Oh, sure, Finals MVP Tony Parker's 25 points per game average, and Duncan's presence in the paint helped a bit, too. But really, LeBron James never had a chance against this face:
And to my good friend Robert Boley, a die-hard Dallas Mavericks fan, I offer my congratulations. His boy Michael Finley finally won a ring! Except it was with, uh, the Spurs. Oh, well. At least Dirk's got the regular season MVP trophy to keep him company, Robert.
Now, if Shaq just decides that he wants three more rings before he retires, and moves to San Antonio... mmmmm..... the Dunquille Duo. (slobber)
...and didn't drop her! Not even once. Imagine that!
This month (and the end of last month), Danielle got to meet our good friends the Yancys (Justin, Christa, George, Elizabeth, and Griffin), and the Dugans (Robert, Sherri, Kylie. Sean wasn't there this time).
She was pretty cool with them all, though she was still going through her "stranger danger" period when Justin and Christa and their kids were over. Unfortunately, I don't think we got any pictures. Boo.
By the time Robert and Sherri visited, Danielle was pretty mellow. And she loved Kylie!
She even let them all hold her, and Robert gave her a Super-super Danielle sky ride. Robert's a foot taller than me, so she saw the world from a whole new perspective when he lifted her up. He's a big ol' softie.
We're going to see Grandpa Ron and Grandma India next Wednesday. Dad's home from the hospital after a lung transplant (!), and this will be the first time he's seen her since a week or two before that operation. We had a wait a while to see him, until his immune system strengthened enough to have visitors. But he's doing remarkably well, so we're all thrilled and grateful about that!
Next weekend, Grandma Barbara and Grandpa Mike come in for a visit. Danielle will be a regular social butterfly, with all these visitors! She's been a really happy baby lately, so we're hoping everyone gets to hear her little giggle-fests. We'll post some more pictures and videos when we visit.
Tonight for the first time, Danielle played peek-a-boo with Mommy. By the time I got it on video, she was going a little too fast, but it was still pretty cute.
Danielle had her first print audition today. Actually, we all got to go in together to audition, so it was a family affair. Danielle's been busy meeting lots of new people lately, learning how to roll really well (she loves rolling and then camping under the coffee table in the living room). She's not crawling yet, but she kicks her legs all the time like Mr. Ed counting, so she's probably getting ready.
This weekend, Danielle met our dear friends Justin and Christa Yancy, plus their three wonderful kids, George, Elizabeth, and Griffin. We all played soccer in the backyard with our giant swiss ball, but Danielle had to be content with watching. She's going through a bit of "stranger danger" phase, but she's been pretty good this week.
A couple of weeks back, Danielle's Aunt Diana came over to visit, and took some precious photos of her, including the one above and this one:
Last week, we met our friend C.C. Stinson for lunch to talk filmmaking projects. (Danielle tagged along to make sure she had creative control. :-)
This week, she also went out with Mommy and our friend Trina and her kids to the way-cool Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center. Trina took some excellent photos of Mary and Danielle there:
Next week, Danielle turns 6 months (!), which means she can go with Mommy and Daddy to the gym (yea!!). That'll be fun. We'll have to keep her from hogging the treadmill.
We didn't win. Honestly, I can't hardly believe that we didn't even make it to the second round. These folks did.
Compare for yourself. Here's ours (you'll need SOUND):
Actually, Mary DID make it to the semi-final round of the Script Only competition with her "Anniversary Party" entry (be sure to vote for her!), so that's cool. But we were really hoping to advance with the commercial entry, too.
I think the ones that made the cut had a lot more "H.E.B." logos and products screaming at the viewer from the first second of the spot, but I frankly thought that most of them were just lame.
Of course, that sounds like sour grapes, but it's not, really. I used to own a small advertising firm, and the idea that Mary had is something you'd pay a P.R. firm a lot of money for.
I seriously doubt that anyone would pay for an ad campaign based around this.
Ah, well. Maybe we'll walk our kick-butt idea to Kroger's, Randall's, or Wal-Mart.
Mary rocks. She saw this contest for a My H.E.B. Commercial, and decided we should enter. She should be an advertising exec. I know- I used to be one. Sort of. Dad owned an advertising specialty company, which I eventually took over in college, and we did contract work for several advertising agencies, too. No kidding- Mary's ideas were firm-worthy, for sure.
I think it came out well. See what you think. Turn your SOUND on.
THE ADVENTURE Anyway, she had a kick-butt idea for a commercial. So I storyboarded it, and we filmed at home all this past week, after I'd get home from work. We spent all of Saturday and most of Sunday editing it. All for a 25-second spot! But the Grand Prize is a $30,000 car, and First Prize is $5,200 worth of groceries, plus 10 winners of $1,000 worth of groceries, so it was worth it. Meanwhile, Mary had three more script ideas, so she entered those in the "script only" part of the contest, which also awards $1,000 worth of groceries.
Mary was lovely in front of the camera, as always. And Danielle, well, she was a natural. Getting the commercial planned out and filmed was a challenge, even though the finished product looks pretty simple.
The first challenge, of course, was the idea. Mary came up with a great one, straight from her own experience as a coupon-clipper (all those in the video were really her coupons!). She said that H.E.B.'s everyday price is even lower than many stores' prices with coupons, so sometimes she doesn't even bother with the coupons.
Next was the storyboarding. My buddy Joe McReynolds sent me some cool storyboarding templates, so that was handy. I sketched out 16 distinct shots, with a total of 7 different lighting and camera setups. Things evolved in the process of shooting, but at least were able to get what we needed with no pickup shots. Heck, we didn't have time for that, anyway.
Lighting was a big problem, as you can probably tell. We have 14 foot-high ceilings in our home, so the lighting tends to be pretty soft, for photography purposes. I pulled out my trusty Lighting Kit- consisting of 3 Wal-Mart brand tungsten shop lights, jury-rigged onto 2 microphone stands and a 4-foot high bar chair. Nice, eh? I did have one bounce card, consisting of the white top of a plastic Rubbermaid under-bed storage box. We spare no expense here, folks. While it wasn't perfect, at least we were able to get three-point lighting on Mary and Danielle in every shot.
Speaking of baby Danielle, Mary did a wonderful job going between caring for Danielle and acting, while I ran around madly trying to estimate the lighting setup with no body for a stand-in, and no real clue what I was doing, all before the baby's cry-bomb went off. Danielle was a real trooper during the shoot, I have to say. I think she was fascinated by the bright lights (such as they were).
Every night after shooting, we'd fly the video from our Canon GL-1 into the Macbook Pro, in (ugh) real time. Late Friday afternoon we wrapped shooting. Yea! We shot almost 90 minutes of raw footage.
Friday night we edited. Saturday we edited. A lot. Finally, we had a cut that we were happy with.
Then came the sound. Far as I was concerned, we were shooting MOS. But not really, since I left the sound running on the camera. I figured all the sound would be throw-away. As it turns out, we left most (not all) of it. I did have to massage the audio to drop out some waveforms, and level-set, gate, and compress others, but overall it wasn't too bad. I was able to do all of this in iMovie and GarageBand.
After trying to do the voice-over straight into the MacBook's built-in mic (on my porch, no less), I gave up and did it the right way. I dusted off my old Behringer 12-channel board, and a Rode NT-1 large-diaphragm capacitor mic, and plugged it into the Mac's input channel. The Rode is phantom-powered, so I couldn't just step-down with a passive connector. Unfortunately, I didn't have my stereo connections handy, so I panned everything hard left, and recorded a lopsided VO track. GarageBand handled everything nicely.
Finally, we had to lay the music bed. I searched my hefty collection of loop CDs, and some royalty-free Web sites until we found a couple of songs that worked. I pushed them together, found a good cut-point, and tapered the fade on the last one. For some reason, it extended the video by 3 seconds to do this, so I had to re-trim the rendered product back to 25 seconds exactly. But it worked.
That was the last thing that worked.
I exported the iMovie file to a Quicktime .MOV file, about 2 MB in size. But H.E.B's site wouldn't let me upload the file. It was grayed out in the "browse-select" box. Ditto for .WMV files. This despite the explicit statement that it WOULD accept those formats. [Sigh.] The site DID accept AVI and MPG okay, but my MPG converter wasn't picking up the sound. The AVI files were huge- from 50 MB to 750 MB! Anything smaller than 24 MB looked was horribly pixelated.
I spent hours trying to render down to an AVI file that wasn't 50 MB in size, but they all looked like crap. Finally, with my wimpy, lowest-of-the-low DSL connection offering me only a paltry 5 kBps upload speed, and the time approaching 10:30 p.m., I rolled over, and uploaded the fugly 7.7 MB AVI rendition. Yuck.
I was later able to get a 24 MB rendition up on the site, just before their Apache server barfed up a stack trace, then abruptly took the entire site down. But I never was able to upload the .MOV or the .WMV files. It'll all be squashed into Flash, anyway, so I guess that's OK, but garbage in, y'know?
Mary got her scripts uploaded- get this: through a Web form text box control! So much for formatting. She had to manually go back and add line spacing, etc. It was now impossible to distinguish slugs from action lines from dialog, so she had to go back and highlight all those by hand.
By 11:00 p.m. we were ready to break things, but at least our entries were safely uploaded. We had a blast doing the commercial, as did several other contestants, from what we can tell.
Later, we drove up to the town of Edna, near Victoria, where she met her Grandma Nancy Strane (Curtis' Godmother) and her husband Bill Strane for the first time.
She got re-introduced to her girl cousins, Sydney, Caroline, and Jessica Bucek, plus her nephews Broderick and Patrick.
She met her grown-up "country cousin" Sarah for the first time (watch out for that one, Danielle- she's a bad influence! ;-). Plus, she went to two loud, busy, restaurants. All of this activity, and she didn't FREAK OUT. Excellent! (Well, she was a little fussy at Nancy's house, but not too bad.)
Back in Austin, Danielle met our friend Valorie, who had just flown in from San Diego, California.
Val and her husband Tim are great people, and we've just heard that they're pregnant! Congratulations!!! They'll be teriffic parents. We're very happy for them.
So far Danielle seems pretty social, and we're glad about that. We hope that, even though she may end up an only child, she's happy to meet and play with others, including her many cousins. Sydney sure enjoyed holding her.
Jessica wanted to, but she's a bit too small yet. (Sorry, Jess!)
Our friend Diana, one of Mary's ex-students living in Austin, just let us know that she's received a full ride financial aid package to attend Southwestern University in Georgetown. We're thrilled for her! She's great people, and we're happy to see her pursuing her dreams.
Meanwhile, Mary's been called for about 4-5 acting/print auditions, which is pretty dang cool. The movie I shot in late 2005 opens at the American Film Institute Festival in Dallas (www.afi.com) on March 22 and March 31. We'll be up there for that. Finally, it seems that we MAY get the chance to be on a game show together. More on that later.
Dad and India won their battle with the insurance company, and it seems that Dad will be able to have his transplant, and that it will happen in San Antonio, instead of Dallas. What a huge relief!!!
Mom, Mike, and Uncle David are doing OK in the small town of Richards, Texas, though I'm still worried that their house is about to fall down around their ears. Maybe we can get one of those TV shows to do a house makeover for them...
David and Janie Bucek keep going, like Energizer bunnies. They just never seem to stop, God bless 'em. We had a fun visit with them last week. And Danielle has even more energy than they do!
I'm still working at TWIA, still writing scripts, and still working with local filmmakers, and still auditioning for parts. Oh, and still working on selling our rental house in Huntsville, and on remodeling our current house in Austin. And playing tennis (not very well). And still working on a new career venture (more on that later, too).
Wow. Two and a half months. It's flown by. Seems like only yesterday that Lil' Bit was screaming her head off all night long, while Mommy and Daddy walked, patted, fed, and burped her all night long, attempting to soothe her to sleep. Oh, wait- that WAS last night. Riiight.
OK, Danielle had a rough night. We've been kinda spoiled, since she's been on a good schedule lately, giving us 5-7 hours of sleep per night. So last night was sort of a throwback to our first week. Mary was beside herself, figuring it must have been the three microscopic pieces of celery in our chicken soup dinner that set her off. Who knows? We're still learning about Dani's little bowels, as (apparently) she is, too.
During this time, Dani got to experience her first Super Bowl. Unfortunately, the Steelers weren't playing in it. Boo. She, like her Daddy, was completely underwhelmed by the whole event. The Peyton Manning, yadda yadda yadda. I'm happy for Tony Dungy, though. He's a good guy. And an ex-Steeler.
We're looking forward to visiting my Godmother Nancy Strane in March. She's about the last immediate family member to have not yet seen Danielle. We've had to limit Dani's road trips until she had her two month shots (doctor's orders). But we're thinking she'll be more of a world traveler now.
We've also got several friends in Austin who haven't met her, including my best man and good friend, Justin Yancy, and his wife Christa. Hope we can do that, soon, too.
I've been knocked down with the flu this week, but hope to be back on my feet tomorrow, or Monday at the latest. Y'all take care!
Click the blog entry title to link to some photos from the two-month mark.
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