A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Listen Up!
Well, it seems that all of my professors have collaborated against me to make sure that at the end of the semester I have absolutely no time to do anything besides the necessary and classwork. Let's see, I've got final exams in all my classes starting two weeks from now, I've got another quiz before the finals in two of my classes, projects that are due both Tomorrow and on Wednesday in two classes, and my Solid Modeling teacher is still and idiot and thus has assigned us the semester project with nowhere near enough class time to complete it. Good times indeed. My brain is turning to liquid from merely thinking about it.
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*Brain re-solidifies.
So, other than that hell, I';ve got the hell of trying to find a job STILL. Everything I've tried for so far has fallen through, however, I've decided to look up and do research on the walls of MCC because usually those are the classic good student jobs like canvassing, fed-ex shipping, and other. So I've got the info for a fed-ex place, and that's what I'm going to try first.
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Jugglers On Juggling. Yeah, I'm struggling with it right now, because I can't find not only the time to do it now between all this college and job bull that I have to do, but I'm also completely drawing a blank as to what new episodes should be about or what to say. I've got a few ideas, but for all of them I can't seem to come up with more than 2 or 3 points for each. It's frustrating and yeah, I'm seeing what I can do, but for the moment I'm throwing it on the back-burner. I'll work on it if/when I have time or inspiration. Otherwise, I'm busy with other things.
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Tech.MCC, the one other thing ruling my life right now. Well, not really, I'm only thinking about it the day before the meeting, so yeah. Last week's meeting was the Videography meeting (part 1), and it was probably the biggest turnout of the semester AND the best meeting of the semester. I'll go into details in a few minutes because I really want to talk about it. Until then, this week's meeting is sure to be just as good. Otherwise, that's it for the main updates.
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Oh, and also. My next [Juggling] Series video is going into it's final editing stages. I should be having a release date set before the end of the month, and if all goes well I'll have the video up and viewable before WJF5. WOO!

Daily Life:
With Tech.MCC, I had the idea to do a meeting focusing on teaching the basics of making a short film since I decides back during the summer to make the meetings more like workshops, and I'd been saving it for when I thought I could get JT to help me with it from the start. Of course, me not being in regular contact with him, the meeting slipped further and further back, until I realized that there's really only three available meetings left to do it on, so here I am doing this meeting entirely on my own, with only the preparations that I'd made the night before.

So my ORIGINAL plan for the meeting was as follows. I would start the meeting by getting people to suggest exactly what type of scene they wanted, whether it be a fight scene or a comedy sketch, or whatever. From there, we would draft a storyboard and plan out the shots. Then go out into the hall and shoot the shots, come back into the room and convert, then edit the video together and put it up. That was my original concept for the meeting.

I'd decided the night before the meeting that we would do a one punch scene and I would just have them suggest camera angles and get them to think about why the lighting and camera angles was good. Basically try to get them thinking like videographers. So I'd introduce the concept, then work up the first 4 or five shots on my own to give them an idea of how to come up with shots, then guide them through with whatever shots and angles they'd come up with. Then we'd find out who was acting things out and shoot the video from there in the room. Why the room? because I remembered that night that my main digital camera had a cable that plugged in and converted into standard VGA cables that could plug into the projector, that way everyone could see what the camera was seeing AS we were shooting. Brilliant, eh?

So we star off the meeting in exactly that way. I explain the concept of the one-punch scene and draw up the first few shots on the story-board. Then I give them free reign to suggest whatever angles they wanted for the next set of shots, and they really started getting creative. I was helping them along by reminding them of how we had to maintain the setting and position of the actors throughout the scene, and about how we can cheat the viewer, so we REALLY got dirty with it. It was awesome. I was acting out where the subjects would be as the person suggesting a camera angle would be showing it using the camera on the projector, we'd act out exactly what happens where, and discussing where is the cell phone the guy was holding from shot to shot and how does the actor stay in position from one shot to the next. It was all really good.

So after the story-boarding was done, JT walks in. Perfect timing, we decide that it was a perfect time to break because we literally just spent an hour and a half story-boarding this scene out and explaining EVERY principle of videography that I knew, so I gave them a while to absorb it all as me, JT, and one of his film-making friends came in to join us.

So now that we've taken a break, it's time to start shooting, and now things get interesting. Gordon jumps in and gets as many people to handle the camera as they wanted, and seeing as how I was the lead actor and one of the other members was doing the falling over and stuff, we had practically every member of the club doing something from JT suggesting slight tweaks to the camera angles and his friend giving me acting tips, to Gordon suggesting two people hold onto the camera for one shot because it needed to be a really steady angle. We spent at least an hour shooting all this great footage, and then all of the sudden we look at the clock and see that it's already 5:00 and time for the club to end. So I end the meeting there and say that we'd begin the next meeting by editing the video together and uploading it at the beginning. It's going to be just as good I think, so yeah. That was probably the best meeting we've had all year, and actually I dare say the best meeting I've been a part of since my joining the club. Even JT said that we did a better job actyively producing a video than the AV club has done the entire semester.


Juggle This:
I can barely believe it, but I've not only managed today to do my first seven ring flash, but within the span of one hour from my first ATTEMPT at a flash, I got 11 catches of a full cascade! You see, it's feelings like this that remind me of why I love juggling so god damned much.

So I've been wanting to work on seven rings for a LONG time now, ever since I first qualified 7 balls, but have never found a good 4 ring grip that would allow me enough comfort and accuracy to actually throw it at all. So for a while I wanted to make myself a holster, but never really felt the pressing desire to. I just figured I'd make it one day and not do 7 rings for a long time. Then suddenly, I was looking around in my prop box the other day and realized that I hadn't used my 3 fat rings in YEARS. So I immediately decided that I wasn't going to hesitate, I grabbed one of them and brought it down to my basement workshop to tinker and turn it into a holster. My first attempt was to slice the ring into a 1/3 section and see how that works. Of course it failed miserably, so I went straight to getting a 180 degree section. I sliced the ring in half with my regular hacksaw, then carved out the inner section with my precision saw, ad it absolutely worked beautifully. The ring stays in very nicely until I take it out, and it comes out very easily, but only when pulled upwards in the right way. Perfect. So I drill a hole in the plastic and attach the hook necessary to hook it onto a belt loop, and away I go to try it out.

Of course, I wasn't going to wait to try it out, so I run outside and give it a go, only to realize that the winds that night were way too much, even for clubs it would have caused problems, so I suck it up and save trying it out for today.

Absolutely perfecto on the very first use, and I'm flashing seven rings within ten minutes. And I've got nothing more to say except that that made me so happy that I'm still in a good mood despite my film class being complete hell because my camera broke halfway through a film shoot, then having my second roll of film not advance in the rental camera so that I develop a blank roll, then having to produce a contact sheet and bs my way through an assignment because I can't go out and re-shoot it within the remaining 20 minutes before it's due.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150