Pondering a Trip

15 years ago in late November, I set out on a trip, a trip I’ve pondered re-creating for years.

Myself, Russel Friedrichs, Aaron Clark, Rand Sevilla and our fathers (Larry Klaus, Keith Friendrichs, Milt Clark and Roland Sevilla) strapped everything we needed for a week to our backs and made a walked 50-miles from the south rim of the Grand Canyon, to the north rim and back again. We had spent more than a year preparing for the hike so we knew what we were doing and except for some some foul weather on the North rim which held us one extra night on the canyon floor, we all made it without much trouble.

I can recount many fond memories from that trip, it was the first 50+ mile backpacking trip I had ever done (I was 11 at the time) and it inspired me to do many more long treks. A few years after the Grand Canyon trip I did a 50 mile trip in the Northern Sierras. I did 50 miles at Philmont (New Mexico) in 1998, 100 miles in 2001 and 50 miles again in 2003 (you can watch the 2001 trip on YouTube). Since then, I’ve done some trips with Paul, Matt & Travis Lockyer in the Sierra’s and contrary to any complaints I made at the time, every trip was challenging, exciting and wholly worth the effort. In the last 4 years though, my nights on the trail have steadily diminished, and I miss it. I’ve got back in-shape lately (through fits and starts) and the warm sunny weather, long daylight hours and even longer working hours all have me yearning to spend a week away from computers, phones and multitudes of people.

I don’t believe there is time to plan and prepare for a rim-to-rim-to-rim trip in the Grand Canyon for 2010. I’m not even sure who would join me yet, it takes a pretty serious commitment of time and money to make a trip like this happen. However, I can start planning for a Fall 2011 trip, which is exactly what I intend to do. The logistics of the trip itself are fairly simple, and most of it wont fall into place until 4-months before the real hike (the furthest out we can get a permit). It’s the mental and physical prep that takes time, finding extended weekends to do shake-down trips and conditioning trips is difficult for a group of working Adults. I want to start planning now to have a hike every other month, starting small and working ourselves back into the swing of backpacking.

This could be the start of a very good thing.

Battleship – My First AE Project

I’ve been in a particularly creative mode lately, so I decided to tackle Adobe After Effects. After Effects (AE) is primarily used for creating motion graphics and visual effects. My interest in AE originally was to be able to do dynamic pans and zooms on my time lapse footage, which is captured on a tripod as still frames and can sometimes be rather boring. After Effects will allow me to compose the time lapse at the full resolution of the images (~2000 x 3000 pixels) and then build a ‘camera’ that can zoom and pan around the shot without any loss in quality. Lending interest to slower shots or helping to direct focus on a particular spot.

All that said, I had never used After Effects before this weekend so I spent a long time watching tutorials online about how to use After Effects (Video Copilot is a great resource). Using what I’d learned, and various other Google searches online I was able to put together this shortened music video using the song Battleship by The Usuals.

The whole clip probably took me about 10 hours to build. Its basically a lot of key-framing to get the animation and camera moves.

I had a lot of fun animation the battleship tilting, breaking, and sinking. I played with adding bubbles and flames to certain words and scenes but in the end didn’t render them because they detracted from the overall feeling of the clip. Just about every word in the clip is a 3D object, built as a pre-composed scenes for the blocks of text. I animated the block for simple fly-ins and then used camera moves to rotate the blocks and pan around to each letter. The whole thing was tedius and I had to ask Cody for the lyrics in a few spots to make sure I was getting it right but overall I’m really glad I did it, because it got me comfortable with After Effect and ready to take on the next challenge.

You can see all the camera move key-frames in the screen shot above.

Time-lapse Project

Day In, Day Out is a project of mine to capture a typical day in Downtown Sacramento through time lapse. It will likely take me a long time to get the whole thing done, I’ve estimated it will take a little less than 50,000 shots to complete the entire length of the video. Anyway, last night I started sketching out some of the shots to get the timing and ideas “on paper”, and went a little bit overboard so I wanted to share:

Its a very short clip, in case you can’t tell (which is very likely, Adeline could have drawn better sketches than I did) the first shot would be a time lapse of the sun rising over the capitol, a shot which I hope to be able to capture from the Penthouse balcony of my building and the second shot is looking down at the corner just in front of my building (from roughly the same location) at 7th street, and the Light Rail station as people board the trains.

Let me know what you think, and if you have any ideas for some cool time-lapse of downtown sacramento. If your interested in helping with this project too, let me know it might be fun to have a couple people doing time-lapse and join it all together into one continuous movie.

My Summer Vacation

Do you remember in elementary school, after summer break when your teacher would have you stand up in front of the class and explain what you did over the summer? Me either frankly, but its so cliché I couldn’t avoid brining it up since it leads right into my post today.

I want to actually start this off by saying I’d love to get some input back on this, tell me what you did over the summer. A lot of the people I’ve grown up with are just getting their families started while others aren’t done exploring the world. I’d like to know where life’s path has lead you.

As much as it irks me to admit it, Facebook is great for keeping tabs on old friends, but it lack any personality, its nothing more than a list of milestones. Facebook lacks the telling of a complete story. And I know this sort of thing is often left to a letter in a Christmas card, but frankly the Holiday’s have enough things going on, I think its time to go back to elementary school when we updated our friends at the end of the summer. So without further adieu, My Summer Vacation, a report by Kyle Klaus:

I’ll admit, 2009 started out on a bit of a sour note. But I ended up having a great new years with Matt Lockyer, his girlfriend Kelly and brother Travis in Oakland. It was a bit of a foreshadowing event, but more on that later.

2009 marks the fifth year of this blog (through various forms) . While its not much of anything to celebrate, and to say its been constant would be a lie, I’ve still enjoyed putting my musings, ramblings and ravings to ‘paper’ and I hope to continue. This post actually makes number 316 over those five years for anybody who is counting.

In February Kerry and I (as well as the rest of her family) made the long drive down to San Diego to watch the 2009 Rugby Seven’s tournament. It was only the second time I had ever been to a rugby game, and this was on a whole different level. I had a great time and took a ridiculous number of photos of the event. Also, before we left to San Diego we spent a brief amount of time enjoying the very very rare snowfall in Cameron Park.

In April though, Kerry and I split up. Without trying to be too much of a downer, there wasn’t much love left there and it was just simply time to move on. Unfortunately, our lease wasn’t up until the end of September, so we stuck it out and continued to live together until the end of our lease (not really something I would recommend, but we managed it OK).

On a better note though, I started taking tests towards my MCSE certification. The link does a better job of explaining fully what that means than I will here, but basically its a Microsoft certification that says I know what I’m doing when it comes to managing computer systems and, bottom line, is a meal ticket to higher pay. I still have 5 more tests to take to finish my certification, but with the tests I’ve done so far I can officially call myself a “Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP).

I also was able to spend a brief time with the Hoffman’s at Cody’s parents cabin. We went for two reasons, one because the place is awesome and a great way to spend a weekend, but more importantly Cody and Becca wanted some portraits of the very beginning of their new family.

In September I moved out on my own! This is somewhat of a highlight to the year for me. I’m living on my own now in Downtown Sacramento. Its only a studio apartment, but its comfortable and makes me feel très chic. Keith (my brother) only lives a few blocks away, so we’ve been able to work more closely on a small project of ours called Flublub (more on that when its closer to finished). Being able to walk to family, friends and the downtown life has been a gift I don’t plan on wasting.

In case you thought I forgot to mention work; I’ve been working for Airtop Technology Group since February ’08 as a Technology Consultant. Its a small company (only four of us) but we have some big plans. Most of my time is spent with clients providing proactive service on their servers and workstations to make sure they continue operating 24/7. Its sometimes a thankless job, and that can wear but if I’ve done a good job, nobody knows I was there in the first place, so in a way its a complement.

So that brings us to about now, where I’m enjoying the cool crisp air of the night, listening to my eclectic collection of music and composing overly lengthy posts. Now its your turn, tell me what you’ve been up to. You can email it, post it in a comment below, or put it on Facebook somehow.

Until next summer my friends.