It’s been a while since I had a good road trip. Now in the last week and a half I’ve gone to Seattle and back. I’m not a short guy so you’d assume that sitting in a car for 12 hours with 3 other humans and one dog wouldn’t be my idea of a great time. Well you would think wrong. Seriously, get with it. The ladies are beautiful and dear to my heart, and Skip (who’s even taller then me) makes sure everyone is always having fun.

What do you do for 10 – 12 hours in a car? You catch up. You make sure you know everything that’s going on in everyone’s life. You brainstorm amazing business ideas – and most of all you laugh until your cheeks hurt. You can also snuggle with the dog – she likes that.

There are some great books out there about road tripping and traveling out on the open road. It’s no secret that it’s one of Americas favorite pastimes – and we were basically the family version of “Travels with Charlie” (honestly I don’t remember a damned thing about Travels with Charlie; I assure you I read the book though). For me the appeal is getting out of the city and urban sprawl, and eventually hitting the golden rolling hills of California, the climb into Mount Shasta (somehow I always miss the meat bonanza in Shasta City) then the green valleys and lush trees of Oregon. Eventually entering a city that is nothing like the one I live in. I love when it’s a little warm and you can drive with the windows down, the music up, and you sing at the top of your lungs. That’s a road trip.

It seems to be in my blood. I remember traveling time and time again with my dad from LA to the bay area. My dad was so good at keeping me occupied on the trip up. We sang, I would draw, he once even let me plug my piano keyboard into the car stereo to pound out some tunes. As I get older I definitely take note of becoming sore after staying in the car for to long. I also feel bloated. When we came back from Seattle I instantly wanted to go to the gym (so I did). I’m also very conscientious about my environmental impact. I remember reading once how much prehistoric energy from the growth of forests, the perfect circumstances of decomposition with added pressure and heat in the earth that it takes to create oil. Then the massive amount of work and energy it takes to pull the fossil fuel from our earth (at least this is how I remember it : “The Weather Makers” by Tim Flannery). Then we burn it without a thought. This is hard for me to swallow.

So as I grow older I find myself considering new things about the road trip. How long am I able to stay in a car before I want to jump out. Could I even jump out once my legs have cramped up? How much gas am I using and what effect will it have on our planet? Should I stop at the black bear diner for a milkshake or will that just add to the bloated feeling? These seem to be things that I’ll have to keep considering as time continues to push forward. In the meantime I’ll reminisce on the trip to Seattle and Back. The first one with 1 (and only) wife, 2 friends and a dog. The second with 1 (same one) wife, and one great friend. It really felt good to be on the road again.

Reasons:
1. BP is a texbook psychopath – If i’ve learned anything from cyclops, it’s don’t trust psychopaths.
2 – 7. Six reasons not to trust BP – You had me at six.
8. BPGlobalPR: This is the real PR firm for BP; it even says it in it’s twitter account. They tweeted this;
“So YOU want to see pictures of dead animals covered in oil and WE are the bad guys!? Sick bastards. #bpcares”. Think I’m making that up,

Here is the link. Proof.

9. Because of Sean’s blog post.

Here are some of the results of the latest Quiksilver Cypher ad campaign. Kelly Slater, Julian Wilson, Jeremy Flores, and Dane Reynolds were flown down to that lovely little secret spot in Mexico, along with the biggest entourage ever of filmers, photographers, and general support crew to pull this off.

Super slow motion, high speed cameras, and some playful video editing make for a compelling presentation.

If you’re interested in watching the video I made for last years Le Web, it’s here.

Claire and I have been together for over 7 years, and I have footage from every year. Because of the advancement in technology in the last 7 years I’ve been able to save most of the videos I’ve shot on hard drives, the trick has just been tracking them down. I could do a whole other post on the difficulty of keeping all of your media accessible, and even another post on the advancement of digital media and the headache of transferring video into one unified format – that’s for another day.

In the back of my mind was this idea that whenever I was to ask Claire to marry me I would then start editing a video that I would surprise her with at our wedding. Here alone was the biggest difficulty. It is not easy to keep a secret from the person who knows you best, that you live with, that you share everything with. I spent hours tracking down old hard drives, finding old footage on tape, recapturing, and formatting – not to mention the time looking for music and editing. I had kept a journal near me during the whole process taking notes whenever they came to mind – Luckily, having an idea journal near me is normal and was never questioned by Claire. This is where I would write down scenes I envisioned, songs that I could use, and extra footage that I remembered existed somewhere.

I can’t lie and say this video was just for Claire. In end all that really mattered is that she enjoyed it, but when I was making it I had heaps of other people in mind. Obviously I wanted my friends to like it too. The real trick was making a video that could be enjoyed by anyone. The best I could do was to tell the story of the last 7 years of our lives together, the adventures we’ve gone on, the time we’ve spent with our friends, the beautiful city we live in, and our family whom we love.

While the video may have taken me a long time to produce, it was fairly easy with such a good subject to work with. Obviously this video is dedicated to my best friend and love of my life, Claire.

I hope you enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed making it.

Now for some notes, and extras for you.

Music in the order in which it was played.

Happy by NeverShoutNever!
“17 years” by Ratatat
“Land Down Under” by Men at Work
“Great Unknown” by Watercolor
- Trying to track it down – (the Church video)
“La Del Ruso” by Gotan Project
“Scenic World” by beirut
“You and I” by Ingrid Michaelson

These are links to full videos that had clips in Claire’s video. Not everything was online, but this is a pretty good start.

The Church
Land Down Under
My Day in Under a Minute
New Years/ Birthday Haircut
A Fast Week
Paganello 2007

About 2 weeks ago my coworker Thomas Knoll and I were sent a forward from our boss who had received an e-mail from Julia Roy about the Fiesta Movement. (I love when my blog posts start with sentences like, “my fiance’s sisters boyfriends sister works for the Golden State Warriors” – sounds super legit.)

What is the Fiesta Movement you may be asking yourself… or asking me?
Well it looks as though it’s Fords ad campaign for the release of the Ford Fiesta schedualed to release in the US in 2011.
What it really is is a very smart ad campaign by Ford to get people to post videos on YouTube and send it to all their friends, Tweet about it and write blog posts like the one you’re reading.

What we have to do: Send in a video saying why we would be good “Ford Agents”.

What we did: We just posted a video of us driving around San Francisco and talked about how cool we are. Which is not very (cool that is)…

Also worth noting:
Ford posted our video on their site 2 days after we posted it.
We made teasers for our video, 9 in all, they’re short, but decent.

More importantly then winning the Ford Fiesta, Thomas and I think we should try to enter all the video competitions we can find online and make a show out of it. If you have any leads be sure to let one of us know.

EXT:JONES AND ELLIS

So the first problem with my story and my journalism is that this is only my perspective, which I can tell in about a sentence. I hear a pop, we stop abruptly, bus driver yells “fuck”, we drive about 20 more feet, quickly, bus driver yells something like “oh shit”, jumps out of his little bus driver booth onto the floor, a passenger runs to the back of the bus and dives to the ground, everyone on the bus dives to the ground.

That really doesn’t tell you much. Everything else kinda has to be assumed and or made up. For example at one point when we’re all laying on the ground with our heads covered a passenger asks the bus driver if he’s all right:

Guy “Hey bus driver, are you all right”
Bus Driver: “Yeah -is everyone else alright”?
Passengers as a collective “Yeah”
1st guy: “Think you can drive us out of here”?

Remember at this point all of us are still on the ground covering our heads.

Bus Driver “You Fucking drive us out of here, we’re being shot at”.

So at this point Im on the ground because I heard a pop, the bus driver slammed on the breaks, jumped out of his cubical. I never saw anyone with a gun, or a bullet hole anywhere.

I did see a guy laying on the ground when we got off the bus, about 4 police officers around him, and one was cutting his shirt off, which I assume was to stop bleeding from a bullet wound. Now comes the second craziest part (the first being that we were on a bus that was supposedly shot at). By the time we get off the bus at least 4 cop cars are already there, our bus is already being taped off with the magical do not pass this line, protective, yellow caution tape – and a police officer tells everyone to leave the scene. Basically for all we know there is a shooter on the loose, and he wants us to walk through the Tenderloin away from where all the police are. That didn’t sound safe, and it didn’t sound fun, we did it anyway.

I shoot video for a living, but right now I’d like to present to you some of the worst footage I have ever taken in my life, I guess I would be a pretty horrible war time camera man. Below is the footage that I took from laying on the floor.

You know those photos of your dad with a thick beard taken 4 years before you were born. They’re grainy, and the color is filled with amazing oranges and yellows, either because photo technology was still working out some kinks, the colors actually looked like that back then, or they were trying to match the colors of the wallpaper and couches of the time. Whichever it might be… LOVE IT!

I hope that 27 years from now, when I look back on the photos of me and my friends today, they are grainy, lost of color, and we have beards.

I think what i’m getting at is that my new D90 is “way” exciting to me right now. I don’t know where to begin with it, but apparently I like making the photos look like old photos.
This particular photo is of Drew, it was taken in 1937. Here is another photo that I’ve played with that was taken in the late 60’s maybe early 70’s, I can’t really remember.

If you know of any decades of photography I should try to create please let me know. Also, you should know I do portraits for $150. What you get is a photo of yourself. I’ll even make it look like an old photo for an additional charge of $20 or a wheel of smoked Gouda.

Another photo of Claire shopping!

For Claire and I, Christmas #1 is tomorrow. We’re celebrating our first Christmas at my moms house in Pasadena, I’m sure it’ll look a lot like the traditional Christmas – Snow on the ground, wind rattling the windows, kids sledding outside.

Probably not, maybe more like our Christmas in Australia 2 years ago.

Hopefully we’ll have some photos of our LA Christmas in the next day or two. Then up to Portland where the scenery may be more “its a Wonderful Life” like – not that it’s not a wonderful life down in LA, you know what I mean though.

Win a TC50 Pass!