Baby Tse's Nursery

CLICK ON THE PICTURE ABOVE TO SEE THE GALLERY

Alright, after months of sanding, caulking, cutting and painting, the nursery is finally complete.  Whew!  That was hard work.  Who would of thunk building a nursery is so labour intensive!

My wife first wanted the carpet removed.  No biggie, I can do that.  But dang was there a lot of nails to be removed once the carpet is out.  The next thing on the list was the flooring.  Overall, the installation was relatively easy but I was struggling with matching the pattern of the closet.

So then I decided wainscoting is the way to go.  We’ve researched all over and scratched the idea of getting the pre-made panels because we can’t alter the sizes.  And I don’t like the typical wainscoting that cuts the room in half.  I mean this is a nursery, not a dining room…  After weeks of research, we’ve decided to just buy a chair rail and then cut the panels myself.  What a big miscalculation!!  That turned out to be a crazy undertaking that sucked up 3-4 weeks worth of time.  The idea was so simple in my head but once I started drawing it on paper, it was mind numbing…

The panels took well over 300+ cuts.  That number includes all my faulty cuts  =).  Then I have to assemble it to keep it square and create some sort of jig to make sure it aligns properly with the chair rail before gluing.  Once it is glued, i have to nail them to the wall then tap the nails in and finish it with white caulking.  When that’s done, I have to sand everything down, fix all the minor errors to prep it for painting.

We got some free Benjamin Moore paint from going to the show City Line.  I know, i know… it’s a girly show and I was the only guy there that day.  But you don’t argue with a pregnant wife.

So the lady at the store suggested this new release paint from Benjamin Moore.  It is suppose to be the best out there, self leveling, washable, blah blah blah.  Well, the paint is as thick as molasses.  Very difficult to work with.  Thank goodness we have Gabe (my father in-law) painting the nursery for us.  :)  Thanks Gabe!

Once the parameter of the room is complete, we started furnishing it.  The little rocking chair that you see on the left is the same one from Kara’s childhood.  The chrome piggy bank is from her Grandmother and there’s already money in it!  Thanks to grandma.  The Swarovski rabbit is from Kara’s good friends Myranda and Karen.  My aunt from Hong Kong also bought our daughter a Swarovski soother… we’re still not sure what we are going to do with it.

So everyone, this is how I spent my free time for the past few months.  It was tiring, exhausting and at times even frustrating.  Now I realized that my hands are built for typing only.  hehe  Kara keeps telling me that this will be all worth it when I see my daughter.  I’m sure she’s right and I honestly can’t wait to meet her.

Perfect Shutter Samson

I have been too lazy to post anything for the past couple months. The main reason for that is because my wife and I are expecting. That really have a huge impact on my free time. I have to renovate the nursery, clean up my mess around the house, buy all the toys that I want before the baby arrive. =) You get the point…

Aside from that Perfect Shutter has really been picking up. We have so many inquires on a daily basis that it is getting difficult to handle. Also, the fact that we’ll be renovating a studio soon is not helping either.

So, I just wanted to let you guys know that I’ll be updating this a bit more. I will be writing about my nursery renovation and showing off my handy work. As well as focus on this crazy ride that Perfect Shutter is giving me.

Stay Tune.

A Baptism Film by Perfect Shutter

My niece, Alexis, had her baptism recently. I really wanted to surprise my sister-in-law Stef with a short baptism film of the day’s festivities. The day started off with Alexis putting on her dress and getting prepped by her personal servants (in this case, her parents! – Stef and Chris). Then they headed off to the church and the priest went through the whole ceremony. Pictures were taken, then papers were signed.

I’m glad we’ve had all this experience with wedding videography, because this baptism film was surprisingly similar to a real wedding! Anyhow, watch the video and see for yourself.

Special thanks to John and Louie for helping me with the filming.

ps. Alexis is my Little Tiger, because she was born in the Year of the Tiger. I hope she won’t mind me calling her that when she gets a bit older.

Lazy Sunday: A Perfect Shutter short film for Still Motion contest

Alright, I finally have a few minutes to write up about the short film contest.  The goal was to create a short film that follows the guideline of stillmotion and adhere to the same time restriction that stillmotion staffs are allow to have.  It seems like their staff is only allow to have 3 hours to work on this project.

My initial thought was that it would be somewhat difficult. But after shooting the film, I realized how bloody time consuming this really is.  As you can see from the film, the concept is quite simple.  I grab my wife to do a couple midshot, closeups and detail shots.  Then add in music and finally do some color grading.  However, my wishful thinking quickly went down the drain.  The simple shots took roughly 1 hour.  Then I have to convert my footage to Neoscene format since I’m editing in Adobe Primere. It took me another hour to find the song and license it through AudioJungle. After that I must scrub through all the footage to grab the key moments that I want and match it to the music.  For some reason, the music have some techno sound mid way through so I have to use Adobe soundbooth to remove that.  Finally, I had to color grade the whole thing to crush the blacks a little and bring the color back out.  How long did the whole process take?  Try 5 1/2 hours!

This took way too long for such a simple concept.  The funny thing is, I can easily go over 8 hours if I wanted to make tweaks and enhance the result some more.  Fortunately, I didn’t win so now I am going to get our team to try to come up with something more epic that can compete.  We are really excited about doing this next piece. Stay tuned for our next contest.  =)

Another successful trip with the Chan family. This time we went to Chicago. We started driving at 8pm and got there around 12am due to time difference. For some reason we didn’t have to pay any toll while we were heading to Chicago. Thanks to the TomTom GPS (aka. Betty). Obviously the video is going to show otherwise but that’s the magic of editing. Nothing is ever in chronological
order. =) Along the way, Micah cried, we stopped, Tom did the c-walk wiggle to put him to sleep, I grab some footage, we stopped again at a ghetto gas station to fill up, got there and paid $41 parking, Tom and I went to a pub while Rhi stayed with Micah and Kara enjoyed her TLC channel. Now that was a run on sentence!

The following day we had some amazing breakfast at the restaurant across from our hotel. Then we asked Betty to bring us to the museum and she got all confused and threw a fit. So we did a couple left-right-diagonal left turn for Betty and somehow we got there. After that we went to grab some chicago deep dish pizza from Uno’s. Yum! The pizza was soo thick. I’ve determined that one slice is equal to roughly 5 bowls of rice. Don’t ask me how I came up with that number, it’s not scientific, it’s how I felt after eating 2 slices.

On the second day, we went to the Lincoln Park Zoo. Saw a bunch of animals and a few monkey/apes scratching their arses. That’s all I remembered from it. We then headed to Millennium park, saw the bean and some weird giant LCD display of a person’s face spitting water. I’m not sure how I feel about it but they said it’s art. We walked to Navy Pier at night time the scenery was amazing. We had some fried hotdog, popcorns, and ice cream then went back to the hotel and paid another $41 bucks for parking. Yay…

For the last day, we started off with a lovely Cheesecake Factory Brunch! The food was amazin, the service was exceptional but I can barely see my food. It was way dark in there. Someone needs to change those 2 watts light bulbs to 40 watts. After that delicious meal, we walked out and saw some choir singing. I tried to grab some footage and the security guard told me to screw off. So I pretended to pack up and grabbed the rest of the footage and left. Oh ya, someone gave us 3 free tickets to the John Hancock building. We were going to go anyways but it was so much sweeter when it’s free. So we paid for a ticket and up we go. Once we got up, Russ from ‘Friends’ (David Schwimmer) told us all about the landmarks and history of Chicago. His voice kinda got annoying after a while. Finally, we ended our trip with a visit to the basketball god, Michael Jordan. We got to the statue and realized that the Chicago Black Hawk’s playoff game was on. Everyone was inside the stadium watching the game as we took some pictures/footage with MJ outside. Monica thinks that Tom and I had a really fobby pose but I think she should really check out her own photo albums before commenting. O ya, and I think Tony is hating on us big time. He should of sent us a couple pairs of his Pike urm… Nike so we can put it on the MJ statue.

Samson