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At various times my job has involved editing motivational videos and interviews. To get a feel for the inspirational cadence of such videos my go-to reference is this satire of innovative cutting-edge gimmickry by Australian ad agency Creative Fuel in 2014:
Even two years later it hits all the right technological buzzword bullet points. Really a game-changer.
Update: On a related note, stock footage site Dissolve’s “Generic Brand Video” also works great:
The January 2016 blizzard dumped 2 feet of blowing snow on us over the weekend, blanketing our world in white, canceling classes and delaying work for days afterward.
Fortunately water, power, gas, internet, and TV all stayed on, and we had lots of food and time to cook, so we lacked for no creature comforts through the storm. With Amy working on Project Wallaby I was on sole shovel duty and got a good workout clearing the stairs, walkway, deck, and local hydrant.
The nearby marsh and forest turned picturesque.
Neighborhood snow banks piled up considerably with plowing and shoveling.
Based on an NPR story about eating snow I found a bit of powder to be a good addition to some Laphroaig.
In DC I lent my necktie to a snowman.
Snow-related road backups made Metro parking a nightmare, and my video of the line to exit a Metro parking garage made it to WTOP and Washington Post.
The weather’s a lot warmer a week later, so the giant snow banks are melting, and the sunsets have been spectacular. There’s still a lot of winter left, so this may not be the last snowstorm we see before spring, even as warm as it’s been.
More photos from the January 2016 Blizzard in the Flickr photoset.
With the announcement of Project Wallaby, here are a few questions that various people have asked — added to the introspective voices in my head:
2015 was quite a year. Biggest news of the year first: we successfully formed a baby! Amy is dealing with pregnancy admirably, now with a definite bump. Sonograms show a boy, healthy and moving. While we don’t have a name picked yet, I have code-named him “Project Wallaby.” Tentative due date is June 2016.
Other stuff that happened in 2015: in space, New Horizons flew by Pluto, while on Earth, Leonard Nimoy passed on.
We bought a townhouse, moved into it, and sold our old condo. (We did wish to wait till we were in a house before trying for a baby.) In the summer we visited Paris and Amsterdam. I was a creeper for Halloween. In December I went to Kennedy Space Center for work and visited the Atlas V launch pad, but I missed the launch itself.
Best selfie of the year: an impromptu NASA HQ shot with Deputy Admin Dava Newman and senior photographer Bill Ingalls.
Had a very artsy Saturday at the National Gallery to see a bunch of exhibitions and works that had recently piqued our interest:
Power and Pathos: a traveling collection of extremely rare Hellenistic bronzes from the 4th Century BC to the 1st Century AD.
The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L.: collection of multi-part print series by 20th Century artists at the Los Angeles print studio Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited).
Louise Bourgeois: No Exit: the late Louise Bourgeois died in 2010 at the age of 99, leaving an amazing corpus of existentialist art. I also learned her marble sculpture Germinal was once redone in chocolate.
Celebrating Photography: recent acquisitions for the museum’s photography collection, including Richard Avedon’s The Family.
17th Century Dutch painter Jacob Ochtervelt’s A Nurse and a Child in the Foyer of an Elegant Townhouse. Yes, that’s a 5 year old boy in a dress, as was the style at the time.
Over in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum we checked out the Windland Smith Nature’s Best Photography exhibit. (I’d entered a few of my scuba photos into this juried show but ey obviously did not make the cut.)
On Sunday we also dropped by the National Geographic Explorers Hall to see Pristine Seas, photos from marine conservation expeditions led by NGS Explorer-in-Residence Enric Sala around the world.
Good way to spend a relatively warm (if somewhat drizzly) day after Christmas: a visit to New Jersey’s Turtle Back Zoo.
There was a komodo dragon.
There were penguins.
There was a yawning fox.
There were running wolves.
There were pygmy goats.
And a nosy sheep.
More photos from the zoo and the long Christmas weekend in general here in the NJ Christmas 2015 photoset.
We’re up in New Jersey to spend Christmas with Amy’s family this long weekend, and my mother-in-law asked me what my favorite Christmas carols were. This was my answer, although I guess none of these are really carols:
From American composer Morten Lauridsen, his Grammy-nominated setting of O Magnum Mysterium, which I sang for Candlelight Carols in 2006.
Somewhat less religious and much more forceful, Lauridsen’s setting of Robert Graves’s Lament for Pasiphaë — a melody I would love to see as a setting for “Silent Night”:
One of the songs we sang for this year’s Candlelight Carols was The Work of Christmas, Dan Forrest’s setting of a poem by Howard Thurman:
And from the mists of history, a medieval chant of a legend of Saint Nicholas, Reno Erat Rudolphus:
Merry Christmas!
Early December I went down to Kennedy Space Center to shoot some video for work, and got a chance to do remote camera setup at the Atlas V launch pad for Orbital Cygnus CRS-4. (Unfortunately bad weather delayed the launch so much that I had to leave before the successful fourth attempt.) This was a replacement craft for the one that was lost in an explosion last year, launching on an Atlas V rocket while the Antares is redesigned with new engines.
Amy’s mom is having a lot of fun with her Cricut; here are some squirrel pilgrims (squilgrims).
Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws was a feast as always, with all the standard classics, and also some very interesting sweet potatoes. I don’t normally like sweet potatoes but this recipe with vanilla and marshmallows (!) was amazing. Brussels sprouts were also a highlight, as was the day-after-Thanksgiving turkey carcass soup.
On Friday we went to upper Manhattan and walked around Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, which we hadn’t visited for over a decade. It was a perfect day for it. For lunch, New Leaf in the park. Super-busy that day, with a long wait, but well worth it for a pork belly and fried egg sandwich.
Medieval art at the Cloisters is always a treat: I’d been looking forward to the unicorn tapestries after seeing the ones at the Cluny.
In the late afternoon the gardens afforded a lovely view of a golden sunset over the Hudson.
I also got to test out my “new” DSLR, a used Sony NEX-3N body, compatible with my current set of E-mount lenses. Other than that, I got to see more Leave It To Beaver than I have since childhood. Weekend was over far too soon.
Short teaser video I storyboarded and edited for NASA Office of Education’s Digital Learning Network, focusing on the theme of “Surviving and Thriving on Mars”:
Most of the footage was recycled from the 50 Years of Mars Exploration commemorative video and Mars: Journey of a Lifetime, but there were a few choice clips from other parts of the NASA B-roll library, all cobbled together with Adobe Premiere. I also had our intern make a 3D spinning Mars globe and some background textures, which I threw together into visual flourishes for the text titles with AfterEffects. Music is Fractal Planetoid by *imp*.