May it be so…

Great video from one of my favorite bands, mewithoutYou.  Their latest album, It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All A Dream! It’s Alright. is a gem.

Unfortunately, embedding is disabled, but please take the extra second & check this out:

The Fox, The Crow, & The Cookie

the double eagle

last night i had the privilege to hang out with 130 middle school students all night long at our annual all-nighter called “That Thing.”  we had a blast at the Kent State Rec Center for the night playing basketball, dodgeball, soccer, swimming, rock climbing, eating and generally being goofy.  as part of the night, we shared who Christ is through a little video that my pal, Derke Urey, helped me make.  Take a look & let me know what you think…

Melting…

the Reverend Doctor contest round 2 (click here for explanation)…use this creatively in a presentation of some sort and get free things from me:

ht to ysmarko

Battle Royal

The holidays are a time for many things, one of which is a great time for connecting with students.  No school = lots of free time = fun to be had.  With this in mind, a group of 8th grade boys raided the Domanion (my dubiously named house – “the domain of man”) for a Lord of the Rings mini-marathon. 

Lord of the Rings is rated PG-13 for “epic battle sequences.”  Which, interestingly enough, are the parts of the movie that most held the guys attention.  We quickly coined a few terms…everything amazing became a “battle royale” (royal being pronounced “roy-elle”, as opposed to “royl”)and everyone amazing became “so & so is totally hard-core.”  In between the on-screen battle royals the guys created a few battle royals of their own, with spilled glasses of lemonade being the only casualty.

I called it a mini-marathon because we didn’t make it all the way through.  We decided to go for the extended versions, which chart out at 3:30 (Fellowship of the Ring), 3:45 (Two Towers), and 4:10 (Return of the King).  Our gathering started a bit later than we’d planned & was interrupted by a few spontaneous games of foosball, so we charged our way through about half of the series listed above, clocking out a bit over half-way through Two Towers when parents started showing up.

Emerging…

the Reverend Doctor contest round 1 (see tab above)…use this creatively in a presentation of some sort:

Batman: In the Light of Day

a couple of my students from the Chapel wanted to make a movie this summer (one of them, Brad, is awesome at editing/directing) so this is the final product…

my debut as the Joker…

by the way…this is actually a sequel to the original one they made a year ago called “Batman and Vanilla Face”…some of the jokes may make more sense with context clues from it. Then again, they might not : ) Either way, here’s the link.

danger…

a study in music videos

sorry it’s been so long. rather intense last week. on the other hand, not really sure many people take a look here that often. so if you hadn’t noticed i hadn’t posted recently, then i’m not sorry for you. but if, for some strange reason, you do check in here regularly and were disappointed by my lack of material, to you i am deeply apologetic.

anyway.

music videos usually interest me very little. i find them largely uninspired and often incoherent. so i don’t usually watch them. however, this isn’t because i don’t believe that there’s incredible potential in music videos. such a genius mix of two complimentary art forms…swelling sound and moving pictures.

today i stumbled across a music video made for a song by a band called Menomena. as to the music, i’m still undecided as to if, why, and how i like their style. but i found this video absolutely entrancing because of it’s creative genius. yes, perhaps it is somewhat incoherent in the sense that i don’t know that there’s a disctinct message. but the genuine uniqueness of it is engaging. so you’ll find that as the first video here. following that, i thought to myself, i wonder how this song would be changed by a different video accompanying it. so, employing my friend youtube, i found two other versions. the one, found second here, is beautifully shot and has some intriguing artistry (interestingly shot on 16mm film). the third, and final video i found largely uninspiring, but kept it solely for what i thought was a brilliant shot found from 1:54-2:08, where there’s three distinct modes of transportation laid atop one another. i just like the flow of the shot…as an amateur videographer/student of cinema i saw in it a flash of brilliance. and i did find that each version gave me a different understanding and aftertaste of this sing, “wet & rusting”. i’m interested to hear what anyone thinks…about the song, about the movies, about the genre…

(the final one won’t let me imbed…you can see it by clicking here).

law & letters

in the vein of playgrounds and criminal activity (see my prior post), i bring you this wonderful clip…