My Bro on America's Got Talent!

NEWS FLASH!

We interrupt your not-so regularly scheduled programming to bring you an urgent announcement! My little brother Steven, who has a background in music, gymnastics, dance, and (partially thanks to me) rock climbing, has recently joined a "rock climb dancing" group called AscenDance that has made it into the Top 48 on America's Got Talent! Check out their most recent performance:


He makes his debut on national television at around the 1 minute 47 second mark. Obviously, he's the short Asian guy on the right! I'm very proud and excited to see him on the show, but unfortunatley, being in Australia means I can't support him with my votes. But if you're in the U.S. and want to support him, you can cast your vote here for AscenDance up to ten times!

Go Steven!

Recap: 2010 Edition

Well, as usual it's been months since our last update, and much has happened since then! So here's a quick rundown of everything that's been happening in the last year or so.

As you know, last June we adopted a new baby, who we lovingly call "The Big One." Okay, not really. But I had been eyeing this baby for over a year, so when it was finally available to us employees at a discount, it was mine, all mine all ours. With the purchase of a few more lenses to round out our collection, we're definitely getting more serious with our hobby. We've set up a brand new photography page (powered by SmugMug), which I think will do a much better job showing off our forays into photography.

We kept ourselves busy for three months or so last year making a little movie and revamping our website and creating a new wedding page to announce our upcoming nuptials. And since then, we've been quite busy preparing for said nuptials. Planning a wedding from overseas is no easy task, but we've had the help of an awesome wedding planner and managed to squeeze in a two-week visit to Southern California last Christmas for some face-to-face wedding planning and some much needed family time. Here are some photos of a typical Wong Christmas:





As always, the newest additions to the family always steal the show:





We also managed a two-week stopover in New Zealand on the way over, which was an amazing trip that we'll tell you about in a later blog. The scenery there was unbelievable! For now, here's a teaser photo:



About a month after returning to Australia, something crazy happened that resulted in one of the craziest weeks of our lives. We were bombarded with media requests (doesn't anyone report real news anymore?) and eventually caved in to some interviews. Here's one of the more awkward ones... that's one heck of a satellite delay, huh?



Ever since then, we've been getting a steady stream of visitors to our website, which has given us some impetus to get back to blogging. But the next few months proved to be no less busy... nothing to complain about, it was all fun and exciting stuff. We managed to squeeze in another week-long trip, this time to Thailand, one of the top destinations on our must-see list at the time. It was an awesome trip, which will also have to wait for a later blog. But here's a teaser photo:



Last month, we finally took the plunge and relocated to a more hip and happening surburb in the city, with the very suitable postcode of "2010". We figured we might as well try true city living while we're still young and childless, and thanks to a new train line, our commute is as easy as can be. We've also got an extra guest bedroom now, so we definitely encourage our friends and family to come visit while we're still down under.

I'll end this blog with some photos we've been working on. In February, we had the honour of attending our first Australian wedding in Melbourne, that of our good mates Andrew and Elisha. We also attended our first Aussie Bucks and Hen parties (but what happens in Inverloch, stays in Inverloch). We had an awesome time and it was a good chance to catch up with old friends (wow, we've been here long enough to have "old friends"). They didn't have an official photographer at the reception, so we got to play photographers. Here are some of our favourite shots from the special night:



























Check out the full gallery for more!

Dear Peoples of the Internetz

First off, we want to say a big hello to all the random people who have stumbled upon our little save-the-date video. We're quite overwhelmed by all the love coming in from the vast expanse of the intertubes. And we appreciate all your kind words and even enjoy reading the hysterical comments by the haters.

If you are friends or family and have no idea what we're talking about... it seems that our video is going viral:
The Huffington Post
Boing Boing
Offbeat Bride

We've been getting a lot of questions about the video, so we thought we'd take the opportunity to answer some of them. First off, our video was NOT done professionally (except for the voice-over, more on that later). Second, this was NOT a high budget production, except for the use of a nice DSLR which we already owned. And as should be obvious, this video was only ever intended for friends and family.

This started off as something that was going to be a small project, a video announcement that we would shoot in a weekend. But as we started working on it, we started coming up with more ideas and were having more and more fun with it. And as you can tell, we just got carried away.

We wanted to do the most over-the-top action movie trailer parody we could think of, so we had to have the big movie-trailer voice! But who did we know who could pull this off? How can we process the voice to make it sound like the "voice of God"? After some research, we realized that the only way to really pull it off was to hire a real voice actor. We found Larry Wayne and sent in our script full of every cliche we could think of. He liked the idea and agreed to do it for a VERY reasonable cost. Once he sent back the audio file, we were blown away! Now, how could the video live up to the standards set by the voice-over?

So we figured... what better way to achieve the epic effect we were after than to walk away from explosions? But renting a green screen studio was just not in our budget. How about a green wall? After some flickr-ing, we found this green wall, not far from us! With the help of street view, we tracked down the building and started filming!



Some of the other chroma key shots were done by hanging up a sheet in our friend's apartment!



Everything that was obviously not from a movie we filmed ourselves (with some help from our friend Matt), using a Canon 5D Mark II. It was all edited using Premiere and After Effects on a regular PC. We did most of the title and text effects ourselves, except for the intro 20th Century Fox spoof. A template for that was created in Blender by some cool guy on the internet called Blazer003... we just followed his tutorial.

As for the "evil" cat, she is actually very sweet; her name is Eski, but unfortunately she's not ours, but was graciously lent to us by our friends Ian and Sam. The grand piano scene was made possible thanks to a colleague Peter, who allowed us an hour in the recording studio where he volunteers in his spare time. The Vietnamese subtitles were done by another colleague, Son, whose mastery of the Vietnamese language far exceeds my own.

Maybe we'll post some behind-the-scenes footage some day, but for now, we'll leave you with these screenshots.


Uncooperative cat!


Falling on my butt in front of strangers.


Butting heads... ouch!


Trying to look cool while walking away from a green wall in slow motion!

Australianisation

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Seems like only yesterday we yanks were celebrating our one-year anniversary in Australia! Back then, we boldly claimed that we had become fair dinkum Aussies. Now, over two years later, Australia finally recognizes us as two of her own! Although the citizenship ceremony was uneventful, it was pretty cool to have the mayor of Willoughby City Council proclaim us, in his own words, "dinky di Aussies"!



So what does being an Australian citizen mean? Well, they can't kick us out. If we have kids, they will automatically have Australian citizenship, no matter where they are born. And finally, we're now allowed/obligated to vote. In fact, they registered us on the spot!



But in case you were wondering, no we did not and will not renounce our United States citizenship. In fact, we are now dual-citizens and will soon have the fortune of possessing two passports! How cool is that?



Here's a bit of trivia for you. I haven't confirmed this, but someone once told me that Australia is the only country that eats the animals on its coat of arms, the kangaroo and the emu. That, in itself, is very Aussie. :-)

Summertime and the Living is Easy...

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Ahh, summer in Sydney. Flowering red and purple trees, hot sunny days that erupt in afternoon thundershowers. Wine and cheese picnic dinners in the city gardens. Days spent broiling on the coral-colored beaches, slurping icy treats, floating in the turquoise waves. Evenings at the beach pub in the sun's afterglow, sipping cold schooners in the sticky air.



Sydney in summer is something I daydream of from about May to October. As we are about to embark on another round of summer awesomeness, what better time than now to reflect on last summer's adventures? It was my first summer here in a new job with no weekend work, and we were determined to make good use of all the extra free time. It ended up being a summer filled with great friends, great weather, great fun and most certainly lots of beautiful music, as you will see.

One of the best events in summer is the Sydney Festival. Each January the city performance venues are booked out with all kinds of musical, dance and theatre talent for a month-long series of events. Many of these events are completely free! We checked out the opening night of the Sydney Festival, aptly named "Festival First Night" that took place amongst the city skyscrapers and in the botanical gardens. We were treated to various kinds of free musical entertainment, and a glorious sunset:



A creative highlight of the Sydney Festival was "Films Afloat", where cult classic films were screened on a floating pontoon in Darling Harbour. We saw Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon while New York City musician Karsh Kale along with Indian electronica producers The MIDIval Pundits composed a completely new soundtrack and performed it live while the movie played! (If anyone knows where I can get my hands on the soundtrack, let me know; it was cool!)



If you ever plan to visit Sydney during the months of January to March, you should definitely experience one of the many outdoor cinemas that run during that time. One of our favourites is the St George Open Air Cinema. I doubt you could find an outdoor theatre with a better view. A variety of new-release and independent films are screened throughout summer, on a large screen actually anchored in the harbour. We enjoyed the obligatory wine and cheese picnic in the Botanical Gardens before we took our seats and then watched the sun go down behind the screen showing The Visitor.





To enjoy another free event in the festival, Jeff and I did something we are only prompted to do once in a blue moon: we got up before sunrise and made our way down to the beach at Clifton Gardens to watch the Dawn Chorus. The Sydney Philharmonia Choirs performed a selection of new and old pieces A Capella. Lucky for us, there were some thin clouds in they sky which made for a glorious red and pink sunrise:





But perhaps the best concert of all of the Sydney Festival was the performance by Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova and The Frames that we saw in the Concert Hall of the opera house. This one wasn't free (in fact we shelled out good $$ to buy cheap-seat tickets off some dude because it sold out so fast!) but was completely worth the price. It was a bit strange listening to a band play loudly in the dark of a venue normally reserved for the symphony, but the acoustics were simply amazing. If you haven't heard of them, they won an Oscar for the song Falling Slowly featured in the movie Once. We highly recommend checking out the movie and their albums such as The Swell Season. One of my favourite songs is The Moon from the album The Swell Season. Check out our video clip of the song.



After the Sydney festival concluded, there was still plenty of summer to be had. We watched the new film Australia (of course) in my other favourite movie venue of the great outdoors, Moonlight Cinema in Centennial Park. If you want to enjoy your picnic whilst the movie plays, this is the cinema for you!



We also rang in the new year of the Tiger at the Chinese New Year Twilight Parade. My favourite float was the Leafy sea dragon that closely followed the Chinese dragon in the lineup of Chinese zodiac characters. It looks like something out of the land of Narnia, but it's a real Australian creature related to the seahorse.



Of course we had to make it out to Tropfest again, "The World's Largest Short Film Festival." An American version of the festival also runs in New York every year. If you're interested to see the 16 finalist entries from the Aussie show, you can see them here. The festival is getting bigger and bigger every year, and it's been Jeff's dream to submit an entry one of these years...



Other summer sunny days saw us kayaking around the small beaches and inlets around Manly:



And feeling the beat at the Future Music Festival:



To wrap up the summer, we couldn't miss seeing another one of our favourite bands, Coldplay, live on their Viva la Vida tour! Coldplay were amazing to see live and really got the audience going. We all sang along to the songs and danced amongst flying giant balloons and tons of confetti. Fabulous.





Click here to view the rest of the photos. Stay tuned to hear a bit more about our summer when we ventured out of the city!