Tech Support: Life in Computer Repair
This is a video that I worked on with a friend right after high school and before college. It's a parody of Trauma: Life in The ER. Jason and I sat down the night before the shoot and wrote out a loose outline, which was basically some ideas of problems that could happen to computers. We gathered up all the spare computer parts lying around my garage and brought it to his house and we just started shooting. I think I set up one light, but that was it. It surprises me that we were able to make this with out any script or much planning. Why can't shooting be like this now? Anyway, I found it again the other day and thought it was still pretty good. And yes, we do know that the things we're saying don't actually make sense. It's a parody. I know you can't put dsl on a laptop… it needs a faster processor. Heh.
Maps - To The Sky Video
This is the video we made as an entry to the Radar Festival. When we chose the song (which was a while ago) we had a much different concept for the video. Not entirely different, but different enough that we changed everything we had to shoot. At one point we were an hour away from our scheduled shoot time on the original concept with one actor (out of about 10 necessary actors) and a green screen in a room barely large enough to hold it. We shot the green screen footage the next night after discussing what to do to make the video work. That was actually a recurring theme to our discussions while working on this. We'd get to a point that seemed impossible to pass given the time restraints and the reality of what a limited crew can accomplish. But we figured it out and I'm pretty happy with the result. And happy it's done. Mostly. You can also check out some still images from the video in this gallery.
Heinz Ketchup: The Desert
Arrowhead Water Commercial
It's been a while since we've shot anything (we being Dawnrunner Productions). Luckily though, Darrell had a simple one-shot idea for us to shoot this past weekend. We headed out to Treasure Island in the late afternoon with four giant bottles of water. It was amazingly windy but that probably helped to give us the perfect clear view of the San Francisco skyline. Unfortunately it also meant that there was a constant mist of ocean spray hitting the lens. I did my best to keep it clean, but there's nothing you can do in the middle of the shot. Darrell also chose the music for the commercial and now that it's edited together I think it's a perfect fit. I tweaked the colors slightly from the camera orginal, but not much. In final cut I duplicated the video layer, set the blending mode to overlay and applied a gaussian blur and tweaked the levels. That gives it a nice smooth glow effect. I'm really happy with the results.
Check out Dawnrunner.com
The film production crew that I've been working with lately has updated their website. If anyone reading this is in need of a commercial, music video, or corporate video, contact Dawnrunner Productions so we can help you out!
Game Developer’s Conference 2007 Footage
The Game Developer's Conference was pretty insane. We ended up shooting over 15 hours of footage during the week. Most of the time we were running two cameras gathering interviews and b-roll from around the conference. I'm pretty happy with the footage we shot, particularly the shots from the Nintendo and Sony keynotes. We were lucky enough to get seats in the first row for both of the keynotes and I got some really good shots.
GDC Day 2
Today was more of the same, only I got to sleep in and I knew a little bit about what I was doing. We shot more interviews, captured some footage for timelapse shots (we're getting some more of those tomorrow) and got to see some more of the conference.
The Serious Games Summit and the Mobile Games Summit are over and the big events today were the Casual Games Summit and the Indy Games Summit. Yeah, you didn't know that there were so many different summits for videogames, admit it.
The best part of the conference so far has been sneaking around in the expo halls that don't open until tomorrow. The crews are still setting up the booths but since I have a staff badge I can go in and check out everything. Hence the panorama above. I'm looking forward to the next three days when the expo is open and when we get to see the keynotes.
GDC Day 1
One day down, four to go. Today was pretty quiet at the conference, since things were just getting started. Today was focused on just the serious games and mobile/cellphone gaming and the expo hasn't opened yet so most of the attendees are the bigger names right now, but there's not too many people here.
The convention is huge though, I got a chance to walk around the expo hall while they're setting up and it's pretty cool to see all the booth's before anyone else. We have pretty much free reign of the space.
This morning was a bit crazy, getting up at five to be in the city by seven. Then I picked up the equipment I had dropped off the day before and some lights for the green screen. We made it over to the Moscone Center around eight, but we had to wait to get our badges and get the room for the shoot, etc.
The first room we had had a squeaky noise coming from the air conditioning so there was no way we could shoot the interviews in there due to the noise. We were going to cancel all the green screen interviews for the day, but we got moved to another room and were able to salvage some of the time.
I was roaming around the North and West convention halls getting interviews of people around the conference. My feet are tired and it's the first day. But it's looking like the convention is going to be awesome on wednesday once everything starts to pick up.
Game Developer’s Conference is next week
The Game Developer's Conference. All the biggest names in the video game industry get together to show off their new stuff, make deals, and celebrate the year. And now that E3 is no longer E3, this is the big conference for the year. And the Game Developer's Conference is also going to be the biggest gig of my film/video career. (more…)