This is Valerie and me in our nice clothes getting ready to go to the party.
Here is an actual scene from the film. You can see all the main characters.
This is the crowd of people going to the "Ball" - which could only happen in a castle (but actually happened in a couple of beautifully restored art-deco theaters).
If you want to see some photos I took, let me know and I'll send you the link. For the sake of privacy, I don't want to post them for the general public.
In order to go to the wrap party, Val and I had to miss a dessert auction fundraiser at the church. We still participated though. Val made homemade oreos and I decorated them with an "Up" theme (Val added the balloons - which was genius). The dish apparently went for quite a sum.
Valerie mentioned on her blog that I wore an ugly tie to the party. Well, that was my intention, but I came across an interesting phenomenon. Before I get into that, let me explain my reasoning behind the ugly tie. In the movie there is a sequence where I shaded 11 different ties - most of which were pretty ugly. I thought it would be appropriate to wear my own. If I would have thought about it earlier, I bet I could have found much closer matches to the ties I made in the movie, but I only thought about it last minute, so I ran to the thrift store and bought the 5 ugliest ties I could find - for a buck a piece.
Have you ever heard of the uncanny valley? It's a concept that applies to robots and computer graphics. The idea is that if you have a circle with dots for eyes and a simple line for a smile, we fully accept it as a person. You can add more and more detail and the person gets more appealing and we have no problem accepting them as a person. Eventually you get more and more realistic, but just before you get perfectly realistic, there is this valley where suddenly the character seems like a zombie. They become extremely offensive to our senses and basically make you feel really oogy (think Polar Express). So basically, at some point they become so realistic that you would expect them to be fully believable, but instead, our subconcious pics up on all the things that make them not real, and accentuates them. Eventually, things get so realistic that you cross the valley and fully accept the character as a person again.
I explain this because I experienced something similar with ugly ties. I found 5 very ugly ties, but, it turns out, that at some point they reach a point of ugliness where we don't see them as ugly anymore. I'm sure, if they got uglier they would suddenly cross this uncanny valley and be ugly again. Anyway, you be the judge. The second tie from the right is a tie I bought years ago, thinking I was buying an ugly tie (I mean look at the colors!), but it has become one of my favorites.
4 comments:
I like that I am 10 X's as big as you in the picture and that I have long luscious locks of hair because Mia said she wanted me to have it. I remember when I got my hair cut she told me I looked like a boy, like Jesse from "Tuck Everlasting" and that I needed to grow my hair long so I could look like a girl.
Todd and I are dying laughing, AND I can't stop thinking about uncanny valley, and how it can pertain to photography. Tell Val way to go on the dessert. Looks delish!
I like the third from the left. That tie is hot! Congrats on the Wrap. DJ Jazzy Ben is an official Wrap artist.
Joe
I was trying to figure out if you were calling them ugly because you knew they were actually pretty "in" but were thinking the "in" style right now is ugly. Those ties are not ugly. They are pretty normal.
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