My Top Music Picks for 2011: (in no particular order)

The Antlers: Burst Apart
Highlights: Corsicana, Tiptoe, Hounds

M83: Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
Highlights: Midnight City, New Map, Splendor, The Bright Flash

The Naked and Famous: Passive Me, Aggressive You
Highlights: Young Blood, No Way, The Sun, Girls Like You.

Cliff Martinez & Various Artists: Drive
A masterpiece from beginning to end, the best soundtrack to come out this year.

Tycho: Dive
Highlights:  Adrift, Coastal Brake, Daydream

Lights: Siberia
Highlights:  Flux and Flow, Banner, Suspension

Porter Robinson: Spitfire
Highlights: Spitfire, The Seconds, Vandalism

Foo Fighters: Wasting Light
Highlights:  Rope, These Days, Dear Rosemary

Coldplay: Mylo Xyloto
Highlights:  Paradise, Major Minus, Princess of China

Being that this was his first time having dinner in a restaurant on his birthday, he didn’t know what to expect. After polishing off a Kid’s Crab Legs dinner and half the items from mom’s plate, it was time for dessert.

The staff brought out a warm chocolate chip cookie with ice cream on top, with a single candle lit while 3 servers sang Happy Birthday to Brodie.

Overwhelmed with happiness, Brodie couldn’t contain his emotions and was brought to tears. He was so very appreciative of such a simple gesture of a single dessert accompanied by a song for him. As parents both Tracey and I welled up (she more than me) with pride. It’s nice to see such a simple thing have such a huge impact on somebody.

Brodie saved the candle and the bill (The server wrote him a happy birthday note on the back) and they now reside in the “secret” drawer in his room, where he keeps things that he feels are important.

On the way home, still feeling emotional, Brodie let us know that this was one of the best days of his life.

It’s the simple things….

I love you Brodie.

My Favourite Photos I took in 2010

Also, in 2010, I directed 5 music videos (3 releases, 2 still in post) and a short documentary

I also released my first iPhone app, called RimRoller (www.rimrollerapp.com) and also completed iOS apps for The Walter Greztky Hockey Tournament, and Youth Sciences Canada.

Looking Forward to 2011…

The Social Network

Inception
Can Christopher Nolan do a bad movie?

The Town

Toy Story 3
Gotta hand it to Pixar to create one of the most memorable and moving sequences in a movie this year.

Tron: Legacy
When the original Tron was released, my father took me to see it, and I was blown away watching it.  Fast forward almost 30 years, I took my son, Brodie to see Tron: Legacy.  We both loved it.  My favourite moment was during the light cycle sequence, Brodie leans over and to whisper how cool the movie was.

I still have net seen the one movie that I’m dying to see this year, 127 Hours as it is not playing anywhere in London, Ontario.

Honourable Mentions:
Kick-Ass
Scott Pilgrim vs the World
Black Swan
The Book of ELI

Looking forward to 2011, the movie I’m looking the most forward to is Kevin Smith’s RED STATE.

Hot Chip’s set was evenly balanced covering the high point of the past 3 albums.

Hot Chip Set List: (highlights bolded)
And I Was A Boy From School
One Pure Thought
Thieves In The Night
One Life Stand
Over And Over
Hand Me Down Your Love
Shake a Fist
We Have Love
Hold On
I Feel Better
Ready For The Floor

Some video highlights taken from my iPhone of Hot Chip’s Set:

Going into the show I knew that Hot Chip would be a solid performance, but had doubts about LCD Soundsystem. I’ve been a casual listener of the band, and only own 1 of their albums, I was blown away by their live set, and stayed way longer than I intended.

LCD Soundsystems Set List:

Dance Yrself Clean
Drunk Girls
Get Innocuous
Daft Punk Is Playing At My House
I Can Change
All My Friends
You Wanted a Hit
Tribulations
Movement
Yeah
Throw
Encore:
Someone Great
Losing My Edge
Home
Encore 2:
New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

Wrapping up, in hindsight, this was one of the best concerts that I have ever attended. More pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eplatero/sets/72157625259084150/with/5123459025/

This year really was a step up. I was given access to take photos from the bench and from within the rink after the game. Having that close proximity to the players allowed me to get some great shots.

Spending the weekend down in Brantford also gave us the opportunity to meet a lot of the players on the other View Askew teams.

Aside from taking pics, I also designed an iPhone app for the tournament that featured all of the View Askew teams. I will do a post on the app in the next few days.

I just wanted to drop a huge thanks to Ming Chen he really is the MVP of the View Askew organization.

All of my pics from the tournament, can be found here:

Day 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eplatero/sets/72157624205809682/

Day 2: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eplatero/sets/72157624218270814/

Day 3: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eplatero/sets/72157624218380378/

This afternoon I had a video shoot that started off very well. There was a slight hiccup when we noticed that we forgot 1 half of our wireless lavalier mic across town, but somebody went and grabbed it with 2 minutes remaining before the main focus of the shoot that we were hired to do started.

After two hours of shooting, I looked at the second camera and noticed some green banding across the image…. basically meaning that the footage from the second camera was now unusable. Because of the time limitations of shooting DSLR, for corporate presentations, we run a two camera shoot and offset the start times so we can deliver a seemless video file covering the entire event.

After seeing this image, I was very distressed.

Notice the Green horizontal banding across the image?

So this means that we are going to have to send a camera off to Canon to get repaired, and I’m going to have to work some major magic in Final Cut Pro to deliver this video.

10 Minutes after this, I received a phone call that clouded my head even more.

After driving back to the office, I thought that it would be best if I took the cameras back with me and apply the new firmware update and see if I could resolve this green banding issue.  When loading the camera case into the car, I put my iPad on top of my car.  THIS IS SOMETHING THAT I NEVER DO!!!

Driving home, I heard a rattling noise on my car, and looked out the rear view the and saw something black fall from my car.  It took a few seconds but then I pieced it together….. IT WAS MY IPAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I stopped the car, turned around to pick it up, got out of the car just in time to watch a pickup truck run it over.

It was truly one of those “NOOOOOOOOOOO” moments.  The thought actually crossed my mind about running out in front of the truck, but it all happened so fast.  Hoping for the best… my heart sank as I picked it up, and turned it on to a white screen with coloured lines.

.

I honestly think that the iPad did survive the actual fall from the car, the apple case i bought does provide some protection.

The back of the unit is very dented.

So, the perfect end to the day.

I really did enjoy having my iPad, even for 12 days.  I guess lesson learned, NEVER put anything on top of your car!

Music (Original Score): Up, Michael Giacchino WON
Animated Feature Film: Up, Pete Docter WON
Costume Design: Nine, Colleen Atwood NO
Writing (Original Screenplay): The Hurt Locker, Written by Mark Boal WON
Actress in a Leading Role: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side WON
Visual Effects: Avatar, Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones WON
Cinematography: Avatar, Mauro Fiore WON
Film Editing: The Hurt Locker, Bob Murawski and Chris Innis WON
Sound Mixing: Avatar, Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson and Tony Johnson NO
Art Direction: Avatar, Art Direction: Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; Set Decoration: Kim Sinclair WON
Best Picture: Avatar, James Cameron and Jon Landau, Producers NO
Actor in a Leading Role: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart WON
Documentary (Feature): The Cove, Louie Psihoyos and Fisher Stevens WON
Sound Editing: The Hurt Locker, Paul N.J. Ottosson WON
Makeup: The Young Victoria, Jon Henry Gordon and Jenny Shircore NO
Actress in a Supporting Role: Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air NO
Actor in a Supporting Role: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds WON
Foreign Language Film: The White Ribbon, Germany NO
Documentary (Short Subject): China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province, Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill NO
Music (Original Song): The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart), from “Crazy Heart” Music and Lyric by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett WON
Writing (Adapted Screenplay): In the Loop, Screenplay by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche NO
Directing: Avatar, James Cameron NO

itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id354102052

What we did was, using a logitech quickcam, we took a picture of the live performance every 15 seconds, then uploaded the pic to our webserver and ran a javascript to refresh the image every 25 seconds.  For the audio, I had to contact a company in California to let us use their RealMedia streaming server.  This fed the webpage with the audiofeed that the user first had to download real player.

Here is our original blog post about the event:

February 14th: Johnny’s Rocket Room. Our live show on this web site. This show had a couple of new events for the band. The first being the debut of the newest song to the reel live set, “I hold crush” and the second being reel’s first live show on the internet. We would like to thank the following people who helped make the show happen: Nick Linedecker at Kern Internet Services in Bakersfied, CA, Copyland Systems for supplying the hardware to make the show be broadcast. We would also like to thank the following people who helped to promote the show: Chris Gordon and Karen Murray from 103.1fm “The Hawk” for having us the program “London Live”. Janice Zolf at BBS Communications for the spot on Entertainment Desk on TV-London. And last we would like to thank all the people who came out to the show and tuned in on the internet.

The blog post on WayBack Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/19970422164648/www.execulink.com/~reel/reelnews.htm

Here is the CFPL news coverage:

Sometimes, it is nice to walk down memory lane….

Tracey and I attended a great Q&A session with Kevin Smith @ Roy Thompson Hall last night.  Kevin was really on top of his game and had some great stories about about his experience directing Bruce Willis, and his fun take on Avatar.

While Kevin’s “wake and bake” attitude certainly hasn’t dulled his sharp wit, it certainly has effected his style of dress, i mean a bathrobe now?

We look forward to visiting Brantford again this year for the Walter Gretzky street hockey tournament!

The rest of my pictures from the even, are here.