Been A While

Wow, before you know it like an entire month goes by. 

Many happenings have occurred in the last couple weeks, lots of cool stuff. 

My internship at WTT became more enjoyable as the season fired up and I attended some matches at John McEnroe’s Tennis Academy where they have a stadium where the NY team plays. I also traveled out to Philadelphia twice to their matches at Villanova. They were all pretty cool and getting to wear VIP credentials was secretly kinda awesome. I took a bunch of pictures and video at them and am in the process of cutting some highlight/fan videos for WTT for online marketing. 

Just last week I got Will into a special match featuring Andre Agassi, John McEnroe and Martina Hingis which was very cool as I grew up watching Agassi play. I went to a press conference and interviewed all three. We both had a good time and Will got to meet my coworkers which was cool.

Lucie Miller and Gabby Szewcow, two awesome Elon friends have both come and gone and their time here was precious for all. It’s always a joy to see familiar faces in such a big place. 

I’m starting an internship with ScreenGems this week for a brief 2-ish week stint, we’ll see how that goes. My dad and brother are coming up soon so I’m looking forward to that. 

Attached are some tennis photos courtesy of Will. 

Focus

Here is my first short film.

 

Let You Go

This is my first video project out here in Los Angeles. We were assigned a monologue and an actor.

http://youtu.be/Tf7JeL7exAU?hd=1

 

 

Aramark Music Video

Hooked on Phoenix

“DO-RI-TO” My ‘Crash the Superbowl’ video submission

http://www.vimeo.com/16905595

Nursery Grime

project Halcyon is back with its latest comedic sketch: Nursery Grime

Marshmallows and Your Future

You either have it or you don’t.

What I’m talking about is willpower and I learned more about the research and experimentation behind early childhood willpower and how it affects the rest of one’s life by listening to a story on NPR.

The story revolved around Walter Mischel, a stanford psychologist who developed an experiment after witnessing his own daughter begin to exhibit delayed gratification behaviors at around the age of four. Delayed gratification, as opposed to instant, is the thought that we may not get what we want immediately but may benefit from it in the long run. It’s really about having the willpower to resist temptation for a payout in the future.

The genius experiment put children in a barren room with the scientist who presented to them a single marshmallow. He told them that they could eat the marshmallow now or when he came back, he would bring another one and the child could eat both. Each different subject was filmed as they wrestled over whether to eat the marshmallow or not. The kids stared longingly at the sumptuous treat, sniffed it, rubbed it against their faces and tried to resist the temptation to eat it. It was apparent that all the kids were tempted by the treat and struggled to resist. Some kids caved and ate it, others had strategies to resist; they sang a song, turned their backs on it and even kicked the table. 500 children were tested and it was recorded how many seconds each participant could hold out.

This is where it gets crazy though.

The experimenters followed up with the participants ten years later and got a look at their SAT scores and GPAs. It turns out that the kids who held out longer had higher SAT’s, up to 230 points higher. They also had higher GPAs and were going to more prestigious universities. Those who caved and ate the marshmellow early without much of a fight soon became those labeled as ‘problem kids’, they were much more likely to be suspended, in trouble, or having poor grades. The experimenters continued to follow up with them into their twenties, thirties, and even forties. Those who managed to hold out longer and demonstrate early signs of willpower had better jobs, made more money, were more involved, and were even thinner.

Judging simply from a test involving the temptation of a marshmallow when they were four years old, the experimenters saw startling data emerge as those who demonstrated willpower early on were much more successful and highly functional people. This can certainly give people pause, if my kid fails the test are they screwed? Not necessarily, the only reason some kids were able to resist the marshmallow was that they managed to distract themselves by singing, kicking tables, and making up little games for themselves to remove the object of desire from their minds. The thing about games it that they can be taught. Although it hasn’t been proven whether you can teach these tricks and skills of willpower to children so that they go down a brighter path, it’s still worth a try.

It’s fascinating to see whether a child will be bright and successful based on if they can resist a marshmallow at four years old.

check it out:

Marshmallow Temptation

‘A Man Peeled Back’ release

Some friends and I worked on a silly short film together in the final three days of summer.

Check it out:

Cranium!

A great little project I was involved with was for the company responsible for the highly-entertaining game Cranium.

One of my friends from high school who went to Elon with me approached me about the competition because she had heard about it from one of her family members who works for the company promoting it. I immediately knew I would do it right away because it looked like a lot of fun and was SO easy. The contest asked contestants to grab a video camera and film themselves and their friends/family playing Cranium and having fun. As simple as that. So I borrowed my neighbors video camera, organized a play-date with my mom and dad and some of Laura and I’s mutual friends and had a blast. We ended up being one of the 50 submitters selected to be sent 100 dollars, a HD Ultra Flip video camera, two 8 gb portable usb drives, as well as two new Cranium games and instructions to do the same thing again, except using the HD video camera and the game that was sent.

This was very exciting so we got the group back together and did it again, this time competing for air time on their television commercial, and lots of money at stake.  Although I haven’t yet heard back about the commercial, the whole thing was loads of fun to do, and I’ll attach the first video we submitted for viewing.