A Morning Stroll Through Heidelberg

I'm in Heidelberg for the next few days attending a conference I helped set up. Click on the image below to see the other pictures.

A Morning Stroll Through Heidelberg

Excellence Awards at Wallace Public School

Pierce received his "First Honors" award this evening along with 200 other students from grades 1 to 7. Note the "Mother-approved" future spouse (freckled, red-headed Veronica). The next generation?? Click on the image to see the album.

Pierce Working on His Stop Motion

A pretty laid back weekend. Deirdre and I escaped to a party last night in deepest, darkest Jersey. Pierce occupied his time working on various stop motion projects. Here he is working on another Lego-based project.

Some Respite From the Heat

A new, somewhat cooler, weather system forced its way over the region this evening bringing with it spectacular lightning.

Visit to the Liberty State Science Center

On an incredibly hot day today we ventured forth to the Liberty State Science Center. Not only did the weather try to slow us down, so did the light rail which, for no reason we could divine, was such a mess that it took us an hour to get to our destination, twice the normal time. To cap it all off, we hadn't been at the Science Center for an hour when a fire alarm went off and everyone had to evacuate the building. From Pierce's perspective though, things worked out OK because he got a plush E Coli microbe to add to his stuffed "animal" collection.

Spider-Man 4

Pierce and I finally completed post-production (no, really!) of Pierce's latest stop-motion short: Spider-Man 4. As usual, Pierce has huge ambitions for it but I fear the completed project may never see the light of day given the magnitude of what Pierce envisions. Nevertheless, here's the first sequence of Spider-Man 4. Click on the image below to see the movie. 

Pierce conceived the story-board and shot all the stop-motion himself. He shot his Spider-Man Lego against a green screen so we could add a suitably New Yorky background. We created the background collage using Gimp to glue together a bunch of New York skyline and shop-front pictures culled from the Internet. The sidewalk is from outside our building. The sound-effects are courtesy of Hanna Barbera and the sound track is, of course, due to Danny Elfman. We used Final Cut Express to put it all together.