Kidnapped by Pirates

I post this from the floor of the Chicago Airport Southwest Airlines ticketing... what do you call this? Ticketing area?

I've never been to Chicago nor did I plan on visiting it tonight. That may strike you as a bit unusual. How often do you not mean to be sitting on a cold floor on the other side of the country only to find yourself twelve hours later doing just that?

-Unless you've been kidnapped, you might not expect it. But I guess I've been kidnapped today by Southwest. How jovial.

On with the post.

Here's what I wrote joyfully today on the plane to Denver, before all the trouble happened. It is now 3:04AM and I am still in Chicago. Rock on.

HOW I BECAME NOT A SCIENTIST

Why are Children expected to be scientists? Honestly, the ratio of scientists to not scientists in the real world is staggeringly disproportionate to the ratio in public schools. I'm not sure they're aware of this. As important as scientists are in our world, why was I expected to be one? More specifically why did I have to come back to the school on a Thursday night after already being there all day? And of course, What was I supposed to do my project on?

I don't know why Science fairs are such an established tradition. I suppose many a top scientist found his (or her. We do need to be politically correct afterall. This is my public school experience we're talking about.)

Anyway I'm sure many got their first taste of the fame and glory to be had in scientific inquiry from gatherings like these. The road to Nobel prizedom begins in elementary school.

Mine however did not.

I don't remember how this became my project, but I ended up with one of those stupid tri-fold poster boards, a rubber band, a chicken bone, and a penny.

The only marker in our whole house at the time was an old dried out whiteboard marker. It was brown. Scratched in what looked like disappearing ink at the top of my board was the word "acid".

We were supposed to come up with an experiment to test our hypothesis, which happened to be a big word for "what you think will happen." I think we spent three days learning what it meant. There was a test. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire science fair was really just a ploy to make sure we didn't go through life not knowing what a hypothesis was. How glad I am to know its definition now.

I decided a good experiment would be to soak each of the items minus the tri-fold in a cup of vinegar for a week. My hypothesis, scribbled in pencil because the marker didn't work anymore so I put it back in the junk drawer, was something like, the bone will be rubbery because that's what someone said would happen. The penny was supposed to corrode and the stupid rubber band was supposed to get brittle. That's pretty much what happened but a lot less of it than I'd expected.

I had each item sitting out on my table in front of the dumb tri-fold board . By the time things got going, the bone had dried out and wasn't really that bendy anymore.

I stood there feeling like an idiot while trembling grandparents and civic minded citizens came around to pretend interest in my presentation and tell me I should try the same thing with coke.

I was actually quite surprised and somewhat disturbed to discover how many adult members of my community had taken to this unusual activity apparently effected by some mania in decades past. All I could imagine were pre-TV age children running around splashing coke on things and then waiting in stunned silence to see what happened. I thanked them each for the advise, but began to wonder if I looked like the kind of kid that did this sort of thing for fun.

"You do realize I'm at school right now." I wanted to say. "You don't seem to understand. It's 7:30! I was here all day. And in exactly twelve hours I'll have to be here again. I have to because someone decided to make it against the law for me not to..."

At the end of the night they handed out ribbons.

I didn't get one.

My teacher did come around and snap a Polaroid of me. She handed me the photo and walked away. As I watched it develop I realized how stupid I looked standing in front of a presentation on how to break rubber bands over the course of a week.

Isn't science a glorious thing.

MALK! an example of coolness

For more Julian Smith go to  juliansmith.tv

Yet another shockingly high quality example of how the world

 of entertainment is changing thanks to new

 technology.

Granted, not everything out there is that good, but when we didn't have the technology, movies like this one were shot on crummy hi8 and mini dv cameras. So your audience was limited to family and friends. You'd get some laughs and pats on the back but that was it. The gap between your own work and what you saw on TV was insurmountable. 


The gap is closing.


 Higher production quality suddenly pushes good work forward into the realm of the real world of entertainment. We respond to the shallow depth of field, the sharp focus, the the lack of hot spots due to a wider ability to soak up light. All of it combines into something we  subconsciously take more seriously. That's the future. 


Sure not everything's going to be up there. 


But now the good stuff can be. 
Here's to progress.




If you make things, make them.

Jump Around

STILLS PRojECT from Ben Brooksby on Vimeo.

Here's a little project I did to experiment with still frame images from my Canon 7D. 


The thing can shoot at 8fps which means I can composite great shots like the two pictured here to the right. I wanted to see if I could put them into a timeline and export as video. Found out it was pretty easy. I added some photos I took at the local Draper Days fireworks show where I got tired of the "here's my summer" photos and started opening the shutter for a few seconds at a time and waving the camera around to get a more abstract image.  Anyway when I made them  a video file, they danced around really nicely and I got the idea to lay them over the rest of the video like burnt scratches in film stock. So I did and then I thought, hey why not use some of the shots I've got at 60fps? So I played around with speed ramping those with "optical flow" in Motion. Then I thought I'd add some titles so I did that too and liked it. If you don't like it, leave a comment for everybody to read. Thanks and have a happy day... or night as the case may be.

bouncing off things on the freeway

Now as you might expect, the action described in the title isn't one most of us prefer to experience on our summer journeys. However, judging by the number of TV shows out there that think they're bringing us something we can't see already on YouTube, its something most of us will watch for fun. 


 I don't know how often you've noticed, but those concrete dividers they put on the freeway to separate the two sides are covered with scuffs. I've always wanted to see a car slide along the thing, but naturally, I've also not wanted to see it  since it could end with a pile-up in which I'd be a main participant. 

Yesterday I was privileged to finally see what I'd been wanting to see ever since I was old enough to breathe. 


And it happened safely.
 BEHIND me!


 I was driving along mindlessly when I happened to glance in my rear view mirror. At that precise moment the mini van behind me drifted up against the concrete to relax for a while. A minivan's construction and seating arrangement is such that the occupants are clearly visible from the front whilst being completely ignorant of outside forces from within. It was like watching a short play on a little mobile stage.


 As the people inside rocked violently around, the driver appeared calm, in fact unaware of anything unusual going on. The loud scraping noise that no doubt accompanied this adventure  also seemed to go unnoticed. His wife apparently felt differently judging by the way she frantically started looking around and opening her mouth a lot. This was more than likely accompanied by some screaming.


 The van swerved away from the wall and into the other lane where to everyone's relief, no one was driving. The wife continued to flail and gesture whilst looking around, opening and closing her mouth. The van swerved back, but a little too hard and that darn scraping noise was back. 


 The minivan eventually settled back to a natural normal course the way a golf ball bounces to a gentle roll. The husband remained calm, almost comatose through the entire ordeal. They might have  pulled off the freeway to inspect the damage, but I'm not sure they even noticed since they continued on driving behind us for several more miles as if nothing had happened. What a surprise to arrive at your destination later that night and realize someone's violently keyed your car... While you were driving. incredible.

Impossibleness

Many years ago, there was a little boy who wanted nothing more than a horse. That's actually a lot to "nothing more" about. But he knew this and so his desire hurt even more because there would never be a way to fulfill it. His yard was too small and the lack of fencing meant he couldn't have a dog either... his second biggest hope in life. He did end up with a couple of gerbils but I digress. The horse!

He knew he couldn't have one in a million years. That joy was reserved for knights, cowboys, and Indians which he noticed got the best deal overall because they also didn't have to attend school or wear clothes.

So the only way he would ever enjoy anything close to horse ownership would be to draw them.

But horses are hard.

Horses are agonizingly hard to draw. No matter how he tried he couldn't seem to make the blobby figure on the page resemble the regal form in his mind. His horses looked like bad Halloween costumes for bumbling detectives. It was all this little boy could do not to go out and sulk.

Luckily his mother knew a little something about art and decided it was time to teach this boy to draw horses. But what might have been a simple drawing lesson turned into something that would change his approach to life forever. That's what I'm going to talk about today.

Down the hill from our house was a little pasture with a couple of old swaybacked ponies. I was very proud of knowing they were swaybacked. You had to know a lot about horses to know that's what you call old horses. We took a couple of note pads and went and sat down in the gravel on the side of the road. Mom patiently showed me how to look at a horse and notice the more basic shapes that make up the entire horse. If you've ever looked through a “how to draw” book, this is what they teach you to do. I still remember the order. We started with the oval curve right there in the crease of the hind leg. The horse was facing left. My knights would ride left forever after. She showed me how to lightly pencil in the swayed back and barrel of the horses chest followed by the curve of the neck and then the head.

In all of this I was learning to see. For the first time in my life I noticed that the hind legs were turned backwards on a horse. No wonder my previous attempts had looked wonky. Drawing a horse, the impossible task, was suddenly doable when I learned to sit down in the dirt and study what was really there. And so a little kid learned to do something he'd wanted almost as much as his own horse.

The bigger picture is the way this experience changed my life. My parents fostered a culture of creativity. We didn't have much money, but luckily we had a few things that mattered. There were some tools in the garage, a sewing machine in the sewing closet, a pottery wheel and kiln we were lucky enough to never find a buyer for, a kitchen with an oven. There were a few things there and we were lucky enough to find some surplus materials here and there. There were big roles of fabric from Grandpa in the closet, some scrap wood from down on the tide flats. Some rope, some newspapers, some clay. Library cards: Eight of them, and weekly trips to dig through the mountains of books at our local branch... maybe they were more like hills but we checked out a lot of books.

Basically it all boils down to one very important life lesson:

If you want to do something impossible, you only need to sit down in the dirt for a while and study it out. There's always a way to accomplish things. You may not get it right the very first time but find your passion, dive into it, and let that drive you on to greater accomplishments doing things other people say are impossible because they're too hard.

Learn. Live. Live. And Learn.

Happy Birthday Dad!

7th of July Celebrations Continue Weeks Afterward!

Everybody knows the joy of wearing a Kool-aide smile and blowing stuff up. Here's my brother Aaron blowing up stuff with his home made canon. It doesn't get any better than this, and yes, those are rabbits in the background.

I think we can all learn a valuable lesson here.

1. that you should always have reliable combustables around.

If matches won't do, try piles of gasoline soaked rags.

A hair dryer can usually be employed to get a flame out of something like that... Or simply fill the tub with water, slosh some gasoline over the top, plug in the hair dryer, toaster, or clock radio and toss it into the tub.

Make sure the home electonic has been turned on before doing this as experience has shown that doing so after can result in hand and arm damage including loss of life.

Then you can simlply roll up a newspaper or towel and transport the flame via homemade torch to the backyard where your fire cracker awaits.

and 2. Never eat flamingos. They taste like pink chickens.

The management takes no responsibility for the views, opinions, and or bad advice displayed on this blog. If you are insulted, offended, or otherwise dandered up, please leave a scathing comment or email care of dublbz@hotmail.com so we can post it for the entertainment of our readership. Thank you and have a pleasant life.

Caution: do not ingest. May cause blindness if inserted in eye socket.

How to be Romantic

The long Awaited Answer to Your Love Questions

Dear Freaky in Florida,

I know exactly what you're going through. This kind of thing happens all the time to people your age. But because you're young the rules are a little different.

First of all James- were you the one that asked to be anonymous? Well, its okay, nobody'll know your last name is Badia-Suarez anyway. Why the hyphenation though? You aren't married yet. We're going to fix that. First off can I say you're very lucky to write in when you did. If you hadn't you would have missed the opportunity of a life-time.

Let's start with puberty. The girl in your story judging by her height is well into the throes of womanhood. You however are what, 4 feet or so? The day will come when that changes for you. You must avoid the most common "kick-yourself-later" problem ever, the problem of ruining a good relationship before puberty because you thought you weren't interested.

All guys have a beautiful woman they've lost because they didn't do anything when they had the chance. She flirted, he ran away. Now post-puberty, that means after, she won't have anything to do with him because he branded himself a coward before things first started rolling. Now the poor guy's stuck with whatever ugly undesirable girls are left over.

My advice: Get while the gettin's good.

The best way to prove yourself to this girl is to do exactly what you don't think you should do. So I'd say, wright her a song and perform it in public. Make sure lots of people are around, that way she'll know you mean it. Instruments are optional although they do pump up your romanticness by about a thousand points so if you can't find a guitar or a clarinet, at least bring a pair of spoons or something. As for lyrics and tune be original. Don't just do that song from The Little Mermaid, I Want More, or whatever it is. Every other guy does that.

For best results use this as a template, or just copy it exactly since its worked on thousands of girls:

and bring a bouquet of flowers: poppies, carnations, ferns, anything works.

So there you go James. You might think its weird right now, but believe me, in a couple more years unless you're a really late bloomer, you'll be thanking me. And maybe that hyphenated name will get another hyphen.

Freaked out in Florida

A while ago the management here at the Ben Brooksby blog put out an open invitation to our readers for questions regarding anything that might be on their troubled minds. After sifting through the mountains of prank mail and false pretenses we've finally recieved one searingly important question all the way from Lone Cabbage, Fish Camp, Florida.

Dear Mr. Brooksby

I had a question for you. I guess I just need some advice. I'm going to be in sixth grade this year but right now its summer so I'm not anything. I don't like school because the people there are morons and there's this girl that I think likes me. Let me explain. I had to give a report on something I found interesting. Most of the other kids did theirs on Justin Bieber and why Brittany Spears should stop marketing her body to people our age, I mean what is she now? 40? So I did mine on tigers because they're awesome. Well this girl in my class decided I'm some kind of tiger enthusiast. Every day she comes up and stands over me( Oh yeah. She's like six feet tall) and asks me, "How are the tigers today?" Then everybody laughs at me because they're afraid if they don't she'll think they're trying to be a hero or something like the time she beat up the deaf kid for not joining in. I don't mind being laughed at so much but I guess she figured that out cuz then she started elbowing me in the face a lot whenever she can, like in the recess line, the lunch line, the bus line, and every time she gets up to go to the bathroom or sharpen her pencil. But I can live with that too. The worst part is that now I'm in a summer program because my teacher thought I was getting beat up at home and she's in it! But the worst of the worst is that yesterday she passed me a note instead of an elbow on the bus. When I got home, I opened it and it said, "Will you be my boyfriend?"

I don't know what to do. Luckily I get a few more days before I have to go back because of the Seventh of July weekend, but I really need to know what to do because if I answer wrong she might kill me, but I don't know which one that would be. Can someone please help? This is an emergency!

-Freaked out in Florida

Happy Seventh of Seven

Today is the 7th of 7-10. You won't believe now but its 7 past ten. Don't walk on the stairs only run when your scared and think well of the lilies I'm growing upstairs in the attic my dear where the beastly Gronk stomps with his hairy bean pillows and candied monk bunks which he pilfered with angst from the high mountain alps of the French riviera they cried "What a louse!"

So be careful my friend be careful indeed put finger to nose if you think you may sneeze for now we descend into the dank moldy air of the Giant GuNatt lair beneath my deep freeze-

And so the tour continues past all of the fiends that live in my basement, my attic, and eaves. You'll never believe the sights that you'll see if you pay a buck to enter the halls of Greensleeves. So take my advice, and just stay outside this lovely holiday. Happy Seventh of July.

The first time I ever played with color

Many of you will think this video is unwatchable... fine.

I post it as a symbol of something we all should strive for.

This was the first time I ever played around with color grading. Ever. Now that's what I do for a living.

For four years I'd been playing with vhs deck to deck editing, but there was no way to make the footage look different although I tried various methods.

But within a few short years, Mini DV hit, computers got a lot faster and more affordable, I got out of High school, and all of a sudden things that weren't possible before were.

a similar change is taking place right now.

I remember rendering the first few clips and playing them back. This little project back in 2004 filled me with an excitement I've been recapturing ever since. some of you will scoff at this, but others will remember similar break throughs on their own projects when you learned how to do something you never thought you could do before. That's what I'm talking about.

There are lots of different people saying different things about the new DSLR's and the digital revolution. The fact is that technology is changing again, and things that were never possible before suddenly are. People in the industry scoff at it sometimes because they don't need cheaper smaller cameras. But on the ground floor are thousands of individuals like you who don't have all the tools.
SCARCITY BREEDS CREATIVITY- So what does this mean?

It means that a lot of people are going to spend lots of money on cameras and equipment thinking they're going to make hollywood quality feature films- and then fail. not because the equipment lacks the power but because they do.

But some won't fail, because there's something rooted deep inside of them that fills them with excitement and drives them forward. They'll create new ways of doing things and new techniques with the tools they have- and they'll succeed.
Why?
Passion.
You do what you love because you have to. Its like breathing for them.

So here's to progress, passion, and creativity. Never surrender.