Don’t know where you find it, but this week… for me… it’s in watching performances like this.
Sara Bareilles, “City”
What inspires you?
Archives for posts with tag: creativity
My Valentine’s day memories are mostly caught up in grade school days. Remember picking out Valentine’s day cards for each of your classmates? Trying to match each person with just the right expression of fair-to-partly-sunny affection? The fun of decorating a shoe box/oatmeal canister/paper bag for collecting all your cards? The cookies, the heart-shaped everything, the candy?
Two years ago, our daughter decided she wanted to decorate her Valentine’s day box to look like something related to ancient Greece, the period of history she was studying in school. A brilliant idea. I imagined Greek columns drawn on a kleenex box. She had other plans.
When daddy heard about what our little girl envisioned, the two of them went to work and created this:
A bit challenging as a container of cards, but creative and unique nonetheless. She recently told us that she remembers being sad that daddy wouldn’t use real water. Ohhhh, how the mighty have fallen.
Last year, her class studied the Middle Ages. Once again, daddy and daughter went to work.
It’s a medieval castle. With flowers. I think possibly I was more involved in this one, because it’s very square and box-shaped and not nearly as unusual. But the cards had to go in and out through the drawbridge, so there is that.
This year, we’ve moved into American history. 
It’s Abraham Lincoln’s hat. It’s brilliant. I’ll send 29 chalky little candy hearts to the person who can tell me what it’s made from.
So this is our unintentional Valentine’s Day tradition: Historically appropriate card collectors. We probably have one more year where our daughter will want to do this, but our son is in kindergarten, where everyone decorated oatmeal cans this year. I figure we should get a jump start on next year and start thinking about something vaguely Aztec.
By the way, in the background of picture 3, you can see a bag of Kit Kats. I convinced the kids to attach Kit Kats to their cards this year.
Because when mommies sneak into their kids’ candy stash, there needs to be something more substantial there than little candy hearts.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
My husband and his production crew just finished construction of a cyclorama, or cyc wall. Don’t know what a cyclorama is? Read about it here. Here’s a picture of Neil & his production coordinator standing in the cyc wall they built.
Isn’t it pretty? It’s for green screen, or chroma key, shots. Read about what that is here. The rounded corners had to be created from plaster by hand. Which took some skill and some time. My husband did a stellar job with the design, construction, and management of this project.
The wall has been built at the end of a long narrow gallery that is used for art shows, video shoots, etc. When the green wall isn’t needed, it can disappear behind a lovely red curtain.
Poof.
Oh, and I also learned a nifty trick. If you stand very close to a green cyc wall, looking directly at the wall so that there’s only green in your periphery, anything you look at next will appear magenta. No kidding.
(That one was for free.)
I’m married to a great man who is an amazing daddy. This year, the kids and I decided to create an around-town-odyssey-scavenger-hunt-a-palooza for him for Father’s Day. This could have been done in any number of ways, but I decided to take the leap and communicate about this journey through one of my husband’s love languages…. video. My husband is a video guy. He has always been a video guy. He thinks in color, builds sets out of the most ordinary things, and currently works full time in video production. So a video-guided Father’s Day seemed fitting.
Friday, the three of us spent hours driving around town, designing the odyssey. We shot lots of video (with my little Fujifilm camera), made up clues as we went, and I did a bit of directing (of my two child actors) and a bit of cheerleading (when the actors hit rock bottom).
Saturday I frantically edited said video, meaning I learned how to dig into iMovie on the fly (because, yes, Final Cut Pro is out of my reach) while at church to ‘do a few things for Sunday morning’ (it was just a little lie…).
Sunday after church, the odyssey unfolded. Neil was given a ‘super secret decoder card’, which directed him to the video on my iPhone. The video then led him (and the rest of us) through our afternoon. Here’s the video. I cannot stress enough the number of disclaimers I want to put on this….
The kids had a great time ‘helping daddy’ figure out the clues. The super secret decoder card led us to P.F. Changs (P as in Playground, F as in Fountain, C as in Chinese fire drill). So…. did we make it?
This post is part of the creative chaos at ragamuffinsoul.com.
