An old video

Lately I've realized how much I love creating.  I am an engineer and other stuff by training, but by no means a drama/theater/arts major.

I've made quite a few, not many I can share with the world because I am not sure the subjects would be happy to be in the internet (which lasts forever).

Here's one I made of the gremlins.  It's 1/3 them doing what they want, 1/3 me telling them the general idea and letting them ad-lib, and 1/3 filling in the blanks by telling and showing them exactly what to do.  (Rough numbers, but they get the acting and directing control while I take the editing/post-production control.)

Bottom line -- I let them do what they wanted, let them make up their own plot -- and made a fun film of it.

This was made a while back with less than perfect technology at my hands, and posted via the internet so forgive the graininess.

One thing I'm proud of, if you pay careful attention -- how the music beat is so closely tied to the video.  Sadly, all of my videos to date have been made in an hour or two, so what I post is not perfection.  One day I will make the perfect video.

Frogs

We recently took the gremlins to a local museum in Anaheim that professes to be centered around music.

It's actually two small museums.  One has a very lame exhibit supposedly about jazz greats.  Guess what?  No music, no real exhibits, just about 100 small black-and-white portraits.  Admittedly, great photography but boring when you realize that you have no idea who the majority of the people are and there is no information to help you out.

But... here's what all four of us loved - in the other hall is an exhibit of frogs of all types from all around the world.  The large gremlin stole my camera from me and took hundreds of pictures.

Ugly and hostile-looking:

Proud and dignified:

Huge, fat and slimy (we named him Jabba the Hut):

Cute:

Colorful:

Friends:

Bug-eyed:

There were lots more.  We loved the tiny and hugely colorful poisonous Dart Frogs, but they were just too tiny to get pictures of.

There's also a room full of interactive exhibits (computers, games, etc) that we had to literally drag the Gremlins away from.

For what it cost, this was an immense value.  We got a good 3 hours of entertainment for practically nothing.  It's in Anaheim about 1.5 miles northeast of Disneyland.  Link:  Muzeo