11/30/2003: "November 26nd, 2003"

So, tonight our video club met to do a little preveiw of projects we've nearly completed so far. I showed my current draft of Kite Club, which still needs work but is coming together nicely. People seemed to enjoy it and I am beginning to think I could have a version ready to enter in some film festivals in Janurary.

Jeff came over last night to record the voice overs and it went ok, although there is a bit of a low grade hiss that you can hear when the volumn is cranked. I'll probably want to redo it. We had planned on capturing the audio with firewire but it wasn't in the kit it was supposed to be in so we had to use a mic and it wasn't great.

Mike Maas had volunteered to help with the audio since that's his area of expertise, only I want to learn how to do it on my set up at home, because I have a lot of software and peripherals and I want to learn how to use them since Mike won't always be around to help with the audio. On another note, Jeff got to be my first ever audience for playing a song on the musical saw and he seemed pretty impressed by it. That made me feel great. I'm considering taking it to the party I'm going to tomorrow for Thanksgiving. Would that be lame?

When I got home from the meeting tonight (we're still working on a name, "Hidden Alien Productions" was considered since we include this little green alien from Toy Story in all of our shoots...) anyway, when I got home from the meeting which was a lot of fun, I had 17 messages on my machine. At first I panicked because my grandpa is in the hospital with the flu, but it turned out it was my friend Ann Marie Mueller from high school. It was very cool because she was on her way to a Duran Duran concert and she had her cell phone with her and she had left a message for every song in their concert!

Yes, I was a HUGE Duran Duran fan back in 7th and 8th grade. The reason she thought of me is because I had had a party and created a music video of "Girls on Film" with all my girl friends. We were all dressed up like Duran Duran and we had instruments and one girl (Micheala Gallagher as I recall) was dressed in lingerie and we had a photographer taking pictures of her... it was pretty funny. It made me remember that I have always been interested in film. I used to make a lot of little movies growing up, and music videos etc. I had forgotten all about that, and it was cool being reminded of that tonight after getting kind of jazzed up about this work we're doing in this video club.

It also reminded me that I had created a library in my garage when I was a kid, and I'd taken books from the whole neighborhood and put ownership stamps in them and then checked them out to kids with due dates and fines and everything. It was a short lived endevor, but it cracks me up that I grew up to work in a library. My mom actually lived in the basement of the Holt County Library for a year or two as well. I guess I have the lig in my genes.I can honestly say all I've ever really wanted to be was an artist and/or a director and I'm just happy that even if I'm not making a living at it, it's a part of my life.

I heard from Thomas in London again. We seem to have a lot in common including that we're both learning to play guitar and have similar tastes in music, and that we both have a thing for Grizzly Adams (more of wanting to "be" him than be "with" him.)

He is actually German, but has perfect English, that always amazes me. I've been speaking and studying Spanish forever and I feel I'll never be that fluent in it. Especially with idioms etc. I am more concious of the expressions I use, like saying something "wasn't my cup of tea". That's kind of a strange thing to say if you aren't familiar with the expression, no? Anyway, it has been fun emailing back and forth with him. He is still planing on taking photos of London but hasn't found anything that has inspired him yet so I will be patient for the photographic muse to strike.