11 Nov
Every year on Veterans Day, my Dad goes to a high school in Indiana and spends the day talking to history classes about his time in VietNam. I was able to go with him a few years ago and shoot some video of his talk. The following videos are taken from his talks he gave throughout the day and captures a little bit of his experience. Thanks Dad. Thanks to all the Veterans. We appreciate you.
9 Nov
As you may (or may not) know, Sarah and I have made it an annual tradition to make a video Christmas greeting each year (who can forget our “Feliz Navidad” or our amazing reading of “The Night Before Christmas”). Well, this year we turn to you for help. We would like you to send us your letters to Santa. They can be written by you or (if you have them) your kids, but be sure to let us know who it’s from and what city you live in. Pass this along to friends if you’d like. There’s no guarantee we’ll use your letter(s) but we thought we’d throw this out there. Send your letters to me at eplacencia@gmail.com and be sure to put LETTER TO SANTA in the subject line. Thanks! We look forward to hearing from you!
Ed & Sarah
22 Oct
Tonight I started going through my video footage from our Ireland trip earlier this year. I realized there was a lot I left out of the daily recaps we did, so I decided to post a series of shorter videos, highlighting some of the fun things we had to cut out of the original recaps.
Here are the first three. Enjoy!
16 Oct
Well…sort of. At the time she was like 16 years old and going by the name of Katy Hudson as a budding Christian singer. But you can catch a glimpse of her in this clip where she is joined by the Newsboys’ Phil Joel and the duo V*Enna. She’s almost unrecognizable with her blonde hair and tan beanie and not kissing a girl or waking up in Vegas, but there she is nonetheless. Enjoy!
15 Sep
If I told you I spent a good portion of my youth reading MAD magazine , would you really be all that surprised? While most teenage boys were probably reading to snicker at the fart jokes, sexual innuendo, and the occasional cartoony glimpse of a breast, I found myself taken in by the artists who brought my favorite movie characters to life. I studied every panel, taking in every detail the artists buried inside.
I began to pride myself in the fact that I could identify the artist without reading the tagline, and if one of them had work that popped up in another magazine, I spotted them there, too. Forget Rodin, Picasso, Monet, Dali, and DaVinci. They didn’t draw fun Moonlighting parodies and fill my head with countless random images like Sergio Aragones, Jack Davis, Bill Gaines, Don Martin, Antonio Prohias, and Mort Walker.
My favorite, though, was an illustrator named Sam Viviano.
I first became a fan of his when I was even younger and an avid reader of Dynamite magazine. It’s been out of print for some time and for those who don’t know, it was kind of like a cross between People and Disney’s Magazine for ADD Tweens. Viviano was known for his crowd scenes, and I remember one particular two-page spread that featured Darth Vader, Valerie Bertinelli, E.T., and Indiana Jones.
As a kid I always enjoyed drawing and doodling, most of the time copying the cartoons I found in MAD and Cracked. But when I looked at the detail and attention in Vivano’s art, that’s what sold me. This guy was good. Take the above picture of Steven Spielberg. He didn’t just draw a picture of Spielberg holding a letter but also added references to a bunch of the movies he was associated with: Gremlins, E.T., Hook, Saving Private Ryan, Close Encounters, Raiders, Jaws, Jurassic Park, 1941, Munich….you get the idea. (Of course, he could have been told to include those references but in my mind, it was all Sam’s doing.)
Because I was operating under the belief that every dream I had could be attained by writing a letter, I decided to write my artistic hero. I was 14 years old. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote in my fan letter, but I remember starting off by telling him I was his GREATEST and MOST DEVOTED fan. And then I continued by asking if he would draw a picture of Indy, Willie, and Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and send it to me. You know, because apparently I thought this poor guy had nothing better to do than draw pictures for kids – by request – and for free on top of that.
I sent off my letter and life went on. I wondered if he got it. I wondered if I would get an Indiana Jones cartoon. And then life went on some more and as the weeks turned to months, I forgot I had ever written the letter at all.
Until, one sunny day (I still remember it exactly. I was in the back yard trying to get up the nerve to try to teach myself how to do a backflip but I was too afraid of breaking my neck. Weird, huh? But that’s what I was doing, I promise you) when my mom brought me an envelope I’d received in the mail. In the upper left hand corner it said “VIVIANO” and the postmark was from New York.
I then proceeded to freak the hell out.
Not only had he written me back (“A whole page! He wrote a whole page!!”) but he also included an autographed reproduction of the cartoon I had seen in the pages of the magazine (the one with Indiana Jones). I put the cartoon on my wall and tucked the letter away for safe keeping.
He wrote me back. Sam Viviano actually took the time out of his schedule to write back. That was the coolest thing ever. It wasn’t long after that I stopped copying other people’s cartoons and started drawing my own. That was 1986.
It’s 2009 and I’m still doodling. I’ll be the first to admit my doodles are nowhere near the caliber of Sam Viviano (who, by the way, the internet tells me is now the art director at MAD), but doggone if I don’t have fun drawing them, and really, that’s kind of the point.
I’m sorry to say I don’t know what happened to that cartoon he sent me.
Somewhere between middle school and 23 years later I misplaced it.
But this story’s got a happy ending. For Christmas Mom made a photo album for each of her three kids, kind of chronicling our lives in pictures and achievement certificates and report cards. And there, nestled about halfway in, was this:
Pretty cool, huh?
28 Aug
I posted my 200th doodle this week. That number sounds a lot bigger than it actually feels.
I had a contest on my fan page to see who could correctly identify the most doodles and the winner got doodled as their prize, so congrats to Janelle!
And, if you’re in the Lancaster PA area, you can see my doodles in person all through the month of October at Square One Coffee for their spooky-themed month of art!
Good times indeed.
22 Aug
Roger Ebert was right. One viewing isn’t enough.
Sarah and I went to see the new Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds today and five hours later I’m still processing what I saw.
There’s so much to say, so much to ponder, and I know I’ll never word it correctly. I know myself well enough to know I’m not that good of a writer. So I’ll just say this: Tarantino did it again. He’s the master of making you wait. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true. And he doesn’t just make you wait; first he spoils the surprise by showing you all the cards, and then he makes you wait as you wonder what’s going to happen next.
Pretty vague, I know, so I’ll try to explain.
In any other movie, the hero would seem trapped when, all of a sudden, he surprises the audience by revealing the gun taped to his back he had been hiding all along, and he blows the bad guys away. Tarantino prefers a different route. Not only will he reveal the good guy has a hidden gun, he’ll reveal the bad guy does, too. And then he’ll fill the characters in as well.
Now everyone knows. You, me, and the people on the screen. The only surprise now is how everything is going to play out. And when. You know they’re going to start shooting sometime….sometime…but the suspense comes in not knowing when it’s going to happen. And you know how it’s going to happen….or at least you think you do. And as you wait for it to begin to play out, you feel the suspense building to an incredible height.
Once in a while, what you think is going to happen actually does, and even when it does, it still takes you by surprise.
Take for example the scene in Pulp Fiction when Uma has OD’d and they need to inject her with a shot of adrenaline to get her heart beating again. The only hitch is they have to inject it through her sternum, and directly into her heart. As Eric Stoltz’s character holds the needle above his head, waiting to plunge the needle into her chest….well….that’s when it gets you.
You know what’s coming; they just spent the last 5 minutes explaining it. And yet, when it finally happens…it still manages to take you by surprise.
Tarantino does the same thing with Inglourious Basterds. He lets you know what’s going to happen and then makes you squirm while you wait to see it play out.
As we were leaving the theater, Sarah said, “You know how people tell you there are certain rules in movies that you have to follow when you make a movie. It’s like Tarantino takes those rules and just breaks them.”
Exactly.
27 Jul
A couple of weeks ago I went with Fred, the station General Manager, to Teen Haven out in The Middle of Nowhere, PA to put together a video package. Teen Haven is a camp for kids who live in the inner city. It offers them a few days of escape and a chance to get away from what is very often a very rough home environment.
While we were there, we met the Camp Director, Vinny. At first I thought Vinny was a New York Italian, but as it turns out he’s a Russian from Philadelphia. I wasn’t even close. Vinny is one of those guys who has a million stories, each one of them more fun to listen to than the next. He’s been working at the camp for 20+ years and it’s obvious he has a heart for these kids the size of a Geno’s Cheese Steak.
At one point in the interview, Vinny started telling us a story about a rough patch in his life and he became visibly moved as he retold the account. He’s a great storyteller and it’s hard not to get caught up in his words. This guy is a public speaker for a reason.
Not only did we speak with Vinny, but we also talked to campers and counselors (all of whom were once campers themselves). At the end of our time there, I had just over 50 minutes of footage to edit which is fine, except we try to keep the final run time of our videos to 5-7 minutes. As I uploaded the footage into the computer, I knew a lot of stuff was going to get left out that I really liked. But hey, what’re ya gonna do. Thus is the plight of the editor.
When all was said and done, the final product came in at just over six minutes. I was happy with the way it turned out, but also mindful of what got cut. When you pore over footage it can be easy to lose perspective and know if what you kept tells a cohesive story. I thought it did. Or, more accurately, I hoped it did.
This morning Vinny was on the morning show with some other people from Teen Haven. Although the video had been up on YouTube for a couple of weeks, he hadn’t yet seen the final segment. After he was on the air he came back to my office and asked if I would play it for him. I happily obliged. It was a little nerve-wracking watching it with him for the first time. I’ll be honest, I wanted him to like it. I never want anyone to look bad (or think they do), especially if it’s something I had a hand in putting together. I’m not gonna pretend I’m one of those people who says they don’t care what the critics say. I care, and I want everyone to like what I put out there for them. I know that’s never going to be the case, but I’m creative and that’s what you get from us folk. Jerry Seinfeld put it best when he said he can perform comedy in front of ten thousand people and 9,999 people can be laughing hysterically at his comedy. After the show when he’s alone in the dressing room, he said he’s only going to remember that 1 person who didn’t laugh. And I’m the same way. If I was a perfect Christian, I would only be concerned with what God thought of me, and not anyone else on Earth. But I’m not a perfect Christian. I’m just Ed and I gots flaws.
But I’m off-track a bit. Where was I? Oh yea. I wanted Vinny to like the video.
It begins and as he watches himself introducing the video, he chuckles a bit to himself. And then the kids come on and start telling their stories. And as Vinny watches, this tough Russian guy from Philadelphia starts to tear up. And the more the video plays, the more he wipes his eyes. By the end of the six minutes, his eyes are red, and whether it’s from the tears or his big hands constantly wiping them away, I don’t know.
The video went black and came to an end. Vinny turned to me and said, “We’re all just pieces of the puzzle trying to work together for the greater good. You took our pieces and made them into a big picture, and I thank you.”
It was so unexpected, I didn’t know what to say. I paused and said, “I just tried to show what you’re doing, Vinny. You’re the one doing the work, not me.”
“We’re ALL doing the work,” he said without hesitating. Vinny shook my hand and turned to leave. He stopped, looked back, and said, “Thanks again. I’ll see ya later and if I don’t, I’ll see ya there. I love ya.”
I’m glad I met Vinny.
Here’s a glimpse of the guy. I hope you get something out of meeting him, too.
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