Why Nobody Likes Santa

Every year thousands of Children are placed unwillingly on the laps of men dressed this way to fulfill a desire no child has.

Here's the problem: A parent will say, "Santa Claus is at the mall. Do you want to go sit on his lap?"

The child nods his head about a million times on the way to see Santa, but the lap is there, and screams of agony ensue.

Why? Didn't the child want this?

No.

When a parent says, "Santa Claus is at the mall. Do you want to go sit on his lap?"

All the child hears is, "Santa Claus --mall -- - want?"

Maybe a mathematical equation will help to illustrate.

According to grown-ups the North Pole is full of toys, and Santa's basically King. So you're telling me that this old man with nothing better to do than give away free toys is sitting at the mall right now waiting to take orders?

What sane kid's gonna turn that down?

But then you get there and its not even close to what you expected. The guy smells like someone else's stinky laundry detergent. There's no flying deer anywhere and when you ask him about it, he gives you some lame excuse about them being back at the north pole because the elves wanted to play games with them.

If you had flying deer, would you leave them at home?

Who is this guy?

And why can't he stop laughing?

So as you begin questioning the legitimacy of the experience he tells you to sit on his lap.

Fat chance Dirt Bag!

So there.

I wasn't any more interested in sitting on an old man's lap than any other kid in America. 

The only reason any of us ever waited in that dumb line was to make sure we got on the "Commercially Successful Toys" list so we wouldn't end up with that boring wooden crap the elves were always making in movies.

This was honestly supposed to be worth staying up all night for.

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.

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!

How to be Romantic

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

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.

'Twas Beauty Killed the Beast- or - how to kill monsters

Marsupials are a strange breed. They have fur like mammals and give birth to live young, but prematurely according to our standards. Marsupial's come with their very own baby bags with which to carry the prenatal young until such time as they decide to jump out and start fending for themselves. Of course the majority of their diversness resides on the far side of the world on and around the Continent/Country of Australia. That goes without even being said...

North and South America's fossil records indicate that we had our fair share of Marsupial diversity as well but at some point in history the ecosystem was inundated with mammals and the marsupials failed to compete for food and water and so died out.. All that remains of their furry baggy kind are a few squirrels I didn't know about and neither did your sixth grade science teacher, aaaannnnd- the North American Possum or Opossum depending on how old the book is. Unlike the bunny faced fully fuzzified kind of marsupials you find down under, these natives of forests, sheds, and local dumpsters resembles none other than the R.O.U.S.'s of Princess Bride fame. Rodents of unusual size. In other words: Giant Rats.

Yet unlike the giant rats of S. Morgenstern's classic tale, these dog sized creatures have more in common with reptiles than rats. Exchange those heavy incisors for a set of alligator teeth and the fuzzy hair you might expect for the mangy white snaggled hair of a swamp witch and you'll start to get an idea of what the North American Possum looks like.

Now dispensing with any further explanation- the story...

I know a young lady in Tennessee. She lives about 40 miles from Nashville on a small farm. Two nights ago she heard something outside her home. It was her chickens. A week or so ago she built a new coupe for the young hens she'd been raising this year. It so happened that a large ugly Possum had discovered the coupe and had decided to make it his own personal buffet.

This girl isn't very tall and isn't very wide, but what she lacks in stature she makes up for in what a famous southern lady calls being "fragile as coal trucks" or as I like to say "having a face like a dump truck.," but I digress.

Behind the back door of every home this girl's ever lived in sits an old aluminum baseball bat. As far back as she can remember its never been to a game, but two nights ago it played quite a different game. Armed with nothing but this bat, this young lady of which I speak ventured out into the yard gripped by a sensation only a disrupted grizzly bear commands when a tourist feeds her cub Tabasco sauce. There perched on her henly house loomed the dark figure of the biggest swamp gator rat you could ever imagine.

With a mighty heave she let that bat swing as hard as it'd go! A deafening "Ping" rang out across the farmyard followed by the thump of a heavy hairy body armed with four sharp sets of burly claws! Up came a mouth full of razor sharp teeth and a guttural hiss of deranged anger and hate!

There's nothin on this earth so awfully fierce as a possum that's just been distracted from a free meal! But before the beast could get its footing to leap at her she let fly with another hard overhander! This time the PING was accompanied by the crunch a skull makes when it starts to give way. But the Possum doesn't run so much on brain power as it does on raw hatred in the bloodstream and that was now running at a hundred and ten percent!

It snapped its crooked jaws and hissed its fierce black breath at her! But something deeper than a natural protective nature had taken over her otherwise gentile demeanor.. Her heavenly blue eyes now glistened black. Her breath came in heavy gusts like the ones from a bull that's about to charge. A bead of sweat ran down her cheek. Judgment day.

The Rat monster leaped towards her but was pummeled to the ground by an earth shattering shower of hard metallic clanks and crunches the likes of which you've never even nightmared about! The chickens huddled in stunned silence as the killer became the killed.

By the time she'd finished with it, there was more blood on her than on the carcass and the only bone left in tact was the wishbone although the buzzards made quick work of that yesterday. Rather than waste time with a Christian burial which would have been sacrilege anyway since beasts like that don't hail from above, she hauled what was left of it out to the highway where it could stand as a warning to all evil creatures and demons and maybe dissuade some of them from meeting a similar fate.

The bat is safe.

back behind the door

sitting in silence

waiting...

waiting for the time when it can once again strike a blow for justice!

Justice and a marsupial-free continent!