Hollace (sent her to Barb's next door) and we went out to Tsukasa (Japanese steakhouse). One of these weekends real soon we will leave Hollace with grama Ward and we will stay the night somewhere. Still working on that plan. My First Show Through ArtWorks, I am part of their brand new artist guild. For the month of February, I was artist of the month at the Fox Lake Library.   Hollace's is now 4 Boy is Hollace's imagination running on overdrive lately. Hollace has 2 imaginary bug friends. Her left hand and right hand with her 1st two fingers as their eyes. Lisa (6) and Michael (2) are their names. Sometimes Michael is wearing his shark pajamas and last week he apparently had a friend stay over night while Lisa went to church. Today Lisa drew in chalk, a picture of a slippery ant. For a while there Hollace had an imaginary boyfriend as well. His name was Jason, he is from the ocean. He has no daddy and a mean mommy. I haven't seen him around here lately. Today Hollace tells me that he has a little cold, he is in bed. Hollace's favorite movies are Barbie and the Nutcracker of which she dances along. And Miss Spider which we taped off of Nickolodeon the other day. Hollace isn't a "little Missy" and will growl at you if you call her that. She wants to be addressed as "Princess" She likes to color and draw and "write" lists. Coming to this website soon will be an artist gallery of her artwork. Somewhere along the line Hollace has gotten the idea that the president is really a bellboy or a guy who is hired to help you. We have this Fischer Price hotel doll house and Hollace calls the bellboy, "president". The president is always fetching towels for the swimming pool. DVD The last month my free time has been consumed with a DVD project of monster proportions. I am taking 3 years of video footage (got the camcorder when Hollace was almost 1) and organizing so I can author them to a full featured DVD with custom menus and all. As I write this I am watching my 1st successful DVD. This is proving not to be so straightforward as I was lead to believe. I have a few new coasters and a 12 pack of DVD+Rs. My burner (or works burner) only takes DVD-R and the DVD-Rs I ran out and bought are apparently crap. I originally compressed all my movies in Cleaner which took my computer forever to do. Then I tried the compressor that comes with DVD Studio Pro and the time difference is amazing. One large movie that took 8 hours with Cleaner took 40 minutes with QT. And as I am discovering right now, the Cleaner movies (which is 80% of them) are crap. Looks like some kind of field issues. Ug, it looks like I have to go back to the drawing board and recompress. At least it is a faster compressor. Live and learn When I showed my DVD at work I got Adam, the art director, all excited with dollar signs in his eyes. He says I can make a lot of money doing these for rich people. He can definately sell it. Sure I won't invest the same kind of time I have already but do I really want to go through someone elses video footage? Right now, I have to fix disc one then start disc two and three! Then maybe I may put together a movie player in Flash for some of the true gems. You can see the screen shots of the menus here. Other Projects...Kaleidoscopes! The projects never end. Kaleidoscopes are everywhere, in my eyes at least. I always wanted to consider myself a digital artist but really couldn't. My art form was really straight forward photography. I very rarely altered my pictures digitally. One of my outstanding projects is the virtual kaleidoscope. It is pretty cool actually. I created a 3D kaleidoscope and turned it into a QTVR (virtual reality) object that you could turn around and upside down with sounds of a turning kaleidoscope. When you clicked on the eye piece it would show a kaleidoscope pattern. I am becoming obsessed with kaleidoscope patterns. I put a variation of the virtual kaleidoscope pattern as a start screen in my DVD and now I am thinking I should do a whole DVD of different patterns set to music to watch on my TV. How soothing is that? The other project I am doing with kaleidoscopes is still prints of the patterns. I plan to do different themes then cut them into 12" circles and mount on foam core. It will be one of those things that you really have to look to see what is going on in a particular print. I would like to have a series of these done for the next time I come up as artist of the month. And the final thing I would like to do with kaleidoscopes is to actually make my own, real ones in stained glass. I got to find time to practice sodering then I am ready to go. I bought a few kaleidoscope kits awhile back.       The Race ...the movie I have edited my first feature film, well all 2.5 minutes of it. It is 3mbs as either a Quicktime or Windows Media movie or if you have a really fast connection, download the 9mb version. It is worth the download so go check it out. 3.4Mb QT or 3.4Mb WMV,