A Collection of Pictures

Now that it's been almost two weeks after we've been back at Taylor, I thought I would post more pictures.

This is a heater post. They were all around town for people to stand by and warm up. We all really appreciated it.

A picture of the mountains/some of the ski runs. The mountains in Utah are different than Colorado, but both are beautiful!

This was really cool. It is the same concept as looking at a map on an iPhone where you can move the map with your fingers and zoom in and out with two fingers. This alters that technology slightly by enabling people to move the map with their feet. I didn't get to do it, but we watched a couple people play with it.

This was also really cool. There are five screens in one room. Two guys are playing the same song in different locations with different instruments and they are played together for one song. It was like complete surround sound if you stood in the middle of the room.

This is Rikki (in front) and this is Rikki if she were a boy. Brad pointed that out to us so naturally I covertly took a picture.

This is at the after party. There were a lot of people there and some weird dancing. I took a short video of a lady dancing. I wish I had her whole dance, but I just stood and watched her for a few seconds and then we had to move on.

Another picture of the stage. The music was really loud, but good.

Here's a banner for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. Naturally I had to take a picture of it. A lot of the skiing and snowboarding venues for the Olympics were actually held in Park City. I saw the Superpipe from a distance and there were various other Olympic banners around town.

This is at the high school where they filmed all 3 High School Musical movies. Jonathan absolutely loves those movies so we stopped by the school on our way to the airport in Salt Lake City. It took us a few times to get a good picture, but we were all happy with how this one turned out. Plus, I'm pretty sure it was the highlight of Jonathan's week. Not even joking.

I decided to keep a track of what movies I see this year. So far I've seen 36. I feel pretty good about that number even though that's kind of a lot. Oh well.

Sundance Journey Ends, Experience Lives On

The trip officially ended at 2 am this morning. I was sad to say goodbye to the trip, but I also know I will never forget the experience. It was definitely a life changing experience and one I'm glad I had.

Saturday morning was a relaxing morning as most of us were able to sleep in. The first movie I watched was called Please Give. It's loosely about a family waiting for their elderly next door neighbor dies so that they can buy her apartment to expand theirs. However, the plot is much more than that, but purely driven by the characters. It was also a very funny movie in the sense that it was real life humor. I felt the script was well written.

Mother: "They have like 12 children."
Grandma: "No one told them to do that."

Grandma: "You've got a handsome boy there."
Boy's Mother: "Thank you."
[pause]
Grandma: "But he's very short."

Granddaughter [to grandma]: "I'm sure they're going to guy it. You'll be dead so you don't have to worry about it."

They might not make much sense or not very funny, but I assure you, in context, it is very funny. Especially when you see how much of a ball of fire the grandma is. Overall, it was a much lighter film than most other movies we had seen, so that was a welcome change.

Brad and I went on an adventure downtown to find more Sundance water bottles. I also needed to get a deck of cards from Park City for my collection. Both of which we accomplished! After our adventure, the group headed back to the church where we heard Jeffery Blitz talk about his film Lucky and he also directed the Office episode where Angela throws the cat through the ceiling. That was also his idea. So that was pretty cool.

Later that night we presented Ralph Winterwith the Spirit Award from the Windrider Forum. The award is for someone who basically integrates faith into their projects. He certainly does that. He is the producer of the X-Men and Fantastic Four series as well as a lot of others. I met and talked with him for a few minutes on Sunday and I just want to be his best friend because what kind of person he is. He's one of the most genuine and generous people ever with his time and money. He consistently chooses to make time for those around him and I think that's admirable. He also happens to be one of the major producers in Hollywood. So I guess that was the most famous person I saw. Now I want to watch all his movies. Not necessarily because I'm super interested in the topic of movies, but because he made them, I want to see them.

There were six of us that needed to leave the church early in order to go to the Grand Jury Documentary Winner. When we got to the theater though, they announced the winner as Restrepo, which all of us but Brad had seen. So he opted to see it while the rest of us tried to sell off the tickets. After doing so, we ran to the Grand Jury Dramatic Winner, which ended up being Winter's Bone. It's a movie about a 17 year old girl on a mission to find her criminal father so she could convince him to go to court so her family won't lose everything. The 17 year old girl actress played her character beautifully. It was a good movie. It didn't win the audience award, which was understandable, but it definitely seemed like a movie the jury would pick. Here's the director on the right.

After the movie ended, Ryan K, Jonathan, Brent and I headed to the official Sundance after party, which was pretty epic. We were there for all about 20 minutes. We also unexpectedly met Brad there as well. The party was interesting. A lot of different people dancing. I wasn't really bummed that we were only there for 20 minutes though. All the decorations looked pretty cool I must say. You can't really see them in this picture, but they were cool.

Here's a picture of one of the Olympic banners form the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002. They had them posted in various places around Park City. It was cool to see them.

I'll still be posting Sundance, pictures, or other movie related things even though Sundance is over. Still a lot to discuss.