lines of flight

this was an amazing sunset

(enlarge)

Fun yet futile: trying to capture it on the Motorola Droid. Too bad I have such limited Photoshop skills, or I would have stitched this together better.

Anyway you had to be there. :~j

Wrote about Grammy-winning artist Daniel Ho for the new Halekulani in-room magazine that came out a couple months ago. Only later I noticed: there is also a version of the story in Japanese! I’m officially translated!

Check out the articles (PDF).

Only slightly dampening my enthusiasm is the way they transliterated my first name.

Just call me Gee-la, I’m used to it. =\

Got to do a fun story for Mālamalama about University of Hawaiʻi locations featured on the TV show LOST, as the show heads into the series finale. The story was a photo-driven feature in the print issue and a narrated slide show online.

Here is the slide show:

Art Director Rowen Tabusa did both the slide show and the print layout. I especially love the print version for looking Lost-y with the bamboo grove background and for being smack in the center of the magazine. heh. It’s quite the popular story online, too, with two thirds of our total visitors taking a look at it.

Tho it doesn’t seem like it would be, this was actually a challenging piece. I was dealing with lots of different people—from ABC and each of the locations; trolling LOST fan sites for information; and trying to verify everything I was getting. Which isn’t so different from what I always do, but was a lot for such a short story. Unfortunately one major mistake crept into the print version, but it was corrected in the slide show (quite cleverly, I thought).

Modest as it is, the story feels like another deliberate baby step forward in the integration of print and online storytelling for Mālamalama magazine.

Since I last updated the links in my list of published articles, HI Luxury posted all their content online. Nicely done! View my author archive. Will have a new story listed there in the April/May 2010 issue. :~j

UPDATE: Here is my story about the Trump Tower lounge Waiʻolu.

Short video feature we did for the January issue of Mālamalama magazine, below. I did the interview with Paxton, oversaw the editing of that portion (i.e. chose the quotes—what is that job called?), wrote the narration and am the narrator.

Is that really my voice? It sounds so deep and sluggish. Can that be adjusted to sound perkier? yeesh.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! I just noticed that YouTube now has an automatic captioning based on Google voice recognition! How long has that been there?? that’s AWESOME!! Tho it looks like you need to view the video on the YouTube site to get that option (look for the CC button in the control bar).

That is the answer to many an accessibility prayer… Never mind that “University of Hawaiʻi” is alternately transcribed as “university of havana” and “university of why,” those both sound like great schools, too. LoL.

[Mālamalama]

Honolulu is under a smoggy, gray haze again. Only it is not smog, or haze. It’s vog. This picture was taken today around noon.

Whether arriving via airplane or cruise ship (both pictured above) or living la vida local, these noxious natural fumes fill the lungs. There is no daily vog index popularly reported. Who is studying vog? Is enough being done to warn people of potential dangers?

Here is what our view towards Diamond Head looked like at noon today:

How is it possible that the Air Quality Index for Honolulu today is “good” when it looks like this?!

In comparison, see how clear the horizon is in this sunset video from the same vantage? Even as night falls, you can see a striking difference.

=_=

Mano & Jeela ~ Dec. 27, 2009 ~ Makawao, Maui

Dreams do come true. Facing 2010 full of hope for the future.

Happy once in a blue moon New Year’s Eve!

Hmm… so I see another month is about to slip by without me clocking in on this blog. Can’t have that. Without any ado, here are a few things I been up to:

• Handed in my MA project to the committee that will decide if I am good to grad—or not! *cross fingers*
• Accepted my first freelance assignment in a year-and-a-half. Now that the bulk of the MA work is done, I can do this again!
• Published a story on Second Life, with web extra.
• Got a killer URL and am building a site which I hope to monetize. Will it (soft) launch next week? No promises…
• BONUS: July 2009 Atelier Hawai’i web extra production about a summer painting course. Helped conceptualize the video, conduct and edit the interviews (content) and write the script. This came together well.

A few notes on how I’m feeling about my blog, Twitter and (what I think is about to be) my embrace of Flickr.

Two days after the public Michael Jackson public memorial, we visited the former home of the Jackson family in Gary, Indiana. It was slightly surreal. We left a card and took a picture of ourselves in front of the house, even tho it felt strange to do so. We didn’t smile.

Recently I was doing research on the 90s music scene in Hawai’i.

I found this guy JonHawaii2003 had posted footage of Tool and Stone Temple Pilots at the first Big Mele—an alternative music festival that ran in Hawaii for seven years—on YouTube. Turns out Jon was one of the sound guys for the show, and knows a thing or two about getting quality concert footage.

I contacted him to thank him for the hard-rocking flashback, and a week later he reuploaded the Tool footage in even better quality!

Here’s the link to the entire 10-part playlist, or if you just want to hear my favorite (aka most popular on Radio Free Hawaii) song of the day, that’d be Opiate featuring a surprise guest appearance from singer Layne Staley of Alice in Chains:

The one thing you can’t see here is the waves, they are going off(!!) in an area of the island where huge surf is not that common. Despite Kualoa being a Ranch and having an abundance of ranchly things like cow poo (and the fungus that grows upon it), I can hardly imagine a more beautiful backdrop for a killer music festival.

I wasn’t even a huge Tool fan until that day, when the bass in my face—an emotionally blown state since I’d just been dumped that day—rocked my world. Other artists that played the Big Mele were Stone Temple Pilots, Fishbone, Violent Femmes and Primus.

No subsequent Big Mele ever packed as much of a punch as this one did, for me. They lost even the little bit of diversity they had, becoming way too alterna-punk-heavy for my tastes, tho I did go in ’96 (No Doubt! plus Cypress Hill and their ginormous inflatable Buddha) and ’97 (Wu Tang, sorry guys, that is *not* Wu Mountain behind us). Lineups of all The Big Mele festivals on hawaiibase.com.

This video slideshow accompanies a travel feature in The Atlantic called Saunas and Silence: The Finnish idea of a perfect vacation. It’s writer/photographer Trevor Corson’s take on Finland where, he claims, solitude is a national pastime.

The pictures are lovely and he’s done a good job capturing that back-to-nature instinct that Finns cherish, myself included. Admittedly, a good portion of the rest of the world probably considers going to a rustic cottage on a mosquito-infested lake to be a difficult and boring sort of vacation. But hey, that’s where the beer comes in, and it’s really, really good for your soul. The nature stuff, not the beer.

Finnish food was not really featured in the story like I wanted it to be, it’s as simple and boring sublime as getting away to the cottage. I suppose it’s possible that the author doesn’t find pickled herring on hard rye bread a mouthwateringly irresistible breakfast food and was trying to be nice by not mentioning it, but, I really wanted a few more mentions of tasty Finnish eats.

Overall though I’m digging this self-produced video slideshow. Good inspiration for the ones we’ve been working on for Mālamalama, as mentioned here and here.

Am I the only one that missed this Sesame Street Captain Vegetable clip as a kid? This is too funny.

As if the crazed and kooky haired muppets weren’t enough, the dialog has extra snark (“what are you, some kind of weirdo?”) and the silly song gets stuck in my head when I least expect it.

Taking the cake (er, salad?) are those sad looking vegetables! Poor Andy gets his black licorice candy swapped for a plate full of dry, raggedy celery. I dare a cracked-out puppet to try and take my licorice and replace it with celery. NO.

But that’s of course beside the point. The point is to promote good nutrition and not nightmares, so the trippy hippies at Sesame Street reprised the sketch with John Leguizamo as Captain Vegetable.

Leguizamo’s Captain Vegetable comes off awkward in places and to be honest, Elmo was never my main muppet. But it’s still a funny skit and the costume reaches new heights of ridiculousness. Is that corn silk coming out of his head? At least he’s armed with more than two vegetables. Thanks, playa!

The old link was passed on by friend, web designer, music lover, LA denizen Tim Ganter, back when he was still blogging… poke, poke… Thanks for introducing me to Captain Vegetable, Tim!