Yesterday I headed out to Tahquitz again and climbed six pitches. It looks like I’m moving steadily into trad climbing. That makes me stoked.

I still have a special place in my heart for canyoneering—it combines two of my passions after all: rocks and water. Sunday, Karl and I ventured into Little Santa Anita Canyon. It is filled with several short falls and a few slides. Apparently, it can be a very wet canyon when conditions are right. Unfortunately, rainfall has been lackluster this year. Thankfully, it had rained a few days before and water levels were adequate.

I received a new GoPro HD Hero 2 a couple of days before. I tested it out in the canyon. So far, reports that it is optically superior to the first generation camera seem to be true. We shot a fair amount of video and I’m sure some of it will end up in an edit some day. Below are a few select screengrabs.

It’s been a while. This year has turned into a busy one. Much of my time is, unfortunately, spent sitting at a computer, but I do manage to get out a fair amount.

That is indeed Fabio in the photo above. I do meet celebrities every once in awhile, but I try to avoid being that annoying guy who begs for photos and autographs. There are, of course, exceptions. When I discovered that the man who shirtlessly adorned every romance novel in the 80s and 90s, the man who recorded amazing work-out videos and romance cassettes, the man who appeared in hilarious bit parts on many B-rate TV series, the man who hocked butter that wasn’t butter, the man who defeated a goose with his nose on a roller coaster would be at my local Whole Foods Market—I knew fate had smiled upon me. I also knew that my dearest pal, Bryan Nelson, would never forgive me if I passed up this serendipitous opportunity. And so, Erika and I traveled to the Glendale Whole Foods just so I could meet Fabio (and apparently buy his whey protein powder). Who says dreams don’t come true?

Besides being shackled to a computer and admiring Fabio, I’ve also been keeping to a relatively frequent climbing schedule. I attended the Red Rock Rendezvous in Nevada again this year. It’s an annual climbing festival filled with clinics, events, and vendors giving away lots of great stuff (Mammut gave me a free $90 headlamp!). Despite having our tent destroyed by high winds again, we had a great time. My highlight this year was my multi-pitch clinic where I got to go trad climbing for the first time. If you aren’t familiar with the term, trad is traditional climbing, what some consider “real climbing.” It’s the type of climbing where a group starts at the base of a rock and places protection as they climb up bringing the rope up with them. As they make their way up the rock pitch-by-pitch, the follower removes (or cleans) the protection. I took on the role of follower. Leading a trad climb is the dangerous part and requires experience and practice. The guide was our leader. We climbed four pitches on a 5.8 (moderate) route. Besides Erika and I, a few of our friends came to the Rendezvous this year also. Maybe we’ll get even more folks there in 2013.

One of the nice things about attending the Red Rock Rendezvous are the cool people you meet. I met a guy named Mark who has been climbing nearly as long as I’ve been breathing. He offered to start taking me trad climbing. I’ve been trying to move into trad, but it’s difficult since I’m the most experienced climber amongst my friends. The multi-pitch clinic at Red Rock and Mark’s offer were two great opportunities that graced me on the same day. Two weeks ago, Mark made good on his offer and we headed over to Idyllwild and climbed a six pitch route on Tahquitz Rock. It was a low-grade easy route, but snow had fallen earlier that week. The base was covered in snow and four of the six pitches also had a bit of snow on them. That made the ascent a little tricky, but dealing with the snow was a valuable piece of  additional climbing experience. Mark and I are heading back tomorrow.

I’ve also been doing as much canyoneering as I can squeeze in. I’ve run Rubio Canyon multiple times in the last few months and Karl and I ran Little Santa Anita last weekend. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a permit to do Mystery Canyon in Zion this summer.

In closing, a huge thing that happened in the last few months was the completion of “The Many Maladies of Marty Mitchell.” This is a short kids’ show I shot in my living room three years ago. It was finally finished and premiered in March. We held a Butcher Bird Studios Screening at the Goethe Institute on March 16th. We showed several of the projects we’ve worked on together and with others. We closed the night with the premiere of “Marty Mitchell.” It felt really good to finally be able to show it to people, especially those who helped make it happen.

I received an interesting email in December. An ad agency in Northern California had seen my video Hesperia Swimstream on Vimeo. This is a video from the summer of 2010—a few months after I had purchased my first GoPro—where I played around with the camera for the first time underwater. This ad agency was creating a 2012 ad campaign for Coldwell Banker using footage from various sources featuring families enjoying their homes. They asked to license some of my footage and now Erika and a couple of her nephews are in a few national commercial spots.

Coldwell Banker: Kids
Coldwell Banker: Backyards
Coldwell Banker: 30 Second

I’ve also been working on a few local commercials with a company called The Agency. I was responsible for the graphics, animation, and compositing in the above commercial and the following commercials for CCA and Living Spaces.

CCA – Fitness Trainer
CCA –  Phlebotomist
CCA – Counselor

Living Spaces – Special Order
Living Spaces – Special Order (Spanish)

I squeezed in a few videos with my buddies at Nexon as well. Here are a few of them below.

MapleStory: Aliens (Character Animation & Titles)
Maple Love Story (Character Animation & Compositing)
MapleStory: Ellin Forest (Animation of Titles)

There are several other projects ongoing or recently completed I’ll hopefully be able to post (or at least mention) soon. For those of you sick of seeing these video/work-related posts, fear not! I’ll be posting about some recent outdoor excursions shortly.

February 7th will be the three-year-anniversary of the Marty Mitchell shoot in my living room. Friday I completed the final tweaks and output of the last scene of the show. And it only took three years. Well, to be honest, it didn’t take three years, but it was stretched out over that time period. Thirteen and a half minutes of animated characters interacting with a live-action kid in animated worlds. Finally. Finished. Well, I am being a bit hasty. It isn’t truly finished. Ben Chan is currently scoring the soundtrack and we still need to review audio. Then. Then, it will truly be finished. Well, I’ll still have to output a master file, then create discs and compressed outputs, blahblahblah. But then. Then. Well, then, I need to screen it and maybe enter it in festivals and….

Anyway.

The “Light Teaser” is embedded above. Check it out and prepare yourself for the main event…coming soon (I hope).

It’s that time. More video posts!
Want to know what it is like to work with me? No. Well, watch the video above to find out anyway.

Here are a few other videos I contributed to with VFX and motion graphics:
MapleStory Demon Slayer Audition
Combat Arms: Belly of the Beast 

Combat Arms: Bunny Hopping - This one I directed

That’s enough of that.

And so the year the world ends begins. What better way to celebrate than by jabbing sharp metal into icicles and ascending them? The Extreme Things Adventure Club has visited the Ouray Ice Climbing Festival a few times in the past, but I have never gone. It is a bit pricier than other excursions partly because it involves transport to and lodging in Colorado. This time Erika and I decided the cost was justified.

Nine of us boarded an Allegiant Air jet Thursday morning, January 5th. I had never heard of them and they are cheap so I was a bit skeptical. They do charge for everything: beverages, snacks, seat assignments, etc. But, it was fine. I don’t have many expectations or requirements for air travel, especially for a flight under two hours. If they service areas you intend to travel, it is worth looking into their prices. We landed in Grand Junction, CO in the early afternoon and headed for a large cabin in Ridgway—right next door to Ouray (pronounced yoo-ray). The cabin was quite large: three bedrooms, two stories and a huge basement being converted into more living space. The incomplete nature of the basement made it seem rather creepy and a certain member of the group refused to enter it alone.

We had two days and a night to visit the area. This gave us enough time to visit the festival, partake of the night life, soak in an underground hot spring (known as the Vaporcave), visit Telluride and its ski resort, and meet Telluride’s local rasta. Oh, and drive through the mountains at night in a snow storm.

Thankfully, there were enough spaces available at the Ice Festival that all of us were able to try ice climbing. A few of us enrolled in a six hour seminar and had a full day of ice climbing instruction. I would later recognize one of our instructors while flipping through one of my climbing magazines—Jack Tackle. Apparently he is a bad-ass mountaineer and alpine climber. I thank him for belaying me on my first ever ice climb. Ice climbing is similar to rock climbing, yet drastically different. It uses many of the same principles, but it is entirely dependent on your abilities to wield its gear: crampons and ice tools (think pointy boots and pick axes). Although I hadn’t climbed before, I ended up in the intermediate class. This worked out well because we spent more time climbing than talking. I was able to climb six times and finished each 50-60 foot route. On my last two climbs, I did begin to feel some exhaustion in my arms. I tried a variation up a thin section of ice on my very last climb that was psychologically and physically taxing, but rewarding. I am certainly interested in climbing more ice.

Ouray is a tiny mountain town with an inviting atmosphere. We spent a fair amount of time in O’Briens Pub, but my favorite place was Mouse’s Chocolates. Their chocolates are fantastic and locally made. During the festival, Mouse’s was selling large chunks of chocolate decorated like ice climbers.

Overall, not a bad way to start a new year.

The beginning of a new year always means an inundation of “best of” lists and montages reflecting on the year before. Shortly we’ll all be so sick of both we’ll be vomiting iridescent rainbows of turkey and electromagnetic radiation. Never one to miss an opportunity to contribute to mass public puking, I too have put together a GoPro retrospective of last year. Watch it above.

It has been nearly three years since we converted my living room into a makeshift greenscreen stage and shot the live-action footage I would need to create “The Many Maladies of Marty Mitchell.” Finally, it is almost done. My buddy, Ben is working on the sound design and music and I am tweaking the visuals. We are weeks away from a finished project. The video above is a short teaser. If you want to know more about the project, visit  ManyMaladies.com.

On an unrelated note, below are a few videos I worked on that went live recently:
Blabberbox 5
MapleStory Cannoneer Audition
MapleStory Mercedes Audition

It seems all I post about nowadays are video projects, sorry about that. Hopefully I’ll post on some other topics in the near future.

The video embedded above is one I am pretty proud of. It is a short trailer for a Facebook game called Zombie Misfits. I wrote and directed the live-action segments. The game team was nice enough to give me access to their animated game assets so I could modify them and composite them into the live-action footage. I also handled the color work and motion graphics. Steve Moreno did a great job of shooting the footage we needed so we could make a pretty cool commercial. The game is pretty fun too. If you like tower defense games, check it out.

Shelf Life is an ongoing comedy web series about disgruntled toys living on a tyrannical young boy’s shelf. I handled  the open and the credits. New episodes are going up every Tuesday for the next few weeks. Find out what your toys really thought about you.

Instead of embedding a crapload of videos in this post, the rest will be listed and linked to below:

Puppet Power – Nick Veneroso and I helped my friend Mike shoot some puppet-making videos a while back. I also put together some of the motion graphics. You can see a sample video here or buy the series at the website.

Movember Guyde – I was responsible for animating the elements created by a graphic designer for Break’s Movember infographic.

MapleStory Legends Trailer – Motion Graphics & Cannoneer Animation
Sudden Attack Trailer – Motion Graphics
Wonder Cruise Trailer – Crooner Character Animation
MapleStory Cannoneer Audition – Visual Effects (first of three videos)
MapleStory Ascension Trailer – Motion Graphics

That’s most of the recent stuff. Back to work.

Above is a short video encompassing some of the experience of hiking through Subway in Zion National Park in early September. It’s a damn good time if you have the knowledge and will to do it.

I recently got back from Zion yet again—this time—backpacking the Narrows route for my third time. It is always rewarding, although, I felt the pain afterward in a way I hadn’t before. Too much time at a computer being sedentary is wreaking havoc on my body. Thankfully, I was able to renew my gym membership last week so I can get into proper shape again.

I finally decided to give sleeping outdoors tentless a try while on the Narrows trip. Thankfully, it didn’t rain and it was an enjoyable experience. I’ll have to do it more often. I also led my first multi-pitch sport climbs in September (two pitches each). Hopefully, I can start devoting some more time to climbing and advancing my skills.

Work has been pouring in, which is great, but I’ve had little time for much else. Balancing life and self-employment is a challenge I certainly haven’t mastered yet. I’ve completed several projects recently. Some of them will be live soon and posted here for the world to deride.