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.
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.
Botball 2007
Ahhh… January. It took Eric and I most of the month to finish this video. This year we decided we wanted to render the Botball introduction video in HD. 1080p to be exact. I had 7+ computers running in my bedroom for over a week to render everything, and the result was well worth the wait (not that you can tell from this video on the web). The fuzzy pom-pom balls were the toughest to model/render, but I think the result was pretty good. We had to balance between actual hair/fuzz simulation (that would have pushed the rendering time into the months range) and just using spheres. I was able to make a fuzz-like texture and shader effect in 3DSmax that worked well. In the end KIPR was very happy with the video, as am I.
Starting Arts Promo Video
This is a video that I put together to introduce people to the Starting Arts program. It's mainly still photos that I took, matted into a collage using Photoshop and animated using After Effects. The text was then added and made to fold between the layers.