Photos!

I've always been a video guy but lately the photography side of things has kind of peaked my interest. Photography has always inspired my video work as the attention to composition, lighting and all that makes for a great image, same principles really. So I got together with a couple photog friends and and had fun shooting each other. Here's some of the ones I took:

(These display at kind of a crappy resolution so click on the pictures for larger higher rez versions)

Presbyterian LDI Event Video

This project was a lot of fun to work on. Got to see some of the highlights from Presbyterian Hospitals year and got to get creative on how to make looking at photos and facts entertaining. The clients were really pleased with the end result and said it was a hit at their event. Here's a little clip from the video:

Production Update

Been a busy year so far. I'm currently working some small side jobs here and there and am crewing on some commercial work for Presbyterian Hospitals as well as doing some assistant editing for them. Getting to work with guys like James Kwan, Joshua Sallach, Sarah Loeppke has been awesome. Those projects have been a lot of fun to work on and it's great getting to be a part of a team and not having all the responsibility that comes with Producing stuff on my own.

I also did a fun little project for this Jolly Rancher contest commercial which was super fun and got to work with a great team. Myself and Tony Gambino tonygambinophoto.com were the Producers, I Directed, my friend Daniel Zollinger danielzollinger.com shot it, and Scott Wells helped out on SFX. We put it together super quick so it's not as polished as it could have been but we had a good time. Check it out:



But the main event these days is I'm working on my first long form project. Last November I went out to Oregon to capture the story of these amazing people Wally and Victoria Roth- victoriasvegetables.com These are some of the coolest people I've ever met and I'm so excited to help tell their story.

They are growing Tomatoes almost year round in Central Oregon where the typical growing season in something like 80 days. They're using a method of growing which is largely unheard of and they are having incredible, incredible, results. They have 3 commercial greenhouses but also have a small community garden which was farmed this last year and in six small rows they produced over 1000 lbs of produce which was all donated to Neighbor Impact to feed the hungry in their community. The story then connects to their Mittleider Growing Method mentor Jim Kennard in Galletin, Missouri and we hear how he has carried on Dr. Mittleiders charge to feed the hungry all over the world using this incredible method of growing. It's a tremendous story and one which I'm so fortunate to be a part of. I'm currently knee deep in editing the hours and hours of footage we shot but am looking forward to sharing more as we get closer to release date.



For more information about what we do, check out OneThingProductions.com

FINALLY Updated my portfolio

I guess it's been a busy year but I finally updated the portfolio section on my website at onethingproductions.com Feels much better to have some fresh material on there. Ok now that that distraction is out of the way I can get back to what I'm actually supposed to be doing and get to editing dialogue on the new documentary project I'm working on...

Pixelsilk video

Here is the video I did last week...

After Effecting Pixelsilk

Tekkie name right?

I've so enjoyed reading my brother Chase's running blog (rununtilidie.com) that I decided I should give bloggin another try. So here I am back in the blogging saddle. Without going into what's happened in the past year (and much has happened) because that might get long, I'll just get right into my latest project.

I've been working with Mark Knowles and the guys at Smart solutions for the past few years making videos for their clients websites. These guys are real pros and I've been fortunate to get to work with them. Well this time around Mark asked me about taking the production quality to the next level. So after we decided on budget and time concerns, he volunteered to be the first to try this new breed of video for his other company Pixelsilk, pixelsilk.com.

Pixelsilk is a website content management system that blows all other CMS's out of the water. They've got some really great features and I could see why Mark wanted a video to showcase it all.

Mark first told me this video would be for an expo in San Fran and for about a week I thought I was going to be traveling to California to shoot an expo. Then I come find out he wanted a video to be played AT the expo. Ooooooh, well we better get to work! With the expo about 4 weeks away and a 2 week trip to Italy in the middle, I knew time would be tight.

Before my trip I called my buddy Trevor McCreery in Bend, Or to shoot the video as he's in the same town as Mark. Trevor is one of the best I've worked with and got me just what I was looking for. Some great looking footage of Mark describing Pixelsilk on a nice blown out white background.

So while I was away Trevor and Mark got the footage in the can Mark was getting together graphics for me. Turns out Mark also has a bit of video producer blood in him because before I knew it he was sending me a transcript of the footage, storyboard and pre viz for the motion graphics! This was a huge help in the time crunch.

So coming home, I was not too worried as I still had about a week and a half to finish the project. Well this was August 1st the day we were departing from Italy. Around that time I get an email from Mark saying they'd like to do an email blast with the video on the 3rd, any chance we could have it done by then?.. Eh, um, uhhh our flight didn't even get back to Albuquerque until the 2nd around noon, with all the magic tricks I could try to pull out, there's just no way. We had talked about this video being heavy on the motion graphics side of things and there's really no rushing after effects. You get those key frames wrong and your video goes from cool special effects to cheesy windows movie maker slides reeeeal quick.

I explain this to Mark feeling a little bad because I've been out on a yacht on the coast of Italy when I could have been working, but hey that's not really the kind of thing you can just reschedule right? But he would still like to get it done asap and was very kind and just asked if I could let him know the soonest I think it could be completed. Well I thought about it, and the different animations we had talked about, and being that this video was bigger budget more produced than some of the other basic web videos we've done, I wanted to make sure to give time to do it justice. So I tell him Friday at the earliest, Monday at the latest. And with that it's go time.

We got home around noon which was about 9pm Italy time and I immediately get to work. The first thing to do is to lay out all the footage, with Marks storyboard I knew exactly what cuts he wanted to keep and in what order, sweet, just like the Coen brothers! This saved a lot of time and I quckly had a rought edit together of Marks content.

I then export each of these clips individually so I'll have greater control of clip start and end times in After Effects, and also recode from the Canon 7Ds .mov file type to cineform neoscene's .avi format for better playback and better control in color grading.

Once in After Effects that's where the real work started. I had a white canvas and Mark from a few different angles and my job was to paint in the margins. The main idea behind the post work was not to add content but rather to support and reinforce the dialogue. So if Mark was saying you can copy websites with ease, I needed a graphic representing this action done in a cool way.

I decided to just start at the beginning and start working my way through. First up, "Hi I'm Mark Knowles, CEO of Pixelsilk...". I had seen something on a couple other videos I wanted to try and exported a frame of Mark and masked out the background. Went black and white and scaled it up to accompany titles with his name and such. This went fairly quickly and I was pleased with the results.

Next up he was talking about the ability to have website features applicable to as many sites as you would like and kept all in one central location. So I went in to desiging the "Site group" graphic, a folder with a few websites fanned out. I did this by grabbing screenshots of websites Mark's company has designed and photoshopped them into a clip art folder I found. I then added a paper texture background to make it interesting and duplicated the site group image according to the dialogue.

I did a quick copy site graphic, duplicating an image and adding a sound effect of a copy machine, so far so good! And then I got lost on the next sequence.

Mark said this bit about being able to have site features or "tokens" on multiple sites was a big one and we needed something cool to represent this. Ok, something cool. Like sites flying in from the side? Umm Saved By The Bell called and they want their intro back... Now I needed to be working in 3 dimensional space for sure. Ok, sites flying around that's cool... but not REALLY cool. At this point it's already Friday and being that I was making sure the animations were clean I could see this really was going to take some more time. I decided to let Mark know, unfortunately I wouldn't be able to have it done today, but definitely by Monday.

So knowing I do have a couple days and not hours, I decide to plunge into a new world which I've had very little experience with but really like the outcome. Rotoscoping. Fortunately I picked up Adobe CS5 earlier this year and knew their rotobrush feauture is supposed to be a miracle in this department so I feel a little more comfortable diving in. What if instead of the sites just flying around in 3D space I actually had the sites go behind Mark, REALLY making it look like his space and this animated world are the same. That's what I need! Little did I know what that would entail...

I begin using the rotobrush and according to legend it miraculously finds my edges and tracks them, allows me to cut Mark out from the background and work in any kind of graphic I want to be directly behind him. However... turns out it works for a few frames tracking the points at a painfully slow pace, and then stops automatically, forcing you to again select your subject, select your start point, start the process all over, every few frames. No big deal, except that there are 30 frames a second! Ah! This went on FOREVER but finally Mark was free of his background and I could manipulate the graphics however I pleased.

So without getting to repetitive the video went on like this section by section, inluding animating something they call rainbow mucous from a still image to a wavy gobbly goo. Sunday night, knowing my deadline was the next day and I need allow render time I decided I better just go for the kill and keep working through the night. About 4am at almost the exact same time my wife came out to ask what the H E Double hockey sticks I was still doing up, I FINISHED! Of course like most projects there were things I could go back over and tweak but save becoming a tweaker sometimes you just need to call it good. I hit Make Movie, Render and off to bed.

I woke up about 4 hours later to start the upload and found it was still rendering... Wow I guess multiple layers of 1080p video, rotoscoped and color graded is a little processor intensive. Ok back to bed for a bit. And now here I am still waiting for the render but with some time on my hands to write this blog, hopefully it's done soon and I can still get it sent off today to make that Monday deadline!

Hope you enjoyed this novel of my experience!

PS I'll post the video soon and let me know what you think!

Eminence

I'm a little late on the blog with this one but this is a video I did for Veil Arms here in Albuquerque. I'm super excited about their vision for raising up artists to make a difference in our world. Check it out!

Eminence from eric parnell on Vimeo.

For more info on the eminence conference check out eminenceworkshop.com