Debbie Turns 50

I made this video in 2004 for my mother's 50th birthday. It's the first time I tried to make a "slideshow" type video, and the first time I tried to use Adobe Premiere.

Comm?union

As a senior at UC Santa Cruz, I was involved in the annual theater festival known as Chautauqua. The festival is made up of entirely student written, directed, acted and produced plays and films. One of the interesting works that was accepted that year was a Italian Futurist "script". I put script in quotes because in the true vein of Italian Futurism, it was just an one page diagram with abstract designs and words written all over it. Four directors were chosen to interpret this diagram and produce a short staged version. As you can imagine each director took it in an entirely different direction and all 4 productions were as interesting as the were divergent. The process fascinated me so much that I decided to do a short video project about it I interviewed the author (Kelly) and the 4 directors and cut together a video which was also shown in the festival. Originally I wanted to make the video itself follow the theme of Italian Futurism, fast, chaotic and inevitably confusing. It wasn't pretty, so I started over. In the end though, I found a nice (I would say post-modern) editing balance of enough jumping around to respect the ideas of Italian Futurism, but narrative enough to actually tell a story. I hope that the viewers felt the compromise worked.

It's one of the first videos I ever made (with some video logging help from my friend Mike), and looking at it now, I definitely notice it's shortcomings. But I left it intact just the same.

Rachel and Neil's Wedding Video

The video slideshow I made for Rachel and Neil for the wedding on 7/7/07. Granted, the quality isn't that great considering youtube's limitations. But you get the picture. Again, thanks to everyone who helped me out.

Videos from Guatemala

I took a bunch of videos with my digital camera, and as such, they aren't the highest quality. But a handful of them were fun, so I thought I'd throw them up here. Emjoy!


Lava at the top of Pacaya:



Pacaya, as we were driving away we saw eruptions from the the top of the volcano:



We took a tour of a cave near Coban, and as we were leaving thousands of bats flew by us to get outside:



Some random parade we encountered while in Antigua. I think it was a high school performance of some sort:


Weirdest thing ever. I wish I could tell you what the hell is going on here, but I don't speak Spanish:

OK, I'll Tell You

So I'm back, safe and sound.

For those of you who didn't figure it out, I went to Burning Man. The first time for me. For those of you who have never gone and want to know what it's like, I can tell you some stuff, but really you have to experience it for yourself. There is a quote on the web page that says something like "trying to describe burning man to someone who hasn't gone, is like trying to describe a color to a blind person." It's kinda true.

I took a bunch of pictures with Doug's camera, so I have to wait until I get them from him to put them up. I'll let you know. If you want a sneak peak, just look at flickr pictures from burning man 2007.

The only thing I would enjoy more is if next year, I could get a bunch of friends to go. Think about it. Don't you need a week off in August?