Is anyone familiar with the way car insurance works? Specifically, I let a friend of mine borrow my car and she scraped the side of it while parking. Would I be able to go through her insurance to have it repaired or am I doomed to having to use my own? I've tried researching, but all I can really find is stuff about the latter.
I'd rather have her insurance cover it and not let mine know anything at all.

So as I'm sure everyone knows, I'm a film student. I like to watch a lot of movies because you never know what will inspire you when you least expect it. A lot of times, I'll see a movie that I like and that I'm glad that I saw. Something that I often say about these films though, is "but it didn't change my life". That might sound a little hyperbolicious to some of you, but for me, sometimes a movie will do just that. I have an ongoing list of movies in my head that I refer to as my 'top 10' and within that 10 is obviously a 'top 5'. The top 5 movies are constant and the lower 5 don't matter specifically which number they are, but they're there.

In order, my Top 5 is:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - This is the movie that made me want to become a film student. It's creativity, ingenuity, and story are unsurpassed to me. I first saw this film when I was going through an awkward stage in my long relationship with Cody and so the film touched a really exposed nerve for me and completely upheaved my view on relationships and breakups. When I left the theater, I was pensive and I found myself crying about it long after we left because I couldn't get it out of my skin.

Amelie - This film just makes me happy. Its cinematography and art direction are top notch and the characters, especially Audrey Tautou's Amelie, are so easy to love. I've watched this movie possibly more than any other on this list.

Requiem for a Dream - This is the most starkly, psychologically painful film I've ever seen. There's no happy ending for anyone in this film. It's gritty and gut wrenching, but beautifully rhythmic and visually powerful. This is another movie that stayed with me for a long time after watching it for the first time. Ellen Burstyn's monologue about growing old puts a lump in my throat every time.

The Fountain - I love this one mostly because of the epic scope of the film, but also from a filmmaking perspective, the passion Darren Aronofsky had about this movie as well as all the trials and tribulations he had in trying to get this put together and released. Rachel Weisz and Hugh Jackman both give outstanding performances in this film.

What Dreams May Come - Beautiful imagery and a moving storyline. This movie makes me cry like a baby every time I see it. Every time.

The rest of my top 10, in random order, there is:

AI
Elephant
Birth
Dancer in the Dark
Legend

The reason I'm writing about any of this is because in class tonight, we watched a movie that may have made its way into my Top 5 after first viewing.

The film is called 'After Life', which was made in 1998 by Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu.
Has anyone else seen this? Without divulging too much about the story and ruining anything, the reason I feel so affected by this film is because it encompasses almost everything that put the aforementioned 5 films in the Top 5 to begin with.
It centers around a halfway home of sorts where people, young or old, are sent to for a week after they die. Upon arrival, each deceased person is assigned an agent who will assist them for three days with deciding on only one specific memory that made the deceased most happy or affected their life in the biggest way. For the rest of the week, the agents would then do their best to recreate that memory and film it for the client to take with them into the afterlife. The client will then live within that memory for the rest of eternity, forgetting all else in the world. The story becomes more dimensional when it's revealed who the agents are and why they do what they do (it's all spoken about and performed in a very routine, business-like fashion).
This film is exquisitely wonderful. It's shot in a documentary style (think a real documentary, not like Cloverfield documentary style) with natural lighting and gritty, realistic sets. The home made memory films (which the movie doesn't even make a big production about revealing) have a whimsical DIY sort of feel to them, which reminded me a lot of Michel Gondry's style in ESotSM and in Science of Sleep (think fake trees and cotton clouds).
The film is very talky, in that maybe 1/2 of it (and it's a long movie) consists of the clients being interviewed, which could potentially lead to something scarily tedious and dreadfully boring to watch. This is never the case because the characters are all very engaging and so genuine. The reason for this is because most of the characters are non-actors. The director interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people to find the right ones, who then discussed frankly and passionately their own real memories about what made them happiest in life. This brings a touching quality that would be hard to emulate with actors and scripts. One of the most touching 'clients' is a 70 year old woman whose favorite memory is from when she was a little girl dancing in a show and remembering how proud her older brother was of her. Behind the cut is part of her interview, if you'd like to watch it:
( Click here to watch )

So for me, what makes me say that a movie has "changed my life" is how it makes me feel while watching it, but more importantly how it makes me feel after it's over. This film made me think about so many aspects of my life and it made me really try hard to think about if I were given, at this point in my life, the same task of choosing the one memory that defined happiness for me, what would it be?

Would it be a memory about Dom? I've been happier and more satisfied in the past two years with him than I have with anyone else. Would it be about Cody, who was the first person I ever truly fell in love with? Would it be about my mother? Would it just be a feeling? Laying in the grass or climbing a tree or flying a kite? Is my happiest memory still yet to come?

The clients in the film are given 3 days to decide on their memory and I'm not sure if I'd be able to choose just one. As soon as I got home from school today, I found the DVD online and bought it right away. I can't wait to watch it again.

Does anyone think they know what memory they'd choose to relive for the rest of time?

Helios released an album of, well... unreleased material. I got it yesterday and have already incorporated a track into my junior film.
I love him.

White Blur from Christopher Galasso on Vimeo.

This is something I created for my experimental video class a few months ago.
The assignment was to create an alternative way of seeing.

In this video, I started with an audio track, "White Blur" by Aphex Twin. I split the audio into two tracks, one with boosted treble and one with boosted bass. I then extrapolated key frames that reacted to each track's dominant frequencies. I attached a null object to those key frames so that the bass null would move forward on the z-axis and the treble null would move away on the z-axis. I parented a separate video clip to each null object, the bass being represented by a plant and the treble being represented by a lake.
After that, I just panned the camera back and forth to the rhythm of the audio because it wasn't as interesting when they were just moving on one axis.

Shot on: Canon HG10
Edited using After Effects
Music: White Blur by Aphex Twin

Window Sill from Christopher Galasso on Vimeo.

This was an assignment for my Film Forum: Dance and Media class. We shot raw footage of a dancer and were given the task of editing it in any way we saw fit.
I unfortunately missed the day we filmed the dancer, but made do with the footage I received.

Dancer: Cassie Eckerman
Camera Operators: Joanna Revelle and Emre Ozdemir
Music: Window Sill by Aphex Twin

Shot on: Panasonic DVC30
Edited in After Effects

"Hi, leadfill (leadfill)

bjork (bjork) has requested to follow your updates on Twitter!"

pr x op from Christopher Galasso on Vimeo.

This was an assignment in which we had to utilize text or speech.
The words have a correlation among them.

Should I add some sort of audio? Any ideas?

Echoes and Coral v.1 from Christopher Galasso on Vimeo.

This is something I was messing around with for one of my classes. Nothing too extreme going on. It stops kind of suddenly because it was late and I was tired. I might finish it out. Maybe not.

Shot on Canon HG-1
Music: Echoes and Coral by Colleen

2001: My journal will be created two weeks from this day.

2002: No posts on this day, but the following day my mom sent me out to the store in the snow and the store was closed. I was annoyed.

2003: Cody and I made a spur of the moment trip to Wildwood which was apparently a lot of fun. I remember that stinky ass motel room, ha.

2004: I discussed my disapproval with Charlize Theron being cast as Aeon Flux.

2005: I discussed my disapproval of being unfriended on here.

2006: Month long lapse of posting then a post about my DS friend codes.

2007: Months long lapse of posting then a post about my grades from my first semester at UArts. 4 As and 3 Bs.

2008: The obligatory "I haven't posted in a while" post.

Man. These history posts are a real drag. I need to jazz up my life.

These are all work related. I'm a bartender at a restaurant so a lot of my business comes from guests who are waiting for their tables. Here's what bugs me:

6a) I will always try to cash guests out as soon as possible even though we do have the ability to send bar tabs to get added onto dinner tabs. I try to cash the guests out myself because when I do transfer their check, 90% of the time the guest will not tip me. I don't know how people can feel comfortable walking away from the person who just served them without taking care of them back.

6b) Related to that, if a large bar tab has been transferred that I don't receive a tip from, we have a policy that we can ask the server who gets said transfer for 10% of the tab (so that we're essentially splitting the tip that should technically be mine) and a lot of the time, servers will complain about this, pointing out that we get tipped out at the end of the night for a reason. We get tipped out 1.5% from the servers at the end of the night. So that $85 check that your guests just left me out to dry from? I'm getting $1.28 for that in tip-out.

6c) Speaking of guests leaving the bar for their table, the stunt that really grinds my gears is when I don't cash them out right away and the next time I turn around, the guests are gone. No tip, no request to transfer, no thank you, no clue as to where they went, nothing. Who does this? It's just plain rude. When this is the case, I will print out a check and bring it to the table and make them pay me personally. You can't go into old navy to try on a shirt and then wear it over to the gap without paying for it. You can't take drinks from my bar and then vanish into thin air with them. So rude.

A lot of people say 'oh, that's pet peeve number such and such'. Well, usually it's all baloney.
Today, I'm officially starting my list of pet peeves so that I can say with confidence what my pet peeves are and bring them up to people by number, haha.
So without further ado, in random order, here's my list of pet peeves, to be built upon as I think of them.

Pet peeve number:

1) When someone uses up the last of the toilet paper, is civil enough to get a new roll, but doesn't take the old cardboard tube off of the dispenser and leaves the new roll on to counter, on top of the toilet tank, etc.

2) When someone leaves the sponge in the bottom of the kitchen sink without wringing it out so it becomes gross and smelly.

3) When someone leaves dirty dishes in the sink (which I'm not COMPLETELY opposed to), but doesn't put water in them so that by the time I get around to cleaning them, the food is fossilized onto them.

4) When someone uses my soap, shampoo, toothpaste, etc (which again, I'm not opposed to sharing) but uses the last of it and doesn't replace it so that when I go to use it, I don't have any.

5) When someone removes/relocates something that they have no reason to remove/relocate. For example, I have a pepper grinder that I need for work. One time, it went missing for weeks. I eventually found it in the hostess closet. Wtf?

To be continued.

Last night, I went over Dom's house. I played Twilight Princess while he ate dinner and watched me play. After that, we took a shower, made hot chocolate, and played old school card games, like spit and egyptian rat screw. When we were finished with that, we watched Monsters Inc. until we fell asleep. This morning, he made me homemade oatmeal with apples, walnuts, and maple syrup before I left for home.

This is why I'm so in love with him.

Ability/Disability from Christopher Galasso on Vimeo.

My school hosted a drawing marathon in which all students in the college of art and design participated in various workshops in place of their usual studio classes.
Those not interested in the 'drawing' aspect of the marathon were invited to document by way of film, video, or photography.

I opted to document and went to a workshop entitled 'Ability/Disability' in which the artists were required to draw in nontraditional ways.

In order of appearance in my video are drawing with appendages other than your hands, drawing while seeing in nontraditional ways, and using tools in nontraditional ways.

Shot on: Canon HG10
Music: Handlebars by Flobots

Please to be clicking here to watch it in full HD at Vimeo.

Where have I heard Jóhann Jóhannsson before?

Dom and I are obsessed with Superjail.

My brother got me an Apple gift card thinking that I could use it on iTunes. I found out today that you can't use Apple gift cards at the iTunes store. You can, however, use an Apple gift card to buy an iTunes gift card.

What kind of logic is that?

So now I'm waiting 2 - 7 business days so that I can get the iTunes gift card that I just bought for myself using the Apple gift card.

I upgraded to Leopard a couple weeks ago and forgot to backup my iTunes playlists and stuff, so now I have to start all over making playlists and rating stuff.

Son of a-

The rules are as follows:
1. Put your mp3 player or computer music player on random.
2. Post the first four lines from the first 20 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song (Skip repeat artists and any instrumentals.).
3. Post, and let your friends guess which song and artist the lines come from.
4. No Googling! Don’t cheat!

( Check it. )

Here's a couple things because a little more procrastination never hurt anyone.

I've been test driving the BlackBerry Storm since Sunday. Dom is a manager at VZW and can get company phones whenever he wants, so he gave me this one for a few days to see if I like it. So far, I like it a lot. The touch screen is really easy to use. In comparison to the LG Dare, which I currently have, I very rarely have trouble clicking things that I want to click because of the Storm's clickable screen thing. There's also a function where if your thumbs are just plain too thick to hit a link properly, you can activate a cursor that you you can move around with your thumb to more accurately click things. I've never been good at using qwerty keyboards with my thumbs, but I'm getting pretty good at this one. Some people have asked if typing is slow because of the clickable screen, but the only thing I've noticed with that so far is that you should only really have only one thumb actually touching the screen at a time when you click, otherwise you often trigger the wrong letter. I've never used a BlackBerry before, but I like how it's in constant connection with your email and all. In fact, it saved my tail from failing a class yesterday. I didn't know I had a crit yesterday until my prof wrote me 40 minutes before my assigned slot. If I didn't have the BlackBerry on me, I wouldn't have gotten that email until late last night and would have probably failed my class.
I also like how you can have multiple programs running at once, like a browser window, AIM, and VZ Navigator, for example. This way, you can look up a local restaurant on Navi, open google and get reviews, then IM the results to someone without quitting out of each program. Like I said, I'm new to BlackBerrydom so I don't know if this has always been standard on BlackBerries, but I like it.
Some complaints: It's impossible to text and drive using qwerty and I'm not really good at typing in T9 on it yet. Sometimes while typing a message, I'll accidentally click above the keyboard, which hides it causing me to have to open it again manually. There's just a few dumb things like that. Overall, I'd say that I like it a lot and I'll probably end up getting it.
I guess that is all.

Since teebag37 is LATE, here's a ( survey )