Hearing

I am watching a documentary on HBO about an elderly couple, both deaf all their lives, who get cochlear implants. I have no idea what it is called because the info says it is Little Miss Sunshine, but I have found myself drawn deep into the story of these people. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to not be able to hear, but even more so, what it must be like to live your whole life without hearing a sound only to suddenly be able to hear everything. The noise that we put so easily into the background is instantly all in the foreground all at the same time to the point where you can’t distinguish which sound you should be hearing. 

I love what the father says when asked what the voice he hears sounds like - he says “I don’t know, how do I describe what green looks like.” There is absolutely no reference. They go home and test everything out. The light switches, rubbing their hands on the walls, their footsteps, tiptoeing down the hall, power tools, fans, car washes - everything that we take for granted they are immediately in tune with and amazed by.

It is also heart-wrenching, the pain that they go through with the frustration of not progressing quickly in being able to distinguish different noises. They usually revert to taking their receivers off to return to the “normalcy” of no sound rather than get used to the new sensations.

The daughter, who is narrating the story, said something that hit me hard…”As I watch my mother struggle with all these new sounds, I realize that part of learning how to hear must be learning how NOT to hear; how to tune in what’s relevant and tune out what you don’t need or what you just don’t want to hear….In the car, mom had already stuffed her $7,000 tool in the compartment next to her chewing gum.”

I realize that my life for the most part is sensory overload. It’s so loud that it is hard to distinguish what God is trying so patiently to speak into my life, that I often just give up and put His tool in the compartment next to the chewing gum. Then I get frustrated that I cannot hear only to realize that I’ve already discarded the only thing that can repair what is, in my case, a deaf heart, and turn it back on, wondering why I had turned it off in the first place. I am wired to be around people all the time - it gives me energy, but it’s so good for me to realize my need for quiet, to remind me to simplify and quiet the noise in my life. 

What do you do to quiet the noise?

Next Set

The next set is being built this week, but doesn’t go in until the first week of June. It’s much more simple than the last two have been, but still has loads of saturation, texture and depth. I will probably post more about the process this time around rather than just the final product. 

Cool Gimick…

Check out how Sony is choosing to advertise their new environmentally friendly attitude.

read more about it here…

http://www.advertolog.com/paedia/prints/2008/5/6/200426/

AGH…

So…my 4runner and I got in a little altercation with a Rav4 today - don’t worry no one was hurt, but it definitely caused a good bit of damage to both of our cars. It’s so frustrating…maybe even more so that when it happened about a year ago. Probably due to how much I LOVE my 4runner, but it should be patched up and in working order in no time. Drive was an amazing time, but it’s so hard to unpack when things like this get in the way…I can’t even think in coherent sentences! Agh…there goes my Tax Rebate check I was looking forward to!

Poll…

Jeans that you are not supposed to wash for six (6) months…really cool or really gross?

 

Nudie Jeans

check out the gallery before you vote…

Texas

I’m in waco for a couple days hanging out with some friends I haven’t seen in a long time. I’m excited because we are driving to Austin tonight and all I hear are amazing things. Not to mention that I get to hang out with my friend Lane who I also haven’t seen in forever. It’s been a nice break to get away and breathe for a bit. I got to go to an art class with my friend Anna yesterday. We were just going to talk while she painted, but they had an art critic come in a critique their work - I just think critics as a whole are a funny genre of people. I thought it was funny that he said he stopped painting in HIGH SCHOOL. How can you be a part of art and have no expression in it? Maybe that’s why everything comes out vicious. It was interesting watching the student’s reactions to him. I don’t know, I just thought it was funny. Horray for Austin!

Back in the Saddle

after some awfully cold weather for this time of year and a couple days off the bike, it feels good to have a sunny day to go riding on! Get out and do something, seriously, it’s gorgeous!

 

Everyone’s a critic

I promise I am not going into blog-hibernation again…but I do have a question I would love for anyone and everyone to chime in on. 

I went to Passion this past weekend, and absolutely loved it…amazing time to worship corporately and refocus my mind on the cross. Here’s the question: Is it impossible once we enter production-world to go to an event and not critique every little bit of it?

Comment it up!

Out of gas…

So, I’m an idiot and decided that it would be a good idea to drive from my house to downtown atlanta and back then repeat the journey all while my gas meter was squarely (or under) E. Well, sure enough, when I was about half a mile from the gas station, my car cut out. Thankfully, I had just left the Living Room (Buckhead’s college group that I help out with) and my friend Ben was amazing and brought me some gas. I won’t be trying that again anytime soon! Thanks for rockin’ Ben!

The Anatomy of a Set #2

So here we are again - a new month, a new set. The concept stage began the end of february/first week of march with several concept drawings which I took into my concept meeting with our production director Chris. Some of them are complete thoughts and others are more bits of ideas that have been floating around in my head for a while. These meetings are usually really cool because I tend to be more abstract while Chris tends towards concrete, so usually I can come in with and idea and Chris will have an amazing way of implementing it. 

Here’s what we left with (4) weeks out:

 

For the most part, I didn’t want to do anything with aspect ratio video for a while, so I wanted to do something with a versa-tube look and was really inspired by the form-factor of Coldplay’s XY cd. Obviously this much versa-tube (250 tubes) would cost upwards of $60,000 and could cost as much as $20,000-$30,000 just to RENT for the 9 weeks that we want to have this set up for (a couple one-offs, a short series and a long Buckhead capture series), so we turned to an idea that we used for our set last easter and decided to use projection for these panels instead. The object on which we would project? What’s round, white and about 2″ in diameter - that’s right - PVC…1,000 linear feet of it. As you can see from the above sketch, we built 4′x4′ frames, painted them black, and screwed 8 PVC tubes to each frame (it’s funny that this one sentence in actuality took almost 2 full work days to complete). I wanted to build them modular for a couple reasons.

1. We could change the design if we needed to really easily simply by moving squares around

2. We could have more people working on more projects at the same time and have more of an assembly line set up

3. I had no idea how we were going to get it all in the air if we built the whole structure on the ground first

Once we got everything built, the panels went together rather quickly, but this was an incredibly long process. 

The other big piece of this design puzzle was the American Idolesque towers that line our proscenium and sit dead center in the camera 1/2 shot. Honestly, I had no idea how we were going to build these and it would have taken us forever, but God definitely knows what He is doing and one of my volunteers, Mickey, has a guy who does high-spec welding for gasoline tankers. I drew up some specs and sent them his way and the welders pulled it off to perfection! We started talking to them about it on last wednesday, had specs to them on thursday, they had materials monday, welded it tuesday and delivered it wednesday…amazing! The columns are made out of 1/4″ aluminum and lined with velum paper. I lit each of the columns with 3 Coemar ParLite LEDs and lit the wall behind the column instead of the actual column so that the column would light evenly without any hotspots. I did the same thing with the center, but use left over foam that we had used for a previous set as the reflector.

We also planned on doing a lighting change, but thankfully, we decided to push it back to this coming week to save our team from killing themselves with another 20 hours of work. I’ll post more pictures when we are done with that.

The video portion of the set is done with (2) Christie S9 projectors with .8 lenses controlled by PVP at front of house. We are using (2) mac minis as slave nodes so that we can have one image stretched across both screens instead of the same image repeated on both panels. The secret is using high contrast loops.

Here are some photos that Tyler snapped quickly this morning:

 

 

Whew…that was a brain workout. I hope you enjoy! What do you think?