So this is it guys, in three weeks I will be on a plane to Beijing, China to start my semester at Peking University.  Throughout the application process, they kept asking me about my goals and objectives. I meant what I said about changing perspectives, cross-cultural exchange and all that, but truth be told, I have another agenda. The following are my real study abroad goals and objectives:

1. Eat a lot of food (really, I have no excuses!)
2. Buy some ping-pong shoes (bowling shoes are sooo passé)
3. Infiltrate a counterfeit Vibram Five-Fingers racket
4. Stalk/Say hi to the REI Adventures “Treasures of China” tour group while they’re in Beijing
5. Eat a lot of food
6. Introduce China to P-Funk (I plan to give new meaning to the “One China” policy)

YOUR SUGGESTIONS:

1. Drink lots of bubble tea! Buy lots of weird Chinese stuff for super cheap! – Jess
2. Acupuncture! – Kyle
3. Go to Korea – Su

This is my final project for Multimedia class last year.

I had wanted to animate one of my favorite songs, Time is Tight by Booker T and the MGs. The graphics were all hand water-colored and animated frame-by frame in Final Cut Pro. I spent a lot of time in the multimedia lab matching it all up, but I’m very happy with the result.

The blue represents Bass. The yellow streaks were meant to suggest a strumming guitar. The green and orange splotches are percussion. As the Hammond B3 is the most dynamic instrument in the piece, I had a hard time figuring out how to represent it, but I decided on the banded accents and background color changes that you saw.

I used photoshop to isolate the shapes and set transparent backgrounds, and then as mentioned above, I placed each frame in Final Cut Pro.

Overall, I’m very pleased with how it turned out. Of course I would still make some changes, but now that I’m not taking the class, I don’t have access to Final Cut Pro.

I hope I did Booker T and the MGs justice.

Let me know what you think!

I’ve been making paper wallets for a few years now. Here’s my latest. I used some Japanese paper treated with map sealant for extra strength. Click through for more photos. I’ll probably post pictures of my retired wallets soon.

BUZZ-SAW-FOR-A-HAND FLOATING KILLBOT?!!! RUN!!!!

Today I felt like making something with the containers I’ve been saving from all the box-lunches I eat. The material is the perfect thickness for crafts (see nap light). I’ve wanted to make some robots pretty badly; here’s the first. Click the picture for more photos, or go here.

Here‘s my first set of photos from Europe. I got these in and around Grindelwald, Switzerland. I’ll add some more descriptions and photos later. Enjoy!

A few weeks ago a friend and I biked to the Great Falls in Maryland. THEY WERE SO COOL!
Who knew that you can bike for a couple hours and there you are looking at some serious waterfalls? This is the sort of thing you can’t get in NYC.
The book I used, Road Biking Washington DC, is of course a road biking book, so the route there was all along roads. Once we got there, however, we realized we could just take the C&O Canal all the way back to DC. That was some of the most beautiful trail I’ve seen.

Here’s a picture next to an old pumping station or something along the canal.