Hi all -

Happy New Year. How was your 2008? It was a busy year for me just being a new dad. Paloma's just about 11 months now and she's chatting away, just not any particular words...sounds like a typical girl...woah, had to dodge a shoe after that one ;). Now I know how Bush got those skills.

She's also crawling like mad and totally capable of climbing a full flight of stairs. The gates are up everywhere and I can't get that Pearl Jam song out of my head. Every time I pass a gate, "Even Flow" starts to play...amusing at first, but tiring after a couple of days. For those without kids, "Evenflo" is the name of a company who makes baby products...namely the gates that we use.

Two really cool projects I worked on this year I'll tell you about. First is School House Rock: Earth Rock. It's a DVD collection of 11 new shorts about, you guessed it, going green. I teamed up with some of the original creators and acted as Digital Supervisor on most of the shorts. We had to outsource in the end so 3 were done at other companies. This was ongoing since about March. It was supposed to end in March this year, but Disney upped the schedule by 4 months and we had to rapidly finish 6 spots in about 6 weeks. According to Amazon.com, it's scheduled to be released March 31st, just in time for Earth Day.

The songs are as follows -

- Solar Power to the People
- The Little Things We Do
- Fat Cat Blue: The Clean Rivers Song
- The Rainforest
- Report from the North Pole
- The Trash Can Band
- You Oughta Be Savin’ Water
- Save the Ocean
- Windy and the Windmills
- Don’t Be a Carbon Sasquatch
- A Tiny Urban Zoo

One of the things I can totally take credit for on this is helping to convince Disney to deliver in HD. It was originally conceived of as a standard frame (1.33) DVD. Sure it was a little more work for us, but I thought it was important in the end to be HD because just about everyone has an HD set now and you can't get a standard definition set anymore. Now, whether or not Disney decides to release a blu-ray or even a letterboxed (1:77) DVD is up in the air. They'd be stupid not to considering my last statement on the number of HD sets out there. However they have the proper materials to do so...and it was DESIGNED for HD. We delivered 24p full 1080 HD. The standard definition one that is listed on Amazon is cropped.

The second one is a feature film called They Came From Upstairs. It's not a horror film, but a family comedy/adventure. Starring Ashley Tilsdale (from High School Musical), Doris Roberts and Kevin Nealon. View the IMDB page here.

I spent 10 weeks in Vancouver working as a Shake compositor for this show, and yes, that was 10 weeks away from Alison and Paloma, and despite that fact, it was a wonderful experience working over there. There's not much I can say about the show except that originally it was supposed to be released in February, but it tested so well that the studio pushed it to July 31 for summer release. I found a trailer showing the old date here as well as the movie-list page here where there's a hires download. It doesn't have any of my shots in it, but maybe the next one will.

Until next time, I'll be rocking out with Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band. The GH drum kit is so awesome.

Enjoy...

- Luciano

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