We all laughed, some of us cried, and one of us got the chance to sleep. Afterward we were treated to homemade deliciousness which included some amazing smoked baby back ribs and macaroni and cheese. You can never go wrong with baby backs and mac-n-cheese, you’ll win over these photographers every time.

The shoot was so much fun, everyone looked great. Below are some of the pictures from the afternoon.

Bailey is probably the most amazing four, almost five, year old we know. Not to disparage other four almost five year olds in the world of course. After the shoot she was showing us her home school room and pointing out what was organized in each bin. Then she said, “There’s my abacus.” We asked her what the abacus is for. She said, “I use that to add my numbers.” Well, she’s now one up on us. We’re not even sure how to use an abacus, in fact, we had to look up how to spell the word for this post. It really keeps you humble to be shown up by a four year old who is almost five. Bailey was a real trooper, she was such a good little model.

Older sister leading the way.

We were so honored to spend the afternoon with Mike, Kirsten and the whole family. We’ve known them for years, first as neighbors then as friends. We have been privileged to watch their children grow up and become their own individuals. We watch the way that Mike and Kirsten love each other and how they love Bailey, Taylor and Jason. Together they instill a love for Jesus into their kids lives by modeling that love toward one another on a daily basis. It’s fun to not only be a part of their lives, but to also capture some moments a fraction of a second at a time.

Mike and Kirsten you have a beautiful family and we are blessed to call you friends.

They built a cardboard house to resemble the house from UP. At one point the wind kicked up and we all thought it was really going to be life imitating art.

Baby food jars with Hunter’s picture on them were filled with trail mix and passed out to the guests.

You can’t have an UP themed party without a lot of balloons.

Hammy, short for Hamlet, was such a good boy the whole day. He just hung around and watched the festivities.

Hunter is getting ready to smash his first birthday cake. The frosting is courtesy of dad trying to get him warmed up.

Mission accomplished! Time for the preppy clothes to go into the wash. This photo reminds me of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

Program Overview

When Jamie and I last worked together it was on a depressing little 16mm black and white statement film that I wrote and produced in college called Heroin. Jamie played the main character, a heroin junkie who ends up jumping from a building. It was awesome and so uplifting.

Classic Courses

This project was much more commercial and didn’t involve drugs, real or fake. This time I got to put Jamie in front of a green screen and have him read from an iPad teleprompter. What was great was getting the chance to write with Jamie in mind. It’s always fun and so much easier to write when you have an actor in mind.

It’s also important to know when, as a writer, to just let the actor do his thing. This was the case with the Busy Lives and Classic Courses promos. They were written with some ad-lib opportunities.

Busy Lives

The videos have been done for some time but we were still finishing up the site. Now that the site has soft-launched I can share some of the videos.

Tough Times

We shot on a Canon T3i in 1080p and recorded the sound to a Zoom H4n digital recorder. The editing was done in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and After Effects CS5.

Regardless of whether it was busyness or just laziness, I’ve added a lot of projects that have kept me busy over the last year. I did leave some out due to time but the pieces I consider a good representation of how I spent 2011 are here. Now, if I can manage to update this blog more than twice a year I would be golden.

As I was working on an article the other day, I thought it would be pretty sweet to have a few extra Quicktags up in the editor bar. I remember back in the days of WordPress 1.5 and hacking the quicktags.js file. I shudder at the very thought of doing that now. Hacking a core file is not an option and I don’t want to install a plugin. Installing a plugin would mean I would have to install it on every site I do and set it up new each time.

So I set out to see if I could find some information on how to add my own Quicktags using a js file in my theme and my functions.php page. I didn’t have to search too hard to discover some information. I came across this article on scribu.net. Rather than create a plugin, I tweaked the code to reference the js file from my theme. Here is what my code looks like.

First add this to functions.php:

/*
* Setup some custom quicktags in the HTML editor
*/
function my_quicktags() {
	wp_enqueue_script('custom_quicktags', get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/js/custom-quicktags.js', array('quicktags'));
}
add_action('admin_print_scripts', 'my_quicktags');

Then create a file called custom-quicktags.js and place it in your theme directory. I put mine in a subdirectory called “js”. Here is what I added to mine.

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// preformatted text for including code in a post
edButtons[edButtons.length] =
new edButton('ed_pre'
,'pre'
,'<pre lang="css" line="1">'
,'< /pre >'
,''
);
//definition list
edButtons[edButtons.length] =
new edButton('ed_dl'
,'dl'
,'<dl>\n'
,'</dl>\n\n'
,''
);
// definition list - definition term
edButtons[edButtons.length] =
new edButton('ed_dt'
,'dt'
,'\t<dt>'
,'</dt>\n'
,''
);
// definition list - definition description
edButtons[edButtons.length] =
new edButton('ed_dd'
,'dd'
,'\t<dd>'
,'</dd>\n'
,''
);
// tab character
edButtons[edButtons.length] =
new edButton('ed_tab'
,'tab'
,'\t'
,''
,'',
-1
);

Note the added spaces around the </pre> tag on line 6, didn’t want to close out of the highlighter too early.

The first couple of lines are copied from the quicktags.dev.js file in the WordPress includes directory, just so I remember what each parameter does. The first tag adds a pre tag so I can quickly include highlighted code syntax with the wp-syntax plugin. The next couple add the elements of a definition list with the appropriate tabs and carriage returns. The finally button adds a tab, that way if I’m working on a list and I happen to hit the delete key one too many times I can re-insert the tab character back into the editor so my code stays clean.

That’s all there is to it, upload and open a new Post or Page and you should see the Quicktags.