Category: music & art
Bonsai!!
I have always loved bonsai trees. I’m not sure why, but they are just so uniquely cool. Maybe it’s my affinity for the Karate Kid movies and how Mr. Miyagi worked on one throughout. It’s definitely not because of the one that my wife gave me and I, er, uh….killed. Sorry baby. But regardless you will definitely enjoy this video by sound designer/producer Diego Stocco and his musical bonsai:
DJ
Sunday Morning Listening – Michael Gungor
A true artist and wonderful musician, Michael Gungor of the band Gungor. If you haven’t checked out his album, Beautiful Things yet, then you are seriously missing out. This song was performed at Relevant’s studios. Check out this song then pick up their CD:
start small
photo by frederic sean
DREAM BIG!! This is one of the catch phrases I love to live by. You? I love to dream in large numbers of people (not large people) and how they will be forever changed if they could just hear a bit of my music, read my lyrics, or listen to my wisdom. And the more that can hear ME, the better?
I work with various artists (filmakers, musicians, dancers, photographers, webdesigners….you get the idea) and the one thing that seems to hold true for them all is that they always want their art to reach 1,000’s of people. They want their area to be GINORMOUS before it even starts. That’s a good sentiment but sometimes a little unrealistic for a first step. What if we just took it a step at a time and started small?
A filmmaker friend of mine recently completed a beautifully artistic film based loosely on his life. The story could have affected so many people if he would have promoted it online, pitched it to a big studio, or tried to sell it to the masses. But instead he submitted it to a local film festival. It just missed making it to the finals in the short film category. So how successful was he? He would tell you that he had a semester’s worth of film school through making the film. Oh, and he was just invited to show it at the opening of that same film festival. The one he didn’t win. This Thursday many people will see it, many people will be affected by small steps.
Maybe twitter can sum it up for us:
To a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next 3 feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon – C.S. Lewis
Don’t misunderstand. DO DREAM BIG. But first – take those next 3 feet of road.
DJ
my tilt-shift perspective
A few months ago, I happened across a band’s blog where they had these really unique looking photos. When I first saw them, I thought I was seeing pictures taken from the Mister Roger’s Neighborhood intro (you remember how the show had all those miniature houses leading up to Fred’s house). This mystery effect causes full-sized photos to appear as pictures of miniature scale models simply by “shifting” the perspective in a photo.
Interesting.
Later, I googled it and found out that this effect is actually called tilt-shift. So later that night, I went on a bit of a tilt-shift binge (thank you flickr!) obsessively searching for photos. The next day I was so taken with tilt-shift that I completely forgot about it….
Until yesterday – I was doing some work, and suddenly the interweb took over and brought me to this site – artandmobile.com – and their FREE TiltShift app for your computer (you can also purchase their app here, if you have an iPhone). So I took a regular old photo from my Blackberry, and turned it an über-cool photo using the TiltShift app.
Here’s the before photo:
And here is the after (using the TiltShift free app):
Pretty cool, huh?! I showed theses pictures to a few friends, and it opened up some interesting conversations regarding perspective and life. I won’t give you the long drawn out versions of our talks; I’ll just give you the thoughts and questions that drove these conversations:
1. Go Huskers! Okay…that was actually just my thought. Here’s a few others:
2. Maybe all the life issues that seem HUGE today would actually be quite small if we stepped back and took a different perspective on our situations? Or maybe if we took on someone else’s perspective? Or maybe if we just let the little things (the ones that take too much of our attention) fade out, blur, and take a back seat to the central focus of our lives?
That’s just my perspective – what’s yours?
“There Is A Redeemer”
Last week, in response to the Easter Sunday setlist post, I promised that I would eventually post a video of my son and I singing “There Is A Redeemer” by Melody Green-Sievright. Thanks to our whole wondeful TV crew (and specifically James Powell, who finished this up today) for capturing this moment. Here we are singing together:
There Is A Redeemer from danieljohn on Vimeo.
or click here to view it on your mobile device.