November Video

This is the video I made in November, and am now posting in January. Uh Oh. My bad.

Enjoy!

Salem Ratto... from Mark & Elysabeth Ratto on Vimeo.

...get Lost my friends.

October Video

Here is the video I made in October, and am now posting to my blog in January. Ooops.

 Enjoy!


 
Martin and Kaylen's Wedding from Mark & Elysabeth Ratto on Vimeo.

...get Lost my friends.

September Video-Chinn Family Day Trip

Liz has a really awesome family. My father-in-law, Ken, is currently on a professor exchange out here in Korea. This means life is good. Life is really good. Even when we live super far from California, family is a simple bus ride away. This is a video of a day-trip we took during a Korean holiday a few weeks ago. Enjoy...

Chinn Family Day Trip Sept 2012 from Mark & Elysabeth Ratto on Vimeo.

...get Lost my friends.

August Video-Coaching Some Koreans

In late July this summer, I had one task, coach team Germany to a championship.

 Team Germany in this instance consisted of 12 fourth, fifth and sixth graders from all over Seoul. With each kid living at an orphanage in the city and every year Jerusalem Ministry holds a volunteer-run soccer camp for some of the orphaned youth in the city.

 When I first volunteered for the camp I thought, yeah, we will play some soccer, give high-fives and have a little fun. But by the end of the camp most high-fives became hugs and having fun meant investing eight hours of encouragement into these kids. As you can imagine, love is not necessarily rampant at the orphanages. So, the camp aims to blind-side them with encouragement.

 I bought in to this idea. By about hour two, it became obvious that this three-day camp was about much more than kicking a ball.

 I was the head coach of team Germany and while I couldn't communicate fully with the kids, I had seven Korean-speaking volunteers right there with me at every turn.

 We poured into these kids. Whenever they pulled the ball back quickly, made a crisp pass or went in for a solid tackle, we cheered obnoxiously. Most of the time, if we weren't doing drills or playing a game, the team and the volunteers were interacting. Laughing. Joking. Smiling. Enjoying.

 At no point did it ever occur to me that this experience would impact me so greatly, until it was over. After winning the camp tournament, our team was treated to a victory dinner.

At that dinner, I understood. The kids were truly grateful for their meal. They made us lettuce wraps and basically stuffed them into our mouths as a sign of endearment. The older kids were teaching the younger ones how to cook. They asked me about my wife, and told her she was ugly (a Korean custom when you think someone is very pretty). We joked about how badly they beat the other teams and about how good if felt to be champions.

 For a moment, I witnessed them in a family style environment. Mother and father figures sitting around them and simply looking at them, with that gaze of appreciation and endearment. And in that moment it became clear; this was a life-changing soccer camp.

 ...

 Above is a video my wife, Elysabeth, made of the camp. She was the volunteer videographer.

 ...get Lost my friends.

Video for July

Here is my video for July. I take you through a popular area in Seoul near Ewha University. It's been a very hot summer out here in Korea, so getting some good street food when the cool night air starts to settle is much needed.

Enjoy!


 
July Video from Mark Ratto on Vimeo.


...get Lost my friends.

Wedding Video

Here's some advice: hire a talented videoagrapher for your wedding. It's not about price or equipment with these kinds of things. It's about talent.

With that being said, our wedding video is super good.

Elysabeth & Mark's Wedding 06022012 from inhousegoods on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/inhousegoods
http://www.facebook.com/inhousegoods

...get Lost my friends.

May Video

On June 2nd, I experienced incredible love. The kind of love that only comes around, well, once in a lifetime.

Elysabeth and I had a wedding in a backyard. Her backyard, in fact. The home her family has lived in for almost 15 years stands at over 120 years old. Sits on an acre lot. And provides the perfect setting for an occasion.

We returned to the states from Seoul for just over a month to prep. But, it's funny, no matter how much you prep for a wedding, there really is no telling how it'll turn out.

To be honest, our expectations were high. Shoot, Elysabeth's mom and aunt had been working quite diligently for over six months prior while we were still abroad. And in our month back, we worked overtime to get all the details squared away. So, with that in mind, we expected the shindig to run pretty smooth.

It did, of course, run smooth. The weather was Southern California perfection. The food was great. The dance party stayed bumpin'. And all aspects seemed to work out.

But at the end of the night, we didn't talk about any of that. All we kept saying was, "There was so much love out there tonight."

It is a powerful thing when over 320 people make a trip (some came from Australia, Canada, Minnesota, Texas, Tennessee, New York..all over the place) to your backyard and express their love. Elysabeth and I were overwhelmed at the amount of smiling faces, huge hugs and sincere sentences of love we received.

We understand that this was to celebrate our marriage, but we can't help but feel like it was about so much more.

The video below recaps the month and shows a time-lapse clip of the actual wedding. Enjoy...

May Video & Wedding Prep from Mark Ratto on Vimeo.

...get Lost my friends.