Film Ahoy!

I got my camera two weeks ago and it's a real beaut. Everything seems to work fine. I got some discounted film from Kodak because they offer a sweet student discount on their website. Ektachrome 64T is the only color Super 8mm film still in production by Kodak. I got two cartridges because the shipping was too much to justify just buying one. So much for a discount when the shipping is $12 flat rate.

Last Thursday, while Tick was in Liberty, Indiana for the evening, I humped the camera to class and spent my sweet time wandering back, looking for cool things to shoot. With my new Johnny Depp sunglasses and the Super 8 in hand I felt very artsy. I headed up the slant walk looking for squirrels (apparently squirrels is a hard word to spell). I figured I could get pretty close to one, since Oxford is the Squirrel Capitol of Southwest Ohio. Go ahead, look it up...

Some of you might say, "I did look it up and that's wrong," but that's because you looked it up in a book. Next time, try looking it up in your heart.

So I'm crouched down in the grass behind a bench, zeroing in on this particularly interesting squirrel, who's hopping around and digging and all of a sudden his head snaps up and he stares right into my soul. I swear he squinted at me. It made me really uncomfortable, like he knew I was filming him, and did not intend to sign any release forms.

On my way home I had the camera on the tripod, thrown up over my shoulder, enjoying the day and thinking about how cool I must look with this neat camera. I came by the library and passed a girl who was holding what appeared to be a Grade-A digital camcorder, strap around her neck, headphones plugged in to monitor sound, a big old microphone sticking off the front and over each shoulder she had a nice, big digital SLR camera. I thought we might exchange a "hey, nice camera" look, but she didn't notice me. So much for feeling like the coolest kid on campus.

Today I finished off the last 20 feet of film in Liberty, where I went to help Sam finish up her project with one of the high school students. This is the project in the creepy, abandoned opera house, which is even stranger in person. Hopefully the film turns out and I'll be able to post a quick tour.

I'm not sure if I'll send off the cartridge to have it developed, or wait until I film the other one. I'd kind of like to just develop one in case the camera doesn't work and nothing shows up. No sense in possibly ruining two. Of course this whole Super 8 thing is by no means a practical way to shoot, but it really is fun. I'll have to come up with a script for the next cartridge, rather than just shooting squirrels and creepy buildings.

Hmmm, maybe squirrels in creepy buildings.

OMFG

Delicious. Superb. I would write more, but I feel so heavy my brain won't work. Let my darling wife tell you about it. All I can say is that she continues to surprise me. Apple pie is just like icing on the cake, or in this case like pie in my tummy.

Today was kitchen experimentation day. I made Philly Cheesechickens, which turned out okay. I think a little more practice is in order to get them absolutely disgustingly delicious like Penn Station. The ones I made today didn't even soak through the bread :(

In an unrelated incident: Wii Fit told me I gained 5.3 pounds in the last 3 days.

We Eat a Lot of Cereal

Samantha and I went gorcery shopping the other day. To cover more ground (mostly because I was incredi-grumpy and I didn't want to spend a single minute in Kroger) we split up. I had a few items to get, she got some. We both got milk and didn't realize it until we had already paid.

We've got to use this milk before it goes bad. I hate letting food go bad. It's just too expensive to mess around with. So every night I ask Sam how many bowls of cereal she's had. She's doing her best to help me defeat the milk burden in our fridge.

These bowls have all been used in the last 24 hours. We're on a good pace to finish the milk before October 16th. Only one half gallon left.

Goodbye Mozilla

I feel bad, but I guess I should just say it. Get it over with.

*ehem* Firefox....okay... I don't know how to do this. It's hard, you know? I mean, we've been together a while. And it was fun. It was real fun, but sometimes things change. I'm sorry, but I've been using another browser. 

Don't be like that. We both knew that when I said that I'd never leave you that it was wishful thinking. It just got stale, like we were sitting around staring at each other. You'd be loading

 something and I'd just sit around and wait. Not to mention you'd just crash on me. That's not fair. Am I supposed to just wait for you to crash and then have to be the one to reboot you? I can't take on that responsibility, always fixing things. Why don't you just fix yourself sometimes?

Sure, it's not perfect, but Chrome is just new...exciting. It's so much bigger. I can see all this extra stuff. I can rearrange tabs, pull tabs to new windows, browse incognito! You always wanted to know where I was all the time. Chrome is totally cool just letting me wander around without tracking my every move.

I'm sorry, Firefox, but it's over. There might always be a special place for you on my harddrive, but Chrome is taking your spot on my desktop.

Radio killed the radio star

The radio around here has been a heaping pile of dissapointment lately. So, once again, I've turned to Pandora Radio for my music fix. 

For those of you who don't know about Pandora it's an online radio station. You create your own "channels" by entering a band, a song or even a genre and Pandora grabs songs that are related to your choice by using perameters set up by the Music Genome Project. Then you have the ability to approve or dissapprove of each song it plays by giving a thumb up or down. This tweeks your station to play only music with a style you like. And, luckily, if you give the same band thumbs down twice, they are banned from ever playing on that station again. I quickly used this ability to kill Nirvana. You also get the ability to ban a certain song from the station for one month, and skip a particular song you don't feel like listening to. Try to get that from 94.9

I've been playing my Modest Mouse station exclusively. My hope was that Pandora would grab some new music I haven't heard and play it for me, which it did a few times. It appears that I have extremely predictable tastes, because after about 2 weeks of various thumbs up and down, I've basically tuned the station to play my iPod. The only difference is that it's playing songs from bands from which I only have a few songs. So I'm getting what I like, but a wider array of what I like. And I like that.

Today's mix thus far:

Modest Mouse- A Different City

Cake - Short Skirt, Long Jacket

The Shins - Mine's Not A High Horse

The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army

Modest Mouse - Never Ending Math Equation

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Y Control

Death Cab for Cutie - Crooked Teeth

Spoon - The Way We Get By

Interpol - Narc

The Shins - Tun On Me

Death Cab for Cutie - Hindsight

The White Stripes - The Hardest Button to Button

See any patterns?

Silent Canosound

Samantha recently found a blog at The New York Times website by a man named Jeff Scher. He is an experimental film maker and on his blog you can catch a few of his videos. He uses old formats, in this case a 16mm wind-up that allows him to film for only 30 seconds at a time. Actually, both examples use the 16mm. While You Were Sleeping really got me thinking about the strange, emotional effect that this old format lends to the film.

An even more exaggerated example is 8mm silent film. Silent film lends an extra layer to just about any subject. Take away the sound and all of a sudden you're looking at these tones and nuances you never realized were there. Or perhaps, and I'm sure Mr. Scher would prefer me to say, that feeling is brought about by the fact that the photographer can no longer rely on sound to tell the story. When you enter into this purely visual world, you're forced to make decisions, to propel your narrative without dialogue and that is what really intrigues me.

Long story short, I'm the proud new owner of a Canosound 514XL-S, which, ironically, is one of the few super 8mm sound cameras I've seen lurking around the internet. It took quite a bit of research to find a camera I thought would be well balanced between quality functionality and low learning curves. I'm not sure if this is the one, but it'll have to do because I already paid for it. Of course, after my long, adjective-soaked description of why silent film appeals to me, I should say I don't plan on actually using sound film. It's probably more expensive to develop anyway.

It was a good deal, $35 after shipping on eBay. Hopefully it will be here soon. Next I need more disposable income and after that a projector. I've been researching how to digitize super 8 for editing, and it looks like digitally recording the film from a projector is the best bet. After the projector I'll need some more disposable income, then after that I'll get some film developed and after that I'll be uploading and playing with editing.

So, family and friends who are willing (even if you aren't) could be showing up in silent, exaggeratedly emotional versions of themselves. The only danger here is that simple films highlighting people often come across as in memorandum.

I submit as evidence: